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University of Bolton PhD in Arts, Social Sciences and Education

Fantasy and Feminism

An Intersectional Approach to Modern
Children’s Fantasy Fiction
by Miriam Laufey Hirst

May 2018
 Contents

Abstract 1
Acknowledgements 2
Introduction 3
Chapter 1: Literature Review 14
Chapter 2: Heroes and Heroines 39
Chapter 3: Beauty 83
Chapter 4: Magic and Empowerment 124
Chapter 5: Outside the Gender Binary 166
Conclusion 196
Bibliography 207
 Abstract
This thesis compares modern children’s fantasy literature with older texts,
particularly Grimms’ fairy tales. The focus is on tropes from fairy tales and myths
that devalue women and femininity. In looking at these tropes, this thesis
examines how they are used in modern fiction; whether they are subverted to
show a more empowering vision of femininity or simply replicated in a more
modern guise. Whereas other approaches in this area have addressed the
representation of gender in an isolated fashion, this study adopts an
intersectional approach, examining the way that different axes of oppression
work together to maintain the patriarchal hegemony of powerful, white,
heterosexual men. As intersectional theory has pointed out, mainstream
feminism has tended to focus only on the needs and rights of more privileged
women, who are themselves complicit in the oppression of their more
marginalised “sisters”. Intersectional feminism, in contrast, seeks to dismantle
the entire system of interlinked oppressions, rather than allowing some women
to benefit from it to the detriment of others. The intersectional issues around
feminism that this thesis addresses include race, disability, class, and sexuality.
There is also an emphasis on female solidarity, which is championed as an
effective strategy to weaken the hold of patriarchy and subvert it in its aim to
“divide and conquer”. It is this intersectional approach to children’s fantasy
literature that is seen as the thesis’s main contribution to knowledge.
The primary texts under examination are mainly from the United Kingdom,
but also include works from the United States, Australia, and Germany. All of
them were originally published between 1980 and 2013. The thesis explores
heroism, beauty, magic, and gender performance in these works, showing how
such themes can be dealt with in ways that are either reactionary and
detrimental or progressive and empowering.

1
 Acknowledgements
I would like thank my supervisors, David Rudd and Jill Marsden, who helped me
turn a few vague ideas into a coherent thesis and were very patient with me. I
would also like to thank Lindsay Walker for lending me her copies of the “Old
Kingdom” series and constantly providing me with book recommendations. The
blog “Writing With Color” has also been immensely helpful for finding resources
and correct terminology. Thank you to Lísa Hlín Óskarsdóttir and Sæborg Ninja
Guðmundsdóttir for reading some of my drafts that I was struggling with. Thank
you also to Griffin Allen and Harry Kim for coming over to see me when I really
needed help.
My most heartfelt thanks go to Lee Hirst, who has patiently supported me
these past few years, both financially and emotionally, and never seemed to get
tired of the question “Does this line make sense?” You are the best thing in my
life!

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 Introduction
...there can be no such thing as “power feminism” if the
vision of power evoked is gained through the exploitation
and oppression of others. (hooks, 2015, p. 6)

I wanted to write a thesis about feminism, because being a feminist has been
important to me ever since I realised how much my life has been impacted by
sexism. My feminist education began at the time when social media was
starting to become all-pervasive, so I learned about feminism mostly from the
internet. It was not until I was undertaking research for this thesis that I read
some of the classic theoretical feminist texts. While I learned a lot from them, I
also often felt excluded from some aspects of feminism put forth in them. For
example, many feminists claim that working outside the home is empowering for
women, whereas housework and child-rearing are oppressive (Friedan, 1963, p.
15). As a working-class person who is also disabled, I see work outside the
home as difficult and frequently unpleasant labour that is necessary for survival
within a capitalist system, rather than as being voluntary and empowering.
Some feminists also argue that it is demeaning for women to be treated as
though they are disabled (May and Ferri, 2005, p. 120). The implication is that
people who are actually disabled – such as myself – deserve to be
condescended to and demeaned. This attitude is particularly troubling for
disabled women. Additionally, assertions that reproductive rights only affect
women exclude transgender people like myself, as I have a womb but do not
identify as a woman, despite being treated like one by society.
It is evident from these examples that some mainstream feminists only
focus on the challenges of the most privileged women. While they claim to
speak on behalf of all womankind, they actually exclude most of the women in
the world. This exclusionary version of feminism has often been opposed by
black feminists, such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks, who
recognise that white women are complicit in the oppression of women of colour.
They recognise many different types of power imbalances, and the way they
intersect. As hooks writes:

The idea of “common oppression” was a false and corrupt

platform disguising and mystifying the true nature of
women’s varied and complex social reality. Women are
divided by sexist attitudes, racism, class privilege, and a
3
 host of other prejudices. Sustained women bonding can
occur only when these divisions are confronted and the
necessary steps are taken to eliminate them. (1984, p. 44)

The feminist forums I frequent on the internet are, therefore, usually based on
principles of intersectionality. This means that they provide a space for women
(as well as other genders) of all races, sexualities, and social classes to discuss
how different types of discrimination and oppression work together to mark their
experiences as members of minority groups. Intersectional feminism is the only
type of feminism that seems to include me and most of my friends, so it is this
version of feminism that will be the focus of this thesis.
I also wanted to write about fairy tales, because I have always enjoyed
them, even after realising how sexist and racist many of them are. As a child, I
was not only familiar with the Disney films and other cartoons, but also with the
uncensored first editions of the Grimms’ versions of many of the stories. The
tales often raised questions for me that I found no satisfactory answers to. For
instance, when I asked my parents why Rumpelstiltskin wanted the Queen’s
baby, their reply, that he wanted to eat it, did not seem logical to me. But this
illogicality was also part of the tales’ appeal to me. I saw the stories as open
frameworks whose details I could fill in, using my imagination.
Though I probably did not realise it at that age, the open weave of these
tales is what has always given them their strength and appeal, especially in the
oral tradition, before they were collected and written down by people like
Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. Thus, each new version of a tale
reflects the social standards of the time and place at which the retelling takes
place. According to folklorist Vladimir Propp, a “work of folklore exists in
constant flux” (1999, p. 381). As he elaborates,

anyone listening to folklore is a potential future performer,

who, in turn, consciously or unconsciously, will introduce
changes into the work. These changes are not made
accidentally but in accordance with certain laws.
Everything that is out-of-date and incongruous with new
attitudes, tastes, and ideology will be discarded. (pp. 380-
381)

As an example of how storytellers adapt fairy tales to fit their listeners’

sensibilities, modern retellings of the Grimms’ tales often gloss over the sex and
violence that can be found in the first edition, as later editions were more

4
specifically aimed at children.
However, although some details in the stories have changed over time in
response to a changing society, others have remained the same, continuing to
represent the society in which they originated. An example of this can be seen
in “Cinderella”. One of the earliest versions of this tale is a ninth-century
Chinese story about a girl named Ye Xian (Warner, 1994a, p. 202; Tatar, 1999,
pp. 107-108; Anderson, 2000, p. 27). Like Cinderella, Ye Xian is identified by
the prince through her lost slipper, which fits no other woman in the kingdom. In
ancient China small feet were considered attractive in a woman (Hong, 1997,
pp. 45-46), so having the smallest feet in the land marked Ye Xian as the
“fairest of them all”. Even though modern Western society places less
importance on the size of women’s feet, Cinderella’s tiny slipper is retained in
contemporary European versions of the tale. The Grimms’ version even has the
stepsisters mutilate their own feet in an attempt to fit this orthodoxy of beauty.
Similarly, while Rumpelstiltskin’s obsession with the Queen’s baby made little
sense to me as I was growing up in the 1990s, to medieval and early modern
listeners of the tale, who were familiar with the folklore surrounding child-
snatching fairies, it probably would have seemed perfectly natural and in
accordance with their worldview.
As Jack Zipes writes,

such acts which occur in folk tales as cannibalism, human

sacrifices, primogeniture and ultrageniture, the stealing
and selling of a bride, the banishment of a young princess
or prince, the transformation of people into animals and
plants, the intervention of beasts and strange figures were
all based on the social reality and beliefs of different
primitive societies. Characters, too, such as water nymphs,
elves, fairies, giants, dwarfs, ghosts were real in the minds
of primitive and civilized peoples… and they had direct
bearing on social behaviour, world views, and legal
codification. (1979, p. 8, italics in the original)

Though the persistence of some of these more primitive beliefs might seem
innocuous, others are less acceptable, as, we might argue, is the notion that a
woman’s worth depends on the size of her feet, or indeed on any other physical
feature. These more pernicious cultural values that persist in fairy tales, as
though they were truths universally acknowledged, need challenging for their
negative and oppressive messages. Speaking of classical mythology, John

5
Stephens and Robyn McCallum assert that it is “grounded in social assumptions
which were masculinist, misogynist, socially elitist, imperialistic, and often
militaristic and violent” (1998, p. 9). The same can be said about many
European fairy tales, as they mainly come from patriarchal societies, and so
tend to show women as either weak and passive (Snow White and Sleeping
Beauty) or evil (Snow White’s stepmother and the wicked fairy who curses
Sleeping Beauty). Even the tales that originated in more egalitarian societies
have had patriarchal elements added to them in order to appeal to the
sensibilities of medieval and early modern Europeans, such that there has been
“a tendency… for powerful folktale heroines either to be deprived of their power
or for their power to be transformed into evil witchcraft” (Stephens and
McCallum, 1998, p. 202). Zipes states that, additionally, “the active, young
princess was changed into an active hero; the essence of the symbols, based
on matriarchal rites, was depleted and made benign; and the pattern of action
that concerned maturation and integration was gradually recast to stress
domination and wealth” (2006, p. 7).
As an example of a tale that evolved to make the heroine more helpless,
Zipes discusses “Little Red Riding Hood”. In an earlier French version of the
story, called “The Story of Grandmother”, the girl uses cunning to save herself
from the wolf. However, Charles Perrault turned it into a dark morality tale,
which ends with the deaths of both Red Riding Hood and her grandmother. The
Grimms added the character of the male hunter, who comes to rescue the two
females and punish the wolf (1993, pp. 228-230). The Grimms also undermine
female independence elsewhere; thus, in “Rumpelstiltskin”, as Ruth B.
Bottigheimer (1987) observes, they reveal a “tendency to isolate the female
protagonist within the plot”. The version of the story recorded by the Grimms in
1810 has the heroine send her “faithful maidservant” to discover
Rumpelstiltskin’s name. The Grimms, however, removed this character, so that
“the hapless queen suffers alone, companionless, and learns the dwarf’s name
only fortuitously through her husband” (p. 108).
In modern retellings, female characters are often presented in a less
passive way. Whereas the title characters in the classic Disney films Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs (Hand, 1937) and Sleeping Beauty (Geronimi,
1959) have as little impact on the story as the heroines in the Grimms’ tales
they are modelled on, newer Disney films, such as The Princess and the Frog
6
(Clements and Musker, 2009), Tangled (Greno and Howard, 2010), and Frozen
(Buck and Lee, 2013), show far more active princesses. However, while the
passivity of female characters in myths and fairy tales is frequently subverted in
modern media, other patriarchal elements remain largely uncontested: there is
still a focus on physical beauty, antagonism and competition between women,
and a favouring of values deemed masculine over those deemed feminine (or,
as Susan Faludi puts it, “defining male behaviour as the norm, female
behaviour as deviant” [1992, p. 359]). Even when modern adaptations feature
empowered female characters, this empowerment frequently applies only to
women who are privileged in other ways. For example, the heroines in Tangled
and Frozen are young, white, conventionally attractive with European features,
extremely thin, and of noble birth, whereas Rapunzel’s nemesis in Tangled is
older, of a lower class, and looks like a Jewish or Romani woman. Tiana in The
Princess and the Frog is a black, working-class woman, but spends most of the
film in animal form. Moreover, most of these heroines achieve their happy
endings through heterosexual marriage. They are also all able-bodied, although
Elsa’s story arc in Frozen can be interpreted metaphorically as being about the
alienation a person with physical or mental disabilities might feel. These films
might arguably have feminist elements, but they are rarely intersectional, which
means that their overall messages are often contradictory, suggesting that
gains can be made only at the expense of particular interest groups.
As Stephens and McCallum express it, “there is a high probability that
replication of an old content and mode of representation may result in the
further replication of, for example, old masculinist and antifeminist
metanarratives” (1998, p. 22), though they also see the positive, progressive
potential of putting old stories into a new guise:

At the same time, retold stories have the potential to

disclose how old stories suppress the invisible, the untold,
and the unspoken. Such a potential will be realized
through changing the modes of representation as well as,
and more than, changing the content: by careful attention
to point of view; by focalization strategies, since agency
cannot be manifested by characters who do not focalize;
and by textual self-reflexiveness or other strategies which
remind readers not only of how they read the text but of
how they read the world. (p. 22)

7
In the same vein, Marina Warner writes:

Myths convey values and expectations which are always

evolving, in the process of being formed, but – and this is
fortunate – never set so hard they cannot be changed
again, and newly told stories can be more helpful than
repeating old ones. (1994b, p. 14)

Modern fantasy novels use many of the same tropes as classic fairy tales, even
when they are not explicitly retelling the same stories. Thus, many fantasy
worlds feature a vaguely medieval European setting, as in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord
of the Rings (1954-1955), with creatures, magic, and character archetypes from
fairy tales. While some authors use this kind of setting to question assumptions
about race, gender, or sexuality, others simply replicate old prejudices. This can
be disappointing for readers who look to fantasy literature to envision
possibilities of an alternative world without the oppressions and injustices of the
existing one.
To take an example more contemporary than Tolkien’s work, J.K. Rowling’s
Harry Potter series (1997-2007) is particularly pertinent, as it was an important
part of my adolescence, not only because of the enjoyment I experienced from
reading the books, but also because of the sense of community I felt when
discussing the magical world of Harry with other people, either my age or older.
This type of community is still a significant aspect of fan culture for many young
people. Ideally, this kind of community of readers should offer a safe and
welcoming space for children of all races, genders, religions, disabilities, and
sexualities, but, sadly, this is not always the case. Providing children with media
that celebrates diversity and empowers femininity in all its different guises is not
a guarantee that they will embrace these same values in real life, although it is
certainly a good start.
But as I am writing this, many places in the world are experiencing a period
of backlash against advances made in human rights in recent years. Therefore,
it is particularly important to examine representations of female characters in
the media, analysing what they actually have to say about the place of girls and
women in society, especially those who are marginalised in other ways. This is
what I will attempt to do in this thesis, focusing on children’s fantasy novels – a
genre that is close to my heart – from an intersectional feminist perspective. I
will generally be comparing the modern children’s texts with the fairy tales that

8
preceded them, examining the way authors put old tropes into new guises, and
seeing whether this is done in a way that subverts the sexism (and racism,
ableism, classism, etc.) of the old stories or simply replicates it. But I will also
endeavour to judge the new stories on their own merits, to see what kind of
values they espouse. I will be looking in particular at whether texts which offer
positive images of femininity appear less progressive when analysed through
an intersectional feminist lens.

The Primary Texts

The authors I am examining are Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black, Jasper Fforde,
Charlie Fletcher, Cornelia Funke, Neil Gaiman, Shannon Hale, Michelle
Harrison, Diana Wynne Jones, Garth Nix, Lauren Oliver, and Tamora Pierce. I
have chosen these authors because their works deal with a wide range of
topics, and so when considered together, can be seen as fairly representative of
the genre. Many of them deal specifically with issues I wish to address, and are
therefore most apposite for my study. All of these authors are also popular;
indeed, a number of them have won literature prizes, and some have had their
works adapted into films. I deliberately chose popular texts, as I feel that the
current state of fantasy literature requires that its dominant forms and
practitioners be attended to. These texts seem to emanate mostly from the UK
and USA, with some popular examples from Germany and Australia. Although
the “Harry Potter” books are the most popular and influential children’s fantasy
texts of recent times, I felt that these texts had already received considerable
attention from other critics, which is why I have not included them amongst my
primary texts. The same applies to Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” books (2005-
2008).
However, I realise that, in focusing on popular texts, it is the authors who
are white and privileged that are automatically put in the spotlight. Authors of
colour find it harder to gain mainstream success, particularly in a genre like
fantasy that is frequently seen as being particularly dominated by white writers.
What is even more depressing is that those writers of colour who do gain
success sometimes avoid writing about characters of colour, such as, for
example, Soman Chainani in The School for Good and Evil (2013), which
features mostly white characters and is heavily inspired by European fairy tale
tropes. While it would be a pleasure to be able to consult a more diverse body
9
of literature, especially to look at material of a more radical, subversive nature, I
felt it was more appropriate for this thesis to study texts that have had a
significant cultural impact, rather than ones from smaller publishers or the
internet, even if these sources may have more diverse and radical content.
The texts I am using have all been published in English (though a few have
been translated from German) between 1980 and 2013, and are aimed at
children between the ages of about eight and sixteen. Most of the texts
originate from the United Kingdom or the United States, but the Garth Nix texts
are from Australia and the Cornelia Funke texts from Germany. I do not
subscribe to Alison Lurie’s view, which she states in both Don’t Tell the Grown-
Ups (1990) and Boys and Girls Forever (2003), that British children’s books are
more noteworthy and generally of a higher quality than those of other countries:
the prevalence of British texts in my study is simply a result of their prevalence
in the UK. The societies of the four countries my primary texts originate from
are not identical, but similar enough in subscribing to a Western worldview; in
other words, their ideological standpoint is more similar than different. This can
be seen as either a drawback or an advantage. Using texts from more
contrasting societies would have added another interesting dimension to the
study, allowing me to compare the impact of values from various countries on
their respective literatures. However, studying works from similar societies
allows me to examine how different authors use very different approaches to
interpret material from a similar cultural background. Furthermore, the fairy tales
of Perrault and the Brothers Grimm are well known in all these countries, so it is
very likely that the authors under consideration have read at least some of
these tales and their writing has been shaped and influenced by them in some
way.

Chapter Organisation
The first chapter in this thesis constitutes a Literature Review, in which I discuss
what other academics have written about in the fields of fantasy literature and
children’s literature, respectively. There are various definitions for these two
terms, so I specify how I use them in my study, as well as defining my position
within the larger critical discourse. There is also a section on the history of fairy
tales and the feminist discourse surrounding them. Finally, I talk about the

10
history and meaning of the term “intersectionality” and how it relates to my
thesis.
Chapter 2 is called “Heroes and Heroines”, and in it I examine various
forms of heroism presented in my primary texts. I discuss stories in which
heroism is defined in terms of violence and besting others, but I also look at
texts that portray heroism as stemming from values considered more feminine,
especially cooperation. Whether the focus is on violence or something else, I
will examine the social implications of the particular brands of heroism in these
texts, particularly as they pertain to class. I will also discuss how characters’
marginalised or privileged status can affect their characterisation as well as
their heroism. I draw particular attention to texts that portray positive friendships
between girls, as this is an aspect of feminism that I feel is often neglected in
stories that are otherwise meant to show female empowerment. I will also
discuss a few heroines that, I feel, do not reach their potential and whose
empowerment seems very shallow. This situation usually occurs because their
character arcs centre more on their romantic partners or on other male
characters rather than on their own position as heroines.
Chapter 3, “Beauty”, discusses physical descriptions of characters. This
discussion not only covers the question of whether good characters are
described as being more physically attractive than villainous ones, but it also
analyses what beauty is said to consist of. The beauty standards portrayed in
my primary texts tend to be Eurocentric, so I discuss the intersections between
gender, race, class, and disability when it comes to beauty, and how they affect
the way readers are meant to feel about a character. I also talk about bad
beauties, or femme fatales, which are more common in the novels I have
studied than unattractive good characters. Finally, a significant section of this
chapter is devoted to an examination of the way fat characters are demonised,
as this is a very common and troubling element in modern stories, and is often
a result not only of sexism, but of ableism and class privilege as well.
Chapter 4 is called “Magic and Empowerment”. Fantasy fiction provides
unique opportunities for feminine empowerment by using magic as a metaphor.
In this chapter I examine several texts in which female characters discover
magic powers and use them to overcome adversity and grow in self-esteem. My
focus is on how this empowerment manifests itself, and whether it is used to
affirm oppressive systems or to defy them. As in Chapter 2, I draw attention to
11
the way friendship and community between women is portrayed, and how this
aids the characters’ empowerment. I compare depictions of witchcraft with
depictions of wizardry within the texts, as these different types of magic are
often shown to be at odds with each other. Subsequently I look at two specific
kinds of magic that are common in fantasy stories: magic connected with vision
and magic connected with words. Laura Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze is
particularly pertinent in my discussion of the former. I will also examine the
racial elements that are involved in some depictions of magic, as well as
connections to mental illness and physical disability.
The fifth chapter is called “Outside the Gender Binary”, and provides an
analysis of gender performance within my primary texts from the perspective of
queer and transgender theory. While none of the texts feature characters that
are explicitly described as being transgender, there are numerous instances in
which the gender binary is transgressed and the boundaries between male and
female are weakened. This frequently occurs as a result of cross-dressing or
physical transformation, both of which are common motifs in children’s fantasy. I
finish the chapter with a discussion of ghosts and other undead creatures
whose gender identities are often portrayed as being far more tentative than
those of living characters. This has interesting implications for the construction
of gender as a whole. In many instances I provide a transgender perspective
that is often lacking in readings by cisgender scholars. I also discuss how
mainstream queer theory tends to focus mainly on the gender expressions of
thin, white people, and thus fails to encompass the majority of the LGBT
community.
Finally, in the Conclusion, I summarise my findings and discuss their
implications for the fields of children’s literature and intersectional feminism.
Despite considerable progress in terms of promoting positive images of women,
some structural inequities remain invisible, particularly in relation to bodies that
are seen to exist outside the cultural norm. This is why an intersectional
approach to reading contemporary fantasy literature is so crucial.
While many of the topics I talk about in this thesis have been discussed by
other feminist scholars, they frequently approach these areas from a more
limited perspective, which only considers gender or, sometimes, gender
alongside race. However, as I have indicated above, privileged women are
often complicit in the oppression of women with less privilege, so it is not
12
enough to support a feminism that empowers only rich, white women, allowing
them to be part of the cultural elite along with rich, white men. To truly empower
all women, all power structures need to be questioned and dismantled, which is
what I have tried to do in my analysis of these texts.

13
 Chapter 1: Literature Review
Through fantasy, man does indeed enter the Perilous
Realm, and may find there both the familiar made strange,
and the strange made familiar. (Swinfen, 1984, p. 234)

Introduction
In this chapter I will attempt to define some of the terms I am using, as well as
explain my choice of primary texts. As my study focuses on children’s fantasy
literature, I will try to pin down what exactly the terms “fantasy” and “children’s
literature” mean. This is difficult as both of these concepts have been subject to
much debate and disagreement, so I shall situate my definitions within the
larger context of critical discussion, considering various points of view. As I will
analyse how classical tropes from fairy tales are reworked in contemporary
texts, a short discussion on fairy tale discourse is also necessary to explain the
position of this thesis, in addition to what I have already stated in the
introduction.
Finally, I will discuss the definition and purposes of intersectional feminism
since that is the framework I am using for my analysis of my primary texts.

Fantasy
Lucie Armitt writes in Theorising the Fantastic (1996):

Any reader who makes even the most tentative of inroads

into the vast body of critical material on fantasy literature
will discover that, at least historically, by far the majority of
this work concerns itself solely with issues of classification
and categorization and the manner in which the generic
limits which define and confine texts can be continually
tightened and made ever more absolute. (p. 3)

Classifying works of literature can be rather unhelpful, both for the author and
the reader. I do not wish to be limiting or reductive in this thesis, nor set a
standard that should be followed by all writers of fantasy. However, as I have
limited myself to the mode of fantasy for my study, I do need to use a definition
of the genre to explain why I have chosen these particular primary texts and not
others.
When attempting to define fantasy, many theorists, including Kathryn Hume
(1984) and Neil Cornwell (1990), cite Tzvetan Todorov’s study on the subject,
The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1975). Todorov coined
14
the term “Pure Fantastic”, which describes stories that are ambiguous as to
whether the strange events they depict are supernatural or can be explained
rationally. This ambiguity must be sustained to the end for the work to be
classified as an example of the Pure Fantastic. If the events are revealed to
have a rational explanation, then the story is no longer fantastic, but belongs to
the realm of realism. An example of this is Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of
the Baskervilles (1902), in which what is initially thought to be a ghost or a
demon turns out to be an ordinary dog. Stories with unquestioned supernatural
events belong, according to Todorov, either in the realm of the fantastic-uncanny
or the fantastic-marvellous, depending on whether the story in question is
frightening or comforting. Thus, the works of authors like J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S.
Lewis would be classified as “fantastic-marvellous”, whereas the works of Bram
Stoker or Neil Gaiman would be “fantastic-uncanny”. In his book Todorov cites
Le Diable amoureux (1772) by Jaques Cazotte as an example of a work of the
Pure Fantastic. Other authors discussing the concept have also named The
Turn of the Screw (1898) by Henry James. A recent example from children’s
fiction might be Louis Sachar’s Holes (1998), as the events in that story can
either be seen as the result of a curse, or as simply coincidental. While the
concept of the Pure Fantastic provides an interesting perspective, it is also
rather limiting and excludes most of the works considered to be part of the
classic canon of fantasy literature.
In her study, Hume considers the views of Brian Attebery and Erik Rabkin
on the subject; for the former, fantasy is “signalled by the presence of a vividly-
realized secondary creation which gives the readers the sense of its having a
history beyond the fragments presented in the tale”, and according to the latter,
“the changing of the ground rules must be recognized by the characters as
such” (1984, p. 13) for the story to be truly fantastic. In many cases, these two
definitions clash. The characters in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954-55)
or in Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness quartet (1983-88), for example, exist
in secondary worlds (Middle-Earth and Tortall, respectively) in which magic is
the norm. Therefore, when the characters witness magical events, they do not
consider them fantastic as they do not recognise a “changing of the ground
rules”. So the only stories that both Attebery and Rabkin would consider fantasy
are the ones in which characters from the primary world come into contact with
a secondary world, such as in Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56) or J.K.
15
Rowling’s “Harry Potter” (1997-2007) books.
Many other theorists define fantasy only insofar as it relates to the real
world or realist fiction. Thus T.E. Apter defines fantasy by “its deviation from the
norm” (quoted in Cornwell, 1990, p. 217), but also by “the way in which it
highlights the instability, inconsistency or underlying preposterousness of the
normal” (ibid.). Deviating from the norm is quite a vague criterion, whereas the
latter criterion may be true for satirists like Terry Pratchett, but is not necessarily
true of fantasy as a whole. Colin Manlove calls fantasy literature “a fiction
involving the supernatural or impossible” (1999, p.3), and Armitt argues that
“fantasy sets up worlds that genuinely exist beyond the horizon, as opposed to
those parts of our own world that are located beyond that line of sight but to
which we might travel, given sufficient means” (2005, p. 8, italics in the original).
As T.E. Little writes:

All writers of creative fiction are subcreators of Secondary

Worlds.1 The Secondary World of a non-fantastic writer will
be as close to the Primary World as his talents and the
needs of his art will allow… . A licence is granted to writers
of “normal” creative fiction to change their Primary World
for the purpose of their art. Fantasy begins when an
author’s Secondary World goes beyond that license and
becomes “other”… . Such a subcreation could be called a
Tertiary World. (quoted in Cornwell, 1990, p. 16, italics in
the original)

Sarah Godek points out some problems in defining fantasy solely by the way it
forms a contrast with realism, saying that “it leaves no place for realistic texts
that contain elements of fantasy”, but, more significantly, she feels that it reveals
an attitude of ethnocentrism, as “it assumes that the meaning of the term
‘reality’ is stable across different cultures” (2005, p. 91). She writes:

1 The term “Secondary World” is normally used for worlds in fantasy literature that are separate
from our own world, with its own geography, history, and culture. J.R.R. Tolkien, however,
who initially coined the term in his essay “On Fairy-Stories” (1947), used it, similarly to Little,
to describe an author’s creation. He says that the storyteller

makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what
he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore
believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief
arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are
then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive
Secondary World from outside. (p. 12)

16
 Another common definition, which describes fantasy as
literature that depicts the “impossible”, contains the same
ethnocentric assumptions – in other words, it views its own
culture as the norm by which all things are measured,
ignoring the fact that what is impossible to a western,
English-speaking culture may not be the same as what is
impossible to other cultures. (p. 91)

The definition of fantasy I have used, which forms the basis of my choice of
primary texts, is that the stories must involve magic or mythical creatures, so it
is a definition aligned most clearly with Manlove’s and Armitt’s views. However,
unlike Armitt (and Attebery), but in line with Cornell, I would contend that a
secondary world with its own rules is not enough to constitute it as an example
of fantasy. A Series of Unfortunate Events (1999-2006) by Lemony Snicket, for
instance, is not clear about whether it takes place in the primary world. While
there are many familiar elements, they are often twisted in ways that seem
alien, suggesting that this might be a secondary world. However, despite the
strangeness of the series, it does not feature any magic or mythical creatures,
so I have not considered series of this nature for inclusion in my primary texts.
Manlove’s terms should also be qualified a little, as “a fiction involving the…
impossible” could also apply to genres like romance or thrillers, with improbably
handsome and skilled heroes. The supernatural is clearer, though the term
could also be used for stories with religious overtones, which I would not count
as fantasy literature as they represent a group’s world view rather than
something imagined by an author.
Many of the primary texts I have chosen feature various sub-genres of
fantasy, such as gothic fantasy, medieval fantasy, urban fantasy, and humorous
fantasy, but it is not necessary to explore the differences between these sub-
genres, especially since they frequently overlap, and, as I said before, I do not
wish to simplify these works by attempting to fit them into narrow, generic
boxes.
Some critics, Armitt included, treat science fiction as another sub-genre of
fantasy, whereas others, like Ann Swinfen, differentiate between fantasy and
science fiction, as the latter “treats essentially of what does not exist now, but
might perhaps exist in the future” (1984, p. 5). Two of my primary texts, Archer’s
Goon (1984)2 and A Tale of Time City (1987), both by Diana Wynne Jones,

2 Charles Butler writes about Archer’s Goon that “it is far from clear whether the seven siblings
17
could be classified as science fiction, but they have magical elements as well,
making them more like what others sometimes call “science fantasy”. Other
than that, I have excluded science fiction from my study, as not only does it not
generally fit my criteria, but it is also less strongly influenced by fairy tales than
is most fantasy literature.
Another author commonly cited by fantasy theorists is Rosemary Jackson.
She also defines fantasy in terms of its relationship to the real, stating that
classic Victorian fantasy

introduces areas which can be conceptualized only by

negative terms according to the categories of nineteenth-
century realism: thus, the im-possible, the un-real, the
nameless, formless, shapeless, un-known, in-visible. What
could be termed a “bourgeois” category of the real is
under attack. (1981, p. 26)

As this quotation implies, for Jackson the main function of fantasy is to question
and subvert the social order of the real world. She says that fantasy should
“express a longing for an absolute meaning” (p. 158) as it “aims at dissolution of
an order experienced as oppressive and insufficient” (p. 180). In her book,
Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981), she not only includes authors
normally associated with the fantastic, such as Bram Stoker and George
MacDonald, but also authors like Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
who use fantastic elements in otherwise realistic stories in order to challenge
the status quo of the society they were living in. She does not approve,
however, of medieval, secondary-world fantasies in the vein of Tolkien,
accusing such literature of “supporting the ruling ideology” (p. 155) and being
“nostalgic for a pre-Industrial, indeed a pre-Norman Conquest, feudal order”
(pp. 155-156).
Both Manlove and Swinfen agree with Jackson’s observations on the
subversive nature of fantasy. However, Manlove, unlike Jackson, clearly uses
the term in an apolitical sense; as he says: “Modern fantasy is inherently
subversive in its violation of what we call possibility” (p. 142). Swinfen, too,
though she speaks of “the concern of many modern writers of fantasy to use the

who rule the town are magical – ‘wizards’ – or alien beings with extraordinary but
scientifically explicable powers, although Howard/Venturus’s obsession with spacecraft
rather suggests the latter” (2006, p. 242).

18
form in order to present moral, religious or philosophical ideas” (p. 147),
defends the frequent portrayal in fantasy fiction of an idyllic, pre-industrial
society by saying that this tendency

is not a withdrawal in the sense of a shirking of

responsibility. Rather it is a revolt against precisely that
indirect form of violence which has created a widespread
need for release from a sense of imprisonment by
regulations and data-banks… . (p. 229)

She also says that “the fundamental purpose of serious fantasy is to comment
upon the real world and to explore moral, philosophical and other dilemmas
posed by it” (p. 231).
In her book, Hume deals with both fantasy and realism (or mimesis, as she
terms it). She rejects the view that either of these forms is inherently subversive
or conservative. In fact, she condemns a lot of secondary-world fantasy as
providing “comforting illusions” which “offer blind, passive enjoyment, and
demand no obligation toward the source of the pleasurable stimulation” (p. 81).
None of these critics deal with a more problematic element of depictions of
medieval societies in fantasy fiction, seeing them simply in terms of escapism,
therefore being devoid of deeper meaning. As fantasy worlds do not have to
reflect real historical societies, an insistence on writing about worlds with the
same social structure and value systems as medieval Europe can be seen as
an excuse to depict sexist, racist, classist, and imperialist attitudes without a
hint of subversion. For example, the “Bitterbynde” trilogy (2001-2003) by Cecilia
Dart-Thornton features a romance between a seventeen-year-old girl and a
much older man. In our own Western world, it was common in pre-industrial
times for girls in their teens to marry adult men, but as the series takes place in
a fictional fantasy world, there is no historical reason to depict a romantic
relationship that seems, by modern standards, predatory. Furthermore, the
medieval societies depicted in fantasy texts are almost invariably Northern-
European ones, with elements of ethnocentrism. When non-white races are
featured, they tend to be depicted in a stereotypical and exoticised manner.
Common fantasy races include dark-skinned savages, inscrutable Orientals,
and greedy desert-dwellers, all of which are racist stereotypes of real people.
John Stephens makes a similar point, though specifically referring to the
use of the class system:

19
 As a broad discourse, medievalism is perhaps to be
approached warily. Its penchant for allegory and fable,
often packaged in consolatory and sentimental language,
has at times made it a powerful exponent of class-based
ideologies, masquerading under such humanistic tenets
as “the underlying, unchanging nature of mankind”. (1992,
p. 112)

Secondary-world fantasies can still show progressive themes and attitudes, of

course. Some authors deliberately create oppressive societies, so they can set
their characters to work to change them for the better. Thus, Miri in Shannon
Hale’s Princess Academy (2005) struggles against the class system, and
Alanna in Song of the Lioness fights against patriarchy. Other authors infuse
their medieval societies with more modern values, as Rachel Hartman does in
Seraphina (2012), where homosexuality is socially acceptable to the point that
even the patron saint of love in the state religion is homosexual.
Of course, the same thing can be said about fantasies (or any other genre,
for that matter) set in the primary world: some challenge the status quo on
questions of equality, others do not. As Stephens writes, “[t]he worst things
fantasy and realism can be accused of are that the former can be merely
‘escapist’ and the latter bleakly pessimistic” (p. 289), both of which can be said
to discourage people from changing the establishment, either because it is
unnecessary or hopeless.
Most texts of this kind, however, only seek to subvert one element of
oppression, such as sexism or racism or homophobia, but do not explore how
these factors intersect to ostracise people who are oppressed in multiple ways.
So even if the stories appear feminist on the surface, they often only validate
the most privileged of women. For instance, Alanna’s endeavours are
successful because she is wealthy, white, and able-bodied. In the third book of
the series, she joins a tribe of dark-skinned nomads in the South and attempts
to help their women become more liberated. Showing the rich, white woman
enlightening the poor, uneducated women of colour seems paternalistic and
racist. Miri’s story is more inclusive because, as discussed in the next chapter, it
does take into account intersections between class and gender (and, to a lesser
extent, disability). Intersectionality shows how all these deviations from the
norm are interlinked, and how all suffer oppression at the hands of a ruling
(usually white, usually male, usually wealthy) elite.

20
 Having explained my definition of fantasy, I shall now move on to the term
“children’s literature”, which is probably even more contested than the term
“fantasy literature”.

Children’s Literature
The idea that children need a separate literature is a relatively new one, so
many of the works now considered adult classics used to be read by children as
well (see, for example, Piesse, 2004). According to Jack Zipes, “[t]here is
nothing inherently or essentially ‘childish,’ ‘childlike,’ or ‘appropriate for children’
in a book. There is nothing definitive about a text or a book that automatically
demands that it be classified as a children’s book” (2001, p. 65). He questions
the logic of viewing children’s literature as a single genre, and also points out
that children’s literature is the only literature in which the target demographic is
not involved in its production, as all children’s books are written, edited,
published, and marketed by adults who decide what is appropriate for children.
In light of this, I would like to examine some common conceptions and
misconceptions concerning children’s books, using my own research as a
guide.
Perry Nodelman claims that the protagonists of children’s books are always
“either children or childlike animals or adults” (2008, p. 77) and that the story is
focalised through these child protagonists.3 This is not always the case,
however. Many of the works I have studied feature protagonists around the
same age as the intended readers, especially the ones aimed at younger
children, but others feature characters in their late teens and early twenties, as,
for example, in Garth Nix’s Sabriel (1995). Conversely, there are numerous
books aimed at adults focalised through child protagonists (Charles Dickens’s
Oliver Twist [1837] or Stephen King’s The Shining [1977], for example), so the
age of the main character is not necessarily an indicator of the intended
audience. Furthermore, some books, such as Cornelia Funke’s “Inkheart” trilogy
(2004-2008), are focalised through more than one character. While twelve-year-
old Meggie is the main character of the “Inkheart” books and most of the story is

3 He also indicates that children’s books do not normally have first-person narrators, which I
find odd, as I have found that type of narration to be a feature as common in children’s books
as any other kind of literature. Even a text as simple as Dr Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat (1957)
is told in the first person.

21
focalised through her, some sections are told from the point of view of her
parents or other adult characters.
Zipes indicates that children’s books are more prone to censorship than
adult books (2001, p. 44). This implies that there are certain themes that are
considered inappropriate for a young audience. Kimberley Reynolds identifies
the unwritten rules of censorship within children’s literature as “no sex, no
violence, and no ‘bad’ language” (2007, p. 4). However, she also indicates that
these rules are not as rigid as they once were. Thus, many of the works I
studied contain sexual themes, some of them being candid about the fact that
the protagonists are sexually active. Similarly, not all children’s authors shy
away from violence. However, while some of the depictions of violence can be
rather graphic, I have not come across any detailed descriptions of sexual acts.4
The main factor here is probably the age of the intended readership. In books
for younger children, conflicts are more often solved without violence, and if
there are sexual themes, they are far more covert. I should add, though, that
most of my primary texts originate in English-speaking countries, in which
nudity and sexuality are considered much more taboo than in some other
places. A popular children’s author from my native country of Iceland has written
a book in which the eleven-year-old protagonist and her siblings encounter
some sex workers in the red light district of Amsterdam and, later, a male
stripper sent to their mother, and another one in which a pair of twelve-year-old
boys pore over an anthropological magazine with pictures of African women
with uncovered breasts.5 The children in these books also use the same swear
words and slang that real Icelandic children use, whereas in English children’s
fiction cursing is rare, and mostly confined to mild expletives like “bloody hell”.
Even books for younger children often contain other themes that some
people might find inappropriate for children, such as death, war, or family
conflict. Alison Lurie indicates that death disappeared from children’s books
early in the twentieth century, but is reappearing now. However, she says that
“even today the characters who die tend to be of another generation; the

4 Reynolds, Peter Hunt (2005) and other critics indicate that graphic descriptions of sexual
acts within children’s literature do exist, so I believe the reason I have not found any in my
primary texts is because of generic conventions, as they appear to be rarer in fantasy texts
than, for example, teen romance.
5 Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Barnapíubófinn, Búkolla og bókarránið (2000) and Við viljum jólin í júlí
(1999). An English translation of the titles would be “The Babysitter Bandit, Bessie and the
Book Robbery” and “We Want Christmas in July”.
22
protagonist and his or her friends survive” (1990, p. xiv). Additionally, according
to Reynolds, children’s books often manage to slip through the cracks of
censorship applied to adult literature, and are therefore able to have political
themes that publishers of fiction for adults would not allow (p. 16).
A common question when considering whether a work is “child-friendly” is
whether it is too scary for children. The problem with this question, of course, is
that children are not a homogenous hive-mind, and different children are scared
of different things. As Reynolds writes, “Over the years it has become apparent
that precisely what frightens children in the books and other forms in which they
encounter narrative is unpredictable” (pp. 138-139). Using Heinrich Hoffmann’s
Struwwelpeter (1845) as an example, she states that some children are scared
of these stories while “others enjoy their dark humour” (Reynolds, p. 139). In an
endnote, she also mentions an informal survey on books that children are
frightened by, in which several texts by Beatrix Potter are named (p. 191).
Clearly almost any text contains elements that could frighten someone, and not
just the ones that are meant to be scary, like Neil Gaiman’s Coraline (2002) or
Diana Wynne Jones’s The Time of the Ghost (1981). In the BBC documentary,
The Worlds of Fantasy (2008), Philip Pullman suggests that a fantasy setting
distances children from the danger in the story, making it exciting rather than
terrifying. Reynolds shares this view, saying that frequently the “key to how
young readers deal with frightening material is how closely it mirrors real-life”
(2007, p. 150). This is another generalisation, of course, and is probably not
true for all children. I have found, though, that during my studies, I enjoyed
reading about child protagonists experiencing all sorts of magical and fantastical
dangers, but found myself becoming upset while reading a story in Garth Nix’s
collection, Across the Wall (2006), about two young boys in a realistic war zone.
For me, this implies that many of the statements made about children or
children’s literature can be made about adults and their literature as well.
Another common misconception about children’s literature is that it has to
be educational and didactic. John Stephens writes that “children’s fiction
belongs firmly within the domain of cultural practices which exist for the purpose
of socializing their target audience” (1992, p.8), but he also acknowledges that
not all of the ideology represented within children’s literature is deliberately
didactic. As he points out: “A narrative without an ideology is unthinkable:
ideology is formulated in and by language, meanings within language are
23
socially determined, and narratives are constructed out of language” (p. 8).
Surely this means that literature for adults serves to socialize its audience as
well, as it also presents it with authors’ ideologies. While there are explicitly
didactic children’s books (such as picture books for toddlers that teach about
numbers and colours, or problem books for teenagers that attempt to show how
to handle difficult situations in life), books that are mainly escapist in nature
(such as R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books [1992-1997] and other series fiction)
are just as common.
Both John Goldthwaite and Bruno Bettelheim are of the opinion that the
main role of children’s stories is to teach moral lessons. In his book The Natural
History of Make-Believe (1996), Goldthwaite tends to judge whether a work is
worthwhile or not based on the criterion of its representation of Christian
morality. One of the complaints he lays against Lewis’s Narnia books (1950-
1956), for example, is that they involve creatures from Greek mythology, which,
in his view, have no place in a Christian allegory, and are apt to confuse child
readers. Similarly, Bettelheim does not approve of children’s literature that
mixes realistic situations with fantasy, because he feels that it will “confuse the
child as to what is real and what is not” (1991, p. 64). Neither of these critics
seems to trust the intelligence of young readers, which is perhaps why they feel
that children’s books need to be didactic, rather than escapist. Jones, on the
other hand, who spent most of her career writing for children, “has confessed
that in writing her first fantasy novel for adults, A Sudden Wild Magic (1992),
she discovered in herself a number of preconceptions about the expectations
and abilities of adult readers, not least the assumption that they would be less
able than children to follow a complex plot” (Butler, 2006, p. 267).
As unsatisfying as this conclusion is, it seems that the only sweeping
statement that can be made about children’s literature is, in John Rowe
Townsend’s words, that a children’s book is “a book which appears on the
children’s list of a publisher” (1979, p. 10), more or less regardless of the
content. Or, as Peter Hunt writes, “children’s literature has two unarguable
characteristics (however much they are ignored): the implied readers of the
texts were/are ‘children’; the actual users of the texts were/are predominantly
‘children’” (2004, p. 10). Nodelman goes further, indicating that children’s
literature has very little to do with children themselves:
The actual purchasers of children’s books are and always
24
 have been, overwhelmingly, not children but parents,
teachers, librarians: adults. That this is the case seems
part of the same cultural phenomenon that leads adults to
write and publish the books to begin with – the conviction
that children need things done for them by adults. In terms
of success in production, what children actually want to
read or end up reading is of less significance than what
adult teachers, librarians, and parents will be willing to
purchase for them to read. (2008, pp. 4-5)

I feel this statement gives too little credit to children’s abilities to choose for
themselves what they like, as if they passively read whatever book is put in
front of them, without being given the chance to voice their opinions. As children
rarely have enough money to buy their own books, it is true that their options
are limited to what is available at home, at school, in libraries, or what parents
or other adults are willing to buy for them. However, they are still perfectly
capable of saying which books they like, thereby influencing what type of books
adults will buy for them in the future, or they can choose books for themselves
at the library with no input from parents or librarians. Many children take control
of their own reading as soon as they are old enough to get a library card.
Meanwhile there are other children who never willingly open a book, despite
well-meaning presents from relatives.
In addition to his view that children’s books are not actually aimed at
children, but at parents and educators, Nodelman also ascribes a sinister
motive to the adults who write these books, accusing them of trying to
segregate children from adults and trying to keep them in an ignorant state. He
looks at several texts in which childlike innocence is celebrated, as opposed to
a more “adult” outlook on life, concluding that this is a feature of children’s
literature in general. This childlike innocence he connects with a lack of
knowledge, thereby concluding that children’s books tell their readers that they
should be ignorant or at least pretend to be so, in order to be considered cute
and charming. While it is true that many children’s texts celebrate
characteristics that society considers childlike and perhaps innocent, I do not
agree with Nodelman’s conclusion. Of the texts I have studied, the ones that
most strongly feature a conflict between child and adult values are the three
texts by Eva Ibbotson. The children emerge victorious, not because they are
ignorant, but because they are unselfish, open-minded, and kind to animals.
The adults that are portrayed unsympathetically, on the other hand, are self-

25
centred, cruel, and obsessed with money and power. There are some selfish
and unpleasant child characters in these books, too, some of whom, it is
implied, are un-childlike, as they are more interested in money and luxuries
rather than playing outside, while others are shown to be childish in the
negative sense of the word: needy and whiny. Connecting childhood with
kindness and imagination is as much of a social construction as the pure,
ignorant child that Nodelman complains about, but telling children that they
should be nice to other people and animals is surely a better and more
palatable moral than telling them that they need to pretend to be innocent of
certain subjects, in order to get adults to like them.
Nodelman’s arguments are influenced by Jaqueline Rose’s line of thinking
in The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984). She
claims that “[t]here is no child behind the category ‘children’s fiction’, other than
the one which the category itself sets in place, the one which it needs to believe
is there for its own purposes” (p. 10). Thus she maintains that fiction for children
made by adults is actually an impossibility, and that it speaks of a dysfunctional
relationship between adults and children. Both Rose and Nodelman
characterise this relationship as one between coloniser and colonised. Roberta
Seelinger Trites makes a similar connection between children and socially
oppressed groups when she writes that “[o]ne of the most important functions of
children’s literature is to depict children who enact the agency that children in
real life may not have. And since feminism is so often involved with examining
who holds power within a given cultural context, the purposes of feminism and
children’s literature are easily united” (1997, p. 29). Trites’s statement speaks of
social power in general, and perhaps indicates that children can identify with
society’s underdogs because they too normally hold very little power
themselves. Rose’s and Nodelman’s assertion that children are treated like
colonised nations, however, seems to me like an effort to appropriate other
people’s struggles for recognition and equality. Nodelman concedes that, unlike
people of colour, children actually do need special protection, but he does not
feel that this undermines his argument. Additionally, unlike being a member of
most other socially oppressed groups (whether it is people of colour, women, or
queer and transgender people), childhood is a temporary state, so even if it is
harmful for children to be solely defined in adult terms rather than being allowed
to define themselves, the oppression is hardly comparable. In this vein Mary
26
Shine Thompson writes:

Transience and change are integral features of childhood,

while membership of certain subaltern groups is
predicated upon certain givens, such as gender or race,
for example, which are relatively fixed. Childhood is a
state that accounts for perhaps only one quarter or less of
the average person’s lifespan; furthermore it is universal –
everyone, whether empowered or oppressed, has been
once a child. So while it may be asserted that ideological
constructions of childhood have kept children subordinate,
the specifics of children’s subalternity are unique and
create unique dynamics. (2004, p. 16)

Additionally, at one point Rose characterises omniscient narration in children’s

books that edges too close to the child characters’ thought processes as
“molestation” (1984, p. 70, italics in the original). Again, this belittles the
experience of actual survivors of sexual violence by comparing it to something
rather more trivial.
I should add that while I dislike Rose’s and Nodelman’s views on children’s
literature, I do not necessarily disagree with their assertion that children are
often oppressed and exploited. Even in Western society I have observed people
justifying beating their children and depriving them of privacy and other rights
when these would be considered unacceptable things to do to adults. I still feel
that Nodelman misuses the word “colonisation” when he applies it to children.
For one thing, he admits to appropriating Edward Said’s research on orientalism
(1978). Said is a Palestinian-American who invented the term “orientalism” to
describe a type of oppression which he had personally experienced. It therefore
seems inappropriate for a white Canadian like Nodelman to redefine this term in
a way that removes it from its original context. For another thing, like white
feminists’ assertion in the 1970s that “woman is the nigger of the world”, calling
rich, white children colonial subjects appropriates and ignores the experiences
of children whose countries have literally been colonised by the parents of
those rich, white children. Additionally, Rose and Nodelman can be said do the
same thing that they accuse children’s authors of doing – namely speaking on
behalf of children and defining them by adult standards, instead of listening to
the children’s own thoughts and voices. The fact that these theories are written
in a way that is inaccessible to the actual subjects of the study makes them
seem particularly paternalistic.

27
 Accompanying these negative opinions on children’s literature is the view
that books for young people are inherently conservative, favouring oppressive
social orders, even “a wish to keep things from changing and a dislike of it when
it happens. Viewed from this angle, change is always for the worse, an idea that
directly contradicts the idea that childhood is a time of change and that growth
toward adult knowledge is a good thing” (Nodelman, 2008, p. 79). Reynolds
holds the opposite view:

Because writing for the young has a future orientation,

there is often a freshness and urgency to the storylines of
children’s fictions that correspond to the fact that their
target readers are generally encountering ideas and
experiences for the first time. Many children’s books offer
quirky or critical or alternative visions of the world
designed to provoke that ultimate response of childhood,
“Why?” “Why are things as they are?” “Why can’t they be
different?” (2007, p. 3)

This brings us back to the same debate as in the fantasy section of this chapter,
as to whether a certain type of literature is more prone to conservatism or
subversion. My answer here is the same as earlier; namely that there are both
conservative and progressive texts within any genre, either for child or adult
audiences. As Lurie writes, “run-of-the-mill children’s literature tends to support
the status quo” (1990, p. x), but it can also be subversive, because, as she
continues:

its values are not always those of the conventional adult

world. Of course, in a sense much great literature is
subversive, since its very existence implies that what
matters is art, imagination, and truth. In what we call the
real world, on the other hand, what usually counts is
money, power, and public success. (p. xi)

Having discussed both “fantasy” and “children’s literature” as problematic terms,

let me now turn to the question of “fairy tales”. Though not contentious as a
term, approaches to this area of literature are remarkably diverse.

Fairy Tales
As I discussed in the introduction, fairy tales provide numerous tropes and plots
that have inspired writers of fiction for years. This is reflected in all genres, but
is particularly significant in fantasy fiction, as it is full of giants, dwarfs, witches,
28
wizards, kings, queens, and similar fairy tale archetypes.
One of the main critical approaches to fairy tales is the psychoanalytical,
most famously championed by Bruno Bettelheim. In his view, the Grimms’ tales
dispense universal and timeless advice to overcome the struggles of childhood
in an unconscious manner. As Bettelheim is a Freudian, these struggles mostly
involve sexuality, such as the child experiences in dealing with Oedipal feelings.
As Bettelheim writes:

This is exactly the message that fairy tales get across to

the child in manifold form: that a struggle against severe
difficulties in life is unavoidable, is an intrinsic part of
human existence – but that if one does not shy away but
steadfastly meets the unexpected and often unjust
hardships, one masters all obstacles and at the end
emerges victorious. (1991, p. 8)

However, his views have been criticised. For example, Bettelheim does not take
the cultural context into account. He believes that the Grimms’ versions of the
fairy tales survived because they represent the most universal values and are
thus the best at teaching moral lessons to children, even going so far as to
criticise storytellers who leave out small details in their retellings, since “the
elimination of… seemingly insignificant elements… makes fairy tales lose their
deeper meaning, and thus make them uninteresting to the child” (p. 32). This
ignores the fact that the Grimms did not simply present the fairy tales in the way
that they heard them, but edited them so that they were more suitable to the
values of their day. In fact, as Ruth B. Bottigheimer (1987) and Maria Tatar
(1987) outline, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published several editions of their
collection of tales, each one with new changes which they hoped would make
the stories more appealing to the public and thus more marketable. Also,
several critics point out that the fairy tales were not originally intended for
children, contrary to what Bettelheim claims. Robert Darnton points to the
violent content of the French folktales told by Perrault and others, “from rape
and sodomy to incest and cannibalism… portray[ing] a world of raw and naked
brutality” (1984, p. 284). Moreover, as Jack Zipes writes:

In most European countries it was not until the end of the

eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth century that
fairy tales were published for children, and even then

29
 begrudgingly, because their “vulgar” origins in the lower
classes were suspect. Of course, the fairy tales for
children were sanitized and expurgated versions of the
fairy tales for adults, or they were new moralistic tales that
were aimed at the domestication of the imagination… .
(1995, p. 336)

Another common criticism of Bettelheim’s work is that, while he claims that the
tales have equal value to male and female children, his views are steeped in
gender essentialism, supporting the sexism found in the tales themselves. As
Bottigheimer puts it, “Grimms’ Tales may indeed offer insights into the psyches
of children reared unquestioningly along the gender-specific lines that the
volume formulates, but certainly not into the psyches of children in cultures with
differing views of what characterizes appropriate male and female behaviour”
(p. 94, italics in the original). John Stephens and Robyn McCallum add that in
the Grimms’ tales,

female lives are represented as revolving around,

competing for, and winning male attention, and hence the
emphasis falls on beauty, passivity, and dependence on
outside forces. ...such a position drastically changes the
terms of [Bettelheim’s] underlying premise – that folktale
texts function to help children find meaning in life by
teaching that they can transcend the narrow confines of
self-centered existence and make a significant contribution
to sociality. Meaning, subjectivity, and sociality are
represented through and as endemically gendered
structures. (1998, pp. 204-205)

Similarly to Bettelheim, Sheldon Cashdan claims that the main function of fairy
tales is to teach moral lessons to children. Rather than focusing on Freudian life
stages, Cashdan aligns various tales with the seven deadly sins, saying, for
example, that “Hansel and Gretel” teaches children about the negative
consequences of gluttony, and “Cinderella” about envy. He also defends sexist
tendencies in fairy tales, saying:

Modern critics claim that negative portrayal of the

stepmother is part of a misogynistic streak in fairy tales.
There is a grain of truth to the notion that fairy tales often
depict women as cruel and malicious, but there is danger
in attributing too much significance to this notion since it
implies that fairy tales are faithful representations of
reality; they are not… . We consequently must not take the
figure of the witch too literally. She is less an actual person

30
 than a representation of psychological forces operating in
the child’s psyche. (1999, p. 18)

He claims that the reason for the prevalence of female villains in fairy tales is
simply that the tales focus more on women, and that they “are essentially
maternal dramas in which witches, godmothers, and other female figures
function as the fantasy derivatives of early childhood splitting… . In contrast,
male figures are relatively minor figures in most fairy tales” (p. 28). This is
simply not true, as there are in fact many fairy tales about the exploits of male
characters (such as “The Brave Little Tailor”, “The Little Thumbling” and “The
Magic Table, the Gold Donkey, and the Club in the Sack”),6 who usually
contribute to their happy ending in a far more active fashion than the female
heroines do, although Tatar does point out that “it is also not rare for [male]
fairy-tale heroes to suffer silently and to endure hardships in a hopelessly
passive fashion” (1987, p. 88). Tatar also speaks on the subject of fairy tale
villainesses, saying that they “challenge the notion of fairy tales as therapeutic
reading for children” (1999, p. 182). She continues: “However satisfying the
tales may seem from a child’s point of view, however much they may map
developmental paths endorsed by orthodox Freudians, they still perpetuate
strangely inappropriate notions about what it means to live happily ever after”
(p. 182).
Nonetheless, even within feminist circles, there are differing views on
whether fairy tales are sexist or not. Some feminists, including writer Margaret
Atwood, have pointed out that there are actually fairy tales, even in the Grimms’
collection, featuring active, intelligent heroines who do not need to be rescued
by men (see Wilson, 1993, pp. 11-12). Comparing fairy tales with didactic
children’s literature of the early twentieth century, Alison Lurie states that the
fairy tales are “way ahead… with respect to women’s liberation” (1990, p. 18).
She continues by commenting that in children’s books recommended by
educators the characters’ roles are strictly gendered, whereas fairy tales

portrayed a society in which women were as competent

and active as men, at every age and in every class.
Gretel, not Hansel, defeated the witch; and for every

6 Admittedly, these tales are more popular in Germany, where I grew up reading them, than in
the English-speaking world. There are, however, English folk tale characters who appear in
popular culture almost as commonly as Snow White and Cinderella (Jack from “Jack and the
Beanstalk”, for example).
31
 clever youngest son there was a youngest daughter
equally resourceful. The contrast continued in maturity,
when women were often more powerful than men. Real
help for the hero or heroine came most often from a fairy
godmother or wise woman, and real trouble from a witch
or wicked stepmother. (p. 18)

While it is true that there are fairy tales with active and resourceful female
protagonists (such as “Maid Marlene” and “Clever Gretchen”), it is noteworthy
that these stories are far less well-known than stories like “Little Red Riding
Hood” and “Snow White”, in which the heroine needs to be rescued by a man.
Of course, as I outlined in the introduction, passivity of female characters and
presenting female power as evil are not the only sexist tropes in fairy tales.
Neither Cashdan nor Lurie, who insist on the female-empowering elements of
the tales, address the other concerns that I mentioned (preoccupation with
physical looks, a prevalence of female rivalry, and so on), which is why I find
their interpretations rather shallow. Bottigheimer’s study on the ideology of fairy
tales, on the other hand, is very well researched. Rather than simply assessing
which gender is presented as more active or powerful in various tales, she
analyses tales with similar premises and compares how the text judges the
characters. Thus she finds out that the Grimms seem to condemn female
characters for the same behaviour that they praise in male characters. She
writes:

Within the 210 tales of the Grimms’ collection, a witch-

burning notion of eradicating (generally female) evil
coexists with an indulgent tolerance of (generally male)
malefaction. Plots routinely circumscribe girls’ and
women’s sphere of activity by laying prohibitions on them,
and the language of the text exhibits an effort to avoid
laying prohibitions on boys and men. Obedience is
necessary for females but not for males. (1987, p. 94)

She also notes that in many tales in which a heroine needs to rescue someone,
she has to do so through self-abnegation. For example, the girl in “The Seven
Swans” needs to remain silent for seven years to free her brothers from a spell.
As Jennifer Waelti-Walters says, girls in fairy tales “are repressed: they must not
speak or laugh; they must sit in a tree and sew or undergo some initiation into
martyrdom” (1982, p. 5). Maria Tatar adds that, for fairy tale heroines, “[s]ocial
promotion depends primarily on proof of domestic skills”:

32
 Time and again in the Grimms’ collective, we encounter
heroines who are reduced to tending swine, washing
dishes, or scrubbing floors, but who are ultimately
liberated from their lowly condition by clothing themselves
in frocks that arouse the admiration of a prince and that
drive rival princesses into jealous rages. Through a
combination of labor and good looks, the heroine gets her
man. (1987, p. 118)

As I noted in the introduction, Zipes has written about the patriarchal values of
fairy tales, but, according to him, these are mainly the result of rewritings
undertaken by male scholars, and the oral folk versions were far more
subversive: “No matter what has become of the fairy tale, its main impulse was
at first revolutionary and progressive, not escapist, as has too often been
suggested” (1979, pp. 42-43). Lurie agrees: “The handful of folktales that most
readers today know are not typical of the genre. They are the result of… the
skewed selection and silent revision of subversive texts” (p. 20). Speaking of
the revolutionary potential of fairy tales, Zipes writes:

Folk and fairy tales have always spread word through their
fantastic images about the feasibility of utopian
alternatives, and this is exactly why the dominant social
classes have been vexed by them, or have tried to dismiss
them as “Mother Goose” tales, amusing but not to be
taken seriously. (1979, p. 3)

However, he also concedes:

The fairy tales we have come to revere as classical are

not ageless, universal, and beautiful in and of themselves,
and they are not the best therapy in the world for children.
They are historical prescriptions, internalized, potent,
explosive, and we acknowledge the power they hold over
our lives by mystifying them. (2006, p. 11)

Several critics have explored how fairy tales influence modern women’s
writings. Examples of such works include Kiss Sleeping Beauty Good-Bye
(1988) by Madonna Kolbenschlag, Fairy Tales and the Female Imagination
(1982) by Waelti-Walters, Waking Sleeping Beauty by Trites, and Fairy Tales
and Feminism (2004), a collection of essays edited by Donald Haase. Even
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s famous feminist interpretation of
nineteenth century literature, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), includes a

33
chapter on the patriarchal implications in the story of Snow White. Trites writes
that

when feminist writers include intertextual references to

folktales or mythology, they often rewrite these tales to suit
their own ideological purposes. The form these ideological
revisions usually take is to depict how much more aware
of her agency the protagonist is than are the characters in
the tale the author is revising. (p. 40)

Of course, not all of these revisions occur within the fantasy genre, and all but
Trites’s book examine works aimed at adults, which means that they do not
quite have the same focus as my study.
So, finally in this chapter, let me explain my focus in more detail, by
considering what an intersectional approach involves.

Intersectionality
When discussing the history of feminism, the achievements of women of colour
and working-class women are often overlooked. Today many feminists try to
rectify this, by including all women in their concerns, rather than just the ones
with the most privilege. Kerry Mallan writes:

Whereas Second Wave Feminism was accused of being

for white, middle-class women, Third Wave Feminism
attended to the politics of difference and has been
inclusive of women regardless of race, culture, and class.
The emphasis on deconstruction and difference that post-
modernism and post-structuralism posit helped to
reinforce criticisms of Second Wave Feminism by women
of colour, Third World feminists, and lesbian feminists for
its failure to address different sites of oppression and
different sites of struggle. (2009, pp. 12-13)

Black feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) coined the term “intersectionality” to

describe the way racial and gender discrimination work together to make black
women’s experiences markedly different from those of white women or black
men, who only experience one type of discrimination. She writes:

Because the intersectional experience is greater than the

sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take
intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address
the particular manner in which Black women are
subordinated. Thus, for feminist theory and antiracist

34
 policy discourse to embrace the experiences and
concerns of Black women, the entire framework that has
been used as a basis for translating "women’s experience"
or "the Black experience" into concrete policy demands
must be rethought and recast. (1989, p. 140)

She also talks about the failure of mainstream feminism to represent the lives
and experiences of women of colour:

Feminists... ignore how their own race functions to

mitigate some aspects of sexism and, moreover, how it
often privileges them over and contributes to the
domination of other women. Consequently, feminist theory
remains white, and its potential to broaden and deepen its
analysis by addressing non-privileged women remains
unrealized. (p. 154; italics in the original)

Similarly, Audre Lorde writes: “Black feminism is not white feminism in

blackface. Black women have particular and legitimate issues which affect our
lives as Black women, and addressing those issues does not make us any less
Black” (1984, p. 60). One example of a feminist issue that affects women of
colour differently from white women is the battle for reproductive rights. As
Susan Bordo (1993) discusses, white women have mostly fought for the right to
not have children if they so choose, through access to contraceptives and
abortion, whereas women of colour, particularly black and Latina women have
often been sterilised against their will and without their knowledge, and so have
fought for the right to have children (pp. 75-76). While these issues are
different, they both represent the way patriarchy seeks to control women’s
bodies, as well as the way white supremacy seeks to bolster the birth rates of
white children while decreasing the number of black children.
Subsequently the term “intersectionality” has been expanded to take into
account other axes of oppression as well. As Kristine Molina writes: “Presently
intersectionality is used to describe the intersection of more than race and
gender, but also that of class, sexuality, ability, language, and so forth” (quoted
in Fernández-Calienes and Bachay, 2007, p.1). Patriarchy affects different
women in different ways, and intersectionality seeks to address all of these.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes, for example, about how disabled women
are viewed differently from able-bodied women within an ableist, patriarchal
structure:

35
 Women with disabilities, even more intensely than women
in general, have been cast in the collective cultural
imagination as inferior, lacking, excessive, incapable, unfit,
and useless. In contrast to normatively feminine women,
women with disabilities are often stereotypically
considered undesirable, asexual, and unsuitable as
parents. (2005, p. 1567)

Intersectionality also means that everyone’s stories and experiences are worth
listening to, not only those of the people with the most privilege and visibility in
society. In Moving Women Forward (2007), Raúl Fernández-Calienes and
Judith Barr Bachay present a collection of articles by women of various races
who tell their stories and show their findings, including accounts of war,
immigration, and disability, and how feminism impacts on all of these areas of
life.
Some people might argue that trying to include every axis of oppression
makes feminism too complicated and too divisive to continue as a movement.
Jarune Uwujaren and Jamie Utt address this:

The trouble with this line of thinking is that a one-size-fits-

all feminist movement that focuses only on the common
ground between women is erasing rather than inclusive.
Even if all women deal with sexism, not all women deal
with racialized sexism, or transmisogyny, or cissexism.
(2015b, unpaged, italics in the original)

Another aspect of intersectional feminism is to use inclusive language (for

example, by talking about “pregnant people” instead of “pregnant women” in
order to include transgender men and non-binary people who can get pregnant)
and to avoid terms that are racist, ableist or otherwise offensive to groups of
people (for example, using “crazy” or “blind” in a derogatory sense). However,
as Pat Pinsent mentions, “some arbiters have felt that the process has gone too
far, and have ridiculed any attempt to make the language inclusive, caricaturing
it as ‘political correctness’” (1997, p. 2). Presumably the people Pinsent talks
about feel that attempting to make language inclusive restricts them in what
they are or not allowed to say. She counters this argument with a quotation from
a publication called Working Group Against Racism: “Pc is a convenient
bogeyman for those who fear the diversification of our community will dislodge
them from their position as typical and therefore able to speak on behalf of
everyone” (p. 2.).

36
 As more marginalised communities make their voices heard, intersectional
theory becomes more intricate. Even though intersectional feminism is a
relatively new concept, it has already evolved significantly to involve more axes
of marginalisation. For example, two of the landmark texts of intersectionality –
Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider (1984) and Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Woman Native
Other (1989) – talk about the experiences of non-white lesbians but do not bring
up transgender people, even though the LGBT movement in the United States
was founded by transgender women of colour (King, 2015). Patricia Hill
Collins’s Black Feminist Thought (2000) – another key text – mentions black
transgender women in its discussion on homophobia within African-American
communities, but does not examine how transgender women’s oppression
differs from that of cisgender lesbians or bisexual women. Similarly, disability is
rarely discussed at length unless it is specifically the subject of the work (such
as Take Up Thy Bed and Walk [2001] by Lois Keith), even though disabled
people of colour make up a large percentage of victims of police brutality in the
USA (Perry and Carter-Long, 2015), and women with disabilities are more likely
to become victims of sexual and domestic abuse than women without
disabilities (Pate, 2008). These are important factors in discussions on racism
and sexism.
For topical articles on intersectionality, the internet tends to be more useful
than academic publications. Due to the somewhat elitist nature of academia, it
excludes underprivileged people who lack the means or opportunity for
education. As Sian Ferguson points out, “[a]cademia will never be entirely
accessible for everyone. After all, it’s all about judging people by intelligence –
something which will always be ableist” (2017, unpaged). The internet, on the
other hand, provides a platform for everyone. Websites like Everyday Feminism
feature articles by a variety of people on issues of intersectional feminism in a
manner that is accessible to most people, even without a formal education.
Many of these articles have been useful in writing this thesis, as I discuss
issues like fat-shaming, ableism, and transphobia. Often they include the
writers’ personal experiences with oppression, and so have been especially
enlightening and useful concerning areas in which I have no personal
experience because of my own privilege.

Conclusion
37
I have determined that there are no simple definitions of either fantasy or
children’s literature, but for the purpose of this thesis, I have decided to limit the
range of fantasy to works dealing with magic or mythical creatures, and
children’s literature to works that are found in the children’s section of the library
or bookshop. Additionally, I have found that critics disagree on the value of fairy
tales. Although the tales in the Grimms’ collection generally support a
patriarchal world view, this does not mean that every interpretation of every
element in every tale is sexist.
Intersectional feminism is an important element of my analysis of all these
terms. Most critics only focus on one axis of oppression at a time as they
examine fairy tales, fantasy, or children’s literature. Scholars who define fantasy
literature often decide what realism consists of based on a Eurocentric
framework. Nodelman even appropriates terms used for racism and xenophobia
in his theories on ageism, without considering the intersections of race and age.
Instead of focusing on one issue to the detriment of all others, in this thesis I will
use an intersectional approach and concentrate on the voices of those who are
most marginalised.
In sum, my study aims to provide a nuanced, intersectional analysis of
children’s fantasy literature that takes different points of view into consideration.

Chapter 2: Heroes and Heroines

The hero is a man of action and it is in action that he
expresses his nature – skill, courage, dominance and
determination. He is neither contemplative nor creative.
He marches onward, and when he encounters a dragon or
38
 a difficulty he deals with it. (Hourihan, 1997, p. 96)

Introduction
The characterisation of the heroines tends to be the element that is most
changed in updated retellings of fairy tales. Rather than simply depicting girls as
damsels in distress or prizes to be won, modern storytellers often make the
female characters as active and capable as the male heroes. As Roberta
Seelinger Trites writes:

while in prefeminist novels the protagonist tends to

become Sleeping Beauty in a movement from active to
passive, from vocal to silent, the feminist protagonist
remains active and celebrates her agency and her voice.
This, then, is feminism’s greatest impact on children’s
literature: it has enabled the awakening of the female
protagonist to the positive power she holds. (1997, p. 8)

However, sometimes this change is merely a shallow one, making the female
character talk tough and be proficient with weapons, but still needing to be
rescued by male characters.
The differences between traditional and modern male heroes are less
marked, although it varies depending on the source material. Heroes of Greek
myths, for example, represent hegemonic masculinity in that these men are
physically strong, sexually virile, unemotional, and use violence rather than
diplomacy to solve problems. Fairy-tale heroes, however, frequently express
some emotions, such as sadness and fear in the light of difficult obstacles.
While there are fairy tale heroes who rely on physical strength, usually they use
their wits – or, surprisingly frequently, experience a lucky break – to get ahead.
For these reasons, they can be seen as less traditionally masculine than heroes
of other kinds of stories. Maria Tatar warns us of the dangers of reading fairy
tale heroes and heroines too stereotypically:

That Russian folklore has a male Sleeping Beauty reminds

us that we must show caution in drawing generalizations
about female developmental patterns on the basis of that
plot. And we are obliged to think twice about male hero
patterns when we come across a collection of tales
depicting heroines who carry out tasks normally put to
male heroes alone or who denounce fathers too weak to
protect them from evil-minded stepmothers. (1987, p. 47)

She also writes: “Fairy-tale heroines have never stood as models of an

39
enterprising spirit, but it is also not rare for fairy-tale heroes to suffer silently and
to endure hardships in a hopelessly passive fashion” (p. 88). Thus, the
characterisations of male and female fairy tale characters are often more similar
than expected, though, of course, this can differ from collection to collection.
However, as discussed in the Literature Review, there are still
characteristics that are portrayed as positive in fairy tale heroes, only for them
to be demonised in heroines. Tatar gives curiosity as an example, which is an
attribute that often helps plucky heroes to reap their rewards, but is punished in
women. As Tatar writes:

Curiosity, along with stubbornness, occupies a privileged

position in the pantheon of female sins. Since female
curiosity is so often tainted with evil, while male curiosity is
enshrined as a virtue, it is not surprising to find many more
daughters of Eve than sons of Adam in fairy tales. (1992,
p. 111)

Furthermore, in popular stories about male heroes, women tend to be portrayed

with little character or agency of their own. As Margery Hourihan writes:

women in hero stories appear only in relation to the hero.

They are part of the way his manhood is defined: some
are his devoted assistants, dedicated to his cause, some
are trophy brides, and some are dangerous opponents
who seek to steal his potency... . They cannot share the
role of the master for it is his destiny to be master – over
all others. (1997, p. 3)

Problems like these can occur even in works that seek to subvert gender
expectations. It is of little use to portray a female character who is skilled and
feisty if her story arc and personality focus solely on advancing the story and
personality of a male character.
Additionally, even effective heroines can uphold patriarchal views of society
by valuing the same oppressive attributes, such as violence and selfishness,
that are often seen in male heroes. As Hourihan writes: “The meaning to be
constructed from the story of the smart, street-wise, gun-toting female detective,
like the meaning to be derived from most retellings of the history of Joan of Arc,
is not that women can be heroes too, but rather that, if they want any part of the
important action, they must become as much like men as possible” (p. 95). In
this way, these female (and usually white, straight, able-bodied) heroines do not

40
break the system of oppression, but simply uplift themselves by siding with the
oppressors, not only against their own gender but also other minorities.
From an intersectional point of view, it is also important to remember that
while women of some races are traditionally depicted as being weak damsels in
distress, women of other races are, on the other hand, often seen as rough and
unfeminine. Patricia Hill Collins (2000) outlines how black women were treated
like “mules” (p. 11) during times of slavery in performing arduous physical
labour, and Ava Vidal explains that “as a 5 ft 11 black woman I can assure you
that being seen as physically weak was not a problem that I have had to
contend with in my adult life. In fact, on the few occasions that I have asked a
man for help with a heavy object they have [sic] laughed at me and said things
like ‘Come on love! Don’t pretend that you can’t manage that. A big strapping
lass like you!’” (2014, unpaged). Thus, while white women might find it
empowering to see themselves as strong and tough, for black women it can be
just as subversive and feminist to be soft and feminine. According to Audre
Lorde, “[m]ost of the Black women I know think I cry too much, or that I’m too
public about it. I’ve been told that crying makes me seem soft and therefore of
little consequence. As if our softness has to be the price we pay out for power,
rather than simply the one that’s paid most easily and most often” (1984, p. 165,
italics in the original). Thus a depiction of a black girl as a fairy tale princess can
be subversive and break stereotypes, as is the case with the title character in
Jamila Gavin’s collection Blackberry Blue and Other Fairy Tales (2013). While
Blackberry Blue is not entirely passive, she follows the traditional fairy tale plot
fairly closely, beginning as the child of a poor woodcutter, being famed for her
great beauty, and finally marrying the prince. Rather than having to be strong,
unfeminine, and self-sufficient, as black women are so frequently portrayed in
the media, Blackberry Blue is allowed to be kind and pretty, and to find love.
Hourihan speaks of how binarisms of good and evil, friend and foe, winner
and loser, and the desire to outdo others in classic hero stories influence
Western thinking:

The need to struggle for “success” has come to seem

equally axiomatic, and we have structured many of our
social and political institutions as sites of this struggle.
International relations are largely based on the assumption
that “they” are potential or actual enemies and the process
of demonization reinforces the perception; only the identity
41
 of the demons changes. (1997, p. 14)

This kind of aggressively binaristic thinking is detrimental to women as a whole,

but more so to women who belong to other minority groups as well. Lorde
writes:

In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit

rather than in terms of human need, there must always be
some group of people who, through systematized
oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the
place of the dehumanized inferior. Within this society, that
group is made up of Black and Third World people,
working class people, older people, and women. (1984, p.
114)

Some feminist authors strive to do something more than simply place a female
character in a masculine heroic paradigm that is defined by violence and
suppression of others. Rather, they hope to discover a new type of heroism that
is based on values traditionally considered feminine, such as cooperation,
communication, and sensitivity to emotions. Of course, these attributes are not
limited to female characters, but can – and should – be applied to males as
well. As Lorde says:

Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do

their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same
supposedly “inferior” capacity to feel deeply. But in this
way also, men deny themselves their own essential
humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear.
(1984, p. 74)

She argues that men – particularly black men – who show compassion and
embrace their emotions have the potential to break down power structures
established by white patriarchy.
In this chapter I aim to look at different kinds of heroism in characters. I will
not only focus on girls in this section, but on boys as well, because, as Annette
Wannamaker states, “a continued focus on women and girls as the primary
subjects of the study of gender in children’s literature could run the risk of
further naturalizing masculinity and of perpetuating the assumption that girls are
gendered whereas boys are just naturally boys” (2008, p. 122). Not only do I
hope to find girls who break gender stereotypes by being brave and active, but I
also hope to find boys who are allowed to be tender and caring. I will also

42
examine the way these heroes and heroines fit into an intersectional scheme, to
see whether only white, able-bodied, middle-class characters are permitted to
be heroes or whether heroism can be found in characters from more
marginalised backgrounds. As discussed above, using the example of the
strong, independent black woman, even when characters of colour play
sympathetic and heroic roles, sometimes they are portrayed in stereotypical
ways that are more detrimental than empowering, so I shall keep this in mind as
well when discussing non-white heroes.
Most of all I hope to find stories that break the bonds of hegemonic
masculinity as well as other power structures, and thus redefine what it means
to be a hero.

Boys and Girls and Violence

As Kerry Mallan writes:

War has provided an ideal mise-en-scène for the staging

of masculinity. The warring male body signifies the
masculine ideal of control, dominance, and mastery, and
battle becomes the ultimate test of manhood, summarily
sorting out the weak and the cowardly from the strong and
the heroic. (2002, p. 18)

As outlined above, defeating evil in battle still tends to be one of the most
important duties of modern heroes. Whereas in several of the texts Hourihan
discusses, war and violence are portrayed as fun, more recent works at least
pay lip service to the horrors of battle. Rather than being an enjoyable romp,
fighting is seen as an unavoidable duty, possibly a sacrifice. Still, the characters
engaging in battle rarely conceive of alternative ways of solving these conflicts.
The main players on the sides of good and evil in stories like these are usually
male, but sometimes there are female characters who get to participate in the
main action as well. In Hourihan’s words, these characters are usually “little
more than honorary men who undertake male enterprises in a male context and
display ‘male’ qualities: courage, single-minded devotion to a goal, stoicism,
self-confidence, certitude, extroversion, aggression” (p. 68).
Charlie Fletcher’s “Stoneheart” trilogy (2006-2008) is a prime example of a
series that equates heroism with fighting. Even when there is no action going
on, the text is rife with martial metaphors, such as this one from the very first

43
page of the first book:

On the class trip before this one they’d been to the War
Museum and learned all about trench warfare. George had
thought that’s what life felt like: just keeping your head
below the parapet so you wouldn’t get hit. (Fletcher, 2006,
p. 1)

Many of the characters are soldiers, and they are portrayed as being brave and
noble. George himself is merely a twelve-year-old boy, but through the action in
the story he learns to become a warrior. He starts the series of events through
an act of violence in a fit of anger – he punches a wall and breaks a carving of a
dragon.7 From then on he finds himself in the midst of a war between human-
shaped statues, such as the soldier statues he befriends, and statues of
creatures. There is very little nuance in the characterisations of the statues. All
human statues are on the side of good, and all creature statues are
automatically evil. The only statues who seem to have some choice in the
matter are the ones that are part humanoid and part monstrous, such as a pair
of sphinxes. These enemies’ lack of reason and conscience means that it is not
possible to come to an understanding with them, and the only solution is to
incapacitate and kill them.
George’s greatest asset in this conflict is his gift as a Maker. This means
that his hands have the power to create things from stone or clay. However, this
same power also allows him to destroy things others have created, and he uses
his destructive capabilities on his enemies as often as he uses the creative
powers to heal or make something new. The series shows George’s growth as
a character, as he becomes more self-confident and learns to accept his
father’s death and his mother’s unconventional lifestyle. This is shown in lines
like the following: “George... had changed. Whatever he’d been going through
was making him stand straighter and take charge. He wasn’t a sniveller like
he’d seemed when [the Gunner] first saw him” (Fletcher, 2006, p. 413). But
most of this growth seems to come from him learning to fight, rather than
learning to be creative or emotional.
The narrative tries not to idolise the soldier characters, but to portray them
as regular men. The Gunner says about the Maker who designed him and

7 The parallel to Saint George and the Dragon is intentional, and is remarked upon a few times
within the text.
44
many of the other soldier statues:

“People liked what he done, making us look like heroes,

but nothing crowing about it. Made us look like men who
knew about mud and dying first, then made us look like
heroes after. For them that had lost sons and husbands,
the men they hoped they’d become before the bloody
generals sent them out to be butchered by the Boche.”
(Fletcher, 2006, p. 52)

At one point in the second book, Iron Hand (2007), George spends an hour
within a realistic vision of a battlefield in World War I, where he witnesses
warfare at its most gruelling. This account is neither glorified nor romanticised.
However, while the war is brutal, the characters do not seem to consider it to be
wrong. The soldiers are uniformly portrayed as noble and brave, seeing their
profession as the most honourable available. Another statue asserts:

“I have never had cause to exert myself in a martial cause,

and I may now admit that when I once said every man
thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, the
everyman I was thinking of was myself.” (Fletcher, 2008,
p. 182)

Nobody contradicts him, which validates the point of view that soldiers are more
heroic and more important than other kinds of men. However, this definition of
masculinity is dependent on continual warfare and falls apart when there is no
enemy to fight, and thus it encourages aggression rather than compromise.
Furthermore, it is likely to alienate young male readers who have no desire to
engage in combat, possibly making them feel as though they are not “real
boys”.
The focus on violence as heroism in the series is epitomised by an event
that takes place near the end of the first book. The Walker, one of the main
villains of the series, takes the Gunner’s bullets away after telling him: “The
trouble with being a soldier is you think you can solve any problem by pointing a
firearm at it” (2006, pp. 419-420). It seems odd that a villain should say this,
rather than a hero, making it seem as though using lethal violence against your
enemies is a heroic rather than a dastardly thing to do. The Gunner keeps only
one bullet, which he hopes to use in rescuing Edie from a murderous minotaur,
but his shot misses. The story now seems to be set up for a climax in which
George shows his ingenuity by finding a different way to save Edie, without

45
using guns. However, George ends up using his Maker’s powers to make a
bullet out of a piece of clay and shooting the minotaur with the Gunner’s
revolver. While he uses his powers to create, ultimately they result in death and
destruction.
Even though there are some female characters who participate in the
fighting – most notably the Red Queen and her daughters – the heroism in the
story appears strictly gendered. Both George and Edie learn throughout the
series that having friends and relying on other people is not a weakness, but
while George also becomes stronger by himself, Edie becomes weaker and
more vulnerable. Although she is a tough street kid who hates showing
weakness, she gets captured several times and needs rescuing. Near the
climax of Iron Hand she even dies and is resurrected, after which “death will
come further into life looking for her than it will with [George]” (2008, pp. 58-59).
She is brought back by the spirits of the other girls whom the Walker has killed,
though, so there is a sense of female power and solidarity here. However, when
events take a turn for the worse in Silver Tongue, the statues wake George so
he can help them, but they let Edie sleep, because they consider her too
vulnerable at this point and in more need of protection.
There are other power dynamics at play between the two children aside
from gender. George is middle-class, whereas Edie grew up in poverty and has
spent the past few months living on the streets. While George’s mother is
characterised as rather silly and a little careless, she is portrayed as being a
loving parent, whereas Edie was abused by her stepfather before she ran away
from home. The text does at times point out the way George’s privilege makes
him oblivious of some of the realities of Edie’s existence. For example, in one
scene he asks Edie: “Do you remember when you were a kid and it all seemed
safe because your dad was there?” (2007, p. 19) As we have been privy to
Edie’s memories of her childhood home, we know that she never felt safe with
her father, and that George’s assumption that his own experiences of growing
up with loving parents are universal is erroneous. Even in her backstory, the text
puts Edie through a lot more trauma than George experiences. Making a female
character in fictional work suffer more than any of the male characters can be
seen as a form of misogyny, particularly when that female character is
marginalised in other ways as well, as Edie is. The fact that the middle-class
child has loving parents whereas the working-class child was abused can also
46
be seen as expressing class prejudice, implying that parental abuse mainly
occurs among the lower classes.
Furthermore, while the female leaders are ostensibly equal to the male
ones, George talks back to the Red Queen several times. In Silver Tongue he
yells at her for losing Edie, even though the Officer is as much at fault as she is,
and in Iron Hand he interrupts her mid-sentence, telling her: “You don’t suggest
anything. If you want to help, you listen” (p. 387). While this is meant to show
George’s character development and his new-found assertiveness, he never
uses a similar tone with the Gunner or the Officer or any of the other male
leaders, so it makes it seem as though they are more worthy of being listened
to than the Queen is. There is also a moment when the Red Queen is talking to
a large group of statues, and Richard the Lionheart is trying to get a word in.
When he finally does, she snaps at him, at which point, “[t]he Lionheart rolled
his eyes at George” (2008, p. 212). The fact that he looks at George while
rolling his eyes elevates this from a mere display of annoyance to a shared
moment of sexism between men, as if he were saying, “Aren’t women silly?”
Together these scenes undermine female authority, making it seem less serious
than male authority.
The only character of colour in the series is the Queen of America, a statue
of an indigenous American woman, who appears briefly in Silver Tongue. She is
both a healer and a warrior, has a kinship with animals, and speaks pidgin
English. All of these traits represent a white person’s preconceptions about
Native Americans, so even her positive skills seem stereotypical rather than
empowering. She embodies the archetype of the “noble savage”, who is closer
to nature than white people, and can thus communicate with animals and heal
wounds. While this stereotype is meant to be positive, it easily appears
patronising, and still portrays indigenous Americans as more primitive and less
civilised than white Europeans, who have used these views on Native
Americans as justifications for oppression and genocide. This is an example of
the way intersectional feminism gives a more nuanced interpretation than if one
were to judge a character such as the Queen of America by the same standards
as a white female character would be measured. That said, as the Queen is
literally an image of a Native American created by a white sculptor, it is possible
that this characterisation is deliberate, although the text does not seem self-
aware enough to allow for this kind of reading.
47
 There are, however, scenes within the series which attempt to subvert
stereotypes about masculinity. After George goes through his ordeal in World
War I, he is visibly upset, and the Gunner and the Officer encourage him to cry,
telling him, “[n]o one here’s gonna think any the worse of you”, and, “I blubbed
like a baby all the way through my first bombardment” (2007, p. 383), showing
that crying and being emotional are not unmanly. Significantly, though, George
does not actually start crying, which undermines the message a little.
The narrative also presents some of the negative aspects of masculinity in
the form of a guild of knights. Rather than adhering to a myth of chivalry, they
are little more than bullies who glory in violence. They are described like this:

They didn’t look like a happy band of knights in armour

who were devoted to courtly poetry and rescuing damsels
in distress, or slaying picturesque dragons.
They looked like a nasty hard-nosed bunch of
mediaeval muggers. (Fletcher, 2007, p. 151)

The Red Queen says to one them: “Go back to your Guild, Knight. And play
your sword games with each other. That is all you are good for” (2007, p. 211).
Despite being a warrior herself, she has no respect for people who simply fight
for the sake of fighting. It is also notable that she is saying this shortly after the
Knights have killed a friend of hers. Even though she got her nickname by
wreaking bloody revenge for the death of her daughter, in this instance she
wastes no time seeking revenge, but rather goes straight to her friend, to return
her to her plinth and so restore her to life. Although violence is shown to be the
answer to many problems in this series, evidently it is sometimes less
productive than other solutions, and should not be sought after for its own sake.
Again, however, the text slightly undermines its own message, this time by
showing that while most of the knights are merciless thugs, their leader is as
focused on honour as the archetypal knight of legend. For a “trial of strength”
(2007, p. 148), George needs to prove his worthiness by defeating this knight in
a duel, so once again the focus is on fighting. So, while the series provides
some interesting female characters and a lot of action, it fails to provide a
definition of heroism that is not based on strength and masculinity – even in
female characters.

48
The Spiderwick Chronicles (2009)8 by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black features
three siblings with very different attitudes to violence. The narrative introduces
the children in the following manner:

If someone had asked Jared Grace what jobs his brother

and sister would have when they grew up, he would have
had no trouble replying. He would have said that his
brother, Simon, would be either a veterinarian or a lion
tamer. He would have said that his sister, Mallory, would
either be an Olympic fencer or in jail for stabbing someone
with a sword. (2009, p. 3)

This description juxtaposes the tender and nurturing Simon with the competitive
and aggressive Mallory, but the different future possibilities for each sibling are
also juxtaposed. Both of Simon’s possible career paths involve animals, but the
fact that Jared thinks his brother might become a lion tamer shows that he sees
Simon as courageous as well as kind. Both of Mallory’s options involve swords,
but – according to Jared, at least – she has the potential to either be prestigious
or simply dangerous.
Jared himself does not know what he wants to do with his life as he is
dealing with confusion and anger issues. Mallory tells him that their mother
“thinks you’ve been acting weird ever since Dad left. Like getting into fights at
school”, but Jared responds: “you always get into fights” (p. 53, italics in the
original). However, Mallory’s aggressive streak never manifests itself as
pointlessly destructive, the way Jared’s does, probably because through her
fencing she has a healthy outlet for her aggression.
The main reason for Jared’s anger is the upheaval to his life caused by his
parents’ divorce. He misses his father, even though it is clear that he was not a
very attentive parent even before the divorce. Additionally, the siblings and their
mother are left without a home until their aunt Lucinda lets them stay in her old,
ramshackle house, which is described as looking “like a dozen shacks had
been piled up on top of one another” (p. 4). It is not clear what the family’s
economic circumstances were like before the divorce, but it is likely that they
were far better off, considering that they could afford Mallory’s fencing gear and
Simon’s pets, whereas now they cannot even afford a home. The text does not
explore the implications of the children’s newfound poverty in detail, although

8 The page numbers will be taken from a compilation called The Completely Fantastical
Edition. The five books of the series were originally published between 2003 and 2005.
49
the fact that they find themselves living in an old house which they hate is
important to the story.
The action starts when the children unwittingly destroy a boggart’s nest in
their new home. The boggart proceeds to punish each of them with
punishments suited to their personalities: it hurts Simon’s pet tadpoles, impedes
Mallory’s freedom, and gets Jared into trouble with his mother. When Jared
finds the boggart, he considers taking revenge on it: “He thought about Simon
crying and about the poor, stupid tadpoles frozen in ice cubes. He didn’t want to
help the boggart. He wanted to catch it and kick it and make it sorry it ever
came out of the wall” (p. 75). But then he starts empathising with the creature:

“I thought that maybe the boggart was a little bit like us,
because it’s stuck here too. I mean, maybe it doesn’t even
want to be here. Maybe being here makes it mad.”
(Diterlizzi and Black, 2009, p. 82)

Here, Jared draws a parallel between the boggart’s destroyed nest and his own
family’s altered circumstances which have left him displaced and angry. He
decides to respond to the problem with understanding and compassion, rather
than anger and aggression. Instead of hurting the boggart, he makes it a new
nest, after which the creature becomes friendly.
Throughout the course of the series the three children encounter many
other problems involving fey creatures, not all of which can be solved with
compassion. In The Seeing Stone (2003) they are attacked by a gang of
goblins, and Mallory fends them off with her sword. But even after Simon is
captured by the goblins, his love for living creatures comes into play, as he
refuses to let Jared save him until he has freed all the animals the goblins have
trapped and caged. This includes a large griffin. Neither Jared nor Mallory is
happy about freeing the griffin, as they think it looks dangerous, but Jared feels
he “owed it to Simon to agree. After all, he had put Simon through a lot” (p.
172). Rather than harming the children, the griffin is grateful to them and
becomes Simon’s loyal mount. It aids them on several occasions later on, so
once again showing compassion proves to be helpful.
On another occasion it is Mallory who is kidnapped and needs rescuing. As
this is not too different from the earlier instance in which Simon had to be
saved, when Mallory proved herself highly competent, she is not simply a
damsel in distress, but an equal member of the team – possibly even the leader
50
of the group, as she is the oldest and strongest. In an obvious parallel with
Snow White, the dwarfs who have captured Mallory dress her up like a doll and
place her in a glass coffin so that “[h]er beauty and youth will never fade” (p.
343). The dress and make-up are quite uncharacteristic for the tomboyish girl,
which makes Simon say that she “doesn’t look like Mallory at all” (p. 343).
When the dwarfs tell the brothers that “[o]ut of this case she would be doomed
to age, death, and decay – the curse of all mortals”, Jared replies: “I think
Mallory would rather be doomed” (p. 343). Interestingly enough, the dwarfs
pose Mallory inside the coffin with a sword in her hands. As dwarfs are
traditionally great lovers of metal, this is probably meant to enhance her beauty,
rather than to make her look strong and fierce and less doll-like. Of course,
once Mallory has been revived (not with a kiss, although Simon briefly wonders
if that is what is required) she uses the sword to defend herself, rather than just
as an accessory. In this she subverts the dwarfs’ expectations of her as a frail,
passive image.
In the final book in the series the children’s mother is captured by the evil
ogre Mulgarath. This occurrence is particularly significant, as, instead of having
to save someone their own age, now they are called upon to rescue an adult
who is normally their guardian. This can be empowering for child readers.
Although the children have fought goblins and other creatures before, they have
never killed anything until they are on their way to Mulgarath’s fortress. Mallory
fights the goblins with the sword she took from the dwarfs. Despite her
viciousness, she is shocked and aghast when she actually kills one. Afterwards,
“[t]he bloodstained sword hung limply from her hand, and Jared was
overwhelmed with the impulse to take it from her and clean it before she’d have
a chance to notice” (p. 440), showing that Jared is almost as shaken by the
death as Mallory is. He is even more shocked when Simon starts killing baby
dragons to protect his griffin from the mother dragon:

When Simon turned back to them, tears were running

down his face. As Jared watched him, Simon – who had
never killed anything, who always carried spiders outside
– stepped on the head of one of the baby dragons,
crushing it into a smear under his shoe. It squealed.
Dragon blood stained the ground and melted the edge of
Simon’s heel.
“Look!” he screamed. “Look what I’m doing to your
babies!” (DiTerlizzi and Black, 2009, pp. 445-446)
51
This is clearly an act of desperation, one that Simon does not enjoy at all. The
dire circumstances turn even a gentle pacifist like Simon to violence, if only to
protect those he cares about. Unlike George from the “Stoneheart” trilogy,
finding this capacity for violence within them does not make Mallory and Simon
feel more mature. Rather, it horrifies them and they hope never to have to resort
to this kind of action again.
Interestingly enough, Jared, the only one of the children who used to get
into fights, simply for the sake of fighting, is the only one who does not kill any
creatures in this final confrontation. He is also the one with the clearest
character arc, learning to accept his father’s absence in his life and managing
to live more peaceably with his siblings. This does not happen through violence,
but through realising and understanding that other people (his family, the
boggart, Lucinda and her father) have feelings and problems too. Thus he
becomes less self-centred and happier.
The children manage to save their mother, but they do not kill Mulgarath (he
gets eaten by a hobgoblin after transforming into a bird). While they have to use
violence on several occasions, most of the solutions to their problems come
through other means. The violence they do engage in is for the most part not
portrayed as heroic and glorious, but as grim and unpleasant. Still, Jared,
Simon and Mallory are definitely heroes, as they not only save each other and
their mother, but also actively help people and creatures around them with their
actions.

Garth Nix’s “Old Kingdom” series puts young women in their late teens and
early twenties into the role of hero, although there are some notable heroic
males as well. There are different elements to the heroism, including fighting,
creating, and magic. I will mostly focus on the first three books in the series:
Sabriel (1995), Lirael: Daughter of the Clayr (2001), and Abhorsen (2004). In
the first of these, eighteen-year-old Sabriel has to take over her father’s
responsibilities as the “Abhorsen” after his death. The Abhorsen is the chief
necromancer in the Old Kingdom, who regulates the boundaries between the
living and the dead, and protects people from unlawful necromancers and
undead creatures. The title is usually passed on from parent to child, regardless
of gender. The first time Sabriel puts on her Abhorsen attire, she “turned to the

52
mirror, both pleased and troubled by what she saw. She looked competent,
professional, a traveller who could look after herself. At the same time, she
looked less like someone called Sabriel and more like the Abhorsen, capital
letter and all” (1995, p. 123). Touchstone, a prince whom Sabriel rescues from
an enchantment, similarly has difficulty in seeing her as a person with a human
identity outside of her title: “A woman, looking down at him, a young woman,
armed and armoured, her face... battered. No, not a woman. The Abhorsen, for
she wore the blazon and the bells” (1995, p. 166, ellipsis in the original). Even
though it is not unusual for the Abhorsen to be female, her role seems to take
precedence over her gender, so she is no longer a woman in Touchstone’s eyes
(or at least not initially, as later on they get married and have children). The
same would probably not have been true for a male Abhorsen, since the
general view is, as quoted above, that “girls are gendered whereas boys are
just naturally boys” (Wannamaker, 2008, p. 122). This is reiterated when Sabriel
finds a dead body and is startled to discover that it is a woman:

As she expected, the corpse was of a Charter Mage, dead

but three or four days. But she hadn’t expected to find the
dead person was a woman. Wide shoulders and muscular
build had deceived her for a moment, but there was a
middle-aged woman before her, eyes shut, throat cut,
short brown hair caked with sea-salt and blood. (Nix, 1995,
p. 193)

Just like the appointment of the Abhorsen, most skills and jobs in this series are
ungendered. Both men and women can be Charter Mages (Sabriel even learns
most of her magic skills at her girls’ school rather than from her Abhorsen
father), the kingdom is inherited by the oldest son or daughter of the previous
ruler, and female guards and soldiers are seemingly far more common in the
Old Kingdom than in the more modern country of Ancelstierre. After Sabriel
disenchants Touchstone, he decides to become her protector, even though she
has a sword too, as part of her Abhorsen equipment, as well as being far more
skilled in magic than he is (although he seems to be more adept in healing
magic, which is considered a more feminine type of magic in many works of
fiction). Rather than combining male and female strength, for the most part
Sabriel and Touchstone simply bring their own personal skills to their
partnership, regardless of gender. Usually it is Sabriel who rescues Touchstone
when they are in danger (once by kissing him, using a common fairy tale trope),
53
although Touchstone rescues her once too, as well as proving useful because
of his sailing skills, his knowledge about the Old Kingdom, and his ability to
gather information from other people.
A scene in which Sabriel discusses with Touchstone about how she used to
view the Old Kingdom as an adventure demonstrates the reversals of some of
the gendered expectations in this story:

“I used to think like that at school... . Dreaming about

the Old Kingdom. Proper Charter Magic. Dead to bind.
Princes to be–”
“Rescued?”
“Married,” replied Sabriel absently. (Nix, 1995, p. 326)

Sabriel’s childhood daydreams combine masculine ideas of heroism with

feminine ideas of romance, both of which she ends up fulfilling.
One attribute of Touchstone’s that might be gendered, though it is never
stated as such, is that he is a berserker, which means that he is filled with
superhuman strength when he becomes angry. The sequel describes it from the
point of view of Sabriel’s and Touchstone’s son, Sam:

His father worked hard at staying calm, Sam knew, for

there was the old berserker blood in him and Touchstone
feared its rise. The only time Sam had ever seen that fury
was when a false ambassador from one of the northern
clans had tried to stab Sabriel with a serving fork at a
formal dinner in the Palace. Touchstone, roaring like some
sort of terrible beast, had picked up the six-foot barbarian
and hurled him the length of the table, on to a roast swan.
This had scared everyone much more than the
assassination attempt, particularly when Touchstone then
tried to pick up the double throne and throw that after the
man. Fortunately, he’d failed and was eventually calmed
by Sabriel stroking his brow as he blindly wrenched at the
marble footing of the throne. (Nix, 2001, p. 195)

The berserker blood is here causing Touchstone to behave in a conventionally

hyper-masculine manner, by being fiercely protective of his wife and using
violence to defend her, while Sabriel is fulfilling the feminine role of socialising
her husband out of his natural animal state. At least Touchstone and his family
all realise that this ability is not particularly productive and so he tries to keep it
under control, preferring to use other methods than violence.
At the end of Sabriel the characters need to bind a destructive undead

54
creature named Kerrigor back to his body. To do this, they need help from a
large group of Charter Mages, including soldiers who know magic and some of
the residents at Sabriel’s old school. The juxtaposition of the soldiers and the
schoolgirls is commented on, but they are presented as equals:

“Magistrix, if you would place everyone – Lieutenant,

please put your men among the girls... .”
Anywhere else, at any other time, there would have
been ribald jokes and giggles about that. Here, with the
Dead about the building, and the sarcophagus brooding in
their midst, it was simply an instruction. (Nix, 1995, pp.
350-351)

After Kerrigor is bound to his body, Sabriel banishes him on her own, but the
binding is a group effort and, in fact, only succeeds because a dying girl lends
Sabriel her last spark of magic. This means that while Sabriel is presented as
the heroine of the story, a lot of her accomplishments are achieved through
cooperation and community.
At the time of the events in Sabriel the Old Kingdom has been without a
king for two centuries. Touchstone is the last remaining member of the royal
family, and so he is crowned as king, with Sabriel as his queen. Together they
continue the royal line and bring back order to the Old Kingdom. This plot point
presents a problematic element commonly found in fantasy fiction. As I
discussed in the Literature Review, medievalist fantasy is prone to represent a
rigid class system and to romanticise monarchies. The same is true here. The
Old Kingdom was in chaos and disarray during the 200 years since the previous
king, with undead creatures freely roaming the country and terrorising the living.
When Touchstone takes what is seen as his rightful place on the throne, he
returns the Kingdom to its previous peaceful and happy state, showing that the
realm is better off with a king than when the people are left without rule. While
Sabriel is not a member of the nobility, she is wealthy enough to attend a
private boarding school, as are many of the characters in the sequels. While not
all the heroes in the series are rich, the books tend to focus on the wealthier
characters.
Another common problem with medievalist fantasy that I discussed in the
Literature Review is its ethnocentrism. As in many other fantasy worlds, the
inhabitants of the Old Kingdom appear to be exclusively white. It is not until a
later sequel, Goldenhand (2016), that we are introduced to brown-skinned
55
characters. Their race lives to the north of the Old Kingdom, which is
presumably why they do not appear in the series before. While they are still
seen as the “other” to the white inhabitants of the Old Kingdom, the depiction of
these northern tribes is respectful and does not use stereotypes about real
races.
It is, however, interesting to note that a large part of Abhorsen is devoted to
a plot point involving displaced refugees from Ancelstierre who hope to find a
new home in the Old Kingdom. The heroes help the refugees, while the people
who demonise them are portrayed as villainous, so being kind and helpful to
people from other countries is presented as a positive thing.
The series also introduces the Clayr, a society of clairvoyants. Their skill is
the only one in the series that is definitely gendered, as all the Clayr are
women, living apart from men. Their children are fathered by travelling
merchants and other casual lovers. Lirael, the protagonist of the second and
third books, feels like a misfit in this group, because while she is good at
fighting and better at using Charter Magic than most of the other Clayr, she
seems to lack their gift of prophecy entirely. This parallels Sam’s storyline in the
series, as his parents intend for him to become the next Abhorsen, although he
is terrified of death and unable to use necromancy. At one point, one of the
older Clayr (who also happens to be Lirael’s great-grandmother, although she
was never close to her daughter or granddaughter) tells Lirael:

“Remember that while the Clayr can See the future, others
make it. I feel that you will be a maker, not a seer. You
must promise me that it will be so. Promise me that that
you will not give in. Promise me that you will never give up
hope. Make your future, Lirael!” (Nix, 2001, p. 103)

As it turns out, Lirael is Sabriel’s half-sister, and is fated to become the next
Abhorsen, while Sam carries on the legacy of the ancient Wallmakers. Both
characters become heroic as they fulfil their new roles, although they are not
the roles they, or anyone else, expected them to take on. These roles do,
however, reflect the two characters’ strengths and interests more accurately
than the ones that were previously forced on them by their society. After the
magical servants of the Abhorsen’s house bring the emblems of the Wallmakers
to Sam, he says:

56
 “They gave it to me, and I’ve been thinking that it’s as if my
ancestors are saying it’s all right to make things. That’s
what I’m meant to do. Make things, and help the Abhorsen
and the King. So I’ll do that, and I’ll do my best, and if my
best isn’t good enough, at least I will have done everything
I could, everything that is in me. I don’t have to try to be
someone else, someone I could never be.” (Nix, 2004, p.
69)

The powers of creation (as opposed to the powers of procreation) are

traditionally associated with men, whereas death – Abhorsen’s realm – is often
associated with women. As Carole G. Silver writes, “the face of death, like the
face of evil, was often seen as female” (1999, p. 172). However, both Lirael and
Sam also transcend some gender stereotypes, as the Abhorsen’s role also
involves protecting people and fighting evil, whereas Sam is putting himself in a
feminine “helpmeet” role, rather than one of leadership, second to women like
his mother Sabriel (the current Abhorsen), his aunt Lirael (the Abhorsen-in-
Waiting), and his sister Ellimere (the future Queen).
When Orannis the Destroyer is defeated at the climax of Abhorsen, similarly
to the climax of Sabriel, it takes the efforts of several people with various
different skills, all working together. Ultimately it takes an act of violence to bind
the evil presence (Lirael has to slice it in two with a magical sword crafted by
Sam, using blood from himself, his parents, his sister, Lirael, and two Clayr),9
but the emphasis on cooperation between different skillsets makes this series
seem less one-dimensionally martial than Fletcher’s text. In the Old Kingdom
nobody “thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier” (Fletcher, 2008,
p. 182), because there are other ways to help protect the world, whether
through magic, through crafting, through necromancy, through prophesying, or
other means, more or less regardless of gender.
That being said, because most of the antagonists of the “Old Kingdom”
series are mindless demons and forces of evil, it suffers from some of the same
problems as the “Stoneheart” trilogy when it comes to dehumanising the enemy.
Both series have human villains as well, but the ones in the “Old Kingdom”
series are given more depth than the Walker from Stone Heart, and are
occasionally even allowed a measure of redemption. This makes Nix’s text less

9 It can be argued that this is not actually a violent act, as the Destroyer cannot be killed, only
bound with magic. Even so, the binding is still being done with a weapon, so violence is
implied.
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one-dimensional than Fletcher’s.
Most of the heroes discussed in this section come from privileged
backgrounds. The only character of colour is The Queen of America from Silver
Tongue, who is presented in a very stereotypical manner that is more harmful
than empowering. Edie comes from an impoverished family, but she proves to
be a less effective hero than George, who is middle-class. The children from
The Spiderwick Chronicles seem to go from a middle-class life to a working-
class one, though the text does not explore the implications of this. Unlike Edie,
however, who (it is implied) goes to live with George at the end of the novel,
Jared, Grace, and Mallory do not return to New York to their middle-class life,
but continue living in Aunt Lucinda’s old house with their working mother, so that
overcoming their economic circumstances is not seen as a necessary ending to
their story, and is thus less important than helping Lucinda and her father,
defeating the evil Mulgarath, and learning to be more united and happier as a
family. Mostly though, the texts provide very little diversity, even as they try to
subvert gendered expectations.
Overall, while violence and offensive magic are still common in children’s
fantasy literature, these are rarely seen as the only available solutions, and the
focus is more often on helping and understanding others, rather than on
competing with and besting them. How violence against enemies is portrayed
depends largely on the age of the protagonists, but also on how humanised the
antagonists are. There is less remorse over violent actions if the enemies are
portrayed as being uniformly evil with no redeeming features, especially if they
are literally not human, but rather monsters (as in the “Stoneheart” trilogy) or
supernatural forces (as in the “Old Kingdom” books).
If the antagonist can be reasoned with, however, the story might call for
other types of heroism, as discussed in the next section.

Blessed Are the Peacemakers

In some stories the heroism lies not in conquering enemies but in avoiding the
conflict altogether. Jack Zipes writes that in fairy tales “[c]haos and conflict are
followed by the restoration of order which affirms the goodness of the existing
system” (1979, p. 127), but in these novels the status quo is contested and
replaced by a better system, in which characters are more free to be
themselves and which often provides more equality for oppressed people. All
58
this is done through communication and compromise rather than through
bloodshed. Frequently – but not always – these characters are female, which
seems to subscribe to the stereotype that women are less aggressive and more
nurturing than men. As R. W. Connell states,

it is mainly young men who are recruited into jobs that

require the use of force: police, the military, private
security, and blue-collar crime. And it is mainly young
women who are recruited into jobs that repair the
consequences of violence: nursing, psychology, and social
work. (2002, p. 3)

Even though this portrayal of femininity may be more traditional than, for
example, that of Sabriel with her sword, it is still potentially transgressive as it
rejects hegemonic masculinity, both in individual characters and in society as a
whole, and seeks to replace a social order based on physical strength with one
based on compassion. Furthermore, this type of heroism necessitates using
one’s voice, which is often a subversive act for a woman.10 In this vein, Marina
Warner writes:

The story itself becomes the weapon of the weaponless.

The struggles of women, for example, are not resolved by
combat, on the whole (one or two Amazon heroines
excepted), as the contests of men may be in heroic epic;
when they need to undo error or redeem wrongdoing or
defend the innocent, they raise their voice, if only in a
conspiratorial whisper – hence the suspicion of women’s
talk that haunts the whole history of the old wives’ tale.
(1994a, p. 412)

One book that depicts kindness as heroism while also subverting numerous
fairy-tale traditions is Eva Ibbotson’s The Ogre of Oglefort (2010). The story
introduces several “Unusual Creatures”, including a hag, a troll, and a banshee,
as well as the hag’s familiar, who is an ordinary human boy named Ivo. While
there are some creatures that have mostly positive connotations (such as fairies
and enchantresses), hags and trolls are usually seen in a negative light.
However, these characters are all friendly and they hold down jobs that benefit
society. Additionally, they attend a Summer Meeting of Unusual Creatures at
which they decide upon a good deed to do during the summer, using their

10 For a further discussion about the power of women’s voices, especially in conjunction with
magic, see Chapter 5, “Magic and Empowerment”.
59
special powers, simply for the pleasure of it. This year they are planning to help
a family get rid of mice, but these plans are interrupted when the frail, yet
powerful, Norns appear and order them instead to rescue a princess from an
ogre. The troll Ulf says: “It’s because there’s a princess involved... . That’s why
the Norns appeared. Princesses always bring them out” (p. 33). The Norns are
not interested in the kinds of small acts of kindness that the other Unusual
Creatures value, but rather their idea of doing good is based on heroic deeds
involving swords and princesses. As they put it, “[w]hen a princess is in danger,
something has to be done. This is a rule which binds all Unusual Creatures”
(pp. 127-128), although the other Unusual Creatures seem to disagree, as most
of them have no problem leaving and rejecting the quest. Perhaps it is because
of the Norns’ great age that they feel themselves bound by tradition and fairy-
tale clichés, and are thus also unable to envision this story going any other way
than with a weak, passive princess and a slain beast.
Before the Hag and her friends set off to rescue the princess, the Norns
give them three gifts, characteristic of the kind of helpful fairy tale figures that
they aspire to be. These gifts are magic beans that allow the eater to
understand animals, healing water, and a rusty sword. The Norns expect one of
the grown men to take the sword, but they refuse: “The troll was strong and
brave but he worked with wood, not rusty metal – and the wizard thought that
the sword looked heavy and carrying it would make it difficult for him to think”
(p. 39). Little Ivo ends up taking the sword. The former two gifts accentuate the
type of heroism that the Unusual Creatures are comfortable engaging in, in
which they communicate with others and attempt to help them. Both of these
come in handy later on. The sword, on the other hand, turns out to be the least
useful of the gifts by far, and Ivo feels silly rather than heroic carrying it “over his
shoulder like a rake” (p. 56). As the characters never engage in the violence the
Norns expect of them, the weapon is only a burden.
Once they arrive at the ogre’s castle, Ivo and the Unusual Creatures
discover, to their surprise, that the princess was never in any danger. She
sought out the ogre of her own accord to ask him to turn her into a bird, so that
she could escape from the pressures of being a princess. The narrative
describes her as a spirited tomboy and, perhaps more importantly, as a rather
ordinary child, especially in comparison with her older, more lady-like sisters:

60
 Sidony and Angela were pretty, obedient girls who liked
doing all the things that royal people do, but Mirella did
not. She was a misfit from the start. Mirella did not look
like a princess. Her eyes were black and her hair was
straight and her ears stuck out. Mirella would not ride in a
closed carriage and wave to the people; she said driving
made her sick. She would not have her portrait painted or
go and play with children who were “suitable”. (Ibbotson,
2010, p. 45)

Unlike the “Old Kingdom” series, The Ogre of Oglefort is explicitly critical of
monarchy and the class system. At one point the narrative says of Mirella: “It
was a pity she was a princess – Ivo did not approve of people being royal – but
it was not her fault; one cannot choose one’s parents” (p. 41). Aside from
Mirella, the other nobles are portrayed as being snobbish and somewhat
callous at best. At worst, they are selfish and downright malicious, particularly
Mirella’s greedy suitor, Prince Umberto, who only wishes to marry her to gain
money and influence. It is never stated how old either he or Mirella are, but
Umberto is old enough to grow a “silly blond beard” (p. 48), whereas on several
occasions characters note that Mirella is far too young to get married, so there
appears to be a significant age difference between the two. Even though the
proposed marriage is one of convenience rather than being based on sexual
attraction, Umberto is portrayed in a rather predatory way. After Mirella is gone
for good, he suggests getting engaged to Princess Sidony’s newly born baby
girl, but is finally cast aside by her family.
The royal family’s arrogance and lack of support for Mirella is juxtaposed
with the Unusual Creatures’ humble and charitable lives. They work at simple
jobs that are of use to the community, and they enjoy taking care of others.
Ivo and his friends are confused when they realise that Mirella is not in any
danger, and that it is, in fact, the ogre who feels as though he needs rescuing
from her incessant pleading. But as they have been tasked with solving this
situation, they stay at the ogre’s castle to help, albeit in different ways than they
expected. Ivo tries to cheer up and befriend Mirella, while the others take care
of the run-down castle and the ailing ogre. Interestingly, it is the otherwise fairly
masculine Ulf who nurses the ogre. The characters are brought into action
again when the castle is attacked by a human army and they are called on to
defend it, but even then they rely on trickery rather than violence. Once again,
the text subverts expectations by depicting the soldiers as the enemies, full of

61
foolish masculine pride, whereas the ogre and the other Unusual Creatures are
the brave and heroic ones. When the army approaches, one of the characters –
a timid woman with a fear of men – describes it thus:

“There are men with uniforms riding towards us. I could

see them coming over the hill. Many men – a whole
army... . Men like that are bad – very bad. They have flags
with many colours – green and yellow and blue, and
foolish hats. When men have such silly clothes they are
dangerous.” (Ibbotson, 2010, p. 168)

Even though this was written at a time when female soldiers existed – despite
their being less common than male soldiers – Nandi always refers to the army
as “men” rather than “people”. Whether or not there are any women in the
approaching army, its imperialistic agenda and glorification of war and violence
are depicted as particularly masculine follies.
After the soldiers have been scared away, Ivo, Mirella, the Unusual
Creatures, and the other inhabitants of the ogre’s castle settle down there and
live together in peace and community. This is the happy ending to all their
stories, which is achieved through kindness and cooperation rather than
aggression and rivalry. Significantly, Mirella does not return to being a princess,
but is much happier living a common and communal life, in which she works
hard and is equal to her new friends.

A similar approach is found in Shannon Hale’s first two “Princess Academy”

books (2005 and 2013). The books introduce a group of teenage girls from a
village of stone quarriers who are given the opportunity to be trained and
educated in high culture, and to meet the prince. As only one of the girls can
marry the prince and become a princess, they are expected to see each other
as rivals and to compete against each other. Instead, the girls discover a sense
of unity and community as they come to know each other better. The
protagonist, Miri, says at one point:

“I don’t like feeling in competition with everybody to be

seen and liked by Prince Steffan.”
“We should make a pact,” said Esa. “We’ll be happy
62
 for whomever he chooses, no jealousy or meanness.”
All the girls agreed... . (Hale, 2005, p. 196)11

At first the other girls speak badly of Britta, a newcomer to the village, because
they think she is arrogant, but they become friends when they realise that she is
simply shy and actually very kind and sweet. Similarly, Miri engages in a bit of
rivalry with an older girl, Katar, to be at the top of the class but, like her previous
dislike for Britta, this is resolved on a friendly note when Miri learns more about
Katar and comes to better understand her motivations.
The girls’ unity and bravery are tested when the Princess Academy is
attacked by bandits, and they only have each other to rely on to escape this
situation. As Shirley Foster and Judy Simons write:

Stories for children frequently stress their protagonists’

ability to survive in a world without adults. When such a
narrative also focuses on girls who are removed from
obvious patriarchal influence, the emphasis on possibilities
of female autonomy becomes intensified. (1995, p. 86)

This happens in Princess Academy as the girls are cut off from their families for
most of the story, but especially when the bandits attack and remove the other
adults from the vicinity. The girls all work together to help each other escape
through the window and to contact the village to let them know of the danger.
Eventually Miri tricks the leader of the bandits into falling over a cliff edge, but
he holds on to her and nearly drags her down with him until Miri’s father drops a
mallet onto his head. Hale probably chose to end the scene in this way so she
could spare her thirteen-year-old character the burden of having killed someone
herself. Other than that, Miri is very much in charge of her own narrative by
being clever, courageous, and full of empathy.
Miri’s other main act of heroism occurs when she discovers the true value of
the stone that the villagers quarry and so she encourages them not to be
swindled by the travelling merchants any longer. This changes the lives of all
the villagers for the better, as they no longer have to work as hard to merely

11 While this appears to remain true in this book, the sequel reveals that one of the girls, Liana,
is resentful of Britta, who is chosen as the princess, and secretly plots against her. Similarly,
Lady Sisela, who is a leader in the resistance, is mainly motivated by her jealousy of Queen
Sabet, saying about the king, “I wonder if he thinks about how different his life would be if
he’d chosen me” (2013, p. 190). But even these two characters are not demonised for their
pettiness and selfishness as much as they are pitied for not being able to feel the joy and
beauty of female solidarity.
63
survive, and can now afford luxuries like decent blankets and honey. This new
state of affairs is achieved not through battle, but simply through increased
knowledge and the ability to negotiate. As Britta says to Miri later:

“What we did last year – what you did, Miri – that was
revolution. Turning things around. You said just because
things had always been one way didn’t mean they couldn’t
change. You persuaded the village council to refuse the
traders’ terms and fight for fair value. That was pretty
brave.” (Hale, 2013, p. 31, italics in the original)

The sequel, Princess Academy: Palace of Stone, goes even further, as Miri not
only betters the lives of people in one village, but in an entire kingdom. Along
with several other girls from the old Princess Academy, she goes to the capital
city to visit Britta, who is about to marry Prince Steffan, and Katar, who has
become a royal ambassador. While there, some of the girls discover a new
vocation when previously the only opportunity they had was to become
quarriers like their parents. So, for example, Esa realises that she wants to
learn medicine, and Frid takes up steel-working. Furthermore, Miri finds out that
many of the king’s subjects are poor and unhappy, and she wants to help them.
Britta is unable to use her influence as the king’s future daughter-in-law, as he
makes her feel completely voiceless. She tells Miri, “he won’t listen to me.
Sometimes I feel as if when I speak no sound comes out at all” (p. 210).
Miri joins a group of resistance fighters as she is enamoured by their ideals,
but soon discovers that their methods are ruthless and, for at least some of
them, their motivations are not as pure as they pretend. The resistance tries to
incite anger towards Britta amongst the common people to make them rise up
against the entire royal family. Knowing that a violent revolution will mean the
death of her friend as well as of many other innocent people, Miri seeks to find
a peaceful resolution. When an angry mob comes for Britta, Miri manages,
using only words and symbols, to calm it down by making the people
understand that Britta is not their enemy. Later she and her friends draft a
charter to secure the rights of the common people, and convince the king to
sign it, to secure peace in the kingdom while also helping and uplifting the poor.
Rather than simply reaffirming the status quo, with perhaps a higher social
position for herself, Miri successfully changes the system to make it fairer for
everyone. This ending makes Princess Academy and its sequel different from

64
the other texts discussed in this section, as it not only criticises the class system
in the way The Ogre of Oglefort does, but has the characters change it. Even
when the methods and personalities of some of the revolutionaries are
questioned, the narrative never belittles the common people’s need for equality
and change.
The “Princess Academy” books are also the only ones of my corpus of
primary texts that feature a physically disabled character in a major role. The
Merlin Conspiracy (2003) by Diana Wynne Jones has a nameless disabled
woman who appears briefly to serve as a mentor to the main character. Resa in
Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart (2004) is temporarily rendered mute, but she regains
her voice in the sequel. Miri’s best friend, Esa, from Princess Academy, on the
other hand, is portrayed as a normal girl who happens to have a malformed
hand. Her disability makes her unable to work in the quarry with most of the
other villagers, but she is never treated like a burden or an object of pity. Unlike
the hurt woman from The Merlin Conspiracy, Esa gets to participate in the
adventures with Miri and other characters and, unlike Resa’s muteness, her
disability is neither magically incurred nor cured, but a natural thing. These
factors make her a well-rounded disabled character, and her inclusion in the
story shows that Miri’s revolution has a place for disabled people as well as
able-bodied ones.
The story particularly emphasises the impact women can have on history.
Chapter 22 of Princess Academy: Palace of Stone starts with a snippet of song
that reads:

The army slew a thousand and showed little pity

The king ordered fealty from the conquered city
The prince charmed its people with words wise and witty
And the queen sat on a couch, looking very pretty (Hale,
2013, p. 283, italics in the original)

This describes events from the past, as they are perceived. In reality, the
queens in the world of Princess Academy are brave and accomplish far more
than simply lying on couches and being pretty. The school Miri attends is called
the Queen’s Castle, as it was founded by a previous queen, Queen Gertrud,
who wanted to use her limited power to help people by creating a school that
everyone could attend, noble and commoner alike. Sabet, the current queen,
presents the charter that Miri has penned to the king. At first she is not sure if

65
she is brave enough to do this, but a portrait of Queen Gertrud inspires her to
speak up and support Miri’s cause. All of this is accomplished through a sense
of community between women. As Trites says:

One of the strengths traditionally associated with

femininity is the way many women have recognized the
importance of community. Throughout history women have
been depicted in their families and friendships as
nurturers. ...feminist authors often use the common
conception of women strengthening each other within
relationships as a focal point. (1997, p. 80)

Friendship and solidarity between female characters is a significant theme in all

of Hale’s works, particularly in The Book of a Thousand Days (2008). This text
is a retelling of the Grimms’ tale “Maid Maleen”, about a princess who is locked
in a tower for several years, along with her waiting maid. Unlike the fairy tale,
the focus of the novel is on the servant, Dashti, rather than the princess, but like
some of Hale’s other works it presents a friendship between a princess and a
common girl (Britta and Miri in Princess Academy; Ani and Enna in The Books
of Bayern [2003-2010], discussed in Chapter 5). Notably, The Book of a
Thousand Days is the only one of my primary texts in which none of the
characters are white. According to the author, the fictional country in which the
story takes place is based on medieval Mongolia. One edition of the book
features a photograph of a Mongolian-American model on the cover. On her
blog, Hale explains that this edition proved less popular than similar editions of
her other books which had pictures of white girls on the cover, which suggests
that – consciously or not – race is still a significant factor in book sales.
However, she also writes:

When I visited schools, school librarians who told me they

had large Asian populations in their student body said they
wanted the paperback [of Book of a Thousand Days]
specifically. They knew representation matters. That those
students who were of Asian descent would be happy to
see someone who looked somewhat like them on a cover,
leading a story of her own. (Hale, 2015, unpaged)

This reaction shows one of the reasons why diversity in media is so important.
The story is told through Dashti’s diary, beginning on the day when she and
Lady Saren are locked in the tower because Saren refuses to marry the man
her father has chosen for her. Dashti’s narrative is characterised by kindness
66
and optimism, even when she reflects on her harsh life as a peasant. At first
she takes her position in life for granted and she considers it her duty to be
submissive to Saren and other members of the nobility. When Lord Khasar –
the man Saren was meant to marry – appears at the tower, he orders Dashti to
stick her hand out of the food hatch so he can slap her. Dashti knows that he is
a cruel, ruthless man, but, as she states, “I recognized the command of gentry,
and I must do what he says” (Hale, 2008, p. 58). Throughout the story Dashti
discovers her own inner strength. Spending time with Saren also makes her
realise that the gentry simply consist of people as well. This knowledge enables
her to stand up for herself and her own rights. When a lady she dislikes gives
her an order, she writes:

Strangely, her words held no sway over me. Maybe it’s

wrong, but I don’t think I have to do what she says just
because I’m a mucker and she’s an honored lady. I smiled
to myself then, thinking that if I were in a tower now and a
black-gauntleted Khasar told me to put my hand back
down so he could slap it, I’d tell him to go slap himself.
(Hale, 2008, p. 274)

Dashti’s greatest strength is her ability to sing healing songs – a skill passed
down to her from her mother, through a matrilineal line. While serving Saren,
Dashti mostly uses this ability to ease the princess’s pain, but after they escape
from the tower, she finds wider uses for her talent to help various people she
befriends. It even brings her to the attention of Khan Tegus, the prince whom
she marries at the end of the story. Her greatest achievement, however, is when
she uses her magic to stop a war. As in Princess Academy: Palace of Stone,
averting a war is considered a far better outcome than winning one.
During most of the narrative, Lady Saren is presented in stark contrast to
Dashti. While Dashti is cheerful and hard-working, Saren is sullen and idle.
Although Dashti respects Saren’s superiority, she does not understand her
behaviour.12 Later she learns, though, that Saren has been traumatised by
events in her past and is now terrified of all men, and this helps Dashti
understand her better.
After the two young women escape from the tower and are employed as
kitchen maids in Khan Tegus’s palace, Saren learns to work and becomes

12 A more knowledgeable reader might recognise Saren’s behaviour – her lethargy, her anxiety,
and her bouts of over-eating – as characteristic of someone with clinical depression.
67
determined to do things for herself, even when she does them badly. Her
depression becomes less overwhelming after Dashti gives her a cat for
companionship. But what really gives her confidence and helps her overcome
her fears is her friendship with Dashti. Near the end of the story Saren speaks
in Dashti’s defence to a court of chiefs, and for the first time she sounds like a
confident princess rather than like a cowering child. Dashti remarks in her diary:

There was power in her voice, and the chiefs took notice.
How could they not? I’ve seen my lady begin to change
since the cat purred in her lap, since she found use for her
hands in the kitchen, since Khasar died, but never until
that moment had she looked like I thought gentry should.
Like anyone should. More than a thousand days we’ve
been together, more than a thousand songs I’ve sung for
her, and only now, I think, do I see Saren truly begin to
heal. (Hale, 2008, pp. 297-298)

In classic fairy tale fashion, Dashti marries the prince, but it is this celebration of
the girls’ friendship and sisterhood that provides the true happy ending for both
of them. Significantly, Saren does not have a love interest within the book.
While she is no longer terrified of men, heterosexual marriage is not presented
as a necessary next step for her to fully heal from her trauma. Nor is remaining
single presented as a burden or a sacrifice, but as a valid choice.
It bears mentioning that while The Book of a Thousand Days critiques and
scrutinises the class system by showing Dashti to be the equal of Lady Saren
and the other royal characters, unlike the other two texts discussed in this
section, the main characters neither flee nor overturn the system, but end up
participating in it, as Dashti becomes a princess by marrying the prince. Even
then, her power is presented as limited, as it is subject to a council who
represent the traditions of the kingdom. Presumably she will use her authority to
try to better the lives of commoners, but this ending is still less radical than
Miri’s creation of a bill of rights, or even Mirella’s rejection of her status and her
choice to live communally with Ivo and the Unusual Creatures.
Asian women are characterised as being “quiet and docile” and ready to “do
what they are told with a smile” (Sun, 2014a, unpaged). Dashti and Saren break
these stereotypes, not only by being active and refusing to follow orders, but
also by showing emotions other than a cheerful willingness to serve. Mental
illnesses are still commonly stigmatised, and this is particularly true within East-

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Asian communities, which makes it hard for mentally ill Asians to talk about their
problems (Gonzalez, 2017; Soller, 2017). It is therefore rare to see an Asian
character struggling with depression, but Saren’s mental illness in The Book of
a Thousand Days is treated respectfully and realistically, and she is a well-
rounded female character of colour.
Both Hale’s and Ibbotson’s texts subvert how fairy tales and fantasy stories
are expected to work and how the characters in them behave. Ogres are
befriended rather than defeated, pretty girls are allies rather than rivals,
princesses are not helpless, and social structures and gendered traditions are
questioned. All of this encourages a type of heroism that is based on empathy
rather than victory in battles and contests. While Hale’s heroes are mostly
female, Ibbotson shows kind and nurturing characters of more than one gender,
demonstrating that, just like courage, empathy is not a gender-specific virtue
and that the two are not mutually exclusive. All these texts explore issues of
class and the way it affects its characters, particularly the female ones. Princess
Academy: Palace of Stone does so in the most intricate way, and is also the
only one of the texts in which the old system is changed for the better, even
though the revolution fails. The texts also show some diversity when it comes to
the race, class, and disabilities of their heroes and heroines.
Unfortunately, not all heroines prove themselves as effective as the author
perhaps intends them to be. Even when the characterisation of a heroine is
good, sometimes her role in the story is lacking and leaves her with little
agency. There are various ways otherwise strong female characters can be
undermined by the plot they find themselves in, which I shall discuss in the
following section.

Ineffective Heroines
As discussed above, Edie in the “Stoneheart” trilogy is introduced as a tough,
street-smart urchin, but the story undermines her repeatedly, showing her to be
far weaker and far more frequently needing rescue and protection than her
male counterpart, George. Admittedly, her special skills prove vital during the
climax of the series in finding a magical artefact necessary to defeat the villains.
All the fighting that the other, more warlike, characters do in the meantime only
serves as a distraction to give Edie time to find the item. While this is a notable
accomplishment, it is the only instance in the series of Edie saving the other
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characters, and shortly after this happens, she is captured by the Walker once
more, and George needs to rescue her again. Even though she acts like a
character who likes to take charge, it is George who is portrayed as the leader
and the one who is capable of heroism and independence.
This type of contradictory characterisation is more common in female
characters than male ones. It appears to result from authors trying to step away
from the stereotype of the damsel in distress by making their heroines feisty
and skilled, but still wanting the male characters to engage in most of the heroic
action, thus showing those same heroines succumbing to dangers they cannot
save themselves from, despite their skills and feistiness, and needing to be
rescued by their romantic interests or other male heroes. This provides only a
shallow modernisation of female characters, as these kinds of heroines have
little more agency and control over their own lives than characters from more
traditional stories.
Diana Wynne Jones’s stories frequently feature strong female protagonists
with powerful magic, such as Nan in Witch Week (1982), Sophie in Howl’s
Moving Castle (1986), and Roddy in The Merlin Conspiracy (2003).13 However,
in some novels the protagonists are reduced to little more than supporting
characters in their own stories. Such is the case with Maewen in The Crown of
Dalemark (1993). She is sent back in time through magic to take the place of
another young heroine, Noreth. Noreth herself is also less effective than her
reputation suggests. She is on a quest to unite Dalemark as its new rightful
queen, a quest which she claims was set for her by the One, Dalemark’s main
deity. After Maewen takes her place, she does indeed occasionally hear a deep
voice that claims to be the One, although it feels more sinister than comforting
to Maewen. In the future that Maewen comes from, Dalemark has been united
by a single ruler, but not by Queen Noreth. Rather, this leader is the mysterious
Amil the Great about whom very little has been recorded in history, so his
identity is unknown to Maewen’s contemporaries.
Just before the wizard Wend sends Maewen back in time, he tells her about
Noreth’s disappearance at the hands of Kankredin, this world’s version of the
devil. Wend says bitterly: “That was how Amil, so-called the Great, was able to
claim the crown” (p. 77). This description seems to set Amil up as a villain who

13 All three of these protagonists are discussed in Chapter 5.

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snatches the crown from the rightful queen, who has already been established
to be a kind and decent person at this point. However, Amil the Great turns out
to be none other than Mitt, who is the other focal character of the novel
alongside Maewen, as well as being one of the protagonists of Drowned Ammet
(1977), an earlier book in the series. This means that he is someone the
readers are already familiar with and rooting for. He is also a hero – neither a
tyrant nor a pretender – and his claims to the crown turn out to be legitimate,
more so than Noreth’s, as he is descended from Dalemark’s first king. Noreth
herself, while being a good person, has been misguided all along, as the voice
speaking to her is actually that of Kankredin, who has been using her for her
entire life to further his plans to rule the land and upset the course of history.
Also, despite being a trained fighter, she cannot save herself from being
ambushed and having her throat cut by an assassin.
At first, Maewen’s plan in this situation is simply to carry on until Wend’s
magic brings her back to her own time. She does not mean to change history,
but simply to observe it as it happens around her. But her attitude changes
when she starts feeling empowered in her own abilities. Wearing Noreth’s
armour excites her: “She felt a mad, hilarious pleasure. I’m a warrior maid! I’m
changing into a fighting-girl under my own eyes – what I can see of myself!” (p.
75) After encouraging a group of miners to go on strike, she feels even more
empowered:

This afternoon, she had done something which really

would affect history and, because of that, whether it was
impossible or not, she wanted this mad adventure of
Noreth’s to succeed. She wanted to take it and make it
work. Maybe, when the time came, she would not tamely
hand over to Amil the Great. That would be changing
history indeed – if only she could think how to do it.
(Jones, 1993, p. 107, italics in the original)

As Maewen comes from a fairly wealthy family, rather than hailing from a
working-class background herself, it does, however, seem patronising that the
workers need her initiative to figure out how to fight for their own rights. Thus,
while the narrative advocates for workers’ rights, it does so in a somewhat
paternalistic way that fails to be truly intersectional. It bears mentioning that Mitt
and Moril, both of whom are likable characters, come from poor backgrounds,
although neither of them are workers, as Mitt grew up in a middle-class

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household after his peasant father’s death, and Moril is a travelling musician.
Despite her bravado, Maewen accomplishes little else, and actually has
barely any effect on the things that happen around her and to her. She needs to
be rescued by her male companions several times and never manages to
rescue anyone else (though arguably this is because she is the only one in the
group without any combat training or magical skills). When Mitt rescues her, she
starts crying and reprimands herself by thinking: “How – how totally – girly!” (p.
184, italics in the original) The implication is that being “girly” is silly and
embarrassing – a statement that is reinforced when Mitt and Moril mock Kialan
for his effeminate looks and manner.
When the time comes to take the crown, Maewen has already learned from
Mitt and Moril that it is Kankredin who has been talking to her and that Noreth
has been killed, so she does not try to seize it for herself. Of all the people
present – Maewen, Moril, Mitt, Kialan, and Ynen – she is the only one who does
not have a claim to the throne, though this is because she is out of her own
time, not because she is female (although, significantly, she is also the only girl
present). Mitt is deemed the most suitable candidate by all, and so becomes the
new leader of Dalemark. At this point Maewen has fallen in love with him and
wishes to stay with him in the past, forsaking her old life and family, even
though she knows that Amil the Great, meaning Mitt, is her ancestor. She
fleetingly thinks of her family, but does not really seem to care about their
feelings: “The One alone knew what Mum and Aunt Liss would feel, but this was
what she wanted” (pp. 276-277, italics in the original). Despite her reluctance to
go, however, she is finally sent back to her own time.
While Kankredin has been defeated in the past, parts of him have survived
and in Maewen’s time they put themselves back together. This finally seems to
give Maewen the opportunity to be the hero of her own story, as none of her
friends from the past are there to help her this time, and she remembers a
magical word of power that Mitt used earlier, which might be strong enough to
banish Kankredin again. But before she gets the chance to put her knowledge
to use, Mitt – who has achieved immortality – appears, defeats Kankredin with
an even stronger word of power, and even soothes the traitorous Wend.
Meanwhile all Maewen does is watch. In the last scene of the novel, she runs
off to find Mitt to continue her relationship with him, not caring that he is now
over two hundred years older than her, nor that he is her ancestor.
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 The story not only undermines Maewen by letting her accomplish very little,
but it also undermines Hildy, the heroine from a previous book in the series, by
turning her into an arrogant and mean-spirited character. When Hildy appeared
in Drowned Ammet, she was a likeable girl who lived in constant fear of her evil,
oppressive grandfather, Earl Hadd. In The Crown of Dalemark she makes it
clear that she looks down on Mitt, who was previously her friend, for being a
commoner. She also ignores her gentle brother and argues with her firm, yet
kind, father. Although they grew up in the same luxurious, yet abusive,
circumstances as Hildy, she is the only one of the three who starts taking after
her grandfather. This makes the change in her character seem particularly
sexist.
Maewen instantly dislikes Hildy when she meets her, and is upset at the
way she treats Mitt:

When Hildy nodded coolly and turned away, Maewen

could have slapped her. He’s looked forward to meeting
you, and worried about you – which is more than you
deserve! – and you do this to him! she thought. You little –
little cow! (Jones, 1993, p. 177, italics in the original)

Other characters agree with Maewen’s assessment of Hildy. Kialan calls her a
“white-faced little sow”, declaring, “She’ll be worse than Earl Hadd before she’s
through – she’s the image of him already!” (p. 175)
As Hildy becomes more snobbish after spending time at an expensive girls’
school, this might be a commentary on public schools. In another of Jones’s
works, The Lives of Christopher Chant (1988), Millie becomes obsessed with
schoolgirl stories and desperately wants to go to a girls’ school to play hockey
and have midnight feasts. Her wish is granted at the end of the novel, but in a
later book, Conrad’s Fate (2005), it is revealed that the school Millie goes to is
unlike her romanticised fantasies. Instead, she is bullied for being a misfit and is
deeply unhappy. Hildy, on the other hand, adapts to public school life quickly,
and seemingly internalises its elitist attitudes, which is what makes her reject
her former friends. However, the fact that the only other girl from the school
whom the readers meet is portrayed as being a very nice person – as well as
being Hildy’s best friend – rather confuses this point. In reality, the narrative
reason for Hildy’s change in character is probably to make her seem less
compelling as a romantic interest for Mitt, freeing the role for Maewen.

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 Perhaps the only female character in the novel who is not undermined by
the narrative in some way is Cennoreth, who first appeared in The Spellcoats
(1979) as a young girl, but is now a powerful, benevolent witch. She sees
through Maewen’s disguise straight away, recognising that she is not Noreth,
and her cabin is the only place where Kankredin’s influence cannot be felt.
Unfortunately, she only appears in one scene.
While the story certainly plays with readers’ expectations, it does so in a
way that makes the heroine more passive than the male characters around her.
Some of the depictions of class in the novel are also interesting, such as the
commentary on the elitism of public schools, and the fact that a commoner ends
up inheriting the crown, rather than a noble girl. Even so, the fact that Hildy
becomes an unlikable snob, whereas her brother and father, who come from
the same background as herself, remain sympathetic, makes her arrogance
seem like a result of her gender rather than her class, and so fails to be
subversive. All of this makes the book a disappointing conclusion to the
“Dalemark” quartet.
One of the main problems with The Crown of Dalemark is that Maewen
ends up defining herself mostly by her relationship to her love interest. The
same is true of Polly in Fire and Hemlock (1985), another novel by Diana
Wynne Jones. Unlike Maewen, Polly does not need constant rescuing and, in
fact, she manages to save her love interest, Tom Lynn, from the clutches of a
wicked Fairy Queen. What lessens the impact of her achievements is that she
only does these things because she has been manipulated for half her life by a
man ten years her senior who takes a romantic (and possibly sexual) interest in
her. They first meet when Polly is ten years old and Tom is around twenty. At
this point Tom is in thrall to the Fairy Queen who, in nine years’ time, intends to
spirit him away forever into Fairyland, unless someone who is in love with him
releases him from the Fairy Queen’s spell. Tom notices Polly straight away as
soon as she enters the funeral where they meet (probably because she is the
only person who is not supposed to be there). The narrative follows Polly’s point
of view, so the reader does not get an insight into Tom’s thoughts, but it is
heavily implied that by the time they have their first conversation, Tom has
already decided to use Polly for his purposes, and thus to groom the little girl to
make her fall in love with him. They invent a game in which they tell each other
stories about their heroic alter egos, and Tom uses this game as a pretext to
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keep in touch with Polly. He invites her to his house, takes her on outings, and
frequently sends her letters. When, as a young teenager, Polly becomes
preoccupied with other things and does not write to Tom as often, he still
pursues their relationship relentlessly by continually sending her gifts of books.
These books not only serve to win Polly’s trust and admiration, but the stories in
them are also meant to teach Polly about fairies, so that when the time comes,
she will know what to do to break the Queen’s spell.
The relationship becomes explicitly romantic when Polly is fifteen and Tom
is twenty-five. To protect her from the Fairy Queen’s notice, Tom pretends not to
be interested in Polly, but still teasingly encourages her to take a good look at
his naked back when he is injured, even while knowing that she is infatuated
with him. Once the Fairy Queen discovers Tom’s plan, she uses her powers to
drive him and Polly apart, but Tom gets a chance to say goodbye to her first in a
very uncomfortable scene:

Polly looked round to find that Tom had come out into the
hall too. “Goodbye, Polly,” he said and bent down to give
her a kiss on the forehead. Since Polly turned and looked
up as he did it, the kiss landed, briefly and awkwardly, on
her mouth. Brief, awkward, and sideways, ...which caused
Tom to take hold of her shoulder to pull her into a better
position. But Seb gave a meaningful look and he let go.
(Jones, 1985, p. 348)

They meet again when Polly is nineteen, and almost immediately start hugging
and kissing like lovers. While running his hands through her hair, Tom even tells
her, “I’ve always loved your hair” (p. 373), implying that he had already found
her attractive as a child.
Polly is presented as a feisty tomboy who prefers adventures to playing with
dolls. She wants to see herself as a hero, and is scornful of the girl in a fairy tale
she reads, who “had only herself to blame for her troubles. She was told not to
do a thing and she did. And she cried so much. Polly despised her” (p. 179).
She also tells her mother: “I don’t think I will get married... . I’m going to train to
be a hero instead” (p. 91). However, from the moment she meets Tom, her life
and her personality are entirely dependent on him. Looking back on her time
with him, she realises this:
Almost everything Polly did in those five years went back
to Mr Lynn somehow. The four years after that had been
formless and humdrum years. Polly had done things, true,
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 but it had all been without shape, as if she had been
filleted away from her own motives and the things which
gave her shape. (p. 319)

As a child Polly hates her long, blonde hair and begs her parents to allow her to
have it cut short. She is partly inspired by her friend Nina, whom she admires
for her courage to be different. Nina is described as “a big, fat girl with short,
frizzy hair, glasses, and a loud giggle”, whereas Polly is “an extremely pretty
little girl” (p. 16), yet Polly wants to look more like Nina. However, after Tom
compliments Polly on her hair, she no longer wants to cut it: “She saw why Mr
Lynn called it lovely now” (p. 112). This erases any subversiveness that was
displayed when the girl who is pretty in a traditionally Eurocentric way (petite
and blonde) admires and wishes to look more like the fun, fat girl with the frizzy
hair. Nina grows up to become curvy and very outwardly sexual while Polly
continues being conventionally attractive in a far more refined way. As Nina
becomes a less likeable character and stops being Polly’s friend once she starts
showing an interest in boys and sex, this can also be seen as an instance of
shaming her for her sexuality. Unlike Polly, she is the one who pursues boys,
rather than being pursued by them.
What is perhaps even stranger than Tom Lynn’s attentions towards a child
is the fact that none of the other adults in Polly’s life seem to be concerned
about this. Polly’s mother is portrayed as being a neglectful and emotionally
abusive parent, but it is still peculiar that she has no qualms about driving her
young daughter to a strange man’s house, and only tells her not to “let him spoil
you, Polly, and don’t be a pest” (p. 74). After the visit, she does not even inquire
about what Polly did at Tom’s house. Polly’s Granny, who is the only positive
parental figure in Polly’s life, seems to show some concern at first, as, for
example, when Tom again invites Polly to see him, she says: “I’m not sure I like
it, Polly, but if he’s free to ask, I suppose he must want to see you. But be wary
of what he gives you” (p. 110). However, as it turns out, she is only worried
because she knows that Tom is connected to the Fairy Queen and her ilk, and
not because his interest in Polly is inappropriate.
There is another boy in Polly’s life who seeks to gain her favour. His name
is Seb and, like Tom, he is in thrall to the Fairy Queen, and hopes to get Polly to
save him. Unlike Tom, he is only three years older than Polly, rather than ten,
but the developmental differences between a thirteen-year-old and a sixteen-

76
year-old are still significant enough to make such a relationship problematic.
Seb is more physically aggressive in his pursuit of Polly than Tom is, often
kissing her without her consent. The narrative explains that

Polly was continually trying to get rid of Seb, or at least

evade his grabbing and kissing her... . But each time she
tried, Seb got so upset, so humble and miserable, that
Polly got soft-hearted and did not send Seb packing after
all. (Jones, 1985, p. 261)

The aggressive way Seb pursues Polly is possibly meant to serve as a

comparison to Tom, to show that – unlike Seb – he respects Polly’s boundaries,
and that despite his manipulation of her, he is still a good person, as he does
not physically force himself on Polly. However, this interpretation sets the bar for
human decency rather low.
Polly finally manages to break up with Seb by yelling at him: “I told you to
stop bothering me. Go away and don’t come back for a year. I’m too young!” (p.
264, italics in the original). At the same time, she does not feel that she is too
young to pursue a relationship with the much older Tom, and even laments that
“[h]e thinks I’m just a child!” (p. 269)
Once Polly learns that both Seb and Tom have been using her, she is angry
with Seb, but cannot help also feeling a little sorry for him, as “she did see that
Seb had been afraid for most of his life” (pp. 375-376). She does not feel the
same anger towards Tom, even though what he did is not that different from
Seb’s actions. To save Tom from the Fairy Queen’s spell, Polly has to pretend to
hate him, so she says things to him that are completely justified – such as,
“[y]ou took me over as a child to save your own skin” (p. 386) – but she does
not mean them, as she actually loves Tom and wants to be with him, and so the
novel ends with her offering him the possibility of a proper romantic relationship.
Farah Mendlesohn writes about this scene:

What is startling is that Polly’s accusations are the

absolute truth. He has used her; he has manipulated a
child and put her in danger to save his own skin. Nikki
Humble points out that this also defuses “the dodgiest
aspect of the narrative,” a relationship between a little girl
and a grown man. (2005, p. 164)
I disagree not only with the conclusion that this final scene defuses “the
dodgiest aspect of the narrative”, but with the viewpoint that it can be defused at

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all. Whether intentionally or not, Fire and Hemlock is a story about child-
grooming, disguised as a romance. It is common in the media to portray sexual
relationships between teenage girls and adult men. Sometimes these
relationships are romantic in nature, at other times they are presented as a type
of sexual awakening. Often they are used to show the teenage characters’
maturity. Rarely are these relationships portrayed in a negative light, as even
when they do not work out, they provide the teenage characters with valuable
life experiences. Feminist writer Gina Tonic discusses how these
representations perpetuate harmful myths about female sexuality that have
real-life repercussions. As she writes:

By making relationships like these seem like a right [sic] of

passage for young women, by normalizing them to such
an extent that it can even be called a trope, a disturbing
turnaround happens, in which women are seen as the
victors of a predatory situation, rather than the victims.
(2016, unpaged)

Tonic explains that teenage girls in fiction are often depicted as having sexual
powers over adult men. This appears to be true of Polly, to some extent. Mr
O’Keefe, a man she used to run errands for when she was a child, tells her:
“Hey now! Don’t go doing that! …Smiling like that at the men… . You’ve a soft
heart someone will take advantage of, if you go tempting us poor lads that way”
(Jones, 1985, p. 314). O’Keefe is portrayed as a slightly unsavoury character,
so him blaming Polly for his predatory remarks could be seen as being
intentionally creepy (even though Polly appears unconcerned by it), if not for the
fact that characters meant to be seen as sympathetic do not see anything
wrong with being attracted to underage girls either. Narratives like the ones
Tonic describes tell teenage girls that being sexually desirable to adult men is
empowering and makes them more mature, but in reality it makes them more
vulnerable to abuse. As Ginny Brown writes:

Sex with adults can be incredibly harmful to teens. The

power imbalance caused by age means that the teen is
much more likely to feel pressured to have sex that
they don’t really want or are unsure about. This coercion
can lead to all the harmful effects of any sexual violence:
depression, low self-esteem, PTSD, and suicidal thoughts.
Young teens who have sex with older people are also
more likely to experience STIs, unintended pregnancies,

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 and substance abuse later in life. (2016, unpaged)

These risks are increased when other power imbalances come into play
between the teenager and the adult, stemming from factors such as race,
disability, or social status. On this subject, Sandra Kim (2014) cites studies that
find that gender non-conforming children are far more likely to be sexually
abused than children who perform their gender in more normative ways, and
that disabled children are more than twice as likely to be molested as children
without disabilities. These findings show that marginalisation is an important
factor in sexual abuse, and that this subject needs to be considered from an
intersectional perspective.
Brown also addresses the argument that claiming that teenagers are less
capable of giving informed consent than adults is ageist. She says that

respecting teenagers and avoiding ageism doesn’t mean

treating them exactly like adults. Fighting oppression isn’t
about pretending differences between people don’t exist.
It’s about recognizing the power dynamics that affect
people, and working to achieve justice despite these
power dynamics. (2016, unpaged)

Ignoring such power dynamics makes for a shallow interpretation of feminism,

and can be harmful for marginalised people. This is why it is important to point
out that the relationships presented in texts such as Fire and Hemlock are
neither healthy nor empowering for the girls in them.
Not only does the narrative implicitly approve of Polly’s and Tom’s
manipulative relationship, but in the world of the novel, adults lusting after
children and teenagers seems to be a common and accepted occurrence. Both
the aforementioned Mr O’Keefe and a former boyfriend of Polly’s mother are
revealed to have been infatuated with Polly when she was around twelve years
old. Tom’s girlfriend, whom he only courts to keep the Fairy Queen’s attention
away from Polly, is immediately jealous of Polly when they first meet, clearly
seeing an eleven-year-old as a viable romantic rival. Additionally, one of Tom’s
adult friends asks fifteen-year-old Polly to bring a school friend along to their
meeting, because “[h]e loves blind dates” (p. 277, italics in the original). This is
not treated as a joke.
Thus, ultimately, the novel’s feminist message fails not only because the
female protagonist is deprived of her own agency, but also because it seems to

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encourage relationships that are inherently predatory and harmful, especially for
young girls.
Additionally, both The Crown of Dalemark and Fire and Hemlock put girls at
odds with one another as they compete for male attention. This occurs with
Maewen and Hildy in The Crown of Dalemark, and between Polly and Mary
Fields in Fire and Hemlock. Maewen is also the only girl in a group of male
heroes, and Polly often falls out with her female friends. This type of
characterisation is commonly meant to make the female protagonist seem
special, but is more likely to showcase internalised misogyny within them, and
deprive them of female solidarity. As M.K. Rudman writes: “Many books make it
clear that the strong willed, intelligent, self-managing, disobedient female
heroes are anomalies. Some female heroes are extremely lonely and unhappy
young women, despite their bravado” (quoted in Lehr, 2001, p. 193). In this
regard, texts like Princess Academy are more feminist than stories about lone
heroines, because they do not portray female achievements as something rare
and extraordinary, but rather as a natural result of girls supporting one another
and being allowed to be themselves.
As these examples show, having a girl as a protagonist does not
necessarily subvert gendered expectations about heroism, passivity, or
romantic relationships. If a female character needs saving far more often than
she saves others, it matters little whether she is presented as being brave and
plucky: she still follows the archetype of the damsel in distress. This is the case
with both Edie and Maewen. Even though Polly rescues her male love interest,
she is shown to have very little agency in the matter, which lessens the feminist
message the book is trying to express. The fact that it seems to approve of
paedophilic relationships is even more troubling, and undermines the attempt at
female empowerment even further.
Optimally, a good intersectional feminist story should feature a variety of
female characters from diverse backgrounds, with different roles and
personalities, none of whom are solely defined by the male characters around
them. And even if they need to be rescued once in a while, they should get an
equal chance to play the hero.

Conclusion
Heroism is mostly defined in terms of defeating evil and overcoming obstacles,
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but even in stories in which there is an evil force to be resisted, this conflict
does not always solely revolve around violence. While books like the
“Stoneheart” trilogy focus mostly on the fighting, other texts – such as the “Old
Kingdom” series and The Spiderwick Chronicles – show that cleverness, magic,
creation, and diplomacy can be just as important as physical strength in making
a difference. The texts by Eva Ibbotson and Shannon Hale explore themes of
cooperation and solidarity, and show that in many situations kindness and
understanding are superior to violence. Occasionally these traits are even used
to bring down an oppressive system based on patriarchal and elitist values,
rather than simply giving a single character of low status an opportunity for
personal advancement. The best example of this kind of storyline occurs in
Princess Academy: Palace of Stone, in which Miri’s working-class background
is integral to her heroism.
Not all the novels I have discussed in this chapter are successful in making
the girls as capable as the boys, or in making alternative types of heroism seem
as effective as brute strength. The “Stoneheart” trilogy, as well as The Crown of
Dalemark and Fire and Hemlock, all undermine their own message by showing
that their heroines are not in control of their own narratives and destinies.
There is little racial diversity within the texts discussed in this section.
Several of the texts take place in a secondary world, and most of those worlds
are based on medieval Europe, according to ethnocentric fantasy tradition, and
feature mostly white characters. The Crown of Dalemark presents both a pre-
industrial Dalemark, as well as a more modern one, with trains and computers,
but the latter appears to be just as racially homogenous as the former. This type
of representation appears to confirm the stereotype that fantasy is an
overwhelmingly white genre, even though there is no reason for it be so. The
Book of a Thousand subverts fantasy traditions by presenting a Mongolian
fantasy world rather than a European one, featuring a number of well-rounded
Asian characters who break stereotypes about how Asian women (and Asian
men to some extent) are expected to behave.
The most successful feminist stories are the ones that show that heroism
can take many forms and many faces, and that positive traits can be found and
nurtured in anyone, regardless of race, class, or gender.
In this chapter I have addressed some of the assumptions about fairy-tale
heroes and heroines and shown how they are represented in modern stories:
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the characters’ activity or passivity, their social class, their rivalries, and their
alliances. I briefly touched upon the way that physical beauty is emphasised,
which is common in descriptions of fairy-tale heroines Certainly, it pertains to
some of the heroines discussed in this section, as, for example, the way
Mirella’s plainness in The Ogre of Oglefort is considered to be unusual for a
princess, and the way Polly’s beautiful hair is considered an important feature.
While commonly being treated like an objective value, beauty is dependent on
various societal factors, favouring the privileged in society over the
marginalised. This is the subject of the next chapter.

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 Chapter 3: Beauty
The beauty contest is a constant and primary device in
many of the stories. Where there are several daughters in
a family, or several unrelated girls in a story, the prettiest is
invariably singled out and designated for reward, or first
for punishment and later for reward. (Lieberman, 1993, p.
187)

Introduction
The most important attribute of most fairy-tale heroines is beauty. Not only is
their beauty emphasised, but it is also often used to contrast them with other
women who are implicitly of lesser worth. In this chapter, I want to look at this
notion more critically, showing how physical beauty usually intersects with other
features, some visible, like race and ethnicity, age, and disability, and others,
like class, less so. Before introducing this, more intersectional perspective,
though, let me begin with more traditional notions of beauty.
Cinderella is beautiful; her stepsisters are ugly. Furthermore, Cinderella is
kind and humble, whereas her stepsisters are cruel and vain, so inner beauty is
seen to correspond with outward attractiveness. “Beauty and the Beast”
features three sisters, all of whom are described as beautiful, but the narrator
assures the reader that the youngest, the protagonist, “was not only more
beautiful than her sisters, she was also better behaved” (Tatar, 1999, p. 32). In
“Snow White”, as well, the prettiest woman is also the most virtuous one.
Marcia K. Lieberman points out that this dichotomy can easily cause girls to
antagonise one another:

If a child identifies with the beauty, she may learn to be

suspicious of ugly girls, who are portrayed as cruel, sly,
and unscrupulous in these stories; if she identifies with the
plain girls, she may learn to be suspicious and jealous of
pretty girls, beauty being a gift of fate, not something that
can be attained. There are no examples of a cross-pattern,
that is, of plain but good-tempered girls. (1993, p. 188)

Indeed, while there are beautiful wicked women in fairy tales (albeit less
beautiful than the innocent heroine), unattractive women are rarely portrayed
with good character traits, with the possible exception of helpful older women,
such as Mother Holle. As Jennifer Waelti-Walters states, “ugliness in fairy tales
is generally accepted to be the outward and manifest sign of wickedness”
(1982, p. 45). Maria Tatar, however, points out that this might apply only to
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women. She talks about Madam de Beaumont’s version of “Beauty and the
Beast”, stating that it teaches “the importance of valuing essences over
appearances”. However,

[t]hat the... lesson should be inscribed in a tale with a

heroine who embodies physical perfection and a
seamless fit between external appearances and inner
essences is an irony that seems to have escaped the
French governess. In men, by contrast, external
appearances, and even charm, count for nothing. (1999,
p. 27)

Tatar goes on to quote the tale, in which Beauty expresses the view that “[i]t is
neither good looks nor great wit that makes a woman happy with her husband,
but character, virtue, and kindness” (p. 27). Despite this realisation, however,
Beauty is rewarded for her lack of focus on outward appearances by having her
lover transform from a hideous beast into a handsome prince, so while being
beautiful is less important to fairy tale heroes than to heroines, male heroes can
still not be allowed to be ugly unless they are under a spell and are actually
good-looking underneath.
However, as Lieberman writes:

The immediate and predictable result of being beautiful is

being chosen, this word having profound importance to a
girl. The beautiful girl does not have to do anything to merit
being chosen; she does not have to show pluck,
resourcefulness, or wit; she is chosen because she is
beautiful. (1993, p. 188, italics in the original)

This marks a difference between men and women in fairy tales. Even
handsome men have to show other qualities than good looks in order to gain
their reward. If a woman is beautiful, however, her other qualities matter less.
Cinderella may be virtuous and hard-working, but it is her beauty that allows her
to marry the prince and leave her abusive family behind. The same applies to
Snow White. Her prince first sees her while she is lying, seemingly dead, in her
glass coffin, and so never even has a conversation with her before falling in
love with her for her beauty.
These double standards still exist in the media and society today. Naomi
Wolf writes extensively about the damaging effects these standards have on
women, saying: “The larger world never gives girls the message that their

84
bodies are valuable simply because they are inside them” (1990, p. 205).
According to R.W. Connell, “[b]oys are not generally taught to make themselves
attractive” (2002, p. 3), while “[g]irls are still taught by mass culture that they
need above all to be desirable, as if their main task were to lie on silk cushions
waiting for Prince Charming to come” (p. 2). The fairy tale reference here is
particularly poignant and demonstrates just how much the old stories still
influence our way of thinking today. The effect of these double standards is that
women are reduced to objects to be looked at, while men do the looking and
thus retain their subject positions. Women, therefore, are not only objectified by
men, but increasingly by women themselves. All of this ties into Laura Mulvey’s
theory of the male gaze, which will be discussed in detail in the next chapter.
Susan Faludi argues that this focus on tying female beauty to female virtue
is a strategy to keep women obedient and confined within patriarchy:

the beauty standard converges with the social campaign

against wayward women, allying itself with “traditional”
morality; a porcelain and unblemished exterior becomes
proof of a woman’s internal purity, obedience and restraint.
The beautiful… woman is controlled in both senses of the
word. Her physique has been domesticated, her
appearance as tamed and manicured as the grounds of a
gentleman’s estate. (1992, p. 241)

Similarly, she argues that beauty standards often require women to look frail,
almost like invalids, thus encouraging physical weakness in women, making
them easier to control.
Naomi Wolf discusses many of the cultural myths surrounding beauty in her
work. She talks about how society treats beauty as if it were a natural, objective
quality that women must strive to attain. According to this myth, Wolf writes,
seeking after beauty

is biological, sexual, and evolutionary: Strong men battle

for beautiful women, and beautiful women are more
reproductively successful. Women’s beauty must correlate
to their fertility, and since this system is based on sexual
selection, it is inevitable and changeless. (1990, p. 12)

The main problem with Wolf’s and Faludi’s theories is that they focus on the
women who are most visible in society – namely, white, middle-class, able-
bodied women – but disregard the women on the margins. Because of this,

85
they do not consider the ways in which beauty standards are influenced by
various power dynamics, such as class, race, and physical ability. Thus, when
Faludi says that women are required to look like invalids, that excludes real
invalids. As mentioned in the Literature Review, women who are visibly disabled
or chronically ill are considered unfeminine and sexless and need to make far
more of an effort with their appearance than able-bodied women to have their
gender and sexuality recognised. Thus, the beauty ideal is for women to look
weak but not actually be sickly in a way that inconveniences others.
Mostly, this emphasis on frailty is connected to class, which is another point
that many feminist authors fail to address. In fairy tales, rich women who are
unused to physical labour are more likely to have delicate bodies and pale skin,
in contrast to strong, suntanned peasant women. While there are many
examples of beautiful poor girls in fairy tales, they tend to be portrayed as
looking more like noblewomen rather than working women. Some of these
beauty standards have shifted since the industrial revolution, as most working-
class jobs take place indoors nowadays. A tan is now an indicator of someone
with enough leisure time to sunbathe regularly, rather than someone who needs
to labour outside.
Furthermore, Western beauty standards are based on the values of white
supremacy. Features connected with white gentile women (light skin, straight
hair, button noses) are thus considered to be the pinnacle of beauty. In contrast,
women of colour are often made to feel ugly by default. The only way non-white
women can approximate Western standards of beauty is by approximating
whiteness. Often this is done through physical alterations, such as straightening
the hair, lightening the skin and having surgery on the eyes, nose and other
features considered too “ethnic” to be attractive. As indicated above, the
injunction against brown skin does not apply to white women with a tan. The
same is true for many other features that are considered undesirable in women
of colour. When seen on a white woman they are not only acceptable, but often
fashionable. As Rachel Kuo writes: “Whiteness is simultaneously reinforced as
norm while ‘otherness’ gets fetishized and commoditized as ‘exotic’” (2017,
unpaged).
In fairy tales, whiteness is considered most attractive as well, as there are
tales within the Grimms’ collection in which a beautiful white maiden is punished
by being magically turned into an ugly black girl (“The White and the Black
86
Bride” and “The King’s Son Who Feared Nothing”). Patricia Hill Collins argues
that this sort of contrast between black and white, between ugliness and
beauty, is necessary to uphold Western beauty standards: “Within the binary
thinking that underpins intersecting oppressions, blue-eyed, blond [sic], thin
White women could not be considered beautiful without the Other – Black
women with African features of dark skin, broad noses, full lips and kinky hair”
(2000, p. 89). Moreover, black women do not constitute the only “Other” to
white women’s beauty. For instance, physical traits common in Jewish people –
such as bushy hair, thick eyebrows, and prominent noses – are often
considered not only unattractive but evil-looking, and are in fiction commonly
seen on wicked wizards and witches. The same is true for physical disabilities
or deformities. Lois Keith points out that fairy-tale witches are often depicted as
“crook-backed, deformed and supported by crutches and sticks” (2001, p. 17).
From these descriptions, it is clear what is considered ugly in fairy tales, but
what constitutes beauty, in contrast, is somewhat vague. Sometimes mention is
made of traits considered attractive in former times, such as pale skin (a sign of
high class, as well as being of European descent, as discussed above) and red
lips, but mostly the narrative simply states that a character is beautiful or ugly,
often using superlative descriptions such as: “The youngest was so beautiful
that even the sun, which has seen so much, was filled with wonder when it
shone upon her face” (“The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich”, Tatar, 2002, p. 116).
The implication is that beauty is a universal, objective trait not subject to
changing societal standards or personal taste. Even though standards of beauty
are very different today and vary from country to country, beauty is still
frequently treated as though it were unchanging, self-evident, and not reliant on
societal prejudices.
In this chapter I will deconstruct some of society’s common assumptions
about beauty from the perspective of intersectional theory by examining how
physical descriptions of characters are presented in some of my primary texts. I
will compare characters considered attractive with those considered
unattractive, and show how dynamics of gender, race, and class influence their
description, both in sympathetic and unsympathetic ways. I will finish the
chapter with a detailed discussion of “fat-shaming”.

87
The Morality of Beauty
Fairy tales frequently treat beauty as though it were a self-evident fact that
outward good looks are a manifestation of inner goodness, showing that only
conventionally attractive people are capable of goodness, and that anyone who
falls outside of society’s beauty standards should be mistrusted. Kerry Mallan
writes that

ugliness was often considered the painful opposite of

beauty, and even more cruelly, the aesthetic equivalent of
evil. Fairy tales are replete with examples of the ugly
character as evil incarnate – ogres, witches, crones,
demons, giants, gnomes, and monsters... . Both beauty
and ugliness provoke reactions in the perceiver. In the
case of beauty, the reaction is often admiration and praise,
whereas ugliness often may provoke fear and repulsion.
(2009, p. 84)

This fixation on beauty and condemnation of ugliness is often seen as a

peculiar feature of fairy tales, but modern media is just as guilty of perpetuating
this view as classic tales are. Although modern children’s authors commonly
attempt to teach the lesson that outward appearances can be deceiving, it is
still surprisingly common to see that lesson disregarded by the authors
themselves. As Mallan states, “contemporary stories continue to yoke ugliness
to the undesirable, the pitiful, or the ridiculous” (p. 84). In light of how beauty is
defined by the powerful in society, and ugliness is connected with the
marginalised, this trope can easily foster distrust towards people of colour,
disabled people, poor people, and gender non-conforming people. Descriptions
of evil characters who are implicitly meant to be unappealing often resort to
problematic stereotypes, demonising people with certain facial features and
characteristics. For example, Diana Wynne Jones describes the titular
character of “The Fat Wizard” as having “a fat, evil face with large mauve lips, a
nose that was both fat and hooked at once, and dark, unfeeling, unscrupulous
eyes” (2004, p. 404). This description is meant to show that the wizard is both
evil and ugly, but it raises the question of what exactly is meant by an “evil
face”, and what it is about “large mauve lips” or a “fat and hooked” nose that
immediately evokes villainy. Mostly, the connection here is made between
fatness and wickedness. The wizard’s fatness is evidence of his evilness. There
are other, subtler inferences as well. Referring to someone as having a hooked

88
nose tends to be an indirect way of saying that someone is Jewish or Middle-
Eastern. As mentioned above, Jewish features tend to be connected with evil
characters, such as wicked witches; so, depicting a villain with a large, hooked
nose is likely to evoke anti-Semitic associations even when the character in
question is not meant to be Jewish. Examples of this include Severus Snape
from the “Harry Potter” series (Rowling, 1997-2007), the Wicked Witch of the
West from the film adaptation of The Wizard of Oz (Fleming, 1939), and Count
Olaf in the illustrations for A Series of Unfortunate Series (Snicket, 1999-2006).
Similarly, full lips and broad noses are common in black people, so even though
the character described above is probably not intended to be black, referring to
“large… lips” and “a nose that was both fat and hooked at once” as self-
evidently negative traits has racist implications. Again, an intersectional
approach is better equipped to make sense of these various aspects of
discrimination, showing how complicit they are, such that, even when they are
not explicit, there is a thread that insidiously links ugliness to dark skin, to
economic disadvantage, and to imperfection, just as beauty is linked to racial
purity and wealth.
Describing eyes as looking evil or “unscrupulous” can also have troubling
implications. Eyes that are considered untrustworthy are often described in
terms that evoke East-Asian stereotypes, being “narrow” or “inscrutable”.
“Shifty” eyes are also usually an indicator that a character cannot be trusted,
when in reality, avoiding eye contact is a common symptom of autism and other
neurodivergent disorders. Thus, adding value judgements to physical
descriptions can easily result in problematic connotations, even if these are
unintentional.
To reiterate, in most modern instances when a villain is racially coded, it is
not a case of an author deliberately demonising Jewish or Asian or black
people. But when called upon to describe a character who looks evil, writers will
often revert to old stereotypes that are ingrained in the public consciousness,
such as equating prominent noses with wickedness, perhaps without knowing
the origins of these stereotypes.
To examine how the beauty of characters is by no means restricted to their
aesthetic appeal but is connected with other socio-cultural elements, it is useful
to look at several characters for whom appearance, either beautiful or ugly, is a
central feature.
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 I shall start with a few characters from Eva Ibbotson’s The Secret of
Platform 13 (1994). This story takes place on a utopian island where humans
and all kinds of magical creatures live together in harmony. The island is ruled
by a benevolent king and queen. The queen is described as being “young and
kind and beautiful” (p. 6), while there is no such description of the king. This is
reminiscent of fairy-tale traditions, in which being beautiful is an expected
requirement for a young queen, more so than for most other characters. Thus,
not all the sympathetic female characters are described in such a way. This, of
course, not only shows how beauty is gendered, but also how it is based on
class. Age is also an important factor, as the narrative emphasises that the
queen is both young and beautiful, while none of the older women are
described as being good-looking. Beauty is thus the privilege of the queen, due
to her being young and royal, but also her responsibility, as a woman in a high
position. None of the other inhabitants of the island are required to be attractive
in the same way, and some of the non-human ones are even allowed to feel
pride in their ugliness. This includes one of the main characters: a young hag
named Odge. She comes “from a long line of frightful and monstrous women
who flapped and shrieked about, giving nightmares to people who had been
wicked or making newts come out of the mouths of anyone who told a lie” (p.
21). There follow some individual descriptions of the monstrous features of
some of Odge’s sisters. Some of them are simply strange, such as the one with
“stripey feet” (p. 21), while others have features traditionally considered ugly
and disgusting, such as “black hairs like piano wires coming out of her ears” (p.
21). Despite their frightening appearance, these hags are benevolent, as is
evident from the fact that they only punish bad people. Odge herself is
presented in a very likeable way: she is kind and caring, but also feisty and
headstrong. However, she is a bit of a disappointment to her family because
she looks like a regular human girl and not at all like a hag. This plot point
perpetuates the distinction between “normal” and “monstrous”. The hags take
pride in their appearance, but are fully aware that they are ugly, whereas Odge
is seen as disappointingly normal. Normality is thus defined as being – or at
least looking – human, even though the story takes place in a world in which
hags, fairies, ogres, and harpies are just as commonplace as humans.
Furthermore, the type of human Odge resembles is a thin, white, able-bodied
girl, so this restricts the definition of normality even further. It is also worth
90
noting that most of the monstrousness in Odge’s sisters simply consists of
exaggerated features that appear in humans as well, such as body hair, long
nails, or warts. So while the hags are proud of having warts and body hair, the
story still frames these features as grotesque. Besides, even though Odge’s
plainness causes her to be self-conscious, making her wish she was as ugly as
the rest of her family, it is significant that she is the character the story follows,
rather than her sister with the hairy ears, or any other member of her family.
The affectionate description of the hag family’s ugliness is in stark contrast
with the descriptions offered of Mrs Trottle and her son Raymond, both of whom
are extremely unsympathetic characters. Their large size is presented as a
personal flaw, along with their selfishness and greed, making them seem
repulsive. The following description, from the scene in which Gurkie the Fey
meets Raymond for the first time, provides a good example:

Feys are used to kissing children and being godmother to

almost everyone, but Raymond, bulging out of his yellow
silk pyjamas, looked so uninviting that she had to pretend
he was a vegetable marrow before she could settle down
beside him on the bed. (Ibbotson, 1994, p. 68)

Even though Raymond acts in an unfriendly manner towards Gurkie and the
rest of the rescue party, it is made clear that the reason why she feels repulsed
by him is not because of his behaviour, but simply because he is fat. The
implication is that it is perfectly fine and admirable to be a one-eyed giant like
Hans or a warty, hairy hag like Odge’s sisters, but being fat is unacceptable.
This presumably means that grotesqueness is only to be celebrated in non-
human characters, whereas humans like the queen are required to be beautiful.
The Trottles, therefore, being unattractive humans, must be mocked. This is a
common problem in fantasy fiction, in which ugliness in creatures is more
acceptable than ugliness in humans. Human beauty and ugliness are invariably
presented in binary terms, opposing the dark- and light-skinned, for example, or
the poor and rich, the fat and thin, thus evoking structures of power and
privilege, whereas monsters can simply be monsters and thus do not have to
exist within these binaries. This causes a double standard when authors such
as Ibbotson attempt to use non-human characters to show that outward
appearance is less important than attributes such as kindness or intelligence,
but do not extend the same understanding towards human characters who fall

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outside of society’s beauty standards.
In contrast, the protagonists of Monster Mission (1999), another of
Ibbotson’s works, are three middle-aged aunts who live cut off from human
society and in proud defiance of said society’s beauty standards. The oldest,
Aunt Etta, is described in somewhat masculine terms as “a tall, bony woman
who did fifty press-ups before breakfast and had a small but not at all
unpleasant moustache on her upper lip” (pp. 1-2). Aunt Coral, “the arty one” (p.
5) who “liked to stand out from the crowd” (p. 16), is very eccentric, but in a far
more feminine way, as she wears numerous necklaces and colourful turbans
and likes to dance by moonlight. She is also large and plump. The youngest
sister, Myrtle, is not given such a detailed description, but she appears more
frail and sensitive than the other two. All three sisters have hairy legs, a source
of great pride for them, as can be seen from this conversation between Coral
and Fabio:

“I’ve got a kick like a mule. It’s the hair, you see?”
“What hair?”
“The hair on my legs. We’ve all got hairy legs, me and
my sisters. Hair gives you strength; it says so in the Bible.
Samson and all that.” (Ibbotson, 1999, p. 18)

It is rare to see middle-aged women in heroic roles in the media, much less so
middle-aged women who look their age and make no attempt to appeal to the
male gaze. Monster Mission is thus far more subversive in its approach to
beauty than The Secret of Platform 13. The emphasis on female body hair is
surprising too, as that is a subject usually ignored in children’s fiction. Body hair
– particularly on women – can also be racialised. While most women grow body
hair, it is often more noticeable on dark-skinned women. Features such as
unibrows and moustaches are also more connected with Semitic and Latina
women, even though they can appear in women of all races. The result of this
racialising is that dark-skinned women are under even more societal pressure
to shave than white women. When white women decide to let their body hair
grow, they may be lauded by feminists for showing their individuality, but when
dark-skinned women do the same, they are frequently derided and called
unappealing and unhygienic. As Niloufar Haidari writes:

The personal is political, and any movement towards

women spending less time, money and energy on beauty
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 upkeep that they feel pressured to perform rather than
actively choosing to engage in is undeniably positive.
However the resurgence of body-hair-feminism in the
post-internet post-everything fourth wave world has almost
exclusively been on the bodies of white women with little
and/or fair body hair. Women of colour are often left feeling
as if we are still on the outside due to our often naturally
darker and more visible hair. (2015, unpaged)

Similarly, transgender women often have more body hair than cisgender 14
women, and are also under more pressure to appear traditionally feminine, just
to be accepted as female. Thus, taking pride in their unshaved legs may not
seem like an option for many trans women.
It also bears mentioning that body hair or the lack thereof can be a sign of
class as well, since shaving or waxing takes money, time, and energy that poor
women do not always have. This is explored a little in Suzanne Collins’s The
Hunger Games (2008), in which Katniss sometimes ponders the absurdity of
having to remove her leg hair to be suitable for the televised spectacle that is
the Hunger Games, in which she represents the poorest sector of the country,
where people do not normally have the luxury of being beautiful. In the film
adaptation (Ross, 2012) she is, of course, hairless throughout, as showing body
hair on actresses is still generally considered taboo. She is also played by a
white actress despite being repeatedly described as being olive-skinned in the
book, thus erasing any racial significance tied to her appearance and her social
status.
While second-wave feminists have discussed the significance of female
body hair, they have not examined other connections between body hair and
race, class, and transness. This is where an intersectional approach has more
traction.
Living apart from human society, the aunts from Monster Mission can be
said to transcend societal classes. They are never explicitly described as being
white, but in the absence of obvious racial markers, most readers will imagine
them so, since whiteness is seen as the default and any other race is a
deviation from the norm such that it needs to be mentioned and possibly
politicised. This does not mean that the aunts’ rebellion against beauty

14 The Latin prefix “cis”, meaning “on this side of”, is the opposite of the prefix “trans”, meaning
“across”. “Cisgender” is thus the opposite of “transgender”. A cisgender person is someone
who is not transgender.
93
standards is insignificant – simply that it is possibly easier for them than if they
had been explicitly written as characters of colour. But just as a disparaging
description of a villainous white character with a hooked nose can be hurtful to
Jewish readers, so a positive description of a white woman’s moustache can be
encouraging to a Middle-Eastern girl with more body hair than is traditionally
considered attractive or feminine.
The aunts have another sister, Betty, who chose a more conventional
lifestyle, “shaving her legs and marrying tax inspectors” (1999, p. 39). They look
down on her for this, seeing her as shallow and foolish. When they talk about
her foolishness, they usually mention the fact that she shaves her legs. Thus,
while the aunts are admirable characters in many respects, they still set up a
dichotomy between those who follow society’s beauty standards and those who
do not, distancing women who make different choices with their bodies from
themselves. This echoes what Wolf says about the real-world consequences of
impossible beauty standards:

At present, “beauty” is an economy in which women find

the “value” of their faces and bodies impinging, in spite of
themselves, on that of other women’s. This constant
comparison, in which one woman’s worth fluctuates
through the presence of another, divides and conquers. It
forces women to be acutely critical of the “choices” other
women make about how they look. (1990, p. 284)

This kind of division between women is detrimental to any feminist cause, and
is more likely to replace one oppressive set of standards with another. In this
regard it is important to take into account issues of ethnicity, class, able-
bodiedness, and other factors that determine how a person’s body is perceived
by society. As noted above, dark-skinned women are under more pressure to
remove their body hair than light-skinned women. Disabled women and
transgender women often need to “perform” femininity more thoroughly than
cisgender and able-bodied women to be taken seriously. Thus, beauty
standards not only divide women by their personal choices, but by race and
class and other societal factors as well, which is an issue that Wolf does not
address. As a black feminist, Collins takes a more intersectional approach than
Wolf. She writes about the racism and colourism inherent in Western beauty
standards:

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 Redefining beauty requires learning to see African-
American women who have Black African features as
being capable of beauty. Proclaiming Black women
“beautiful” and White women “ugly” merely replaces one
set of controlling images with another and fails to
challenge Eurocentric masculinist aesthetics. (2000, p.
169)

The same is true for other images of what is considered beautiful or ugly.
Rather than changing beauty standards to privilege a different group of women,
every group should be allowed to see itself as beautiful in its own way, including
disabled people, poor people, transgender people, fat people, old people, and
people of colour. That way women would no longer feel the need to compete
with one another to achieve an arbitrary standard of beauty, or look down on
one another for making different choices with regard to those standards. Thus,
for example, women with hairy legs, such as the Aunts in Monster Mission,
could be presented as beautiful and worthwhile without denigrating women with
shaved legs, no matter what reason the latter have for making such a choice.
But this can happen only if society starts treating people as being valuable in
their own right. That way their bodies can be seen as valuable too, just the way
they are, rather than as something that needs to be modified or hidden to fit an
elitist – that is, white and often patriarchal – cultural narrative.
Another character defined by ugliness is Violante from Cornelia Funke’s
Inkspell (2005) and Inkdeath (2008). Because of a large, conspicuous birthmark
on her face she is known as “Her Ugliness”. She is also pallid and sickly-
looking, and so does not meet her society’s standards of what a princess
should look like at all. In the story within a story, she is never meant to play an
important part, but is only mentioned as the villain’s unfortunate little daughter.
Once the story moves out of Fenoglio’s hands, Violante grows up to marry
Prince Cosimo, bearing him a child, and affecting the course of events in the
kingdom. Another character explains her situation:

“If Violante hates anyone, it’s her father himself. She was
seven when he sent her here. She was married to Cosimo
when she was twelve, and six years later she was a
widow. Now there she sits in her father-in-law’s castle,
trying to care for his subjects, as he has long neglected to
do in his mourning for his son. Violante feels for the weak.
Beggars, cripples, widows with hungry children, peasants
who can’t pay their taxes – they all go to her, but Violante
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 is a woman. Any power she has is only because
everyone’s afraid of her father... .” (Funke, 2005, pp. 106-
107)

Although her power is limited, she uses it for good, and more than once aids
the heroes of the story, either by asserting her authority over their enemies or
by using subterfuge. Her husband, Cosimo – who was actually intended by
Fenoglio to be the main force of good in the Inkworld, and is considered by all
to be the epitome of a handsome prince – ends up doing harm to a lot of
people, which leaves Violante as the braver, more heroic and more just
character.
Violante is actually aware that she could mask her imperfections with make-
up, but “it was her opinion that beautiful women might be desired but were
never respected, certainly not feared. Anyway, she would have felt ridiculous
with her lips painted red or her brows plucked to a narrow arch” (Funke, 2008,
p. 299). Fenoglio even toys with the idea of using his powers as a writer to
make her birthmark disappear, but eventually dismisses this notion as being too
sentimental and incredible. Violante’s musings on feminine beauty can be seen
as dismissive of women who try to follow beauty standards, but as she does not
show any resentment toward the conventionally attractive women she knows
(such as her maid Brianna), she seems to be simply expressing her personal
choice in the matter. While her distinction between beautiful women who are
desired and plain women who are respected is highly simplistic, it might be true
for the society she lives in. Her thoughts also show that in her world beauty is
solely defined by being desirable to men – as it too often is in our own world as
well. At this point Violante’s worth is therefore mostly defined by the men
around her, although she defies and challenges their judgement.
After the defeat of the Adderhead, Violante becomes a benevolent ruler
over the kingdom. The epilogue, which takes place a few years into her reign,
reveals that she is no longer known as “Her Ugliness”, but as “Her Kindliness”,
showing that her righteousness and her empathy have become more important
in the eyes of the people than her looks. Instead of adjusting herself to fit
society’s standards, Violante manages to adjust society, so that it no longer
defines her first and foremost by her appearance, although there is no
indication whether the same is true for other women in the kingdom, or whether
Violante has simply managed to make an exception for herself by virtue of

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being the monarch. Despite being the most powerful person in the kingdom,
she does not, however, redefine what it means to be beautiful. Her people no
longer care that she does not fit into a conventional standard of beauty,
because she champions other values, but they never seem to learn to see her
as beautiful as well as being kind and strong. From an intersectional
perspective there are two different ways of reading this ending. The first is to
lament the fact that the society of the Inkworld never widens its views on beauty
to include women like Violante, with their pale faces and large birthmarks. The
other viewpoint is more radical, maintaining that it is pointless to expand the
meaning of beauty, and that it would be far more productive to do away with the
entire concept, and hence dispense with the need to look beautiful in the first
place. Thus, Violante being chiefly defined by her kindliness rather than her
appearance, provides a more feminist and inclusive interpretation of her
character, as opposed to her being suddenly considered beautiful. Suzannah
Weiss asks in this vein:

What would be so bad about someone not being

beautiful? That’s not scary unless we believe beauty
determines our worth. Not everyone is conventionally
attractive, and that’s okay. (2017a, unpaged, italics in the
original)

There is merit in both these views. When championing body positivity, it is easy
to inadvertently adopt the rhetoric of patriarchy by simply asserting that women
who are normally seen to be on the margins of society are also sexually
desirable to men. As Weiss argues, “[t]his type of body positivity caters to the
male gaze. It celebrates women who don’t quite fit the cultural ideal, but are still
generally considered pleasant for straight men to look at” (2017a, unpaged).
This merely continues to base women’s worth on their physical desirability and
leaves men as the arbiters of that worth. Instead the focus should be on helping
women to see the value in their own bodies, without worrying about what others
think.
We know that the people of the Inkworld still do not see Violante as
beautiful, but we are not given an insight into Violante’s own thoughts during the
epilogue, so we do not know whether she has learned to love and accept her
appearance. While her personal acceptance matters more than whether other
people are attracted to her features, it is less important than the fact that she is
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confident in her abilities and her intelligence, and that she treats the people
under her care with understanding and compassion. As Weiss writes: “We don’t
have the right to feel good about ourselves because of our beauty. We have the
right to feel good about ourselves unconditionally” (2017a, unpaged). The only
drawback is that, as mentioned above, we do not know whether other women in
the kingdom are similarly allowed to feel pride in themselves regardless of their
physical attractiveness, or whether this is only the queen’s prerogative, thus
making self-love a class privilege.
The connection between beauty and class is more clear in Jasper Fforde’s
The Eye of Zoltar (2014). The book features a princess named Shazine. While
she is unpleasant and arrogant, the main character – Jennifer Strange – cannot
help thinking that “she was undeniably very pretty with glossy raven-black hair,
fine features and large, inquisitive eyes” (p. 38). This description is juxtaposed
with that of a palace servant named Laura Scrubb, who is about the same age
as the Princess. Laura “was pale, had plain mousy hair and was dressed in the
neat, starched dress of the lowest-ranked house servant. She also looked tired,
worn and old before her time” (p. 39). Her plainness is directly connected with
her poverty and her lack of access to basic resources. She looks
“undernourished” (p. 68) and has a rash that is “likely the result of sleeping on
damp hay” (p. 72). There is also a comment about “Laura’s teeth, nails and skin
complaints” being “hardly princessy” (p. 261). Conversely, the Princess’s beauty
is at least partly a result of her privilege. She never goes hungry or tires herself
out with hard work, and presumably she also has access to beauty products,
which is why her hair is “glossy”, while Laura’s is “plain”.
Shortly after this comparison is made, the Princess’s mother – who is a
powerful sorceress – switches the minds of the two girls to teach her daughter a
lesson about humility. At first the Princess is livid about this switch, while Laura
is not very concerned. But as she travels with Jennifer, the Princess learns the
value of hard work and begins to sympathise with the plight of indentured
servants like Laura, whose body she is inhabiting. She even gets used to her
new body and starts thinking of it as her own. At one point she tells Jennifer:
“Mum will be furious I’ve had a tattoo… . Yes, I know it’s technically not on me.
It’s just that I’ve got so used to this body I’m not really sensing much of a
difference. In a strange way, I’m actually enjoying being Laura Scrubb” (p. 374,
italics in the original). Later, she adds: “I used to think Laura Scrubb was the
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ugliest girl I’d ever seen… but I’ve got to quite like the snub nose, shortness of
stature and lack of any agreeable bone structure” (p. 389). The tone of this
declaration still appears to be mocking Laura’s plainness – and the Princess’s
vanity – a little, but also expresses the view that being plain is not shameful,
and can even be a source of pride.
During the course of the story the Princess loses one of Laura’s hands in
battle, and replaces it with a magical prosthetic. This new hand is large, hairy,
and tattooed, making Laura’s body seem even more strange and deformed.
When Jennifer and the Princess return home, they find that the kingdom
has been overtaken by trolls and the entire royal family killed, including Laura in
the Princess’s body. This means that Laura’s body is now the only body the
Princess can inhabit. While she is distraught over the loss of her family, she
accepts the situation more readily than she would have before her adventures
with Jennifer:

She… smiled, and looked at her hands. The left was still
raw and calloused from the previous owner’s years of toil,
and the other was the hand of the ex-stoker, with “No
more pies” tattooed on the back, and held on with duct
tape. It wasn’t an ideal situation, and as far as we knew it,
a first for royalty.
“This is my body now, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I think it is.”
“Then I’d better start looking after it. Tell me, Jenny,
am I horribly plain?”
I looked at her pale, sun-starved face, her brown hair,
which was still lank with undernourishment, and her dark-
rimmed eyes.
“It’s not the outside that counts, ma’am.” (Fforde,
2014, p. 395)

Once again, all the attributes Jennifer names that contribute to Laura’s
plainness result from her lack of privilege, though she never goes as far as to
consider that Laura might have been pretty if she had been brought up in
different circumstances.
As is the case with Violante in Inkdeath, Princess Shazine does not
redefine what beauty means, but she does eventually reject the importance of
it. She decides to take care of this body, not because she hopes to become
beautiful again, but simply because it is hers now, and that makes it important.

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Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness quartet (1983-1988) features several
characters described as great beauties, all of whom are female. For the most
part, the story is told from the point of view of Alanna, a girl who does not
consider herself to be beautiful at all, and the text does not openly contradict
her in this. She does, however, have fair skin, red hair, and purple eyes:
features which are often considered attractive and fascinating in modern
society. Thus the message that a girl does not need to be beautiful to be a hero
seems rather disingenuous when the role of the hero is being played by a girl
who is described in traditionally attractive terms: white, slender, and able-
bodied. Even though Alanna spends the first two books of the series disguised
as a boy, the cover illustrations of some editions accentuate her feminine
features, for example by dressing her in tight clothes that display her
curvaceousness.
Princess Thayet is the most beautiful character in the series, a fact on
which seemingly everyone agrees. Both George and Jonathan have very
exaggerated reactions on meeting her for the first time, with “eyes widening in
awe” (1988, p. 231). George whispers, “[b]less me, Crooked God” (1988, p.
220), and Jonathan breathes: “Great Merciful Mother!” (1988, p. 231) These do
not seem realistic reactions to seeing a pretty girl, much less so coming from
two separate people. Like Alanna, Thayet is thin, white, able-bodied, and of
noble birth, so her beauty is a product of privilege. In the third book of the series
Alanna joins a tribe of dark-skinned desert-dwellers. While she befriends some
of the girls in the tribe and admires their skills and intelligence, she never
seems to think of them as beautiful, which strengthens the assertion that beauty
is connected with whiteness.
Thayet is a likeable character, so her beauty is portrayed positively, and she
seems unaware of the effect she has on the male characters. In this she is
contrasted with some of the other beautiful female characters in the series,
namely Josiane and Delia, who are portrayed as vain and manipulative. It is
probably not coincidental that both of these women are also rivals to Alanna
and Thayet for Prince Jonathan’s affections. The narrative emphasises how
much better-looking Thayet is than Delia when Alanna comments on a drawing
Jonathan made of Thayet: “Your artwork’s improved. The one you did of Delia
made her look like a cow... . Though now that I think of it, maybe that was your
subject matter” (Pierce, 1988, p. 269). As mean-spirited as this comment is, it is
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not unexpected to make fun of an unsympathetic character’s looks in order to
build up a more sympathetic character. What is more surprising is the following
description, which compares Josiane and Delia:

The room was a parlor decorated in pale green and cream,

perfect for the emerald-eyed brunette on the sofa, less
perfect for the striking blonde beside her. (p. 213)

Even though both of these characters are evil, one of them is shamed for being
less successful as an alluring femme fatale. This seems odd and slightly out of
place.
Despite the main character being a heterosexual girl, none of the men in
The Song of the Lioness are defined by their attractiveness in the way Thayet,
Delia, and Josiane are – including the men Alanna has sexual relationships
with. Despite finding them handsome, Alanna is never stunned by their beauty
in the way that she and other characters are captivated by Thayet’s looks. This
reinforces the standard idea that beauty is not only more important in women
than in men, but also somehow more natural, and privileges only one point of
view, namely the heterosexual male one. Alanna’s masquerade as a boy could
easily suggest a queer reading, but neither she nor any other characters disrupt
the culturally heteronormative narrative. All of Alanna’s sexual partners are
male, and her admiration of Thayet’s beauty is framed in a purely platonic way.
While she is dressed as a boy, she has very little contact with other girls, so
there are no females showing any sexual interest in her while mistaking her for
a boy.
Most of the characters discussed above are female, as a male character’s
physical attractiveness is far more rarely mentioned, even when, as in Alanna’s
case, the focal character is female. Exceptions include Chrestomanci and Howl
from several stories by Diana Wynne Jones, and Farid from the “Inkheart”
series. Farid is particularly notable as, unlike the other two examples, he is a
poor orphan rather than a wealthy sorcerer, and he is dark-skinned. These facts
might make him unattractive within the class system of the Inkworld, but
Meggie, who comes from the real world, considers him to be very handsome,
though unfortunately she breaks up with him in Inkdeath and pursues a
relationship with a white boy, Doria, whom she is fated to marry. This is the only
interracial relationships featured in my primary texts, and it does not last.

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Interracial relationships are rare in fiction, even in modern stories – particularly
relationships between men of colour and white women. This is a reflection of
racist fears about black manhood, and sexist ideas about the purity of white
womanhood. As Jennifer Loubriel writes: “Men of Color, especially Black men,
have historically been coded as animalistic abusers and rapists when it comes
to white women. This stems from the idea that Men of Color literally want to
steal and sully the belongings of white men” (2016, unpaged). Farid is
presented as a positive character throughout, even after his relationship with
Meggie ends, but it is still disappointing that in the end a white boy is
considered a more suitable companion for Meggie than a boy of colour.
For the most part, men are not pressured to define themselves first and
foremost by their attractiveness, so while male characters may be handsome,
their good looks are rarely the first thing mentioned in descriptions. This is
shown in passages such as the one above from The Secret of Platform 13, in
which the Queen is said to be “young and kind and beautiful”, but the King’s
attractiveness is not commented on. To some extent, men’s beauty standards
are also connected with social privilege, just like the standards for women. Thus
white (or at least light-skinned), able-bodied men are considered most
desirable, and other men are less visible in the media and society. However,
while women’s attractiveness is often connected with frailty and with careful
cultivation (while being made to seem effortless), men’s attractiveness tends to
be connected with physical and mental strength, and is often depicted as wilder
and more natural than women’s beauty, men’s being concerned with muscles,
sweat, and body hair. Even the word “beauty” has slightly different connotations
when applied to men. Masculine men may be handsome or good-looking, but
they are rarely considered beautiful. A man described as beautiful is feminised
and possibly queer-coded. In media aimed at girls, beautiful men may still be
portrayed as desirable, but in media aimed at boys, effeminate men are more
likely to seem strange and untrustworthy. For example, in the comic book film
Thor (Branagh, 2011), both Thor and Loki are good-looking men, but whereas
the heroic Thor is muscular and bearded, the sly Loki is slim and long-haired.
Even the devil’s human form is often depicted as androgynous and seductive,
rather than masculine and forceful, in popular culture. An example of this is
provided by the character of Lucifer in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (1989-).
Of the explicitly non-white women in my primary texts, there are only two
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who are described as being great beauties: Flower-in-the-Night from Jones’s
Castle in the Air (1990), who comes from a country based on the fictional
Arabia of A Thousand and One Nights, and Lady Saren from Shannon Hale’s
The Book of a Thousand Days (2008), who comes from a land based on
ancient Mongolia. Both of these characters are described as beautiful by
characters of the same race. The other people of colour are, for the most part,
not explicitly described as ugly, with the exception of two brides from Castle in
the Air, but, as discussed below, their most significant attribute is their fatness,
although their race may also contribute to their being seen as unattractive. As
Nisha Eswaran writes, according to Western media, “brown women… are not
really sexual beings, or at least, not sexual beings worthy of lasting and
intentional love” (2017, unpaged). Dashti from The Book of a Thousand Days
considers herself to be plain, but she does not consider this to be a bad thing,
as she explains:

Mama said that beauty is a curse for muckers. She once

told me about Bayar, her clan sister, who looked like
Evela, goddess of sunlight. And what happened to Bayar?
A lord fell for her beauty, got her with child, then left both
girl and baby in the mud and never returned. That’s
gentry’s right, I guess, but it was a bit hard on Bayar.
(Hale, 2008, p. 18)

Hale points out here that beauty in a poor woman might lead to abuse rather
than social advancement, but she also shows that Dashti’s opinions are
coloured by her society and her upbringing and are thus not unbiased. At this
point in the story Dashti still firmly believes in the superiority of the higher
classes, so she might find it natural to consider the noble Lady Saren beautiful,
and herself, a poor mucker girl, unremarkable. These opinions might not
necessarily match those of other characters. Considering the fetishisation of
East Asian women in Western media, which leads to real-life sexual and
domestic violence against said women, it could actually be seen as liberating to
depict an Asian woman who is allowed to be plain (Kuo, 2015). In any case, it is
Dashti rather than Saren who ends up marrying the handsome prince. Amy Sun
points out that the “[m]edia has traditionally painted Asian-American men as
sidekicks who serve as comic relief... are extremely nervous or silent around
girls... are short and deeply accented... and sidekick samurai warriors” (2014b,
unpaged). Consequently, depicting an Asian man in an American novel as a
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handsome and desirable romantic interest is also unusual and potentially
radical, as it challenges the common association of these intersecting aspects
of discrimination.
While racist beauty standards undoubtedly play a part in the lack of
characters of colour who are acknowledged as being attractive, their omission
reveals a deeper prejudice, in that characters of colour hardly feature at all.
Thus, although most of the characters described as being beautiful do indeed
have white, European features, most of the characters described as being ugly
do so as well, albeit they often have other qualities – such as androgyny,
fatness, or visible disabilities – that mark them as social outsiders.
For the most part, it appears that in modern stories a character’s
personality is more important than looks, so that not all unattractive characters
are automatically evil, and not all beautiful characters are good. Yet this is still
frequently the case, especially with female characters, who are subject to the
male gaze, as well as to judgement from and comparison with other women.
Beauty is usually treated as an objective attribute, and authors rarely question
its connection with social privilege. Yet descriptions of ugliness frequently have
racist and ableist connotations, particularly in villainous characters, in which
large noses and physical deformities are often made to seem objectively
sinister.
Oddly enough, however, whether villains are good looking or not, as long as
they are unlikeable, their appearance is subject to criticism and mockery, even
by characters who are meant to be kind and virtuous. The implication of this is
that rights to bodily autonomy and respect are not universal, but are dependent
on whether someone is agreeable or not, and can thus easily be revoked. This
state of affairs is not healthy, but it is often found in society, even in feminist and
social justice circles.
So as I have shown in this section, introducing attractive villains is not
necessarily an effective way to subvert existing beauty standards, for this is
where differences between the genders come into play, themselves intersecting
with other markers of privilege, around class, race, and able-bodiedness. It is
this archetype of the bad beauty that I will consider next.

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The Bad Beauty
The dangerous, wicked beauty is a common trope, both in traditional fairy tales
and modern media. She uses her sexuality as a weapon against men,
something that both the aforementioned Delia and Josiane from Pierce’s Song
of the Lioness quartet are adept at, as they try to gain Jonathan’s trust by
seducing him. Significantly, Jonathan does something similar when he uses
Josiane to make Alanna jealous, but the narrative does not condemn him nearly
as much as it condemns the two girls. Of course, just like the wicked
stepmother or stepsister in a fairy tale, neither Josiane nor Delia is as beautiful
as the pure, innocent Thayet. The key here might be that Thayet, like Snow
White or Cinderella, is unaware of the effect her beauty has on men, whereas
the femme fatale knows exactly how to employ her beauty to her advantage. Of
this character archetype Laura Mulvey writes that she

connotes woman as enigma, threatening active sexuality

and androgyny. In the movies, the story must, in the last
resort, distance itself and close off identification with this
figure who is doomed to an ending of failure and probable
death. (1985, p. 141)

The femme fatale is used to demonise women for being openly sexual, or even
for caring about how they look (even though, as I have already established,
women who are not considered attractive enough to solicit the male gaze are
frequently not just mocked but also demonised). This archetype suggests that
women’s sexuality is inherently dangerous, and that women who display sexual
agency do so mainly to trap and manipulate men. It also implies that women’s
main, if not only, power lies in their sexuality and their ability to have men desire
them, which is very different from how sexual power dynamics tend to work in
modern Western society, where being desired by men can make a woman
more vulnerable rather than powerful. As Wolf writes:

I have heard... men employed to believe in and enforce

concepts of fairness speak complacently about the uses of
“feminine wiles” – a euphemism for beauty deployed to the
woman’s advantage. Powerful men characterize them with
grudging admiration, as if “beauty’s” power were an
irresistible force that stunned and immobilized
distinguished men, to turn them into putty in the charmer’s
hand. (1990, p. 46)

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At the same time, Wolf also cites sociological studies that reveal that men are
far more likely to use their sexuality and appearance to get ahead than women
are. Thus, the belief in these “feminine wiles” not only perpetuates male
superiority, but is also erroneous. Still, it breeds mistrust towards women,
particularly conventionally attractive ones. It causes people to doubt that a
beautiful woman can achieve anything by her own merits, rather than by her
appearance, and to blame her for any harm that befalls her, as she must have
invited it by her looks or dress or behaviour.
What Wolf fails to mention is the fact that this narrative of women’s sexual
powers leaves out women who are not traditionally attractive. As Suzannah
Weiss points out:

Placing value on women based on men’s attraction makes

those who don’t possess the traits society considers
attractive feel worthless, and it makes women of all
appearances feel like objects. (2015, unpaged)

Since, as I have already discussed, beauty is defined by the powerful, the

women who are thus left out of this conversation about “feminine wiles” are
mainly the ones who are marginalised on the basis of race, ability, body type,
and age. As they are not considered beautiful enough to display sexual power
over men, they are sometimes barely considered to be real women at all.
Mistrust of attractive women can, in fact, be seen in many fairy tales, as
Maria Tatar argues:

Beauty breeds a sense of superiority that spells disaster

for suitors – think of the countless princes who line up one
after another to lose their heads at the castles of proud
beauties who spurn alliances. It is left to heroes to design
prenuptial rites of passage that will turn these arrogant
girls into marriageable women – women who are as
humble and deferential as they are beautiful. (1992, p. 98)

The main sin these women seem to have committed is to have been aware of
and to have taken pride in their own appearance, while at the same being
desired by men for that beauty. Thus they must be tamed, but without losing
their attractiveness and desirability.
It is important to note that while women’s sexuality is thus painted in a
negative light, men’s sexuality is often celebrated. White men are expected to

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be virile and always ready for sex. This is why promiscuous women are deemed
of lesser worth, while promiscuous men are admired. This is also why men are
often believed to be incapable of being raped, since they are supposedly
always willing to have sex.
Again, these stereotypes apply differently to men of colour, whose sexuality
is often characterised as being predatory and dangerous, particularly towards
white women (Loubriel, 2016). Thus, as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, current
American president, Donald Trump, “inaugurated his campaign by casting
himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican ‘rapists,’ only to
be later alleged by multiple accusers, and by his own proud words, to be a
sexual violator himself” (2017, unpaged).
In the same vein, women of colour are more likely to be depicted as exotic
seductresses than white women. There are sexual stereotypes about women of
almost every non-white race, such as the black Jezebel, the Chinese dragon
lady, or the sexually adventurous Roma. All of these stereotypes work to
fetishise women of colour, which often results in sexual and physical violence.
An example of a bad beauty is Selia, the main villain from Shannon Hale’s
The Goose Girl (2003). While she is described as being beautiful, her main
weapon is her ability to lie and to manipulate people with her words. In a later
book in the series, Forest Born (2010), she manages to become queen of Kel
by marrying the king. Although she achieves this with her people-speaking, it is
implied that her sexuality plays a part as well. However, she is not shamed for
displaying her beauty and sexuality in the same way that other women of her
kind, such as Delia and Josiane, are. Upon her arrival at Bayern, the workers
gossip about her and make fun of her for wearing “a gaudy dress showing
enough bosom for a tavern girl” (Hale, 2003, p. 136). Hearing this, the deposed
princess Ani, whose dress Selia is wearing, “placed a hand on her chest and
felt her cheeks warm. On her, the dress had fallen slightly lower” (Hale, 2003, p.
135).15 Although Ani feels embarrassed by the workers’ remarks, the narrative
voice appears to be on her side, implying that there is nothing wrong with
wearing low-cut dresses or being beautiful.16 This, after all, is not what makes

15 Both Ani and Selia come from the neighbouring kingdom of Kildenree, where the standards
regarding how much cleavage is considered appropriate to display are clearly different from
Bayern.
16 While Ani is not a particularly vain character, she does show a fondness for her own long,
blonde hair, being loath to cut it, even though it makes her stand out from the crowd in a
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Selia evil, but rather the fact that she manipulates people and has betrayed
Ani’s trust. Ani also displays her sexuality to some extent – albeit in a far more
innocent manner than Selia does – when she flirts with the prince. In addition,
both women lie about their identity, but while Selia lies for personal gain and to
hurt others, Ani only lies to protect herself. Thus, it is specifically Selia’s
selfishness and ruthlessness that mark her out as a villain, rather than her
beauty, her cleverness, or her refusal to remain passive – all of which are
attributes that are often demonised in women.
It can be argued that some of Selia’s actions would be viewed in a more
positive light if they were performed by a man. Whereas a woman may be seen
as manipulative and sneaky, a white man might instead be seen as persuasive
and clever. In the context of business and politics men are often encouraged to
lie to gain advantage, the way Selia does. It is also considered normal for men
to lie to and manipulate women for sex. This brings to mind Coates’s reference
to Trump, which I quoted above. Many of Trump’s supporters defended his
comments on women, characterising them as harmless “locker-room talk”. It is
unlikely that comments such as these would have gained so much support if
they had been made by a white woman running for office, and inconceivable if
they had been made by a person of colour of any gender.
In a way, this shows that the archetype of the femme fatale is a projection of
men’s own sexual proclivities – particularly white men’s. They fear being
manipulated by women through sex, because they themselves manipulate
women. As stated above, women of colour are particularly likely to be
characterised as having mystical, sexual powers. As they are more clearly
social outsiders than white women, they are distrusted even more for displaying
agency or sexuality, and are thus demonised for it.

Michelle Harrison’s The 13 Treasures (2009) introduces Morwenna, a teenage

girl who has been trapped in fairyland for many decades. She is described as
having “creamy skin and thickly lashed dark eyes” (p. 82), but when another
character is asked to describe her, all he manages to say, with “a hazy look in
his eyes”, is: “Pretty... . Really pretty” (p. 86). The mystery of Morwenna’s

country where most people are dark-haired. Again, this shows that being proud of one’s
physical features is not necessarily a bad trait.

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disappearance lies at the heart of the events in the novel and is deeply
intertwined with the family histories of the protagonist, Tanya, and her friend,
Fabian. Many of the villagers believe that Morwenna was murdered – and
possibly raped – by Fabian’s grandfather. As Fabian explains:

“It was common knowledge that Amos had... had a thing

for her. They’d been seeing each other for a few weeks,
apparently. But Morwenna had broken it off – and broken
his heart... . People thought he was angry and frustrated,
that he might have followed her, tried to get her to change
her mind. Maybe they had a fight. Or maybe he wanted...
he tried to... oh, I don’t know. I don’t know.”
But he did know and so did Tanya. But neither of them
wanted to say it. (Harrison, 2009, p. 134, italics and
ellipses in the original)

Once Tanya discovers that Morwenna is still alive in fairyland, Tanya hopes to
rescue her. Throughout, Morwenna seems to be an innocent victim – either of
Amos or of the fairies. As it turns out, however, Morwenna went to fairyland of
her own free will to escape her overbearing family and to stay young forever,
and is now attempting to get back to the human world by forcing Tanya to take
her place. The entire time, when she seemed to be reaching out for help, she
was simply using Tanya. Thus she proves herself, rather than the mischievous
fairies, the real villain of the story; yet she is neither a witch nor a fairy, but
simply a selfish teenage girl, obsessed with her own image and embittered by
her best friend’s betrayal. Tanya thinks that

whatever the girl had once been she was beyond mercy
now. Half a century in the fairy realm had put paid to that.
All that remained was a shell capable only of revenge and
hatred, unrecognisable as something that used to be
human. (Harrison, 2009, p. 297)

Even before she became twisted into something inhuman by spending so many
years with the fairies, Morwenna was manipulative and self-centred. As the
story follows Tanya, who is only twelve and shows no signs of any emergent
sexuality, readers do not really see Morwenna using her sexuality as a weapon
in the way femme fatales tend to do. In the past, she has manipulated Amos by
relying on his attraction to her, but other than that, she mostly uses her image
as a seemingly innocent child to make people believe that she could not
possibly have any wicked ideas.
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 Like Snow White’s stepmother and other fairy-tale villainesses, Morwenna’s
wickedness is partly motivated by vanity and a desire to stay young. In the end
Fabian attempts to defeat her by destroying her youth, the one thing “she
values above all” (p. 302).
Both Selia and Morwenna are undoubtedly bad beauties, but their
characters have more depth than the archetypal femme fatale, and so do not
simply seem like creations of the male gaze and men’s sexual insecurities. Both
have been haunted their entire lives by their supernatural abilities, which
alienated them from other people. While their deeds are still unconscionable,
this background gives them a bit of humanity, so they are more than simply
one-dimensional caricatures of female vanity.
A more one-sided beautiful villain is the Duchess from Diana Wynne
Jones’s The Magicians of Caprona (1980), who literally turns out to be a devil.
While her scheme involves obtaining power by marrying the Duke, it is,
however, not clear whether she uses her beauty to accomplish this or whether
she simply charms him with her magic. After her evils have been uncovered, the
Duke says about her: “Terrible female! I can’t think why I married her – but I
suppose that was a spell too” (p. 236). The Duke himself is portrayed in a very
childlike manner, so he seems to be easy to dupe. Tonino even thinks that
“probably he was too stupid to count” (p. 177). His main characteristic is his
gleeful love for Punch and Judy puppet shows. He is kind and mild-mannered,
so he probably does not take the domestic violence in the play as seriously as
some of the other characters do, although it could be a response to his feeling
limited by his overbearing wife, especially since one of his Judy figures looks
“uncomfortably like the Duchess” (p. 195). The Duchess is keen on puppets as
well, but for different reasons. As one of the characters exclaims, “[h]er mind
seems to run on puppets”, to which the Duke replies: “She sees people that
way” (p. 236), meaning that she enjoys manipulating people and taking away
their agency. This is a common attribute of femmes fatales, but the Duchess
does not use her sexuality much for this purpose in the story, or at least not in
sight of the child protagonists, who are all under twelve years of age.
Another way to shame women for their perceived beauty is to portray
conventionally attractive women as shallow and foolish. As Jarune Uwujaren
expresses it: “Girls are expected to perform femininity while being put down for
being girly. Girls are expected to care about their looks, but girls who care too
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much are often labeled ‘fast’” (2015a, unpaged). Samantha Flynt from Jasper
Fforde’s Song of the Quarkbeast (2011) is such a character, defined by her
beauty as much as her narcissism and perceived lack of any other redeeming
qualities. She is an employee at a magic company, despite having “failed to get
her [magic] licence for three years running” (p. 48). Jennifer Strange baldly
states that the only reason Samantha has a job is because “she’s dazzlingly
pretty and Blix thinks that a physically attractive sorcerer would be good for
business” (p. 48). Apart from being an inept sorcerer, she is also perceived to
be very silly. Jennifer dislikes Samantha for all these reasons, calling her
“Samantha ‘Pretty-but-dim’ Flynt” (p. 48) and “every bit as annoyingly pretty and
perfect close up as she was from a distance” (p. 264). Notably, the other female
sorcerer in Blix’s company is “the well-dressed Dame Corby, who wore far more
jewellery than was good for her” (p. 227). According to these descriptions of
Samantha and Dame Corby, Jennifer judges and mocks both of these women
for their traditionally feminine appearance.
Later it is revealed that Samantha has been using magic – an analogue for
plastic surgery – to make herself prettier. This shows that she is just as
preoccupied with her own beauty as everyone else appears to be. The moment
of this revelation is meant to be shameful, embarrassing Samantha and
humiliating her for her vanity, despite the fact that she lives in a society that
places such importance on women conforming to narrow standards of beauty,
such that magically enhancing her looks might have been seen as a gesture
towards fitting in and being taken seriously. In this vein, Mulvey writes:

The female body has become industrialised; a woman

must buy the means to paint on (make-up) and sculpt
(underwear/clothes) a look of femininity, a look which is
the guarantee of visibility in sexist society for each
individual woman. (1989, p. 54, italics in the original)

Plastic surgery (or its magical counterpart) is simply an extension of this.

However, some of Jennifer’s other assumptions about Samantha prove to
be wrong. When the evil Blix attempts to gain powerful magic for himself,
Samantha tries to trick and distract him by offering herself to him. The attempt
fails, but it does show her courage and ingenuity, though like many other
beautiful characters, her attractiveness and sexuality are portrayed as being
her only weapons. After this, Jennifer and the other characters start respecting

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her more, though they still do not think much of her intelligence and abilities, as
this paragraph shows:

For her stalwart yet rash bravery during the final Blix
showdown, Samantha Flynt was granted a full cadetship
at Kazam, “no matter how long it took”. She has still to get
her magic licence, despite the Useless Brother’s
insistence that she should have a licence anyway, “for
being so utterly captivating”. She has turned him down for
marriage sixty-seven times, proving perhaps that she is
not quite as stupid as we think. (Fforde, 2011, p. 289,
italics in the original)

All in all, the subversion of Samantha’s character is humorous and enjoyable,

but not as effective as it could have been if it had been handled with a little
more depth.
Samantha is the only one of these bad beauties whose sole power lies in
her attractiveness, and at the same time she is the only one who is not really
bad. The others all exhibit some of the behaviours of classic femme fatales,
though the sexual aspects are often minimised, especially in works for younger
children. None of them are as obsessed with their own looks as fairy tale
villainesses tend to be, not even the perpetually young Morwenna. All of them
appear to be white, too, Selia and Samantha having long, blonde hair, and
Morwenna being described as having “creamy skin”. While these descriptions
certainly link beauty to whiteness, at least none of these characters represent
racist assumptions about non-white women’s sexuality.
Because of these factors, none of the works mentioned imply that it is
intrinsically evil for a woman to be beautiful or sexual, which makes them more
progressive than older portrayals of bad beauties. However, it is certainly
significant that the beautiful villainesses are depicted with more depth than the
ugly ones, which means that the social narrative on beauty is still rather one-
sided, and mostly depicts only one type of beauty.
Throughout this section and the preceding one, I have frequently referred to
the focus on thinness in representing female beauty. Conversely, fat people are
commonly seen as an acceptable target for prejudice and ridicule. As this is a
complex issue, interlinked with issues of race, class, and disability, I shall
devote the next section to an in-depth analysis of “fat-phobia” and “fat-
shaming”.

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Fat-Shaming
Prejudice against fatness – particularly in women – is partly based on
erroneous assumptions about the correlation between weight and health, but is
mostly a way to control women’s bodies and self-image (Kinzel, 2013; Feng,
2015). Using the same line of reasoning as Faludi, above, Wolf argues that the
ultimate goal of fat-shaming is to keep women feeble and submissive by
denying them sustenance: “Modern culture represses female oral appetite as
Victorian culture, through doctors, repressed female sexual appetite: from the
top of the power structure downward, for a political purpose” (1990, p. 97, italics
in original). She also writes:

The ideology of semistarvation undoes feminism; what

happens to women’s bodies happens to our minds. If
women’s bodies are and have always been wrong
whereas men’s are right, then women are wrong and men
are right. Where feminism taught women to put a higher
value on ourselves, hunger teaches us to erode our self-
esteem. (pp. 196-197)

Other feminists, such as Susan Bordo, feel that the desire to lose weight is
more symbolic: that it is a desire to take up less space in a world that frequently
thinks of women as being, as she puts it, “too much” (1993, p. 161), meaning
too loud, too emotional, and too demanding.
When people fat-shame, they often claim to do so in the name of health,
even though unhealthy behaviours that are celebrated in thin people are
criticised in fat people. Even if it were true that fat-phobia is simply a reaction to
unhealthy lifestyles, the idea that only people who attain an arbitrary standard
of health are worthy of respect, dignity, and love is troubling, as it excludes
many people with disabilities and chronic illnesses (Allard, 2016). Melissa A.
Fabello and Linda Bacon argue that this line of thinking turns health and,
subsequently, bodily respect and autonomy into a meritocracy. They write:

when we perpetuate the narrative that we all have a

choice in whether our bodies are fat or thin, we push the
idea that everyone should be striving toward thinness all
the time – and that is something that actually harms us all.
In the meantime, we also push along the notion that
since fat is unhealthy and therefore bad, the “choices” we
make about our bodies also speak to our moralities and
the extent to which we “deserve” good health and respect.
(2017, unpaged)
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Fabello and Bacon outline some of the ways in which ill health can be caused
by institutional oppression, some of which are directly linked to fat-phobia. By
ignoring these factors, privileged people can pretend that illness – just like
poverty – is a personal failure, rather than an institutional problem that requires
a restructuring of capitalist society. This also erases sympathy for fat,17
disabled, and poor people – and particularly for people who belong to all three
groups. In this regard, it is important to note that there is a significant overlap
between fat people, disabled people, and poor people. Disabled people are
often poor because of medical costs and because it is harder for them to find
work than it is for able-bodied people. Poor people are often fat because they
cannot afford healthy food and do not have the time for exercise. Thus, fat-
phobia is strongly connected to ableism and to class prejudice.
As with other beauty standards, there are elements of racism in fat-
shaming, as the body type deemed ideal is one more common in white
Europeans than in most other races. As Caleb Luna writes: “The idea of what
we have been taught to believe a ‘normal’ body should look like is literally
based on ideas of white male bodies and has become translated onto bodies of
color across the world” (2017b, unpaged). As a historical example of this,
Rachel Kuo names Saartjie Baartman, an African woman who was paraded
around freak shows and human zoos in Europe during the 19 th century, due to
what was perceived as her curiously large buttocks and genitalia. Kuo writes:
“While her body was similar to that of other women in her community, she was
perceived as ‘abnormal’”. She continues: “Today, the gawking at Black women’s
bodies continues. For example, the size and shape of Serena Williams’ body
is constantly scrutinized” (2017, unpaged).
Racialised fat-shaming affects men of colour as well. Fat men of colour are
characterised as lazy, gluttonous, and villainous more often than white men.
While white men are sometimes fat-shamed, they are not solely defined by their
bodies the way people of colour and white women are. This means that as long
as they possess other admirable qualities, such as a sense of humour, chubby
white men are permitted to be visible in the media in a way that chubby women
are usually not, as women are expected to be attractive even when they are

17 Note that I will be using the words “fat” and “large”, rather than “overweight” or “obese”,
because, as Julie Feng (2015, unpaged) points out, the latter two terms are derived from
classifications on the wildly misleading Body Mass Index Scale and are thus essentially
meaningless.
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funny or strong. This can be seen, for example, in television sitcoms that
feature a fat husband with a thin, conventionally attractive wife (e.g. The King of
Queens [Weitthorn and Litt, 1998-2007], The Simpsons [Groening, 1989-],
Family Guy [MacFarlane, 1999-]). As Ann Alston states:

It is worth considering whether there are many fat heroes

or heroines in English children’s literature. It seems that
[there] are very few, for these heroes and heroines tend to
be strong and slim... . The chubbier characters are often
dismissed as ugly, stupid or villainous... . While there are
exceptions to this pattern, it is nonetheless strong. Size is
an important determining factor in whether the character is
to be a hero or villain. (2004, p. 80)

Alston’s statement here is gender-neutral, and she names a few famous fat
male characters who are portrayed unsympathetically. My own findings are
similar to hers, except that I have found that female characters are more likely
to be mocked for being fat than male ones. In the books I have studied, fat
characters are rarely portrayed sympathetically. If they are not downright
villainous, they are described as being stupid and repulsive. As explained
above, Raymond and his mother in The Secret of Platform 13 are portrayed as
having unattractive personalities, being greedy, selfish, materialistic, and rude.
But the text also takes every opportunity to point out how physically unattractive
they are, due to their size, stating for example that Mrs Trottle, sunbathing in
the nude, “was not a pleasant sight” (p. 11, italics in the original). This is in stark
contrast with the description of Aunt Emily (who is a sympathetic character)
wearing her home-made skirt in another Ibbotson novel, The Beasts of
Clawstone Castle: “During the many years she had worn it, it had taken on the
outlines of her behind, but not at all unpleasantly because she was a thin lady
and her behind was small” (2005, p. 8).18 These descriptions seem to imply that
the Trottles’ fatness is as bad as their negative personality traits, or even that
having an unattractive personality goes hand in hand with being fat.
Additionally, there are some repulsive descriptions of the Trottles eating,
recalling Wolf’s point about the politicised repression of oral appetites. Eating is
seen to be both disgusting and morally wrong when fat people do it.

18 Oddly, the same novel also features a male ghost who died of an eating disorder, as well as
a woman who feels she no longer recognises her own body after having had countless
cosmetic surgeries to please her husband. So the author recognises how damaging the
desire to be thin can be, but still comments that Aunt Emily’s behind is pleasant because it is
small.
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 Another example of a fat, villainous character is Augusta, the wicked
stepmother from Lauren Oliver’s Liesl & Po. She is described as being “broad,
and flat, and enormous, with a wide, coarse face and hands as thick as
paddles” and giving “the impression of a full-grown toad” (2011, p. 144). This is
juxtaposed with a description of the beautiful heroine Liesl, with her “sweet,
pale face” (p. 177) and “long, elegant fingers” (p. 178), which makes her sound
like a dainty, rich white girl. Indeed, Liesl comes from a wealthy family, while
Augusta used to be a teacher who married Liesl’s father for his money. Even
though she is rich now and wears fur coats, she still looks “coarse” while Liesl is
described as “elegant”. Augusta has a daughter of her own, who looks just as
out of place in her expensive clothing and make-up as her mother does. She is
described as “pale and sickly-looking despite the powder on her face and rouge
on her cheeks, which she never went anywhere without, looking a little bit like a
wriggly tadpole clothed in fur and lace” (p. 143). Thus, beauty is directly tied to
high birth, and while the lower classes may attain the trappings of the wealthy,
they cannot replicate the latter’s natural grace. Augusta’s fatness is accounted
for in such terms. It is part of her coarseness, and her coarseness is part of her
ugliness.
Significantly, at one point Will, a boy who is infatuated with Liesl, worries
that she has been sent away to work in a factory. While there is real danger in
factory work, Will’s main concern appears to be that Liesl is too pretty for such
menial work, and that the chemicals and the needlework will tarnish her beauty.
Jones’s The Merlin Conspiracy features Sybil, who is disparagingly
described by another character as looking “just like a sack of sweetcorn
balanced on two logs” (2003, p. 19). When she dances, the reader’s attention is
drawn to her “big square-toed feet”, “her massive legs”, and “great dark patches
of sweat spreading from her armpit almost to her waist” (p. 446). Shine, from
Jones’s Archer’s Goon, is not described in quite such humiliating terms,
although the narrative states that she is “vastly fat” (1984, p. 169). There are
still several offhand comments about her size. Some of these make sense,
such as when her equally evil, yet thin sister taunts her by mentioning her
weight (p. 176), or when Howard compares the strength of Shine’s large arms
with the strength of her mind (p. 175). But the description that “Shine was fatter
even than Howard had thought” (p. 176) seems to serve no other purpose than
to underline the fact that, because of this character’s size, readers are not
116
meant to sympathise with her. Howard’s sister later complains that Shine is “fat
and horrible” (p. 181). As with Mrs. Trottle, the implication is that her fatness is
part of what makes her horrible.
A particularly overt example of fat-shaming occurs in another of Jones’s
works, Castle in the Air. Early in the story, Abdullah’s relatives introduce him to
two women whom they want him to marry. The first thing he notices about them
is that they are “extremely fat” (1990, p. 55). He goes on to criticise their use of
make-up (“Both wore a very large amount of make-up, which was, in both
cases, a severe error” [p. 55]) and concludes that they must be stupid, despite
not having had any conversation with them. For a moment he feels sorry for
them, as he realises that his relatives are using the two brides, just as they are
using him. But this does not last long as he starts comparing them to his
beloved Flower-in-the-Night:

That brought Abdullah back to reason. With a bump. With

the sort of bump a magic carpet might make if loaded with
two such weighty females – always supposing it could
even get off the ground with them on it in the first place.
They were so very fat. As for thinking they would make
companions for Flower-in-the-Night – phooey! She was
intelligent, educated and kind, as well as being beautiful
(and thin). These two had yet to show him that they had a
brain cell between them... . And they giggled. He had
never heard Flower-in-the-Night giggle. (Jones, 1990, pp.
58-59)

While Abdullah’s main focus is still on the women’s size, he also disdains them
for behaving in a stereotypically feminine way (wearing make-up, giggling). He
has only met Flower-in-the-Night a couple of times, so he really knows very little
about her, but simply by being thin and not giggling, she is shown to be superior
to other women in his mind. The comment about her being educated can also
be seen as expressing class prejudice, since Flower-in-the-Night is a princess,
and the two brides are common women who have not had the former’s
opportunities for education. John Stephens writes about the “basic gender
assumptions informing” this story:

Flower-in-the-Night is beautiful in a very conventional way

(slim but not thin, and so on); more significantly, we read
about how much Flower has learned since she was stolen
from her father’s palace, but this does not present as
character development. Conversely, the nieces of
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 Abdullah’s relatives are fat, foolish, and giggle, and
Abdullah can give them to Hasruel’s brother in an utterly
patriarchal gesture. (1992, p. 280)

Of course, the story is told from Abdullah’s point of view and, in a few instances,
it is made clear that his viewpoint is somewhat biased and not always the most
trustworthy. For example, when he first meets Sophie, he feels that she is
“uncomfortably strong-minded for a young woman” (p. 197). Readers who are
already familiar with Sophie from Howl’s Moving Castle (1986) know that she is
a brave and admirable character, so will disagree with Abdullah’s assessment
that she is too bossy to be likeable. Similarly, when he first meets a white
woman from Ingall, he observes that “[h]er clothes made her into a plump
hourglass-shape which Abdullah found very foreign and displeasing” (p. 107).
This sentence makes it clear that Abdullah’s opinion expresses a personal bias
and might not be shared by readers. However, in his encounter with the two
brides there is no such qualifier, so it seems likely that readers are in this
instance meant to share Abdullah’s disgust. In the end, Abdullah, thinking that
“now the girls’ other relatives had deserted them, they were surely his to
dispose of” (pp. 268-269), happily gives them away to a wicked genie who
whisks them off to live on a secluded island with him, even though earlier in the
novel Abdullah seems to support women’s independence when he argues with
the Sultan, who claims that “[w]omen do not count... . Therefore it is impossible
to be unfair to them” (p. 71). Of course, the main purpose of this conversation is
to establish Rashput as a savage, uncivilised country in which women are
treated as cattle, in order to later juxtapose it with the more European country of
Ingary, which is presented as more enlightened when it comes to women’s
rights. This is not only racist, but also somewhat hypocritical, as Ingary has its
own problems with sexism.19 “Disposing” of the girls in this way is seen as a
fitting punishment, not only for the women, but also for the genie. Readers are
not meant to feel sorry for them for being treated as objects to be handed
around, or for having to spend the rest of their lives alone with an evil genie.
The fact that they are fat and perceived not to be very intelligent makes them
less human in the eyes of the other characters and not worthy of sympathy.

19 Tamora Pierce’s The Girl Who Rides Like a Man (1986) has the same problem, as the plot
involves the white Alanna educating brown-skinned women on their rights in a way that
suggests that her background makes her more knowledgeable about feminist issues, even
though her own home country is thoroughly patriarchal as well.
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 Even novels with likeable large characters can have instances of fat-
shaming. Nan Pilgrim, one of the protagonists of Jones’s Witch Week (1982), is
bullied by her classmates not merely for being a social misfit, but also for being
chubby. As she is a positive character, portrayed as being clever, funny, and
creative, the reader is meant to take her side and feel that it is an injustice when
the other girls make fun of her. But it is unclear whether the same is true of an
anonymous girl Charles sees kissing and cuddling her boyfriend in the bushes
outside the school. She is described as “a very fat girl – much fatter than Nan
Pilgrim” (p. 66), and Charles wonders “how anyone could enjoy grabbing, or
watching, such fatness” (p. 67). However, while Charles is a focal character, he
is a less reliable narrator than Nan, and is, by the author’s own admission, “in
many ways... awful” (2008b, p. 292). So, as with Abdullah’s description of
Sophie, it is possible that readers are not meant to agree with Charles when he
thinks this girl is repulsive, even though there is no conflicting point of view on
this (the fat girl never appears in Nan’s sections of the story). But considering
that the narrative emphasises that this girl is “much fatter than Nan Pilgrim”, it
seems the reason readers are allowed to like Nan is because she is only
“dumpy” (p. 9) and not really fat, as this other girl is.
Interestingly, Charles describes the witch he saw burned as “a large fat
man” (p. 13), but unlike the nameless girl in the bushes, he feels no scorn or
disgust towards him. There is no indication as to whether this is because the
witch is male.
One of the characters in Jones’s Crown of Dalemark (1993) is a big girl
called Enblith, nicknamed Biffa. After finding out that she is named after the
legendary beauty Enblith the Fair, one of the other characters says: “Unkind,
isn’t it? ...Her parents made a serious miscalculation there. Not that she’s
unbeautiful, poor girl. Just too big for one to see it” (p. 186, italics in the
original). Biffa is portrayed as a very kind person, and the people talking about
her in this extract actually like her, but see no problem with criticising her looks
in this way. When Maewen returns to her own time, she finds out that her love
interest, Mitt, ended up marrying Biffa in the past. At first Maewen is a little
indignant about this, thinking: “Fancy that! ...Biffa! Biffa!” But then she adds:
“Well, Mitt had showed some sense at least! And it was really a very good
choice... Biffa was nice – so nice, in fact, that it was entirely likely that Mitt had
lived happily ever after” (p. 311, italics in the original). She concludes that it
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must have been a political marriage, as Mitt, being a king, could not remain
unmarried, and Biffa would present a sensible option as a wife and queen. It
never occurs to her that Mitt might actually have fallen in love with Biffa, and the
story itself dismisses this possibility when it is revealed that the immortal Mitt
still loves Maewen after several hundred years, even though they only spent a
few weeks together as teenagers. The implication is that a big, unattractive girl
like Biffa might be married for convenience, but will never find true love, as such
is reserved for pretty, thin girls like Maewen.
Of course, there are some likeable fat characters who are not undermined
in this way but, as Alston indicates above, they are disappointingly rare and are
often only seen in one or two scenes. Usually they are friendly older women
who appear in supporting roles, rather than young heroines. One example is
Mrs Fairfax from Howl’s Moving Castle, who is described as “one of those
plump, comfortable ladies... who made you feel good with life just to look at her”
(Jones, 1986, pp. 115-116). Here, plumpness is depicted as a positive,
comforting attribute.
A particularly positive large character is Frid from Shannon Hale’s Princess
Academy (2005) and Princess Academy: Palace of Stone (2013). She is taller
and wider than many of the men in the village, and has a father and brothers
who are even bigger than she is. However, the narrative never uses negative
words to describe her and does not judge her to be ugly. Rather, she is
portrayed as loyal, brave, and hard-working, and someone readers can
potentially identify with. Unlike Biffa, the only person to make a nasty remark
about Frid’s looks is a bandit who is clearly not likeable and not meant to be
taken seriously. At this, “Frid blinked a little longer than normal, the only
indication... that his comment hurt her” (p. 232). In all the examples of fat-
shaming I have covered, this is the only instance of the fat person’s hurt
feelings being acknowledged. Again, this encourages empathy with Frid, rather
than with the person making fun of her. When the girls at the Princess Academy
get ready for the ball, all of them are allowed to feel pretty in their new dresses,
including Frid. In this scene, the narrative draws particular attention to Esa, who
is disabled and thus also falls outside of society’s beauty standards. She is
happy when the seamstress takes her disability into account when designing
her dress. Thus, the text shows that all girls – including large and disabled ones
– can be beautiful, but that beauty is not the main feature that defines them.
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 For these reasons, Frid and Nan are the two most positive fat characters in
my primary texts, but when it comes to portraying fat people as a whole,
Princess Academy is more empowering than Witch Week because it does not
shame other large characters aside from the most important one.

Conclusion
In a society where the white, abled, male body is treated as the norm, all other
bodies are seen as deviations. Feminist theory has traditionally focused on the
way the female body is regarded as a defective form of the male body, but has
ignored similar narratives around disabled, non-white, and fat bodies, even
when these bodies are female as well. In this chapter I have tried to escape the
notion that there is such a thing as a “normal” body, although I have examined
the different connotations inherent in physical descriptions of men and women.
As I have demonstrated, beauty still tends to be an important attribute for
fantasy heroes and heroines, especially the female characters, although less so
than in older stories. Many texts try to subvert readers’ expectations as to what
a hero or a villain should look like; for example by featuring monstrous, non-
human protagonists, such as in The Secret of Platform 13, or by presenting
characters who do not care about society’s beauty standards, as in Monster
Mission. Even the texts that try to subvert tropes often fall back into old
stereotypes, however, as with the description of the queen as being young and
beautiful in contrast to the grotesque, villainous Trottles in The Secret of
Platform 13. The texts rarely question what beauty really consists of, as they
simply take for granted that it is an objective value that means the same thing to
all people. While they do occasionally show that a character’s view of beauty
might be biased (such as Abdullah’s opinion of women from Ingary), they do not
offer a contrasting point of view (for example by having two characters disagree
on what they consider attractive in a potential partner). By presenting beauty as
an objective value, the texts frequently replicate various oppressive narratives
surrounding the body. Thus, beauty is equated with whiteness, thinness, youth,
being of a higher class, and able-bodiedness, whereas ugliness is equated with
marginalisation. Feminist authors such as Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi have
written extensively on the ways in which traditional beauty standards are used
to control women’s bodies, but they fail to take into account these other axes of
oppression and how they impact on women who are marginalised in other
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ways. I have demonstrated that an intersectional approach is necessary to
deconstruct all the harmful messages created by Western beauty standards
with regards to race, age, ability, and class, as well as gender.
While there are several stories where beautiful girls are friends with girls
considered less beautiful (Thayet and Alanna; Maewen and Biffa), often there is
animosity and contempt between girls and women who strive to follow society’s
beauty standards and those who do not. This encourages girls to be
judgemental towards others who make different life choices, rather than finding
beauty in everybody and in every body. I noted that it is important to take into
account that some women – such as women of colour and transgender women
– experience more societal pressure to appear feminine, often at the risk of
ostracism or even violence, so feminists who decry all women who wear make-
up and shave their legs ignore the needs and realities of many marginalised
groups.
I also looked at bad beauties in my primary texts, of which there are
several, most of them belonging to the archetype of the femme fatale. Aside
from Josiane and Delia, these characters are not as explicitly sexual or as one-
dimensional as the archetype tends to be in media for adults (Josiane is also
driven violently mad by the end, which displays mentally ill women in a negative
light, characterising them as evil and dangerous). Samantha from Song of the
Quarkbeast can also be classified as a bad beauty, as the text mocks her for
being overly obsessed with her appearance. However, the story subverts
expectations slightly by revealing Samantha to be brave and more capable than
the other characters had assumed, even though she is also silly.
Finally, I examined the phenomenon of fat-shaming, as, it seems that when
it comes to physical appearance, the worst thing a character can be is fat,
which is far too often treated as an unforgivable crime. Frequently, being fat is
equated with being immoral and selfish.
On the whole, while physical perfection is no longer treated as an essential
characteristic for a heroine, only Princess Academy comes close to offering a
more egalitarian alternative to modern beauty standards: one in which no one is
considered ugly, regardless of age, size, race, class, or physical ability. As
Suzannah Weiss writes: “A truly feminist, body-positive viewpoint says that
everybody can be beautiful in their own way, and no group is objectively more
attractive than any other. After all, beauty is personal and subjective – sweeping
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generalizations just don’t work” (2016, unpaged).
Considering all of this, beauty alone is not sufficient to provide
empowerment for female characters – particularly those who fall outside the
cultural norm in one or more ways. A more effective tool of empowerment
commonly used in fantasy literature is female magic, which is the subject of the
following chapter.

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 Chapter 4: Magic and Empowerment
Witchcraft is the resort of women because it symbolises
the only way they can work politically; by stealth, in secret,
rather than on the public field of battle or debate. (Purkiss,
1996, p. 191)

Introduction
Magic is connected with power, so it is often perceived differently depending on
the gender of the magic user. For a man to be powerful is normal, but a
powerful woman is seen as unusual and dangerous. Likewise, the word
“wizard” – which is usually gendered as male – is morally neutral, so a wizard
can be either good or evil. But a witch – usually gendered female – is almost
always an evil and threatening figure in fairy tales. Thus, in Arthurian myth,
there is the wise, male Merlin in contrast to the wicked female, Morgan LeFey.
Whether she is a frightful old hag or a beautiful sorceress, the witch usually
works as an antagonist to the innocent heroine.
However, there exists a discrepancy within the fairy-tale canon between the
characters said to be witches and the characters actually using magic. As Ruth
B. Bottigheimer writes in Grimms’ Bad Girls and Bold Boys:

Of the successful spells actually laid in Grimms’ Tales, the

overwhelming majority, if not all, are performed by young,
beautiful, and usually nubile girls. Furthermore, the girls’
effectiveness in laying spells seems related to an inborn
connection to nature itself. It takes close and careful
reading to come to this conclusion, because the text often
imputes fearsome powers to old women and young men.
(p. 40, italics in the original)

She cites tales like “The Goose Girl” and “Brother and Sister” as examples. The
titular heroine in “The Goose Girl”, for instance, summons the wind, and the
sister in “Brother and Sister” understands the voice of brooks. In contrast, two
of the best-known witches in the Grimms’ collection – the one living in a
gingerbread house in “Hansel and Gretel” and the stepmother of the
eponymous protagonist in “Snow White” – never actually use magic in their
stories (of course, he gingerbread house itself can be seen as magical, and
Snow White’s stepmother has a knowledge of poisons, which is associated with
witchcraft).
While there are still wicked witches in modern fantasy literature, magic is

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also presented as a tool of empowerment for female characters, an active
alternative to the passive roles fairy tales offer women. Frequently the
protagonist discovers her special powers in the course of the story, leading her
to gain courage and confidence. Sometimes the magic operates as a metaphor
for other types of talent, ones that might be more applicable to readers in the
real world, such as the power of words or, maybe, simply the power of self-
confidence.
However, while self-confidence and personal empowerment are important,
too often mainstream feminism does not look beyond simplistic examples of
female empowerment, failing to examine larger systemic issues. Thus, powerful
businesswomen are often celebrated as examples of what women can achieve,
even if they work for companies that exploit their workers, many of whom are
women themselves. Similarly, successful female politicians are often praised as
feminist heroes, though the policies they support might harm other women,
particularly working-class women, disabled women, women of colour, and
women in third-world countries. Ashley Truong points out how this situation
operates in popular media, where

there are some [female] characters that are celebrated just

because they do the same things that male characters
would do — even if those things harm other people.
That’s why it’s important to always ask at what cost
empowerment comes. Is it worth it for women to be able to
do the same things as men, if doing so means that they
harm others? (2015, unpaged)

In the previous chapter I mentioned the patronising attitudes that white

characters in both Castle in the Air (Jones, 1990) and The Girl Who Rides Like
a Man (Pierce, 1986) show towards societies that are coded as Middle-Eastern.
This is an example of white women’s personal empowerment being used as a
tool to silence the voices of non-white women. This type of paternalistic thinking
results in the othering of Muslim women (as well as other women of colour),
who are mainly characterised as victims, unaware of their own oppression until
they are saved by white Western feminists. Deepa Kumar elaborates on this
subject:

As several Third World Feminists have argued, a historical

weakness of liberal feminism in the West has been its
racist, patronizing attitude towards women of color who
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 have been seen less as allies/agents and more as victims
in need of rescue. This attitude prevails both in relation to
women of color within Western nation states, as well as
women in the global South. This is what allows figures
such as Madeline Albright and Hillary Clinton to be viewed
as feminist saviors even while both, in their roles as
Secretary of State, have advanced US imperialism. (2014,
unpaged)

Thus, this narrative of the non-white woman in need of white saviours advances
the aims of colonialism, imperialism, and Islamophobia, which actively harms
many non-white women and girls.
In this chapter I will examine the way different types of magic are used in
my primary texts, and explore how they are used either to empower the
characters or to silence them. Furthermore, I will look at the effects of this
magical empowerment: whether it is used to uplift other women or simply for
personal advancement to the detriment of others.
First I will look at magic that is specifically characterised as being feminine.
Often this type of magic originates from nature, and is contrasted with magic
that comes from book learning, which is seen as a more masculine form. Then I
will examine two common types of magic in fantasy literature – magic
connected with vision and magic connected with words – both of which are
frequently used by female characters and can thus also be described as
feminine magic. I will also talk about the way race influences depictions of
magic, and how this intersects with other sites of identity.

Witchcraft and Wizardry

Although witches are frequently portrayed in a more positive light in modern
fantasy, often there still exists a difference between male and female magic.
Wizards’ masculine magic often operates according to strict rules and is
associated with books and institutional education (as noted above), from which
women have traditionally been excluded. As Diane Purkiss puts it, “the
medieval sage reproduces critical assumptions about the gendering of
knowledge; he can act as the repository of knowledge about the historical past
and the national future precisely because he is male” (1996, p. 184).
Female magic, on the other hand, tends to be connected to nature, and is
therefore portrayed as more wild and uncontrollable. As John Stephens and
Robyn McCallum express it, “what in… contemporary fantasies is referred to as
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‘wild magic’… is equivalent to a female sexual power often exhibited as
deviance by the central female characters in adult fiction” (1998, pp. 121-122).
Barbara Fass Leavy endorses this point, noting that “virtually all supernatural
female folklore characters are imbued with features of the wild woman, that is,
the animal side of the human being” (1995, p. 221), which makes female magic
users seem uncivilised and dangerous. As mentioned in the previous chapter,
wicked witches are often described as looking distinctly Semitic, with prominent
noses and chins, as well as bushy hair. The traditional witch’s hat also bears
some resemblance to the peaked caps that Jews, in the middle ages, were
forced to wear in order to identify themselves (see Burke, 2001, p. 136), so it
can easily be argued that fairy tales like “Hansel and Gretel” contribute to an
anti-Semitic rhetoric about bloodthirsty Jewish women preying on Christian
children.20 Because of this anti-Semitic history, even positive portrayals of
crones with pointed hats – such as Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters (1988) –
could be upsetting for some readers.
This mistrust of female magic and power is not universal, though. Trinh T.
Minh-ha writes that “[i]n many parts of the world, magic (and witchcraft) is
regarded as essentially a woman’s function” (1989, p. 128), and she outlines
how witches are revered in many African societies, where they perform religious
functions and continue a tradition of female wisdom and knowledge.
In modern Western stories, the wild magic of witchcraft is also frequently
presented as a positive, natural thing. Alison Waller argues that the witch “offers
complex and hybrid versions of femininity” (2009, p. 126), be it through the
depiction of “an aged and despised hag of myth and fairy tale, a female victim
of early modern history, or a compellingly sexual teenage seductress in
television and film” (p. 128). Thus, the witch and her female power can be
represented in a positive way, allowing readers to identify with her and share in
her feelings of empowerment. As Purkiss writes, “the figure of the witch could
be an occasion for female self-fashioning in the full-blown Greenblattian sense;
that is, it was an identity which allowed class boundaries to be crossed for

20 Significantly, while few people today would consciously connect witchcraft with Judaism, this
traditional anti-Semitic depiction of witches means that wicked witches in film and television
are frequently played by Jewish actresses. This is particularly notable in films such as Oz the
Great and Powerful (Raimi, 2013), in which the evil witches are played by the Jewish Rachel
Weisz and Mila Kunis, whereas the good witch is played by Michelle Williams, a blonde
gentile woman. In the original Broadway production of Wicked, the Musical the Wicked Witch
of the West is played by the Jewish Idina Menzel, while Glinda the Good is played by the
blonde, non-Jewish, Kristin Chenoweth.
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those who otherwise found them impassable” (1996, p. 162). If the witch can
cross such boundaries, then perhaps she can break them to allow others the
same freedom that she enjoys herself.
In this section I will compare three novels by Diana Wynne Jones that
strongly feature themes of feminine magic: The Merlin Conspiracy (2003), The
Time of the Ghost (1981), and Black Maria (1991). Each of these takes a quite
distinctive approach to this subject.
First, The Merlin Conspiracy, which takes place in a world called Blest
where magic is common. While magic in that world is divided into male and
female varieties, it is never made quite clear what these different types of magic
consist of, although how they are used appears to be a distinguishing feature.
The story is narrated by two children: a girl named Roddy whose magic is
connected with plants, and a boy named Nick whose magic lies with animals.
Roddy inherits her powers from an ancient wise woman who needs to pass on
her knowledge before she dies. It is indicated that she cannot pass this
knowledge on to Roddy’s maternal grandfather, even though he is a very
powerful magic user, but this probably has more to do with the fact that he is not
human rather than because he is male. The narrative tells us that “[i]t hurt” this
wise woman

to stand or walk. She had been ritually injured when she

was fifteen because she was a powerful witch. A very
powerful witch... . The village chief had smashed her right
hip so that he could control her. She had never forgiven
him. She had vowed never to pass on the knowledge her
gifts had given her to anyone from the village. (Jones,
2003, pp. 129-130, italics in the original)

Throughout the text Roddy refers to the witch as “the hurt woman” (p. 153). As
mentioned in the last chapter, certain physical disabilities are commonly
connected with wicked witches, but in the case of the hurt woman, her disability
makes her an object of pity rather than of repulsion. Those are the two roles
disabled people tend to play in fiction, with very little in between. As Alaina
Leary points out, “[w]hen we pigeonhole disabled characters into basic roles that
are easily defined, such as sympathetic and pitiable or villainous and evil, we’re
reinforcing the idea that disabled people don’t live full, meaningful lives the same
way non-disabled people do” (2017, unpaged). Despite being unable to walk, the
hurt woman is portrayed as being knowledgeable and powerful, rather than
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simply feeble, but she is still chiefly characterised by her disability, especially as
she is not even given a name.
On her father’s side, Roddy is descended from a coven of hereditary
witches who “wouldn’t let anyone male stay with them beyond seven years” (p.
259), including husbands and sons, for fear of having their female magic
contaminated. Their magic is not the same as Roddy’s and the wise woman’s,
as they do not work with plants. As Roddy informs us:

Apart from a bush of lavender and a box tree cut into a

round ball, there was nothing in this garden. It was all tufty
grass. How odd, I thought. I’d always thought that witches
cultivated herbs and were generally bowered in fertility. (p.
264)

Roddy’s grandmother, Heppy, guards an assortment of magical items. When

she shows them to Roddy, she explains that the witches use these various
items “according to which day it is and where the moon is. We give them all a
drop of blood every time we use them” (p. 275). The connection with blood and
the moon evokes the menstrual cycle. Despite this, when Heppy asks, “[c]an’t
you feel how secret and how female they are?” (p. 275, italics in the original),
Roddy thinks to herself, “[t]o tell the truth, I couldn’t. The strength that came out
of the space lined with red velvet did not feel to me particularly much to do with
women, or men either” (p. 275). In reality, of course, there are many women
who do not menstruate, due to age, disability, or other reasons (in contrast,
there are also transgender men, as well as non-binary and intersex people, who
do menstruate, but are not women), so Roddy might be suggesting, through
Jones, that defining femaleness or female power by the presence of a
menstrual cycle is misleading. It is also, we might add, essentialist, ableist, and
transphobic, even though mainstream feminists cannot seem to countenance
the idea of a woman who either is not able to menstruate, or whose
experiences with menstruation are negative rather than empowering. In
Suzannah Weiss’s words, “[s]ince periods are associated with females, people
project... ‘feminine’ qualities onto them. They’re said to embody women’s ever-
changing, earthly, emotional, and intuitive nature” (2017b, unpaged). However,
as she continues:

These ideas have been used to justify sexism. To this day,

while men are seen as fit to indulge in the life of the mind,
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 women are viewed as limited by their bodies. Periods and
the connected process of childbirth are commonly cited in
arguments against putting women in power. (ibid.)

Weiss acknowledges that “these ideas are meant to empower women. A lot of
them probably do – for some” (ibid.). It only becomes a problem when this
connection between womanhood and nature is treated like an objective fact.
Roddy’s aunt is also part of a magic circle that practises the kind of magic
that is associated with witches: “taking all your clothes off and galloping round
in a ring” (p. 313). Other characters mock her and her magic circle, though,
calling her Dotty Dora, albeit they admit that she is “the sane one in that group”
(p. 313, italics in the original). At best, their magic is characterised as silly and
inept, at worst as dangerous and far out of the practitioners’ depth.
Heppy mentions a family of male witches, but does not explain how their
magic differs from hers. While it is never stated, there is some indication that
communicating with animals, as Nick does, is a male skill, complementing
Roddy’s female herb magic. Throughout the book, Nick talks to various
creatures, and Roddy’s male friend, Grundo, can speak to salamanders, which
Roddy herself is unable to do. However, both Roddy and her female cousins
can understand the elephant that Nick befriends, while Grundo can hear the
elephant’s voice, but is unable to make out the words, and Roddy’s male cousin
does not hear the creature at all.
The best indication of the difference between male and female magic can
be seen in the roles of the “Merlin” and the “Lady of Governance”. The Merlin
(which is a title passed on since King Arthur’s day) is the king’s official magical
advisor. He travels around with the king’s court and governs the country’s
magic. The Lady of Governance is less well-known than the Merlin, as Roddy
reveals when she admits that she has never heard about the Lady until she
meets her in person. She does not travel with the king, but resides in one place,
in her cottage. According to Roddy’s aunt, she is “as powerful as he [the Merlin]
is, but she doesn’t usually concern herself with State magics [sic]. She controls
the more domestic things” (p. 294). This statement is rather misleading as it
seems to suggest that the Lady’s realm is household magic. In truth, while the
Merlin is involved with politics, the Lady of Governance upholds the balance of
the land. To do this, she communicates with anthropomorphic representations
of towns and cities. Both the Merlin and the Lady of Governance are appointed

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by magic, making their claim to power seem natural and possibly divine. This is
particularly true for the Lady of Governance, who is named by an
anthropomorphic representation of the land of Blest itself. The novel never
explores the king’s lineage, and it does not directly indicate that his position is
as natural and rightful as the Merlin’s, though the latter’s role as the king’s
magically appointed advisor does seem to legitimise monarchy in general.
At the end of the novel, Roddy uses her inherited magic to wake the land of
Blest, and, in its, or, more precisely “her”, anthropomorphic guise, this being
sets everything aright, putting an end to the Merlin and his associates’ attempt
to seize political power. This act identifies Roddy as the next Lady of
Governance, so it is explicitly female magic, connected with the femininity of the
Lady of Governance. However, throughout the novel Roddy has been working
with other magic users, both male and female. So while she appears to be the
most powerful character in the end, the emphasis of the novel lies on
cooperation and using different types of magic to complement each other,
which, as I discussed in Chapter 2, presents a more successful alternative to
patriarchy than stories that focus on violence and antagonism.
As things generally go back to normal by the end of the story, the
characters do not question whether the political system in their world needs to
be changed. The Merlin is defeated because he intends to use his power and
influence for selfish reasons, but the power and influence that come with the
position are not portrayed as intrinsically negative and corrupting. The king
himself features surprisingly little in the story, despite being a key part of the
Merlin’s wicked plans, and his claim to the throne is never questioned. The main
force to check the influence of powerful people in the world of The Merlin
Conspiracy appears to be the land of Blest herself, who can be seen as a
goddess, though she uses human agents such as Roddy. This appears to
legitimise power as divinely appointed, turning the magical leadership of Blest
into something of a theocracy.
However, the fact that Roddy is chosen as the next Lady of Governance
has different connotations than if she had been chosen as the next Merlin. The
Lady’s magic, which is connected to nature and the earth, is less prone to
corruption than the Merlin’s political position, the implication being that the
power and responsibility that comes from communing with the earth is more
benevolent than political power. Thus, Roddy does not simply replace a corrupt
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leader while promising to use her position more responsibly; instead, her power
lies in a completely different area, one that is explicitly coded as female. This is
not to say that women cannot be corrupt politicians, for one of the Merlin’s
associates is a woman. She is even a fortune teller, which involves a type of
magic that is often connected with femininity. Still, the Merlin’s desire to attain
political power and use it to oppress others is characterised as more masculine
than the Lady of Governance’s natural, feminine magic. The same point is
made with the conflict between the hurt woman and the village chief seeking to
control her. The hurt woman uses her powerful herb magic to help and to heal,
while the village chief uses violence to subjugate her.
Thus, while male and female magic users work together to achieve the
happy ending of the story, feminine-coded power is usually presented as more
benign than masculine-coded power, if only because of the way the former is
used to help others, rather than for selfish reasons. As mentioned above, it can
be problematic to characterise femininity as connected with nature and
masculinity with culture, but the overall message of the novel is a positive one;
namely, that power, whether in the hands of a man or a woman, should not be
used to hurt others.

In The Time of the Ghost, four teenage sisters are haunted by a ghost from the
future. They try to perform an amateur exorcism with bell, book, and candle,
thus appropriating a type of power normally reserved for adult men. Even
though the exorcism nearly works, the girls later decide that they are not
religious enough to succeed in performing this Christian ritual, so they try a
more heathen approach instead. Rather than banishing the ghost, they collect
blood in a bowl to communicate with her. Interestingly enough, they derive the
idea for this ritual from one of the classical works taught by their father, who is
the headmaster of a boys’ school. Their father (significantly nicknamed Himself)
runs a very patriarchal institution and represents oppressive male power. He
enjoys exercising authority over the schoolboys in his care, while neglecting his
own daughters. For him, the classical canon of literature represents the
patriarchal authority of dead white men. The girls, meanwhile, subvert this
authority with its established literature by using it to inspire their pagan magic.
The sisters get help from the boys at the school to fill a bowl with blood.
While the boys are happy to help, most of them are disgusted by the sight of
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the blood. The girls, however, feel that it is right and natural, which suggests a
female connection to paganism and witchcraft, and, possibly, to blood itself. Of
course, as stated earlier, defining femininity primarily by menstrual blood is both
shallow and exclusionary, and the same is true about defining femininity by
linking it to nature.
Notably, while the girls enjoy the magic, the female ghost is repulsed by it,
even though the magic is successful and they manage to communicate with the
apparition. The ghost’s reason for being uncomfortable with the magic is
probably because she has had negative experiences with a pagan goddess
who has tried to kill her in the past. This shows that natural magic and power
can be sinister as well, even if they derive from a feminine source.
When Himself walks in on this scene, he is furious:

Everyone well knew that Himself wanted to let rip in one of

his screaming rages. He wanted to roar and shout and hit
people and call his daughters bitches, but he did not want
to do it with Mrs Gill looking on… .
He settled at length for sarcasm. “I seem to have
spawned a coven of witches,” he remarked. (Jones, 1981,
p. 162)

Like everything else about him, Himself’s religious views are expressed in a
way that puts him in a position of power. Thus, when he said grace, “he had a
different manner, more like a priest. Himself’s voice rolled out the few words like
organ music” (p. 52). His daughters’ witchcraft is not only an affront to his
religion, but to his patriarchal authority. This is why he cannot tolerate it, and
never forgives them for it.
The two most important aspects of the novel are the sisters’ relationships to
each other and their relationship to their parents. Sally insists that their parents
are perfect, even though they are, in reality, extremely neglectful. Their mother,
Phyllis, acts more maternally towards the boys at the school than she does
towards her own daughters; and Himself, of course, is commanding and devoid
of love.
While Sally ignores her parents’ shortcomings, she is very aware of her
sisters’ flaws. For much of the story the four girls bicker and call each other
names. Fenella writes a poem about how ugly her sisters are, and the ghost
thinks at one point, “[w]hat a hateful family! …[w]hy did I come back here?” (p.
19, italics in the original). Additionally, Julian Addiman, one of the boys from the
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school, often tries to turn the girls against one another by playing on their
attraction towards him. He enjoys humiliating other people, and encourages the
mean-spirited side of the four sisters. When Sally thinks back on the past, she
realises that her life “had been dominated on one hand by Himself, always
angry but seldom there, and on the other hand by Julian Addiman, always
laughing, always demanding more and more. Between them, she had scarcely
been a person” (p. 130).
But when Sally is in danger – both from the cruel goddess and from the
abusive Julian Addiman – it is her sisters rather than her parents who do
everything to help her. They not only reject Himself’s patriarchal authority, but
they also reject Julian Addiman’s divisive cruelty. Rather than humiliating one
another to make themselves feel better, the way Himself and Julian taught them
to do, they find strength in their unity. It is this unity that allows them to deflect
the curse of the goddess, as well as to move past the neglect and abuse of
their childhood. Thus, it proves far more powerful than the magic with which
they experiment.

Finally, there is the novel Black Maria, which is narrated by Mig, a character
hoping to become a writer. Unlike Nan from Witch Week, discussed below,
Mig’s aspirations are not an analogue for the magic power within her, but simply
a reason for her to write down the events of the story.
The Black Maria of the title is Mig’s nickname for her elderly aunt, who
resides in a small town called Cranbury. While Aunt Maria pretends to be too
feeble to do anything on her own, she manipulates the lives of everyone in
town. She and her friends (whom Mig’s brother, Chris, scornfully calls “the Mrs
Urs”) have very specific ideas about what is men’s work and what is women’s,
even though Aunt Maria herself never does any work. She does not approve of
Mig going outside or of Chris helping in the kitchen, and she scolds Mig and her
mother for wearing trousers.
Mig and Chris discover that all the men in Cranbury (apart from their
neighbour, Mr Phelps21) look and act as if they are hypnotised, causing Mig to

21 Mr Phelps is very outspoken about his misogyny, calling Mig a “stupid little female” (pp. 85-
86), and saying things like, “[w]omen’s brains alarm me. Totally obtuse” (p. 164). Presumably
readers are not supposed to agree with his views, but he never gets criticised for them, and
he is a far more helpful and sympathetic character than any of the women in Cranbury, apart
from his sister.
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describe them as zombies. It turns out that the women are in control of the
town, and use magic (which they simply call “the power”) to keep the men
subordinate. Aunt Maria is their Queen, a position she gained by overthrowing
the rule of men led by a young man named Antony Green. Antony explains this
constant war between men and women in Cranbury:

“It goes back to the time when somebody here decided

that men and women were different and that the rules for
the way they used the power should be different… . They
divided into men’s ways and women’s ways then, and
they’ve been thinking up more and more rules ever since
to make the difference seem even bigger. Women allowed
men the strong, out-of-doors things... while the men gave
over all the secret, indoors things to strong women who
would work by the rules. Those are the ones we call the
Queens.” (Jones, 1991, p. 178)

The representation of the current matriarchy in Cranbury is strange and

sometimes contradictory. Despite being in charge, the women maintain
traditional gender roles. They force their husbands to go to work and earn
money, which seems to be a parody of a patriarchal society where wives are
pressured into staying at home and doing housework. But this gives them very
little power or authority outside their own homes, so the only one who truly
benefits from this system is Aunt Maria, who has everyone in town serving her.
As Nikita Redkar writes, “unlike male privilege, ‘female privilege’ corners
women into benefiting from a much smaller, domestic sphere, rather than the
system at large” (2016, unpaged). Although the men in Cranbury have been
turned into zombies and are unable to think for themselves, Mig has
misgivings:

I pride myself on having ideas, but all the time we’ve been
in Cranbury, I’ve been letting Chris do all the real active
thinking. Perhaps it’s because Chris is a year older than
me. But I am not usually like this. I think it is the way
everyone here takes for granted that having ideas is not
women’s work and not nice somehow. In future, I swear to
do better. (Jones, 1991, p. 110)

These thoughts seem at odds with the events of the novel, in which the women
are portrayed as scheming and the men as obeying.
As the women are upholding an oppressive regime, their power is
portrayed in an extremely negative light, although there are a few instances of
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women’s magic being used in positive ways. For instance, Mr Phelps’s sister,
Miss Phelps, uses magic to send Mig and her mother back in time to help them
discover the secret of Antony Green’s disappearance. Even Mig obtains some
of the power and uses it for a small show of rebellion while she is trapped in the
town’s orphanage (though it does not help her escape). But in an earlier scene,
she sits in the living room with Aunt Mig and the Mrs Urs, and, while looking
down, starts counting their legs: “Twenty-six legs, making thirteen of us, all
female. As soon as I realised that, I wanted to go away” (p. 112). Rather than
female solidarity and witchcraft being empowering, they are horrifying to Mig,
and she wants no part in them.
At first Mig considers herself neutral in the conflict, while Chris feels drawn
to the male side. But when Aunt Maria puts a spell on Chris, Mig no longer
wants to be neutral. With the help of her mother and Miss Phelps, she frees
Antony Green, who has been imprisoned under the earth by Aunt Maria’s
daughter, Naomi, for believing that men and women should be equal. 22 Antony
proceeds to punish Aunt Maria and share the power equally with everyone.
While this is a positive gesture, showing that access to magic should not
depend on gender, the fact that it is a man who sets things right makes this
scene far less of a feminist action than if it had been Mig who had shared out
the magic. Furthermore, the man who does this is the appointed leader of the
town, so rather than a female struggle for equality finally succeeding, a
benevolent male ruler generously decides to give part of his own power to his
subjects.
The fact that the female rule has been overthrown is emphasised by an
exchange between Elaine, Aunt Maria’s former second-in-command, and her
husband, who was previously described like this:

Mr Elaine – who is called Larry – is smaller than Elaine

and I think he was one of the line of zombies who got off
the train. Anyway he has a pale, drained, zombie-ish look
and does everything Elaine says. (Jones, 1991, p. 50)

22 The narrative is not entirely clear on this, but this is what it seems to imply, as Naomi tells
Antony, “You go on a lot about men and women all being the same this way, but I don’t think
you trust me as I trust you or you’d let me put you in that mound and call you out again” (p.
154).

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Apart from the blunt assertion that Larry obeys Elaine in everything, both the
fact that he is smaller than her and that he is referred to as Mr Elaine, rather
than having an identity apart from his wife, show his complete submission to
her. After Antony has broken the spell on the men in Cranbury, he auctions off
the children from the orphanage. Larry expresses an interest in adopting one of
the orphans, but Elaine complains:

“Larry! That’s absolutely out of the question. I hate

children.”
“I love them,” said Larry. “Oh, come on, Elaine. Give
it a try.”
Elaine hovered and spluttered and almost refused
outright, until she suddenly glanced up at Antony Green
sweating on the steps above. “Oh, all right,” she said... .
(Jones, 1991, p. 199, italics in the original)

This act of defiance by Larry against his wife is portrayed as admirable, even
though having a child is a life-changing decision that would affect both of them.
The fact that Elaine, who was previously an unsympathetic character, is
redeemed by agreeing to adopt a child, also reaffirms the point of view that
women who do not want to have children are cold, unnatural, and monstrous.
In the quotation above, Purkiss suggested that the witch can cross class
boundaries. However, this does not appear to happen in these three stories, as
all the girls in them are comfortably middle class and presumed to be white. 23
Thus, the texts do not explore power relations beyond those between male and
female, and between adults and children, which represents a missed
opportunity, as such engagements would have added more depth to these
narratives of opposing unjust authoritarian systems. This omission does raise
questions about just how inclusive the magic in these books is. When Antony
shares the power at the end of Black Maria, indicating that it should belong to
everyone, we might ask whether he actually means everyone, regardless of
race and class. Or does it include only the typical inhabitants of a small English
town, who are predominantly white and middle-class? The text does not
provide answers to these questions. That said, at least in the case of the hurt

23 Most of the characters’ races are not mentioned explicitly, but – as I outlined in the last
chapter – in a society where whiteness is considered the norm, most readers will imagine a
character to be white unless they are told otherwise. While it is perfectly reasonable that
some readers might imagine Roddy, for example, to be black (as she is described as having
“dark, curly hair” [p. 117]), this cannot be counted as positive representation of a black
character.
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woman in The Merlin Conspiracy, disabled people seem to have a part to play
in magic, even if only as mentors rather than heroines themselves.
Even though these three books are written by the same author, two of them
present female magic in a positive light, but one shows it in a very negative
way. In all of them female magic is opposed to male authority, particularly in
The Time of the Ghost, even though that novel ultimately portrays magic as
less effective than female solidarity and friendship. In The Merlin Conspiracy,
the lines between male and female magic are less clearly demarcated than in
Black Maria, but both have indications that magic should not really be divided
by gender. While The Merlin Conspiracy celebrates female power, Black Maria
depicts it as somewhat sinister when it goes unchecked by benevolent male
rulers. Even though the novel ends with the power being shared equally, thus
erasing the magical hierarchy of the town (something that does not happen in
The Merlin Conspiracy, in which the positions of the Merlin and the Lady of
Governance go unquestioned), the way this occurs still legitimises benevolent
male leadership rather than female rebellion against an unjust system.
Despite the different approaches of these three works, the overall message
of these novels is that magic and, by extension, power, should be shared rather
than hoarded, and that it should not be used to control or harm other people,
suggesting that personal empowerment should never come at the expense of
others. As Charles Butler writes, “Magic in Jones’s books is, like any form of
power, morally ambiguous, and its practitioners are continually faced with the
temptation to treat people as objects of manipulation” (2006, p. 241). Thus,
depictions of magic in The Merlin Conspiracy, The Time of the Ghost, and even
Black Maria are not limited by gender, though they vary in their approach to
female empowerment and its effectiveness. However, they still appear
somewhat limited when it comes to other aspects of privilege.
As seen with Sybil from The Merlin Conspiracy, a common feature of
fantasy literature is the inclusion of a character with second sight: someone
who can either see the future or see creatures that most people cannot
perceive, such as ghosts or fairies. Normally, however, these characters are
portrayed as wise and helpful rather than cruel and villainous, as is the case in
Sybil’s depiction. As I indicated above, these abilities are often gendered as
female, which is what I will discuss in the next section.

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Magic Eyes
Traditionally the power of vision is associated with the masculine and the ruling
class. Laura Mulvey, who coined the term “male gaze” to describe the visual
objectification of women, explains how the line of vision can be used to oppress
women in a patriarchal society:

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in

looking has been split between active/male and
passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its
fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled
accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women
are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their
appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact
so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-
ness. (1975, p. 19, italics in the original)

More simply, in the words of John Berger, “[m]en look at women. Women watch
themselves being looked at” (1972, unpaged).
This insight should be linked to Rosemary Jackson’s observation that
Western society is “a culture which equates the ‘real’ with the ‘visible’ and gives
the eye dominance over other sense organs” (1995, p. 45). Roberta Seelinger
Trites elaborates on this:

to express our understanding of something, we talk about

having a “point of view” or a “perception” or “seeing” what
someone means. Visual metaphors emphasize the
subject/object split: whoever “sees” is automatically in the
subject position… gazing at something which is in the
object position. (1997, p. 33)

However, neither Jackson nor Trites considers how this emphasis on sight as
the centre of identity affects blind people, especially blind women. Blind or
otherwise, visually impaired people can more readily be subject to the gaze of
patriarchy, given that they are less capable of returning this look, making blind
women especially vulnerable; this said, they can also appear to be ignoring it,
which might be interpreted as a rebellious act, making them seem more
impervious or special. Either way, it is important to take blind people into
account when discussing the prevalence of the male gaze, and women’s
strategies to return or resist it; but this side of the issue is mostly ignored,
except perhaps by disability activists. Consequently, in fiction blindness is
usually treated as a narrative device rather than a regular variation of human

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existence. Blind characters in fantasy fiction, for example, often have psychic
visions or similar kinds of magical powers, which appear to serve as an attempt
to compensate for their lack of physical eyesight. However, as this narrative
device still focuses on the importance of being able to see, and is similar to the
miracle cure narrative that disability activists like Lois Keith (2001) deplore, it is
unlikely to be reassuring or empowering to most blind people. As partially
sighted writer Elsa Sjunneson-Henry writes, discussing how blindness is
treated in fiction:

The problem with this trope boils down to a single issue:

Blindness never gets to simply exist in SFF [science fiction
and fantasy]. It’s always painted as something to
overcome and/or to reinvent in order to move forward.
When writers give blind characters superpowers to divest
them of disability, they aren’t just doing a disservice to
their writing but also to the blind people reading or
watching their work. (2016, unpaged, italics in original)

She argues that it would be far more inventive and subversive to create blind
characters whose blindness is not cancelled out by magical or scientific means,
and therefore treating disability as something abnormal that needs to be fixed.
This said, the novelist Berlie Doherty, when collecting ideas from some visually
impaired pupils, found that they were excited to imagine a blind child who
“possessed inner sight of another world” (Pinsent, 1997, p. 131).
Featuring the invisible in fantasy fiction can still serve a subversive
function, when it is not used to stereotype blind people, but instead to take
power away from the male gaze. As Jackson points out:

The topography of the modern fantastic suggests a

preoccupation with problems of vision and visibility, for it is
structured around spectral imagery: it is remarkable how
many fantasies introduce mirrors, glasses, reflections,
portraits, eyes – which see things myopically, or
distortedly, or out of focus – to effect a transformation of
the familiar into the unfamiliar. (1997, p. 43)

Two female protagonists from my primary texts whose power lies in their eyes
are Belladonna and Tanya. Belladonna is the main character in Helen Stringer’s
two books, The Last Ghost (2009) and The Midnight Gate (2011); Tanya
features in Michelle Harrison’s trilogy, The 13 Treasures (2009), The 13 Curses
(2010), and The 13 Secrets (2011). Belladonna has the ability to see ghosts,

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whereas Tanya, in contrast, can see fairies. Both of these girls have inherited
their gifts from the mother’s side of their respective families, and both of them
initially feel that their abilities are more trouble than they are worth. On the one
hand, Belladonna thinks that it cannot be that uncommon to see ghosts. In an
exchange with her father, she says: “Lots of people can see ghosts – you see
them talking about it on the telly all the time” (Stringer, 2009, p. 17). Her father
responds by calling these people “charlatans”, which is probably accurate,
considering that even Belladonna’s Grandma Johnson, who can genuinely
communicate with the dead, holds fake séances by making rapping noises and
telling people what they want to hear. On the other hand, Belladonna feels that
her ability sets her apart from her classmates, making it difficult for her to fit in.
When a ghost starts talking to her at school, the following thoughts go through
her head:

This was exactly the sort of situation that she’d been

trying to avoid. It had been two years since she’d
started seeing ghosts, and while her mother thought it
was all perfectly normal (“Everyone on the Nightshade
side of the family sees them, dear – we always have”),
Belladonna knew better. Being caught talking to herself
by one of her classmates would just put the icing on the
cake of her miserable school year. (Stringer, 2009, p.
27)

Tanya’s ability to see fairies does not just mark her as an outsider, but also
lands her in trouble as the fairies silence her and punish her for trying to talk
about them. In contrast to Belladonna, who is surrounded by family members
who can see ghosts, Tanya initially thinks she is the only person who is aware
of the fairies’ existence, until she befriends another girl with second sight: an
androgynously named tomboy named Rowan, nicknamed Red.
However, Belladonna turns out to be the Spellbinder, a person destined to
save the Land of the Dead. This means that she has various powers, including
the power to open up gates between the world of the living, the Land of the
Dead, and other realms. Her power lies not only in her vision, but in words as
well. When she speaks words of power, the invocation is described thus:

The language was strange and the script unfamiliar, but

she knew what it meant. She knew she was summoning
something old… . Yet it had a familiar ring, as if she knew
the language, knew the words and knew who it was she
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 was calling and had just forgotten. Like she sometimes
forgot the name of the postman, or what that stuff is that
you put in a cake along with the baking soda to make it
rise. (Stringer, 2009, p. 210)

In both The Last Ghost and Midnight Gate, Belladonna uses her powers to save
the world and restore the balance between the living and the dead. 24 While she
still resents her powers at times, she grows more confident and gains friends,
one of whom is a teenaged ghost.
Tanya does not have a destined role in the battle between good and evil in
the way that Belladonna does, but she ends up thwarting the schemes of some
evil fairies and, like Belladonna, she gains friends. She no longer feels alienated
by her gift, but embraces it as a part of herself and her family.
Despite second sight not being an inherently female gift in either of these
texts, there are hardly any male characters with this ability. In The 13 Treasures
the only male characters that can see fairies do so with the help of magical eye
drops. The sequels feature a few men and boys with second sight, but they are
relatively minor characters, compared with Tanya and Red. Belladonna has a
male classmate who learns to see ghosts, but only because his powers are
channeled through Belladonna.
While both sets of texts also feature characters that can see the future,
these are exclusively women.25 It is not stated whether this is a female power,
though in The Last Ghost the character in question is an ancient Greek Sybil
(and, in The 13 Secrets, one of the characters is called Sybil). The most
interesting fortune-telling character is an old Romani woman in The 13
Treasures, called Morag. The people in the nearby village – including Tanya’s
friend Fabian – refer to her as “Mad Morag” because she lives by herself in the
forest (and, most likely, because she is Romani), and is therefore deemed to be
strange and eccentric. Despite the way she is perceived by the public, Morag is
actually represented as a rather ordinary old woman, and so defies Tanya’s
preconceptions about what a witch should be like. When Tanya marvels to
herself about how ordinary Morag’s caravan is (it contains an old-fashioned
broom and a cat, but also a book of crossword puzzles), the old woman snaps,

24 In both instances, right after performing the act that sets the world aright, Belladonna needs
rescuing by her friend and classmate Steve, which undermines her empowerment a little.
25 The Clayr from Garth Nix’s “Old Kingdom” series (1995-2016), which I discussed in Chapter
2, are also all women, further connecting the power of prophecy with femininity.
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“What were you expecting? …Toads and spell books? A collection of pointy
hats? Eye of newt and wing of bat?” (Harrison, 2009, p. 241). The narrative
makes it clear that Morag is supposed to defy stereotypes at this point:

Tanya felt her eyes drawn to the puzzle book once more.
She simply couldn’t help herself. Its normality made it
seem alien.
“It’s prejudice,” she murmured unthinkingly.
“Pardon?” said Morag.
“Nine down. ‘Pre-conceived opinion or judgment
formed without facts.’ The answer is prejudice.” (Harrison,
2009, p. 244)

However, as she lives in a caravan, knows magic, and tells fortunes, she still
conforms to many racial stereotypes of Romani people (the text even uses the
word “gypsy”, which most Romani people regard as a racial slur [see Vagnozzi,
2016]). On the other hand, Romani have also traditionally been seen as greedy
and untrustworthy, using their magic for sinister means. Morag is none of these
things, and her magic is portrayed as beneficent, natural, and female, which
makes her arguably a fairly positive representation of a Romani woman. But
considering that historically the belief that Romani have mystical powers has
played a part in their oppression (Crowe, 2004, p. 1), it is questionable whether
it is appropriate to portray a Romani character with magic at all, even if she is
depicted in a benign way. As with the Queen of America from Charlie Fletcher’s
Silver Tongue (2008), discussed in Chapter 2, attributes that can be positive
and empowering in white characters – such as magic, healing, and a particular
bond with animals – can easily be stereotypical and damaging when applied to
characters of races that have commonly been characterised as savage or
cunning.
In this regard, it is also worth mentioning that Tanya herself is described as
being “olive-skinned”, with “brown eyes and dark hair” (2009, p. 28), meaning
that she is a person of colour, like Morag. Unlike Morag, however, whose race
makes her an outsider in the community, Tanya never appears to have to deal
with instances of racism, although she is used to feeling different from others,
due to her ability to see fairies. This suggests that examining racial issues is not
Harrison’s priority in featuring a non-white protagonist. Of course, people of
colour do not need a thematic reason to exist within fiction, and it is not always
necessary to show instances of racism when writing about non-white

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characters. That said, a non-white main character in fiction is itself a political
statement, given that publishers usually shy away from such figures, and, even
when they are present, they are often “white-washed” in visual representations,
such as book covers (as is the case with one edition of The 13 Secrets, on
which Tanya looks decidedly pale), 26 illustrations, and film adaptations.
Because of these connections between the two characters, Tanya likes
Morag and respects her powers. She never mocks Morag or sees her as a
dangerous outsider. Fabian, on the other hand, continues deriding her for being
peculiar and calls her “Mad Morag”, even after finding out that she is a real
witch and seer, and despite Tanya defending her. This makes Fabian seem
selective in his sexism and ableism. He speaks with great compassion about
Tanya’s ancestor, Elizabeth Elvesden, who was put in an asylum for talking
about fairies. According to him:

“Women had no rights back then. Everything was decided

by their fathers or their husbands. Women could even be
considered mad if they had a child out of wedlock. Many
an innocent, perfectly sane woman was locked up and left
to rot in an asylum on their husband’s say-so... and well, if
they weren’t mad when they went in, they usually ended
up that way.” (Harrison, 2009, pp. 104-105)

Clearly Fabian recognises that in Elizabeth Elvesden’s day, being labelled

insane was a way to suppress women who did not fit societal perceptions of
what women should be like and how they should behave, but he does not
realise that this is something that still happens, and that he is perpetuating this
kind of suppression of women by calling Morag mad. His reference to “innocent,
perfectly sane” women also suggests that he might have less respect and pity
for women who are actually mentally ill. In this vein, it is important to note that
neither Elizabeth Elvesden nor Morag is mentally ill, but they are labelled as
such because of their magical powers. This is a far more common plot in fiction
than stories about the mistreatment of people who do suffer from mental
illnesses. Charlie Fletcher uses this plot point in the “Stoneheart” trilogy (2006-
2008) with Edie’s mother, who – like Elizabeth Elvesden – is put into a mental
hospital because of her magical powers of sight, although there is some
indication that her traumatic visions have actually driven her to insanity. Thus,

26 For a discussion on white-washing on book covers, see Flood, 2009.

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mentally ill people are commonly excluded from the narratives about their own
oppression and abuse, only appearing as background characters in stories
about unfairly institutionalised healthy people. As Kris Nelson writes: “The
problem here is that we’re taught to sympathize with these able-minded victims
– and not to sympathize with those who are neurodivergent and disabled (and
especially not when there are intersections of sexism, racism, homophobia,
transphobia, and ableism)” (2015, unpaged, italics in the original). All these
oppressions are deeply interrelated, and by isolating them into separate
categories of specialist issues, the fight for equality becomes fragmented and
aimless.
Returning to the subject of second sight, this type of magic – connected
with vision – used to have negative connotations in earlier ages. As Katharine
Briggs writes:

In the time of witchcraft trials, when all psychic

experiences were deeply suspect, ghosts, fairies and
second sight were thought to be part of the diabolic
machinery for ensnaring the souls of men. Ghosts were
devils in masquerade, fairies were familiar spirits, and all
those who saw things not seen by other men were liable
to suspicion as witches. (2002, p. 169)

However, in these texts, Stringer and Harrison reclaim these powers and make
them positive, empowering, and feminine. Both Belladonna and Tanya learn to
love the powers they initially felt were a burden, and both of them use these
powers to help and befriend other people, which not only makes them powerful,
but also gives them a network of friends to rely on.
But neither of these works deals with issues relating to eyes and vision as
much as Neil Gaiman’s Coraline (2002). The villain of the story is a beldam who
turns herself into a twisted imitation of Coraline’s mother. She is described as
being taller, thinner, and paler than Coraline’s proper mother, as well as having
long, claw-like nails, as befits a fairy-tale witch. Most striking, however, are her
eyes, which are nothing but two buttons. She threatens to replace Coraline’s
eyes with buttons as well. As the eyes are considered the windows to the soul,
the implication seems to be that the other mother lacks a soul. This puts her in
opposition to the two old ladies who use their eyes to read Coraline’s tea-
leaves, and give her a seeing stone to aid her in her search for her missing
parents. The two ladies are depicted as being rather eccentric, but their help
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proves invaluable, making them a pair of wise women.
The story also features a magic mirror, owned by the other mother. As she
serves the function of both the traditional evil stepmother and the child-eating
witch in the story, her mirror is evocative of the one the evil queen uses in
“Snow White”, but rather than reflecting the other mother’s vanity, it shows her
control and power. She traps people within the mirror and uses it to show
illusions to Coraline. Thus, she uses the power of vision to hurt and control
people. Coraline turns this oppressive power around by using her own eyes to
see through the other mother’s trickery. After the other mother shows her things
in the mirror that are blatantly untrue, this exchange occurs:

“See?” said her other mother.

“No,” said Coraline. “I don’t see. And I don’t believe it
either.” (Gaiman, 2002, p. 43)

Coraline also uses the other mother’s own magic against her, using the mirror
to lead her to one of the ghost children’s souls, which Coraline needs to find in
order to defeat the other mother. Kimberley Reynolds says about Coraline’s
victory that, “when she eventually succeeds, she discovers that the fantasy or
adventure has given her the ability to see with new eyes, and to appreciate
what she has previously taken for granted” (2007, p. 149, italics added). This, of
course, happens only because she refuses to let the other mother give her eyes
made of buttons. Coraline’s power of sight, while not emphasised in the same
way as the power of Belladonna or Tanya, is important and empowering.
The girls in these stories all achieve great things, defeating villains and
saving people they care about by using the power of their eyes and trusting in
the things they see, rather than the lies they are told. Unlike the villains they
encounter, they do not use their powers in oppressive or selfish ways, but rather
to help others. This makes their sight not only empowering to themselves, but to
their communities at large – whether it is just their own family or the entire
world. While Coraline is mostly independent in the novel, both Belladonna and
Tanya learn to appreciate the value of friendship and community, which – as in
The Time of the Ghost – often proves to be more powerful than magic.
In addition to her second sight, Belladonna also has access to words of
power. Words are another common form of magic, as I will show in the following
section.

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“My Voice Is My Weapon of Choice”27
In an oppressive system, the voice of the powerful is imbued with meaning,
whereas the powerless are silenced, their opinions going unheard and their
stories untold. As Mulvey writes:

The workings of patriarchy and the mould of feminine

unconscious it produces, have left women largely without
a voice, gagged and deprived of outlets (of a kind
supplied, for instance, either by male art or popular
culture) in spite of the crucial social and ideological
functions women are called on to perform. (1977, p. 39)

As mentioned in Chapter 1, fairy tale heroines are often deprived of their voice;
in the words of Jennifer Waelti-Walters, “they must not speak or laugh” (1982, p.
5), and sometimes they “have their hands cut off” (p. 5) to circumscribe their
agency even more. She also says that wicked females in fairy tales are
punished for using their voices:

The witch gathers information through her own senses

and through her word-magic. “Mirror, mirror on the wall” is
a way of saying that the queen has power; power to ask
the right questions, to use her senses to receive answers,
her brain to draw conclusions and decide on actions,
power to give orders and get her will accomplished in an
efficient way which has an impact upon her context… .
She is aware of what she wants and able to get it – and
for that she is punished at the end of the story because
she is not an acceptable model in a male-oriented society.
(p. 81)

Sheldon Cashdan claims that “[i]n folklore, a woman’s voice is traditionally

associated with seductiveness and thus symbolizes lustful feelings” (1999, p.
167), turning the speaking woman into a mere sexual object whose main
importance lies in the effects she has on the men hearing her – but not listening
to her.
Showing women and girls who use their voice in a positive way and who
are listened to, is therefore an empowering aspect of feminist art and literature.
As Trites writes:

No longer the passive “good girl” who grows into a

prescribed and circumscribed social role, the feminist

27 The title of this section is a line from the song “Fight Like a Girl” (2012) by Emilie Autumn.
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 protagonist learns to recognize and appreciate the power
of her own voice. Her awakening is not bestowed upon
her by a male awakener; instead, she wakes herself and
discovers herself to be a strong, independent, and
articulate person. (1997, pp. 7-8)

Minh-ha says that “[p]ower, as unveiled by numerous contemporary writings,

has always inscribed itself in language. Speaking, writing, and discoursing are
not mere acts of communication; they are above all acts of compulsion” (1989,
p. 52). Ways to show the power of a character’s voice include giving him or her
narratorial status (Mallan, 2009, p. 9) and a sense of humour (Waelti-Walters,
1982, p. 113). Donald Haase (2004, p. 16) also points out that the power of
storytelling is frequently represented as a uniquely female art, as shown in such
collections of tales as Arabian Nights, which use the framing device of having a
female narrator and male listener. This framing device is another tactic to give
female characters narratorial authority.
As with the dominance of sight over other senses, so treating verbal
language as superior to other forms of communication can be alienating to
disabled people. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes that “[b]ecause English is
often a foreign or second language to Deaf people” they may “have an
adversarial relationship with written English or any spoken language” (2005, p.
1561). Deaf people and others who are non-verbal (such as some people on
the autistic spectrum) have other ways of communicating – most notably sign
language – which are often disregarded as lesser forms of language in an
ableist society. I observed an example of this in discussions of the film The
Shape of Water (2017) by director Guillermo del Toro, in which the main
character is a non-verbal woman who communicates in American Sign
Language. Some commenters argue that this is an example of a male
filmmaker literally silencing a female character, thus objectifying her. Disability
advocates, however, point out that the character is not silent – she simply
speaks in a way that abled people are not used to. They praise del Toro for
putting a disabled character in a leading role and for prioritising sign language
over spoken languages.
In this section I would like to focus on works that present a mastery over
language as a type of magic, thus empowering characters, not only through
magic but also through their ability to speak in their own voices. This type of
magic usually employs the spoken word, but in several stories the written word
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is presented as equally powerful. A good example can be found in Cornelia
Funke’s Inkheart (2004), which deals explicitly with the power of words, both
spoken and written, as the following quotation indicates:

…tonight she [Meggie] wasn’t interested in written words.

Spoken words were what she wanted to hear, the words
being exchanged in soft, almost inaudible whispers by the
two men on the other side of the door. (Funke, 2004, p.
14)

In a later scene another character tells Meggie: “I am not talking about

children’s magic. I mean the magic of the written word. Nothing is more
powerful for good or evil, I do assure you” (p. 422).
This is a deeply intertextual novel, suffused with other texts that the
characters read or discuss, Peter Pan and Arabian Nights being two key
examples.
In the world of the novel, certain people have the ability to bring characters
and items out of books and into the real world by reading out loud. This gift is
dangerous, as it can bring terrible villains into their world, and leave real people
trapped in stories. Mo, the father of Meggie, mentioned above, possesses this
gift, but he has been afraid of using it since inadvertently trapping his wife inside
a book. Meggie is twelve when she witnesses the power of his voice for the first
time. Despite knowing about the dangers accompanying it, she desperately
wants this power for herself. When she attempts to read out loud in the same
way that Mo does, nothing happens. It is not until she reads on her own terms,
in her own voice, without expecting anything to happen, that the magic of her
words takes effect. Thus she manages to read Tinkerbell out of Peter Pan.
Capricorn, the villain of the story, tries to force Meggie to read the terrifying
Shadow out of a book. Meggie thwarts him by instead reading a different set of
words, prepared by the writer who created Capricorn, who had, himself,
previously escaped from a book. These words cause the Shadow to
disintegrate and revert to its components. As it is composed of the myriad lives
that it has taken, rather than bringing death, Meggie’s voice brings life to all the
people, animals, and fairies that were formerly part of the Shadow. The one line
that Meggie cannot bring herself to read is the one that kills Capricorn, so Mo
ends up reading it for her. Meggie is a brave, powerful character, and this scene
does not diminish that. Rather, it suggests that, just as in Princess Academy,

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discussed in chapter 2, the author is uncomfortable with having a child
character kill someone, even when it is someone thoroughly bad and
dangerous. As Meggie thinks to herself, “it wasn’t easy to kill, even if someone
else was going to do it for her” (p. 519).
The 2008 film version, directed by Ian Softley, goes a step further with this
scene. Both the book and the film establish that Meggie wants to be a writer:

Meggie had a plan: she wanted to learn to make up

stories like Fenoglio. She would learn to fish for words so
that she could read aloud to her mother, without worrying
about who might come out of the stories and look at her
with homesick eyes. So Meggie decided that words would
be her trade. (Funke, 2004, p. 543)

Whereas in the book Meggie reads Fenoglio’s words out uninterrupted, in the
film Mortola, Capricorn’s mother, takes the paper away from Meggie as she
starts reading. Meggie then starts writing on her arm, reading the words as she
does so. The audience does not hear Fenoglio’s original text, so it is not clear
whether Meggie is simply jotting down Fenoglio’s words from memory or
whether she is rewriting the story herself. Of course, the empowerment in this
scene is strongest if the words are, in fact, her own, 28 but even if she is only
repeating Fenoglio’s words, being the one to write them down gives her added
power in a patriarchal system in which the pen is seen as akin to a phallus
(Gilbert and Gubar, 1979, p. 3).
In the sequel, Inkspell (2005), Meggie enters the world of Fenoglio’s book,
where she joins a band of resistance fighters. Fearing Meggie’s powers, Mortola
seeks to vilify her, and so spreads the rumour that Meggie is a witch. Rather
than denying this, Meggie decides to own the label of witch and use it to her
advantage:

All eyes followed her – and avoided her own eyes when
they met theirs. Witch. That was what they had called her
before, back in Capricorn’s village. Perhaps it was true. At
the moment she felt powerful, as powerful as if the whole
Inkworld obeyed her voice. (Funke, 2005, p. 534)

28 I should add, though, that it might go against the rules set forth by the story if the words
Meggie uses are her own and not Fenoglio’s. The latter is able to write different endings for
his characters because he is the creator of the original story. In the sequels, Orpheus can
influence the story only by using words that Fenoglio has put down in the book, and by
copying his style. No other words will do to change what happens to Capricorn, the Shadow,
and other characters.
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Again, the emphasis is on Meggie’s voice as the source of power.
While Meggie continues to be a force for good, her contributions become
less significant as the story progresses. In the third book of the series, Inkdeath
(2008), her storyline chiefly revolves around being caught within a love triangle,
and she becomes a less central character than Mo. By the end, her chief
purpose appears to be as a source of inspiration for her future husband, Doria,
an inventor who builds devices based on Meggie’s descriptions of inventions
from the real world. In a way, she is still using the power of her voice by telling
Doria about her world, helping him to create his machines, but it is rather
disappointing that she is relegated from being a creator in her own right to the
traditionally feminine role of muse for a male character.
By the end of the series, both the complacent king of Lombrica and the evil
king of the neighbouring kingdom of Argenta are dead, leaving no male heirs to
take their thrones. This leaves the Adderhead’s kind daughter, Violante, as the
queen of the entire Inkworld, so while there is still a monarchy, it is less
patriarchal. Violante is a benevolent ruler who cares about the plight of
peasants, so her subjects are happier under her reign. However, as discussed
in the previous chapter, it is not clear how much women’s place in the Inkworld
changes after Violante takes the throne, so the society might still function under
some patriarchal rules despite having a female ruler. As the line of monarchy
remains unbroken, we also do not know whether the Inkworld will go back to
being ruled by a corrupt male after Violante’s death, which is always a danger in
a monarchical society, even when the current ruler is benevolent.
Another work that shows the power of using one’s voice is Shannon Hale’s
The Goose Girl (2003), which is a retelling of the aforementioned Grimms’ tale
of the same name. Like the fairy tale, it tells of a princess who journeys to a
distant kingdom to meet the prince she is betrothed to; but on the way there,
her lady-in-waiting betrays her and takes her place. The novel gives the
princess the name Ani. She starts out as a reticent girl, overwhelmed by the
things expected of her, and living in her mother’s shadow. However, her aunt, a
wise woman in tune with nature, teaches her at a young age to communicate
with birds. She also tells Ani about other languages of nature, saying that some
people are born with a propensity to learn them. Like Meggie’s power of
reading, this gift is never referred to as magic, but instead as wind-speaking,
fire-speaking, water-speaking, tree-speaking, animal-speaking, or people-
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speaking, making the connection to language clear. Ani discovers wind-
speaking while pretending to be a goose girl at the king’s court. This allows her
to change the course of the wind, as well as learning about her surroundings
from the whisperings of the breeze. The princess in the fairy tale only summons
the wind to distract her fellow worker, Conrad, by blowing off his cap. Ani
frequently uses wind-speaking to protect herself and her friends from attacks,
and occasionally to fight back. In contrast to the fairy tale, Ani does not simply
wait for the king to recognise her as the true princess, but takes her destiny into
her own hands. She establishes bonds of friendship with the other animal
workers in the city and, with their support, confronts the king and her former
waiting maid, Selia; thereby, she both reclaims her place as a princess and
stops a war that Selia was planning. This solidarity and cooperation with the
workers also emphasises the power for good that she shares with the common
people, in contrast with the fairy-tale version, where it is the royal characters
that are righteous, and the lowly maid that is treacherous. In fact, the first
conflict in the fairy tale occurs when the main character is thirsty, but the maid
refuses to bring her water from a stream, framing it as a tragedy that the
princess needs to get on her knees and fetch her own water. This scene only
makes sense if the reader understands the tale’s classist assumptions about
the superiority of royalty. The only instance of female solidarity in the tale
occurs between the princess and her mother, who gives her a handkerchief with
drops of her own blood as a farewell token. In the novel, this is an empty
gesture from a stern mother who has never truly loved Ani. The King of Bayern
is not portrayed as the wise, righteous ruler that the fairy tale depicts either, but
rather as an indifferent and rather frightening character. Thus, in most instances
the poor characters are kinder and braver than the royal ones. As I mentioned
in the Literature Review, the achievements and needs of working-class women
are often ignored, even within feminist communities, but in The Goose Girl, the
workers – particularly the female ones – prove to be Ani’s greatest allies, and
their roles are even more central in the sequels. This makes Hale’s novel a
more inclusive text than the fairy tale on which it is based, as it espouses a type
of empowerment that encompasses working-class women and considers their
stories to be important.
It is thus not only her new-found wind-speaking that gives Ani the
confidence to achieve all these outcomes, but also her efforts to seek out
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friendships with people in the city. At one point she considers her achievements:

She was little like her mother, though that was all she had
ever longed to be. She lacked the gift of people-speaking,
that power to convince and control that laced every word
her mother uttered. She did not possess that grace and
beauty that all in a room turned to watch. But had the
queen ever told a nursery story to a room of captivated
listeners? Or handled fifty head of geese? Ani smiled at
the thought, and then she surprised herself by feeling
proud. I’ve done that much. What more can I do? (Hale,
2003, p. 166, italics in the original)

Similarly to other novels discussed in this section, friendship and community

are here presented as being as powerful as magic.
As in Inkdeath, the monarchy is not overthrown, although both novels show
the negative impact a cruel or even an indifferent king can have. Neither
Violante nor Ani seeks for power for its own sake, though, nor insists upon it as
her birth-right, even though they were born into royalty. Violante simply wants to
help people, and Ani only reveals herself to be the true princess to prevent a
war. As princess and, later, queen of Bayern, Ani continues to help people and
tries to establish peace with the aid of her commoner friends.
In The Goose Girl there appear to be no negative consequences as a result
of wind-speaking, but in the second book of the series, Enna Burning (2004),
which, unlike its predecessor, is an original story and not based on an existing
fairy tale, Ani starts feeling overwhelmed by the constant voice of the wind and
fears that it will end up costing her her sanity. Meanwhile, her best friend, Enna,
learns fire-speaking,29 which makes Enna feel powerful, but also consumes her.
She is filled with a constant desire to burn that gets stronger the more she
succumbs to it. At first Enna resolves never to burn people, but as the power of
the fire grows stronger within her, she begins attacking both enemies and
friends. After a time she succumbs to a fever that pulls her to the brink of death.
Ani comes to realise that it is a lack of balance that is the cause of the
problems she and Enna experience. They teach each other their respective
gifts, balancing fire with wind. This cures Enna’s fever and keeps both of them
from feeling overwhelmed. They are now both able to use wind- and fire-

29 She learns this ability from a piece of vellum. In the prologue we are informed that this piece
of vellum comes from a woman who hides it in a tree. This means that Enna’s fire-speaking
was passed on to her by another woman, as though it was a female inheritance.
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speaking without losing control, making them more powerful than before.
Enna’s fire-speaking, which for most of the book has seemed to be a
dangerous obsession, turns out to be beneficial as long as it is used correctly.
Bottigheimer states that in fairy tales, “fire belongs to men, and its opposite,
water (or at least certain kinds of water), appertains exclusively to women”
(1987, p. 29), and furthermore that fire “is closely associated with gender
antagonism” (p. 25). In this light, when Enna learns to control the fire that
almost destroys her, it amounts to a victory over patriarchy itself, as she
appropriates a type of power that normally belongs to men, especially since she
does this through female solidarity.
There are two more books in the series: River Secrets (2006), which
introduces Dasha, a water-speaker, and Forest Born (2010), which features
Rin, who is both a tree-speaker and a people-speaker. Each of the four books
has a different focal character. River Secrets is the only one in which the
protagonist, Enna’s friend Razo, is male, and also the only one in which it is
someone other than the protagonist who develops the power of nature-
speaking. Razo does gain confidence in other areas, though: he has previously
felt insecure about his short stature and his lack of strength and fighting ability,
but some of his friends make him realise that his skills with a sling and his
powers of observation are unmatched, and he even grows a few inches over
the year in which the book takes place, making him the same height as Enna.
Nature-speaking, however, is mostly reserved for female characters. While
there are a few males in the series who attempt to become fire-speakers – most
notably Enna’s brother Leifer, who burns himself out on a battlefield – none of
them manage to master fire the way Enna does.
People-speaking is a particularly dangerous talent. As Ani says in the
quotation above, it involves the power to convince people, but also to figure out
their intentions. The people-speakers the reader meets prior to Forest Born
have at best been cold and stern, at worst evil and manipulative. Most notable
of these is Ani’s treacherous lady-in-waiting, Selia, who uses her ability to
convince half of the guards to betray Ani, and to undermine Ani’s confidence,
making her feel weak and worthless.
These experiences convince Ani and Enna that people-speaking is an
ability that always taints its users, turning them into worse people. As Ani says:
“It’s sad, really. You’d think people-speaking would bring
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 the speaker closer to people, as wind-speaking does with
wind. But instead it dooms people-speakers to separation
and self-destruction. I think people-speaking is the most
dangerous gift to have alone, with nothing to balance it.”
(Hale, 2010, p. 133)

Throughout Forest Born, Rin comes to realise that she is a people-speaker.

She has had this ability all her life, but has been afraid to use it because of an
incident that happened when she was seven years old, in which she
manipulated her niece. Rin feels guilty for what she did and for enjoying it so
much, but most of all she is scared of being a terrible person whose family will
not love her if they know what she is really like. Afraid of being herself, she
spends the remainder of her childhood imitating other people, mostly her
mother and her brother, Razo. She uses her people-speaking again for selfish
reasons when she is fifteen and wants a boy she likes to kiss her. Again, she
feels guilty afterwards and fears that she is wicked.
When Rin travels with Ani, Enna, and Dasha, she has several opportunities
to use people-speaking for positive purposes. First she persuades a panicking
woman not to jump from the second-storey window of a burning building. Later
she stops a mercenary from killing a child. She still feels ashamed of being a
people-speaker, and does not want to tell her brother or her new friends about
it, thinking that “admitting that part was about as enticing as cutting off her own
finger” (Hale, 2010, p. 347). Afraid of using her powers inadvertently, she does
not dare to argue or speak her mind.
Rin’s fear of and disgust with her own abilities are strengthened by meeting
Selia, who always uses her powers for her own gain, often to hurt others. Rin is
afraid of becoming like her, but Ani tells her: “You can allow yourself to be
powerful, Rin. That’s not a bad thing… . You saw Selia. You know what not to
become. So, what will it be?” (Hale, 2010, p. 373) Rin figures out how to use
people-speaking without manipulation: with words of truth and comfort, and by
listening to people’s needs. Eventually she embraces her powers and, by
extension, herself:

She had been Ma’s shadow, and Razo’s and Isi’s – but
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 there she was now, ready to let herself be changed. She
was not a queen – not Isi, and not Selia. She would be the
Forest girl who listens to people the way she listens to
trees and speaks truths the way leaves fall. (Hale, 2010, p.
381)

Later she adds:

I’m Rinna-girl, she thought, and I’m Agget-kin. I’m a tree-

speaker and a people-speaker. I’m Razo’s sister and
Dasha’s, Enna’s, and Isi’s friend. I’m many things, some
that I don’t even know yet. (Hale, 2010, p. 388, italics in
the original)

Only after accepting her abilities is Rin able to become her own person. But in
Hale’s works, becoming one’s own person does not mean being on one’s own.
Like Ani and Enna, Rin reaches her potential through the help of other women.
The main message of the series is one of female solidarity, which is presented
as superior to individual ambition and social class, and as essential for
happiness and personal development. Through Selia and other wicked
characters Hale shows how easily power can be used selfishly and cruelly, but
through Rin and her friends she demonstrates that power can also be used to
help and empower others, as well as oneself.
Jones’s Witch Week (1982) also makes a connection between magic and
language, though this does not become clear until near the end of the book.
The story takes place in a world where witchcraft is illegal and witches are
persecuted. “Witch”, in this world, is a gender-neutral term and is applied to
anyone who practises magic. Historically, the term has been used for both men
and women accused of witchcraft, but is still chiefly associated with female evil.
By removing the gendered assumptions around the word “witch”, Jones is
challenging some of the more sexist depictions of witchcraft. The two
protagonists of the novel are Nan Pilgrim and Charles Morgan, classmates in a
boarding school for witch-orphans. Both are bullied by the other children in their
class: Charles for being distant, Nan for being fat. Nan has low self-esteem and
does not see herself as a “real girl”. She writes about her class that “[t]hey are
divided into girls and boys with an invisible line down the middle”, with the girls
further divided into “real girls” and “imitations”, and the boys into “real boys”,
“brutes”, and “unreal boys”. She considers herself and Charles Morgan to lie
outside these definitions, and further elaborates: “What makes you a real girl or

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boy is that no one laughs at you... . What makes you into me or Charles
Morgan is that the rules allow all the girls to be better than me and all the boys
better than Charles Morgan” (1982, p. 57). This is the first instance in which
Nan uses her talent for describing the world in interesting ways. In a later scene
she invents disgusting metaphors for the cafeteria food, and later still she thinks
up torture instruments that should be found in an inquisitor’s office. Both these
scenes are humorous, but initially appear to be inconsequential to the plot.
However, it turns out that Nan’s powers of description are interlinked with her
witchcraft.
The story starts with one of the teachers finding a note that says:
“SOMEONE IN THIS CLASS IS A WITCH” (p. 7). This leads to suspicions and
accusations from both pupils and teachers. The other girls tease Nan by calling
her a witch, more because they dislike her than because they actually believe
it. Nan is angry at these accusations at first, as she does not consider herself a
witch. But when she accidentally makes a broomstick fly, Nan is convinced that
she must be a witch after all. Rather than being horrified, she feels proud:

She really was a witch now. No one but a witch could fly a
broomstick. She knew she was in danger and she knew
she should be terrified. But she was not. She felt happy
and strong, with a happiness and strength that seemed to
be welling up from deep inside her... . It was like coming
into her birthright. (Jones, 1982, pp. 134-135)

Nan is descended from a famous witch named Dulcinea the Archwitch. She
even has the same name as the Archwitch, but chooses to keep this a secret,
as she does not want to be connected to a historical villain. Despite what is
taught in school about Dulcinea’s evil deeds, the actual woman seems to have
been kind and brave, opposing the persecution of witches. She has become a
symbol for all witches, and so various people use her as an archetype of how
they see witches as a whole. Charles “had been taught that Dulcinea was an
evil old hag, and a stupid one” (p. 80), whereas Mr Wentworth, a teacher who is
secretly a witch himself and so has a vested interest in the rights of witches,
says that she was “young and pretty and clever” (p. 80). Once Nan embraces
her witchcraft, she has a romantic vision of Dulcinea, imagining her flying her
broomstick “gracefully, sidesaddle probably, with her long hair flowing out
behind. And because it was London, she probably wore an elegant silk dress,

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with lots of lacy petticoats showing from underneath” (pp. 165-166).
Nan is far from being the only witch at the school. About half of the pupils in
her class turn out to be witches. Several of them perform magical pranks at
some point, such as making a flock of birds appear during music class to avoid
having to sing a solo, and hiding a pair of Charles’s shoes. Charles, who also
finds that he is a witch, promptly uses his new-found powers to take revenge on
his bullies, but then gets so scared of detection that he vows never to use
magic again. Ultimately, however, his magic is just as empowering to him as
Nan’s is to her, and he does not want to lose it.
While Nan and other characters occasionally use their magic to avoid
detection, most of the witchcraft displayed in the novel occurs for mischievous
reasons. Rather than trying to make their school a better place – and possibly a
safer place for witches – the pupils mostly use their magic to bully one another
or to play pranks on the teachers. Thus, while the magic in this story may be
personally empowering to individual characters, for the most part it is not used
in a positive manner, and the empowerment often comes at the expense of
other characters who are being pranked.
When an inquisitor is on his way to the school to find the witch in the class,
Nan summons Chrestomanci, a powerful sorcerer who regulates magic in all
the worlds. Chrestomanci determines that there is an unnatural number of
magic-users in Nan’s and Charles’s world, and the only way to set this right is
to combine this world with its neighbour, which has no magic at all. This
process will cause some of the children, including Nan, to lose their magic
powers. At first Nan is not happy about this, but Chrestomanci tells her: “I know
you are descended from the Archwitch... but talents don’t always descend in
the same shape. Yours seem to have come to you in the form of making-up and
describing” (p. 251). He also asks her: “Wouldn’t you say that, now you’ve been
a witch, and got your confidence, you might really prefer describing things even
to witchcraft?” (p. 250). Nan realises that he is right, and that her way with
words empowers her more than her magic does. Farah Mendlesohn thinks that
in this scene, Nan “emerges as the most powerful figure in the story, because
she is the only one who can break away from the stories that are being written
by authority figures” (2005, p. 179), and that she does this by reaching for
words rather than magic. As Nan exercises her power over words in written as
well as spoken form, this shows that the magic of language can be employed in
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different ways, potentially even by people who are non-verbal, who might feel
excluded by stories in which magic is purely a verbal art.
With the help of Nan’s powers of description, Chrestomanci merges the two
worlds, restoring the balance. The inquisitor tries to silence her during this, but
she keeps on talking: “She was bubbling with pride and delight. She had done
this, just by describing what happened. It was as good as witchcraft any day”
(1982, p. 279). Thus Nan participates in the most powerful piece of magic in the
entire book, as well as the most positive one, as it is used to help everyone in
Nan’s world, rather than just to take revenge on a bully, which is what Charles
does with his magic.
The Nan in the merged world is a burgeoning writer. She has friends and
confidence, unlike the Nan at the beginning of the story. She has gained her
self-assurance through magic, but discovered that creativity and a way with
words are also types of magic, and these are gifts that cannot be taken away
from her. Trites says this about children’s heroines who write:

Because writing and re-visioning have so much potential

to help people understand their agency, quite a few
feminist children’s novels explore what it means for
children to write. The resulting novels seek to explore how
children write, why they write, and what they gain as
individuals during the process. (1997, p. 63)

Interestingly, Nan’s best friend in the merged world is Estelle Green, whom Nan
had previously described as an “imitation” girl. What made Estelle an imitation
in Nan’s estimation was that she was not one of the popular girls, but tried hard
to be like them, which included participating in the bullying and ostracising of
Charles and Nan. After Estelle comes to terms with her own magic, she decides
to stop trying to fit in with the others and lets her kind nature shine through,
becoming friends with Nan. Estelle’s storyline exemplifies rejecting cruelty and
popularity in favour of kindness, and using magic for good, although she is
never as powerful as Nan.
Another female protagonist in a Jones novel who gains confidence after
discovering her magic powers is Sophie in Howl’s Moving Castle (1986). This
story takes place in Ingary, a country in which people believe strongly in fairy-
tale logic, even though it does not necessarily hold true. It begins with a
description of the protagonist’s circumstances:

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 Sophie Hatter was the eldest of three sisters. She was not
even the child of a poor woodcutter, which might have
given her some chance of success. Her parents were well
to do and kept a ladies’ hat shop in the prosperous town of
Market Chipping. True, her own mother died when Sophie
was two years old and her sister Lettie was one year old,
and their father married his youngest shop assistant, a
pretty blonde girl called Fanny. Fanny shortly gave birth to
the third sister, Martha. This ought to have made Sophie
and Lettie into Ugly Sisters, but in fact all three girls grew
up very pretty indeed, though Lettie was the one everyone
said was most beautiful. Fanny treated all three girls with
the same kindness and did not favour Martha in the least.
(Jones, 1986, pp. 9-10)

Both Martha and Lettie have ambitions to escape the destiny prescribed to
them by fairy-tale rules. Growing up, Lettie hopes to marry a prince, even
though this is the lot of the youngest daughter, while Martha plans not to marry
at all, but to become rich on her own account. Once they are older, their plans
change: Lettie wants to learn witchcraft, and Martha says: “I want to get married
and have ten children” (p. 25). Lettie still ends up marrying a prince whom she
meets during her witch’s apprenticeship. Martha also finds a potential husband,
so while some other fairy-tale traditions are subverted in the story, the
heteronormative trope of a happy ending consisting of heterosexual marriage is
affirmed, even if that marriage is not the only thing the female characters
achieve.
Unlike her sisters, Sophie has no plans for the future. She is resigned to
being the unambitious oldest child, working at her father’s hat shop. However,
this is where, unbeknownst to her, she starts using her magic powers. With no
one else to talk to, she speaks to the hats she makes, jokingly inventing futures
with good fortunes for them. These fortunes come true for the people who buy
the hats. For example, feeling sorry for a hat that does not turn out too well, she
tells it: “You have a heart of gold and someone in a high position will see it and
fall in love with you” (pp. 17-18). A young woman whom the other ladies in the
hat shop describe as “a perfect disgrace the way she did her hair” (p. 16), buys
the hat and ends up eloping with a count.
One day a witch turns Sophie into an old woman in a fit of rage. Sophie
takes this transformation in her stride, as she has been living like an old woman
anyway. But now she finally has the confidence to leave her home and seek her

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fortune, because she no longer feels the need to be concerned about what
other people think of her. When faced with things that would normally frighten
her, she simply thinks: “The way I am now, it’s scarcely worth worrying about”
(p. 35). This defies expectations of what a fairy-tale heroine should be like. Old
women in fairy tales may be wicked witches or benevolent wise women, but not
heroines. Young women in fairy tales might be cursed to lose their beauty, but
normally this kind of transformation is seen as distressing rather than
comforting, whereas Sophie is happy being old. She clearly does not consider
being attractive a priority, as she never mourns the loss of her youth, her
beauty, or her physical fitness. The only thing she occasionally regrets is that
her family no longer recognises her, although she manages to fashion a new
kind of family with Wizard Howl, his fire demon, Calcifer, and his apprentice,
Michael. This creation of family bonds begins when Sophie seeks refuge in
Howl’s magical moving castle and bullies him into letting her stay as his
cleaning lady. Howl has a terrible reputation as a Bluebeard who steals young
women’s hearts, but it turns out that he is only a vain coward, albeit one with
powerful magic. As an old woman, Sophie is not afraid of him, and manages to
boss him around when he is being lazy or immature. She even persuades
Calcifer to obey her, which is something that previously only Howl himself could
do. As with Enna in Enna Burning, this can be seen as an appropriation of
masculine power over fire. In one scene Howl throws a tantrum, which causes
magical, green slime to ooze all over the room. Sophie has no patience with
this. As she forcibly washes the slime from Howl, she tells him: “Stop it! ...Stop
it at once! You are behaving just like a baby!” (p. 90, italics in the original)
When Sophie finally discovers that she is a witch, she is not as surprised
by this revelation as might be expected: “It was as if Sophie had always known
this. But she had thought it was not proper to have a magic gift because she
was the eldest of three” (pp. 169-170). As she does in the scene in the hat
shop, above, she works her magic by talking to things. For example, she brings
a stick and a scarecrow to life, by talking to them as if they were already alive.
Rather than reciting magic spells, she enchants items by simply telling them
what they should do, which shows that her voice is powerful and persuasive. In
most instances, however, rather than giving orders, she uses her voice in ways
that are sympathetic and encouraging.
It also turns out that Sophie is the only one who can remove the spell
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placed upon her. Once she stops viewing herself as old, the spell disappears,
and she becomes young again, but she still has the self-assurance she gained
from her experiences as an old woman. She no longer relies on the fate she
thinks the world has set in store for her, but takes her destiny in her own hands,
using her magic and her voice.
In addition to helping herself, Sophie also saves Howl’s life. The two
become a couple and are known as the most powerful magic users in the
country. They appear as secondary characters in two sequels, Castle in the Air
(1990) and House of Many Ways (2008a), in which they are married, but still
quarrel frequently, as Howl still tends to behave childishly at times, while
Sophie is still headstrong and constantly speaking her mind. It is a little
problematic that such an adversarial relationship is portrayed in a positive light,
as if it is normal and expected for married couples to be constantly at odds with
one another. Most of the heroines in The Books of Bayern also wind up in
heterosexual marriages, but at least their relationships with men are borne out
of friendship rather than enmity. The animated film version of Howl’s Moving
Castle (2004) handles this part of the story better. In the novel Sophie first
meets Howl when he accosts her in the town square, calling her a “mouse”.
Sophie does not take this as a compliment, but is mortified at having a stranger
comment on her appearance, even if this kind of male behaviour is considered
“perfectly normal for May Day” (p. 21). In the anime it is a pair of soldiers who
accost Sophie, and Howl saves her from this sexual harassment by using his
magic to make the soldiers leave, and then takes her on a romantic flight
across the town. Thus, accosting strange women and giving them pet names is
portrayed as a rude and possibly menacing act, rather than as innocent and
even charming behaviour.
In the texts discussed in this section the girls and young women all achieve
happy endings by discovering new talents connected with words. While they all
have magic, their talents also manifest themselves in other ways: Nan and
Meggie write stories, Ani and Rin bond with people by talking to them, and
Sophie persuades those around her to be more responsible. Most of the girls
gain friends (and even husbands, in the case of Ani and Sophie) through their
stories. This is also presented as a positive outcome of their speaking out and
telling their stories, and an important part of their happy endings. In these ways,
readers can emulate these characters and explore the power of their own
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voices or writings, even without magic.

Conclusion
In this chapter I have shown different ways in which female magic can be seen
to be empowering. Usually the magic is used to help others, to defeat villains,
and to oppose an oppressive regime, which means that the magic is not just
personally empowering for the characters themselves but also liberating for
others. The only main exception to this is the way witchcraft is utilised in Witch
Week, where characters mostly use it for pranks and mischief and to harm one
another. This is possibly why Nan emerges as the most powerful witch in the
novel, as she uses her magic most responsibly.
The Merlin Conspiracy, Inkdeath, and The Books of Bayern all take place in
monarchies in which corrupt people in dominant positions are overthrown, but
the system of government itself is not challenged and remains unchanged,
except for having a more righteous person placed in charge. However, all these
novels also emphasise the importance of kindness and of treating others as
equals, particularly The Books of Bayern, which centres on the experiences
and voices of working-class women.
I also discussed two common forms of magic that can be seen as
metaphors for real powers or talents. The former is the power of sight, as
exhibited in the “Thirteen” series, in The Last Ghost and Midnight Gate, and in
Coraline. The latter is the power of the word, as shown in the “Inkheart” series,
The Books of Bayern, Witch Week, and Howl’s Moving Castle. Both of these
powers have historically been attributed to men only, so it can be empowering
for women and girls to appropriate these aptitudes for themselves. I noted that
stories like these might potentially be alienating to people who are blind or non-
verbal, particularly when disability is treated as a magical plot device, rather
than a real human condition. However, none of the texts discussed suggest that
speech or sight are the only types of power or magic, and the characters’
strengths are shown in other ways as well. I linked the analysis on the powers
of sight with Laura Mulvey’s writings on the male gaze, but also pointed out that
feminists rarely discuss how blind women are affected by said male gaze,
which shows one of the shortcomings of non-intersectional feminism that does
not take disability into account.
I also discussed race and mental illness in regard to how characters in The
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13 Treasures perceive the old Romani woman, Morag, whose powers are most
likely connected to her race. She is called “mad”, not because she is actually
mentally ill, but because her race and her powers make her an outsider. Using
“mad” as an insult demonstrates how mentally ill people are derided in society,
even when the word is used against neurotypical people (just as heterosexual
men using sexist and homophobic slurs against one another reveal their
disdain for women and gay men). Treating certain women – in this case women
of colour and disabled women – as outcasts is part of the “divide and conquer”
strategy of patriarchy. It allows women to distance themselves from those who
are more marginalised, or marginalised in different ways from themselves. In
this case, the white townswomen might think, “I may be a woman, but at least I
am not a mad gypsy like Morag”. This encourages them to identify with the
dominant force, rather than with other women, which goes against the goals of
feminism. Therefore, it is important to include all women within feminism, rather
than replicating the divisions created by patriarchy.
I also looked at a few works in which magic is strictly gendered. In The
Time of the Ghost, feminine magic is directly opposed to paternal authority,
while in The Merlin Conspiracy it is used to bring down a potential tyrant. Both
of these novels provide examples of powerful girls threatening a patriarchal
system. Often female magic is connected with the Earth and nature and it thus
forms a contrast with male magic, which tends to be more connected with
books and learning. Gendered magic is not necessarily empowering for
readers, though, as it provides rather limited definitions of masculinity and
femininity, reinforcing a binary between female/nature and male/culture. As
shown in Black Maria, this kind of thinking can foster an antagonism between
genders. Furthermore, it leaves no room for identities other than the
conventionally male or female. Attempts to escape this binary way of thinking
seem to be hinted at in The Merlin Conspiracy when Roddy feels that the magic
connected with blood and the lunar cycle is neither male nor female. Whilst
such expressions might seem more inclusive for transgender people, this was
probably not Jones’s intent, as transness is never mentioned, or even hinted at
again, in the novel. It is notable that Deep Secret (1997), which takes place in
the same world as The Merlin Conspiracy with some of the same characters,
features at least one transgender character, although she is treated as little
more than a curiosity, and her subjectivity is not really considered (her partners
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even reveal her transgender status to strangers, which is an act that can
endanger a transgender person’s safety).
Thus, while none of my primary texts openly deal with transgender issues,
there are some scenes that explore potential spaces between male and female.
These spaces deserve to be analysed in detail, which is what I will do in the
next chapter.

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 Chapter 5: Outside the Gender Binary
Ideologies of “natural difference” have drawn much of their
force from the traditional belief that gender never changes.
Adam delved and Eve span, Men must work and Women
must weep, Boys will be Boys. Serious analysis begins
with the recognition that exactly the opposite is true:
everything about gender is historical. (Connell, 2002, p.
68, italics in the original)

Introduction
When studying gender and feminism, it is common to distinguish between the
concepts of “sex” and “gender”. Whereas sex is based on anatomy, gender is
both a personal identity and an outward performance which is dependent on
social context. According to Judith Butler, “[t]here is no gender identity behind
the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very
‘expressions’ that are said to be its result” (1990, p. 25). Gender is thus a social
construct, which has little to do with biological differences, but is rather
determined by the way society expects people of a certain gender to act and
dress.
In contrast, the concept of sex seems to be far simpler and more natural, as
it is determined by physical characteristics. However, sex is also a social
construct. Social norms determine which body parts are considered “male” and
which are considered “female”, and people whose bodies do not fit neatly within
these categories are either ignored or surgically altered to be more socially
acceptable. As Butler expresses it,

“sex” not only functions as a norm, but is part of a

regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs,
that is, whose regulatory force is made clear as a kind of
productive power, the power to produce – demarcate,
circulate, differentiate – the bodies it controls. Thus, “sex”
is a regulatory ideal whose materialization takes place (or
fails to take place) through certain highly regulated
practices. In other words, “sex” is an ideal construct which
is forcibly materialized through time. (1993, p. 1)

The social tendency to divide people into the categories of “male” and “female”
is known as the “gender binary”. This division is mainly based on people’s
genitalia, so that people with vaginas are called females, and people with
penises are called males, except that – as mentioned above – this ignores a
wide variety of gender identities and expressions, as well as biological
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formations. While there are numerous cultures that recognise more than two
genders (see, for example, Chang, 2001; Allen, 2008; Williams, 2010), Western
colonialism made the gender binary the most commonly accepted way of
perceiving gender, often by violently enforcing it in those cultures under its
dominion (Deerinwater, 2017). Despite this, many people in Western society
seek to break free from this prescriptive view by using different definitions of
both gender expression and gender itself.
Rebecca Rabinowitz writes about how literary critics can transcend the
gender binary in their analyses of gendered characters:

Although many gender studies powerfully probe multiple

literary messages about what it means to be each gender,
both feminist analysis and new masculinity explorations...
often leave behind the space inbetween – the neithers, the
boths, the incoherencies. Queer theory endows these
spaces in between with significance. (2004, p. 20).

She goes on to assert that queer critics consider these “incoherencies” to be

proof “that the very structures and definitions of gender and sexuality are
rickety” (p. 20), which is what sets a queer analysis apart from a traditionally
feminist one.
Fantasy provides an ideal arena for this type of exploration. Unlike realist
fiction, characters in fantasy are not necessarily tied to their bodies and,
through shapeshifting, possession, or reincarnation, can find themselves in
bodies that are not their own. As Rosemary Jackson points out,
“[m]etamorphosis plays a large part in fantastic literature”, and as examples she
cites “[m]en transforming into women” and “children changing into birds and
beasts” (1995, p. 81). Additionally, authors can introduce species with different
conceptions of gender than the Western gender binary dictates. Devices like
these can examine the stability or instability of a character’s gender identity and
determine how it relates to the character’s self-image. Jackson says that many
of the themes in fantasy are, indeed,

concerned with erasing rigid demarcations of gender and

of genre. Gender differences of male and of female are
subverted and generic distinctions between animal,
vegetable and mineral are blurred in fantasy’s attempt to
“turn over” “normal” perceptions and undermine “realistic”
ways of seeing. (p. 49)

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In this chapter I will examine gender expressions that transgress the
boundaries of a “cisnormative” gender binary. When discussing this subject,
literary critics and scholars of gender studies tend to treat it in a theoretical
manner, Judith Butler’s prose often being cited as particularly difficult and
abstruse. She was, for example, the 1998 winner of Philosophy and Literature’s
annual “Bad Writing” competition. Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Law and
Ethics at the University of Chicago, spent a whole article criticising not just
Butler’s style, but also its implications for practical change. As Nussbaum
complained, theoreticians such as Butler “do politics in safety of their
campuses, remaining on the symbolic level, making subversive gestures at
power through speech and gesture” (1999, p. 45). Unfortunately, as she
continues, “[h]ungry women are not fed by this, battered women are not
sheltered by it, raped women do not find justice in it, gays and lesbians do not
achieve legal protections through it” (p. 45). As noted at the end of the previous
chapter, transgender people are also a high-risk category when it comes to
hate crime. And, aside from this, there is the fact that transgender people and
others on the LGBT spectrum are more likely to suffer the hardships of poverty
and lack of education, making them less likely to encounter, let alone
understand, the theoretical ideas of academics like Butler. Brad Sears and Lee
Badgett cite the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, which finds that
“transgender people are four times as likely to have a household income under
$10,000 and twice as likely to be unemployed as the typical person in the U.S.”
(2012, unpaged). The rates of poverty for transgender people of colour are
even higher than for white transgender people.
Despite these factors, Butler claims that this kind of abstruse language is
necessary to deconstruct concepts of gender, while blaming complaints about
her prose style on “an upsurge of anti-intellectualism in the academy” (2004, p.
328). This implies that only people with advanced degrees in formal education
are qualified to consider the subjects of gender identity and gender
presentation.
Additionally, works that specifically study transgender people often seem
voyeuristic and fetishistic. As transgender activist Riki Ann Wilchins writes,
gender studies texts written by cisgender academics "escalate the politicization
of our bodies, choices, and desires, so that, with each new book, while their
audience enjoys the illusion of knowing more about us, we find ourselves more
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disempowered, disembodied, and exploited than before" (quoted in Samuels,
2002, p. 69).
This is where transgender activists are invaluable in making such ideas
accessible to all. For example, Sophie Labelle, whose work I refer to below,
shares her views on transgender issues in the forms of comic strips and picture
books. Like Butler, she points out the artifice of the gendered structures of
society, but does so in a way that makes it clear how real people are affected
by them, and what can be done to make it easier for children to explore their
identity and their gender expression.
What sets my analysis of gender apart is that, as a transmasculine person,
I do not have the luxury of treating transgender people as merely a fascinating
concept or the subject of a thought experiment. Rather, I will consider not only
how the texts under scrutiny portray gender transgression, but also how they
might affect actual transgender readers. I will also attempt to take into account
the writings of other transgender scholars and activists in my analysis, although
– because of marginalisation – they are harder to find than writings by
cisgender scholars. Thus, I aim to suggest that a purely cisgender perspective
is often insufficient to analyse texts that deal with gender identity. My
intersectional approach will also include considerations of other axes of
marginalisation to examine how breaking gender barriers might be easier for
some people than for others. This analysis will focus on notions of whiteness, of
class, and of disability within the books under consideration and within the
queer community at large, and will show that the attempts at “queering” within
my primary texts are limited, due to their lack of intersectionality.
First I will explore instances of cross-dressing, where characters
temporarily pretend to be a different gender, and analyse what these narratives
reveal about gender performance. Then I will look at depictions of bodies that
transgress gender categories. This section includes representations of bodies
that change shape, or are created through magic rather than biology, as well as
examining various bodiless entities. This theme is explored further in a section
on ghosts. Most of the ghost characters are shown to have lost their sense of
self, including their gender identity. This type of gender representation raises
further questions about what gender means and where it resides.
But before I begin this discussion, it will prove useful to explain some of my
terms.
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The Politics of Gender Terminology
When describing transgender individuals, common phrases include “a man in a
woman’s body” or “a woman who used to be a man”. These descriptions are
misleading, and do not convey how most transgender people feel about their
gender and their bodies. The former phrase implies that our bodies are not
really our own, and that those bodies are “wrong” somehow. The Canadian
transgender activist Sophie Labelle expresses this view more personally,
stating: “I wasn’t ‘born with a boy’s body’. I am a girl and my body is mine. So
it’s a girl’s body… I was born in the right body. It’s the way people look at it that
is wrong” (2018). Similarly, saying that a transgender woman is “a man who
became a woman” reduces gender to outward physical characteristics, and to a
simplistic binary, one might say, ignoring the reality of those transgender people
who have no desire or opportunity for medical transition, but still feel strongly
about their gender identity. As Butler points out in the quotation above,
speaking of biological sex can also be reductive, especially when considering
intersex people, who are either born with ambiguous genitalia, or whose
outward genitals do not match their internal organs and/or chromosomes.30
Thus the terms designated – or assigned – male/female at birth are more
accurate and inclusive of all genders and sexes. These terms refer to the
gender that is ascribed to a child by doctors and parents when it is born, rather
than to a person’s actual gender.
People who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth are
cisgender, or cis for short, while people who do not are transgender, or trans.
This latter, umbrella term covers not only trans men and trans women, but also
those whose identity is a mixture of male and female, or even something
completely different (genderqueer or non-binary), those whose gender is fluid
(genderfluid), and those who do not feel they have a gender at all (agender).

Cross-Dressing
The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism by Sarah Gamble
defines cross-dressing as “a range of behavior which involves adopting the
uniform of the opposite sex: although their motivations may differ widely, drag

30 According to a study by Blackless, et.al. (2000), up to 2% of the human population may be

intersex, but around 0.1-0.2% of children receive “corrective” genital surgery at birth.
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queens, female impersonators, transsexuals,31 transvestites and butch
lesbians are all cross-dressers” (2001, p. 209, bold in the original). However,
this description is somewhat loaded, not only because it implies that
transgender people are merely dressing up, but it also seems to imply that
there is such a thing as dress that is intrinsically male or female, so that
individuals who move outside their allotted range are pretending to be
something they are not. Stand-up comedian Eddie Izzard, who famously wears
dresses and make-up, once said in an interview: “Yes, I wear dresses. They’re
not women’s dresses. I buy them” (2011, italics added). Thus, he rejects the
gendering of clothes. Gamble’s definition also ignores the reality of intersex and
non-binary people, who are not strictly male or female. Accordingly, in this
section on cross-dressing, I will specifically talk about characters pretending to
be a different gender for story purposes, rather than female characters who
prefer clothes traditionally considered masculine or vice versa.
There is a marked difference between portrayals of female cross-dressers
and male ones. As Victoria Flanagan writes:

For females, the cross-dressing experience is liberatory. It

exposes the artifice of gender constructions, permitting the
female cross-dresser to reconstruct for herself a unique
gendered niche which is not grounded within a single
gender category, but incorporates elements of both... .
(2002, p. 79)

Male cross-dressers, on the other hand, do not normally lose themselves in the
female experience, and rarely learn a lesson about gender performance. As
Flanagan continues:

The masculinity of male cross-dressers is seldom as

fragile as the femininity of female cross-dressing subjects,
nor is it as easily forsaken. Because their behaviour
presupposes the superiority of masculine over feminine,
their self-assured masculinity permeates every aspect of
their cross-dressing experience, rendering comic their

31 Transgender terminology has changed in recent years, and the term “transsexual” has mostly
fallen out of use, as it focuses on sexual characteristics rather than gender identity.
Nowadays most transgender people regard “transsexual” as a slur. As the Routledge
Companion is over a decade old, I do not blame Gamble for using the wrong terminology.
What is more distressing is the fact that in her entry on “transsexualism” (pp. 328-329), she
repeats the openly transphobic views of Germaine Greer and other trans-exclusionary
feminists. As she also briefly quotes Sandy Stone – a transgender writer – Gamble might
think she is being fair by presenting both sides of the argument. Instead she treats
transgender lives as a subject for debate, and legitimises transphobia as a valid position.
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 inability to comprehend femininity as separate to their own
biologically male experience of gender. (p. 79)

Thus, for girls, cross-dressing can be a liberating experience, allowing them to

do things they would normally not be able to do, whereas boys usually treat
cross-dressing as a joke. The difference lies in how society views masculinity
and femininity. As masculinity is viewed as superior to femininity, a boy dressing
or acting in a way considered “girly” is seen to be debasing himself. This makes
it difficult for children who are assigned male at birth to explore their gender
identity seriously, even if they like aspects of femininity and would find them as
liberating as the female cross-dresser might find aspects of masculinity (Flores,
2015). As Madonna Kolbenschlag writes:

Because the masculine role is dominant and associated

with superior status, deviation from it by males is less
tolerated. Girls, on the other hand, belong to a class of
“outsiders,” a group that has inferior status in the cultural
paradigm. Like members of minority groups, they often
show greater adeptness in role changes and are more
psychologically free to experiment. (1988, p. 11)

Besides allowing female characters to break free from strictly gendered bonds,
cross-dressing narratives also serve to break the bonds of the gender binary
itself. As Flanagan says: “Cross-dressing is used strategically to make the
socially constructed nature of gender apparent” (2010, p. 33).
In my primary texts there are three main reasons for cross-dressing: to
overcome gendered oppression, to ensure personal protection, and to deceive
others. The most notable cross-dressing character with the first of these three
motives is Alanna from Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness quartet (1983-
1988). The first book in the series, aptly named Alanna: The First Adventure
(1983), starts with Alanna reacting in horror to her father’s decision to send her
to a convent to teach her to become a lady. She sees this as a waste of her
abilities and a restriction of her potential: “As if that’s all I can do with myself!”
(p. 1), she says scornfully. Her twin brother, Thom, is to be sent off at the same
time to become a knight, even though he would much rather study magic. To
serve both their interests, the children decide to switch places. Alanna cuts her
hair, puts on her brother’s clothes, and spends the rest of her adolescence
pretending to be a boy named Alan, so that she can become a knight. As they
set off to their respective locations, Thom wears one of Alanna’s dresses to fool
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their father and the servants, but he arrives at the convent as himself, a boy
wishing to study magic, rather than a girl wanting to be a lady. So while he
performs femininity for a short time to achieve his goal, he does not adopt a
feminine persona in the way that Alanna adopts a masculine one; nor does he
find fulfilment by taking on a traditionally female role. Although he is
uncomfortable with the violence and physical activity involved in knighthood,
magic is still a mostly male pursuit in his world, so he simply chooses a different
type of masculinity; namely, a scholarly kind. When Alanna is asked whether
Thom disguised himself as a girl, she laughs and responds, “Of course not!”
(Pierce, 1986, p. 34). In line with Flanagan’s observations, Alanna finds the
thought of her brother cross-dressing ridiculous, while her own experience of
performing as a boy is serious. This is a bit of a missed opportunity in the text,
as Pierce could have shown a true role reversal and presented femininity as a
liberating experience for a male character.
The first two volumes of the series focus on Alanna’s attempts to perform
masculinity in order to fit in with the boys she is training with. This involves, for
example, not seeking help when she is bullied by an older boy, but dealing with
the problem herself by training privately until she is skilled enough to defeat him
in a fight. She does not seem to define masculinity primarily by violence, as at
one point she says to her bully, Ralon, “I don’t have to pick on someone littler’n
me to prove what a man I am” (1983, p. 77), and after she finally beats him, she
feels ashamed rather than triumphant. Still, she feels that beating Ralon in a
physical fight “would mean that she could do anything larger and stronger
males could” (1983, p. 86), and “would show everyone – including that part of
her that was always wondering – that she was as good as any boy in the
palace” (1983, p. 93). Thus, she hopes to prove herself by being self-reliant and
physically capable, both of which are attributes traditionally connected with
masculinity. A traditionally feminine approach might have involved seeking
strength from the community and solving the problem through means other
than violence. Interestingly, while the narrative, as well as the other characters,
expresses disapproval of Ralon’s bullying and consider it cowardly to beat up
someone smaller and weaker, it is said of Raoul, a sympathetic character who
is larger and stronger than the other boys, that “[h]e likes hitting Ralon” (1983,
p. 71, italics in the original), implying that using violence on someone weaker is
acceptable if that person is not likable.
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 Even while in disguise, Alanna does not completely suppress her
femaleness. At first she appears to resent being a girl. While becoming tearful
after being beaten by Ralon, she laments that this “wouldn’t have happened to
a real boy” (1983, p. 79, italics in the original). She turns indignant and angry
when she starts growing breasts and menstruating, and her friends need to
remind her, “[y]e can be a woman and still be a warrior” (1983, p. 135), and,
“[y]ou’re a female, child, no matter what clothing you wear. You must become
accustomed to that” (1983, p. 174). This turns out to be true in Alanna’s case,
as she eventually learns to take pride in being a female page, and later a
female knight. Once she no longer has to pretend to be a boy, she takes
pleasure in occasionally wearing pretty dresses and earrings, and connecting
with other women. She also scowls when her brother implies that she always
wanted to be a man. However, Mistress Cooper’s assertion, that Alanna is
female “no matter what clothing” she wears, is also cissexist. The implication is
that people who are uncomfortable with their assigned gender simply need to
learn to accept it rather than seek alternative ways of identification.
Of course, Alanna is not meant to be read as a transgender boy, but as a
cisgender girl. Pierce’s purpose is to create a feminist story in which a girl
learns that femininity is not weakness, and that she can be a female warrior.
Thus Alanna’s femaleness is constantly emphasised. As Stephens and
McCallum write:

The admiration and respect most characters show for

“Alan” exists in a dialogic relationship with the constant
textual reminders that she is always still “Alanna,” and that
neither she nor the text’s narrator ever think of her as
“Alan.” In other words, while Pierce has followed sword-
and-sorcery practice in constructing a female hero by
situating her within a conventional male role in a
conventional structure – training in the Code of Chivalry
and other aspects of cultural heritage designated as parts
of a male domain – she constantly reasserts Alanna’s
femaleness and hence, it can be argued, deconstructs
such gendered classifications. (1998, pp. 146-147)

Pierce’s agenda would thus be undermined if Alanna identified fully as male,

rather than finding joy in her femaleness. The text still states that gender
identity – if not gender expression – is defined by the body and is thus
unalterable. This assertion is cissexist and potentially harmful for transgender

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readers. When Alanna suggests that she can use her gift of magic to change
her body, Mistress Cooper even insists:

“You cannot use your Gift to change what the gods have
willed for you, and you would be foolish to try! The gods
willed you to be female and small and redheaded, and
obviously silly as well–” (Pierce, 1983, p. 174)

Pierce’s intention in bringing up the gods is probably not to provide a spiritual

angle meant to mirror religions in the real world. But, considering that
transgender people are often told that their gender identities and their desire to
transition is an affront to God, it is difficult not to read it that way. This point is
not brought up in any of the other analyses of the series that I have read, which
demonstrates that a purely cisgender perspective on texts such as these is
insufficient and might miss some significant readings.
Once Alanna’s masquerade as a male squire ends, she tries to reconcile
herself to being a woman, while also being a warrior. She discovers that
femininity is just as much of a performance as masculinity is: “It’s going to be as
hard to learn to be a girl as it was to learn to be a boy” she says. Someone
replies: “Harder... . Most girls don’t have to unlearn being a boy” (1984, p. 145).
Thus Pierce points out the artifice of all gender performance. She further
deconstructs sexist definitions of what it means to be a man or a woman in the
following exchange in the third book of the series, The Girl Who Rides Like a
Man:

“You are a terrifying creature,” the Voice told her

[Alanna] solemnly. “You do not take your place in your
father’s tent, letting men make your decisions. You ride
like a man, you fight as a man, and you think as a man –”
“I think as a human being,” she retorted hotly. “Men
don’t think any differently from women – they just make
more noise about being able to.”
As Coram chuckled, Mukhtab said, “Have you not
discovered that when people, men and women, find a
woman who acts intelligently, they say she acts like a
man?” (1986, p. 49)

As Alanna is slowly realising, “acting like a man” or “acting like a woman” are
phrases that have no meaning outside each person’s definition of masculine or
feminine behaviour. Even the title of the book becomes ironic in this light. As
Rabinowitz writes:

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 Mapping the gender signifiers in Tamora Pierce’s Song of
the Lioness series reveals that the blatant feminist
message is perched precariously: it leans simultaneously
upon notions of essentialism and notions of performativity.
A war exists at the series’ very core about whether Alanna
is a girl or a boy, whether gender is essential or
performative, and whether selfhood is internal or
dialectical. (2004, p. 23, italics in the original)

Thus the series proves a fairly effective – albeit limited – subversion of the
gender binary. Alanna’s gender is frequently destabilised, and she upsets the
binaries of her world by not acting the way that women are expected to act.
However, as Alanna ends up being decidedly female, despite her unusual
gender presentation, the series does not allow for a transgender reading, or
even for the existence of transgender people, in that it closes off the narrative
of the body. It is also unfortunate that Alanna’s gender is the only one to be
destabilised, and not that of any of the other characters, especially the ones
designated male at birth.
Female-to-male cross-dressing is mentioned a few times in Cornelia
Funke’s “Inkheart” (2004-2008) trilogy, but is never actually shown. Meggie’s
mother spends some of her time in the medievally inspired Inkworld dressed as
a man so she can work as a scribe. When Mo and Dustfinger go to rescue
Meggie from Capricorn they pretend to be two of his henchmen. Elinor wants to
come along as well, disguised as a man, but they do not have a spare suit for
her. The former instance is inspired by self-preservation as well as a desire to
take on a role proscribed to women in the Inkworld, the latter being simply
inspired by a desire not to get caught by the enemies. At one point some of the
Black Prince’s robbers are hidden in the marketplace, dressed as women so as
not to arouse the suspicions of the guards, but this barely features in the story
more than the aforementioned incidents.
Both Diana Wynne Jones’s The Crown of Dalemark (1993) and A Tale of
Time City (1987), as well as Michelle Harrison’s The 13 Treasures (2009), use
cross-dressing as a form of misdirection. In The Crown of Dalemark, Mitt
encounters a “small tough boy” (p. 25) named Rith. It never occurs to Mitt to
question Rith’s stated gender, so he is surprised to find her, in her regular
clothes, as Lady Noreth:

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 Mitt turned and found himself facing an elegant lady. He
was utterly dismayed. The only thing that was the same
about her was the longish freckled face with its eager,
cheerful look. But that was surrounded by clouds of fair
frizzy hair, done in a most fashionable style, and she had
on a slender dress of grey-blue that hung in sheeny folds
round a thoroughly female figure. (1993, p. 39)

Noreth informs Mitt that she always pretends to be a boy when she travels, for
her own protection. This involves her wearing masculine clothes and hiding her
hair, but other than changing her appearance, her masquerade seems to
require little adjustment, as she is proficient in traditionally masculine skills,
such as sword-fighting and horse-riding.
In A Tale of Time City (1987) the Time Patrol is looking for Cousin Vivian
amid a crowd of evacuee children, but she manages to evade the patrol several
times. The protagonists are unable to figure out how she keeps staying out of
sight until they discover that she has simply been wearing boys’ clothes and a
cap to hide her hair. As the Time Patrol is searching for a girl in the 1930s, at a
time when the differences between feminine and masculine appearance were
very marked, it does not occur to the patrol to look more closely at the children
with short hair and trousers. This is in spite of the fact that, back in Time City,
most people wear androgynous jumpsuits, and long hair on boys appears to be
common. Vivian Smith, at least, who comes from 1938, thinks that “she had
never seen a boy so much in need of a haircut” (p. 15) as Sam, and she stares
at Jonathan because he “had twice as much hair as she had” (p. 17). It bears
mentioning, however, that Jonathan is Chinese. Rather than being consciously
androgynous by wearing his hair long, Jonathan might thus be performing a
traditional Chinese type of masculinity, instead of the English masculinity that
Vivian is used to.
The 13 Treasures (2009) takes place in modern times, when children’s
clothing can often be more androgynous than it was during World War II, but
the characters in it make use of a similar ruse as Cousin Vivian. Red, who is
described as having a “boyish figure” (p. 226), is on the run from the police,
along with a stolen baby boy. She disguises herself by cutting her distinctive
red hair short and dying it black, and then putting on some men’s clothes.
Disguising the baby is even easier, as babies are naturally androgynous: all she
needs to do is dress him in pink to make people assume the child is a girl. As

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Red says: “They’re looking for a redheaded girl with a baby boy. So I need to
be the opposite of that... . And so does he [the baby]” (p. 226).
All of these occurrences destabilise gendered expectations. The characters
in question completely conceal their identities simply by changing their clothes,
without even changing their behaviour. Cousin Vivian acts in a rude and
unladylike manner, but this is not part of her masquerade; it is simply her
natural behaviour, even when she is wearing a dress. Red is a tomboy, so
presumably has no problems passing muster as male, although the readers do
not see this. The most destabilising element is the baby, who is too young to
have learned and internalised gendered behaviour, so the only outward marker
of his sex are his clothes. As he is referred to as a boy, his assigned gender is
clearly male, but as he has not yet developed his own identity, this might not
even be his actual gender. Altogether, the cross-dressing incidents in these
three texts point out the ridiculousness of assuming a person’s gender based
on their clothing, or even, as in the case of the baby, on the colour of their
clothing.
That said, all these female cross-dressers are thin, white girls. Within the
queer community, the abiding images of transmasculinity and androgyny tend
to be thin, white, and boyish, which leaves out any other race and body type.
This makes it harder for people who are not thin or white to explore their gender
identity and have it respected by others. As Kris Nelson writes, “we need more
than just another white, thin, masculine-centered person speaking for our
community. Anything less than that works to make the world less safe for non-
binary and GNC [gender non-conforming] folks, not more secure” (2016,
unpaged). The unfortunate truth is that – just like mainstream feminism – the
LGBT movement often fails to be intersectional and to take into account the
ways in which the needs of queer and transgender people of colour may be
different from those of the white members of the community. As Alan Pelaez
Lopez writes:

My Blackness is visible. My accent marks me a foreigner.

And my gender presentation makes me a target of
violence in a world where femininity is devalued and to be
destroyed.
The LGBTQIA+ movement has failed at being an
intersectional movement because I don’t feel safe entering

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 spaces that market themselves as “LGBT-friendly.” (2016,
unpaged)

Non-binary writer Caleb Luna discusses how their32 fatness is feminised and
therefore constrains their gender expression. They write: “Regardless of how
I feel and how I view my gender, there are material limits to what gender my
body is allowed or – more appropriately – disallowed to access” (2017a,
unpaged, italics in the original). Both Lopez and Luna explain that their
marginalised status, a product of their race, their body type, and their economic
class, limits the ways in which they can interact with their own queerness as
well as with the queer community at large. This is why an intersectional
approach is needed when discussing queerness and gender, and a cultural
narrative in which only petite, white girls are permitted to experiment with
gender expression is insufficient.
Incidentally, while Elinor in Inkheart is white, she is also fat and middle-
aged. She could therefore have been a far more subversive cross-dressing
figure than the young, white, and conventionally attractive girls, had Funke
presented her in these terms. But this opportunity is missed in the novel, and
Elinor’s suggestion that she could have disguised herself as a man to help
rescue Meggie is met with no answer.
In The 13 Secrets (2011), one of the sequels to The 13 Treasures, a boy
named Jack asks Red and her companions for help because he believes that
his mother has been replaced by a fairy. One of the things Jack has noticed is
that “[h]er voice sounded different sometimes. Sort of scratchy... and deeper”
(p. 112).
While the fairy eventually turns out to be male, most of the members of the
coven refer to him as “her”, accepting the gender he has adopted as a
masquerade. Fabian is the only one to refer to the fairy as “it”, but this might be
because he is less used to the fey folk than the others, and might still think of
all fairies as “it”. Since the fairy is using magic to disguise himself, he looks
exactly like the woman he is impersonating,33 but his masquerade involves

32 According to the author profile on Everyday Feminism, Luna’s preferred pronouns are the
gender-neutral they/them/theirs.
33 The nature of this magic is glamorous rather than transformative, as is evidenced by the fact
that even while in the guise of Jack’s mother, who still has both her hands, the fairy is unable
to use his missing right hand. This means that the fairy’s image changes, but underneath the
glamour, his body remains the same.
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imitating her behaviour as well. One of the things that he struggles with is
cooking, a skill considered particularly motherly. He complains: “I’ve tried to act
like a good mother, haven’t I? But it’s not easy. Never easy. And what does a
mother do? She makes dinner. But cooking isn’t the thing. Cooking spoils it”
(2011, p. 177, italics in the original). As the mothers in Harrison’s books are
rarely housewives, it is probably only the fairy’s opinion, rather than the
author’s, that cooking is a necessary part of acting feminine (and perhaps
Jack’s mother is someone who enjoys cooking for her family, although the fairy
characterises this as something that all mothers do, rather than this particular
mother).
The plot thickens as it turns out that the fairy, Eldritch, was never interested
in Jack’s family and never intended to provide a perfect imitation of the boy’s
mother. His plan was from the beginning to make Jack suspicious, so he would
go to Red for help, allowing Eldritch to wreak vengeance on her. Thus, he
treads a thin line between being convincing enough as a double of Jack’s
mother to trick Jack’s father, and being just wrong enough to arouse Jack’s
suspicions.
This is the only extended incident in my primary texts in which a male
cross-dresses as a female, and it is done for sinister purposes. While
Harrison’s text in no way condemns this type of cross-dressing – it even
presents it as beneficial in the case of the stolen baby – the fact that there are
rarely positive examples of characters, assigned male at birth, who dress or
behave in a feminine manner, is problematic. Effeminate men and trans women
are often represented as either villainous or ludicrous in the media (and
repulsive in either case), and for the most part the same is true in my primary
texts: the thought of Thom living as a girl for an extended period of time is
laughable to Alanna, and Eldritch only makes himself look like a woman
because of his evil scheme.
The only man in my primary texts who is explicitly referred to as feminine is
Ishta, one of the traitorous guards in Shannon Hale’s The Goose Girl (2003).
Not only does he betray Ani, but he also sexually harasses her at one point,
which perpetuates the view that effeminate men are sinister and sexually
threatening. Unfortunately, there are very few role models in fiction for gender
non-conforming boys and transgender girls. It can therefore be difficult for them
to feel pride and confidence, rather than shame, in their identity. As Vivian
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Taylor points out, in the popular consciousness, “[b]eing trans is something to
avoid, to exclude, to escape, at worst to nobly bare [sic] up under” (2015,
unpaged), rather than something to enjoy and celebrate.
The instances of female-to-male cross-dressing are fairly effective and
enjoyable, though. Whether performed to take on a masculine role or to hide
from enemies, these stories deconstruct and poke fun at gender norms. They
show that gender can be flexible, fluid, and does not need to define a person.
However, it has also been shown that all the female cross-dressers are young,
white, and thin, which makes cross-dressing and androgyny appear limited to a
single body type. It also means that these texts only explore gender in a very
limited way, without considering the myriad ways gender norms are influenced
by age, race, body type, and other factors of intersectional marginalisation.
Of course, in fantasy fiction cross-dressing is not limited to changing one’s
clothes, but can be achieved through transforming the physical body, as
discussed in the next section.

Transforming and Performing Bodies

Explicitly transgender characters are rare in children’s media, and when they do
appear, it is usually in stories that specifically deal with being transgender,
rather than fulfilling the same variety of roles that cisgender characters do.
However, as authors do not generally take the time to specify that their
characters are cisgender, it is possible to speculate about characters’ gender
identities. For example, Coraline (Gaiman, 2002) thinks that the voice of the
cat, despite being a male voice, sounds like the voice of her thoughts, which
might imply that she sees herself as an androgyne. It is more likely, however,
that the cat represents Coraline’s Jungian animus, which is simply a more
abstract way of representing humans’ androgynous roots. There is also Mallory
in The Spiderwick Chronicles (2009), who becomes embarrassed and
defensive when her family brings up the fact that she is growing into a woman:
Jared teases her for looking as though she has breasts, Simon teases her
about a boy she likes, while their mother, in a more positive way, tries to
encourage her, which only embarrasses Mallory further. But since puberty is an
embarrassing state for cisgender children as well as transgender ones, this
does not necessarily mean that she resists becoming a woman. The strongest
example of a transgender child character in my primary texts is arguably Awful
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in Jones’s Archer’s Goon, who “looked smug” when someone referred to her as
Howard’s little brother, because she “loved being mistaken for a boy” (1984, p.
71). However, as her nickname implies, she is not a particularly nice person, so
she is not the best role model for transmasculine children, even though she is
feisty and often funny. Her main role in the story is to allow Howard to become
more mature and less selfish, which makes her less sympathetic than Howard
himself.
Arguably, the only genderfluid character in my primary texts is Loki in Neil
Gaiman’s Odd and the Frost Giants (2008). The story refers several times to an
episode from Norse mythology in which Loki turns himself into a mare to
distract a magical horse, which results in him giving birth to Odin’s eight-legged
mount, Sleipnir. In Gaiman’s story Loki mentions several times that he was a
horse once, and at one point Thor interjects: “A mare, you mean” (p. 41). But it
is never stated outright in the narrative what happened. The brother of the
owner of the magic stallion that Loki seduced tells Odd: “A mare, the most
beautiful animal one had ever seen, ran across the plain and lured away the
stallion who was hauling the stones for my brother. It used womanish wiles”
(2008, p. 67). At this point Odd “was beginning to have his suspicions about
who the mare had been” (pp. 67-68). The sexual dimensions of this are implied,
but – presumably because the book is aimed at young children – not explored
further, and Loki’s subsequent pregnancy is not mentioned. In the text Loki
seems slightly embarrassed about the whole incident, and the other gods tease
him about it occasionally. They say that Loki’s actions while in horse form were
a result of him succumbing to his animal nature. As Thor puts it:

“It’s something that happens when you have taken on

animal form. Stay in it too long and you become what you
pretend to be. When Loki was a horse –”
“We don’t talk about that,” said the fox [Loki]. (Gaiman,
2008, p. 33)

Loki, Thor, and Odin spend most of the story in animal form (a fox, a bear, and
an eagle, respectively), but presumably these animals’ sexes correspond to
their actual genders when in their natural form, which is why Loki’s previous
transformation into a female horse is considered a lot more transgressive.
Since the horse’s nature took over Loki’s mind, this means that, at least briefly,
Loki was female, both in body in mind.

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 This sort of transformation happens regularly in mythology, in which gender
and sexuality are frequently less stable than in modern stories. Gods often take
lovers of more than one sex, transform themselves into various human and
animal forms, and male gods sometimes give birth by strange means. While in
Odd and the Frost Giants Loki is shown to be embarrassed at having
performed a female role, mythologically it is likely that his transformation and
resultant pregnancy were not considered that peculiar or shameful, and these
events are certainly characteristic of his chaotic personality. In this regard, the
myth is more accepting of gender deviance than Gaiman’s book, in which Thor
and Odin – who are traditionally portrayed as being more masculine than Loki –
mock the latter for his perceived femininity, thus showing that men who are not
sufficiently masculine are worthy of ridicule. Gender-fluidity is thus not really
portrayed in a positive light.
Transformation of the body is a common theme in fairy tales, and is often
presented as a transitional stage. While frequently used as a punishment that
male characters need to be freed from (“The Frog Prince”, “Beauty and the
Beast”, “The Six Swans”), for female characters transformation can itself be a
liberatory experience. As Marina Warner writes:

This phenomenon of metamorphosis as liberty saturates

the imagery of the tales and the language in which they
are conveyed; the animal disguise of the heroine equips
her to enter a new territory of choice and speech; the
apparent degradation works for her, not against her. Being
a beast – a she-bear – can be preferable as a temporary
measure to the constrictions of a woman’s shape. Animal
form marks a threshold she passes over, before she can
take control of her own identity. (1994a, p. 354)

Like many other fairy tale tropes, the concept of transformation as punishment
is subverted in Eva Ibbotson’s The Ogre of Oglefort (2010). The titular ogre has
the ability to turn people into animals, but rather than being feared for this, he
keeps being sought out by people who are tired of their human lives and would
rather be animals. Here, being an animal is neither a punishment nor a
transitional stage that leads to eventual self-fulfilment, but the happy ending
itself. Significantly, some of these transformed people are specifically seeking
an escape from the constraints of their gender. In Warner’s words, for these
characters “[b]eing a beast... [is] preferable... to the constrictions of a woman’s

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[or a man’s] shape” (p. 354). For example, Hamish has himself turned into a
gnu because he cannot cope with the pressures of hyper-masculinity (with its
passion for hunting), and is now happier as a peaceful herbivore. Bessie has
herself turned into a hippo to escape her demanding children and
grandchildren, choosing self-fulfilment over constant nurturing and motherly
self-sacrifice. She probably also had a negative body image when she was
human, as she says about the hippo: “It was so clean and so smooth and it
didn’t mind being fat” (Ibbotson, 2010, p. 143). Finally, Nandi used to be a
beauty queen until she lost a competition because she tripped. After her
boyfriend breaks up with her, she decides to live on her own as an aye-aye,
“where nobody can hurt me” (p. 146). When Ivo and Mirella ask her for help,
she agrees on the condition that “there must be no cruel men – and no
competitions” (p. 146.). All three of these characters are unable to function
within the gender roles set for them by society – being aggressive, being
endlessly nurturing, being beautiful – and they escape these roles by turning
into animals which they admire. Unlike Loki’s mare, it is never stated whether
these people’s animal forms have the same sex as their human forms, but this
is not really important, since the animals are made to seem rather removed
from their human gender, which makes them appear sexless and androgynous.
None of them turn back into humans at the end of the story, but continue living
happily as animals – the only change being that they make friends and learn to
trust people again.
Unlike the texts on cross-dressing I examined, the gender deviance in The
Ogre of Oglefort is not limited to young, thin, white girls. Hamish is a man,
Bessie is old enough to be a grandmother and, it is implied, was fat, and Nandi,
given her Indian name, is presumably a woman of colour. Bessie’s age and size
are, in fact, presented as some of the reasons why she felt the need to escape
her human body. By taking these factors into account, the book thus takes a
more nuanced approach than texts that only focus on gendered oppression.
Initially Princess Mirella, one of the protagonists of The Ogre of Oglefort,
goes to the ogre’s castle to make him turn her into a bird, in order that she can
escape an arranged marriage to a money-hungry suitor who is far older than
her. Being a princess, she is made to feel that her only role in life is to get
married and produce heirs, so she too is fleeing from gender constraints. Once
she escapes from her demanding family and her sleazy fiancé, however, she
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manages to be happy in her human form, being independent and having her
own friends. The main difference between her and the people who are
transformed is that she is a child, whereas the others are adults, and so she still
has her entire human life ahead of her. She is also more likely to be someone
child readers can identify with, who might feel trapped within their social roles
but cannot simply turn into animals to escape these constraints. While the story
does not really provide an answer for children who have such concerns, it does
validate them by telling the children that their families are not necessarily right
about who they are and what they are meant to do with their lives, and this itself
can be liberating. Overall, the message in The Ogre of Oglefort is that being an
animal can be rewarding and liberating, but being human can be just as good,
as long as one is free to express one’s identity, which is a positive message for
both transgender and cisgender children.
Helen Stringer’s The Last Ghost (2009) features an unusual instance of
bodily transformation. Belladonna and Steve encounter a Sybil who was once
beautiful, but her body has decayed to the point where only her voice is left. As
in Odd and the Frost Giants, this book features another character from ancient
mythology, this time Greek. Warner tells the story of the Sybil in From the Beast
to the Blonde:

In Ovid, the Cumaean Sybil tells Aeneas that Phoebus

Apollo had fallen in love with her and offered her anything
she wanted if she would only sleep with him – she then
asked for as many “birthdays as there were grains of dust”
in a heap she scooped together in her hands. But she had
forgotten to ask for eternal youth as well… . When she
meets Aeneas, she tells him she will “shrink from her
present fine stature into a tiny creature... shrivelled with
age”, and that, eventually, her outer form will disintegrate
altogether. Then she concludes, “But still, the fates will
leave me my voice, and by my voice I shall be known.”
(1994a, p. 10)

First and foremost, this story demonstrates the power of a woman’s voice. It
also intimates that even when the body is gone, the remaining voice is still that
of a woman. Again, this ventures into subversive territory as it implies that it is
not the body that makes a person a man or a woman. After all, the Sybil does
not have a body any more.
Steve and Belladonna do not ponder these things, and they do not hesitate

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in referring to the Sybil as female. The Sybil is wise and prophetic, but also
human, despite her lack of a body. She becomes irritated and impatient at
Steve’s cheekiness, and also displays a sense of humour. Presumably her
personality – just like her gender – is the same as when she had a body.
Garth Nix’s series about the Old Kingdom (1995-2016) features some
disembodied characters but – in contrast to the Sybil – they never had a body
to begin with. Some, like Mogget and the Disreputable Dog, occupy a physical
form temporarily, so it is not really representative of their real selves. Mogget
has been bound in the form of a cat, which limits his powers and keeps him
subservient to the Abhorsen. In both Sabriel (1995) and Abhorsen (2004)
Mogget is released into his true form, which is both malleable and immensely
powerful. When this happens in Sabriel, he is still referred to as Mogget, using
the pronoun “he”, but in Abhorsen, Mogget’s true name is revealed to be Yrael
and he is referred to in the narrative as “it”, so it seems that freeing the creature
from its body also frees it from its perceived gender.
Like Mogget, the Disreputable Dog is a powerful, ageless creature from the
Beginning. She has been given a physical form but, in her case, it was with her
agreement. She appears to come into being when Lirael uses magic to create a
dog companion for herself to ease her loneliness but, as it turns out, the spirit
inhabiting the dog body that Lirael makes is that of an ancient being. Unlike
Mogget, the Dog is benign in either form, and she chooses to become Lirael’s
friend and companion.
Both Mogget and the Dog take on characteristics of the physical forms they
inhabit: Mogget is lazy and loves fish, while the Dog is playful and loyal. Since
Yrael does not appear to have a gender, it is likely that Mogget’s and the Dog’s
genders (male and female, respectively) are also characteristics that they have
picked up from being in the bodies that were made for them. It is also possible
that the Dog chooses to appear female so as to match Lirael’s gender.34
The evil force to be defeated in Abhorsen is Orannis the Destroyer, an
ancient creature from the beginning, like Mogget and the Dog. Unlike them,
though, Orannis has never had a body, and is always referred to as “It”, with a
capital “I”. Its lack of gender serves to make it seem less human and thus more

34 This actually happens in Diana Wynne Jones’s House of Many Ways (2008a), in which the
magical dog Waif changes its sex to match Charmain’s, when formerly it had been male
while it was living with her uncle.
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monstrous, though it is unclear why Orannis’s pronoun has a capital letter,
when the same is not used for Yrael or other creatures from the Beginning. This
capitalisation appears to have some resonance with the use of capitalised
pronouns for the God of religions like Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, but
Orannis is never referred to as a god or as a creator, and has equal standing
with the other creatures from the Beginning.
The fourth creature from the Beginning encountered in the series is
Astarael, who appears in the form of a spindly woman. This is only a
manifestation, however, and not an actual body, although there are indications
that she might have had a body at some point, which may be the reason why
she is always referred to as “she”.
Most of the “sendings” – servants created by magic – are also “of
indeterminate sex” (1995, p. 88). Many of them wear clothes that hide their
features, though it is likely that they only have the features that they need to
fulfil their tasks and so lack faces and sexual characteristics. However, Sabriel
encounters one whom she first mistakes for a strange man, who turns out to be
a Charter-ghost whose “face wouldn’t stay fixed, migrating between scores of
possibilities. Some were women, some were men – but all bore tough,
competent visages” (1995, pp. 83-84). As the sendings have bodies made of
Charter magic rather than of flesh and blood, they do not need to be sexually
differentiated, but unlike the Dog, whose body is also made of magic, they do
not seem to have a sense of themselves, so they have neither a sex nor a
gender.
Ultimately, gender seems to be defined by physical characteristics in this
series, even after the soul is removed from the physical body. Therefore, the
ever-disembodied Orannis is the only truly genderless character, but as it is a
force of evil rather than a person, this is not a particularly positive
representation of genderlessness.
Another plot point that bears mentioning involves Lirael’s boat, Finder.
While this craft does not talk, it is clearly gendered as female, following the
widespread tradition of referring to boats using feminine pronouns. Moreover,
she clearly has a mind of her own, and so could be said to be a character in her
own right. She is benevolent, helpful, and clever. Just like the Disreputable
Dog’s gender, the boat’s femaleness aligns well with Lirael’s own, giving them a
more egalitarian relationship, like friends or sisters, rather than the rather
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patriarchal one of a male sailor commanding a female boat. It is not surprising
then, when Lirael has to leave the boat behind at the end of her journey, that
she “kissed Finder’s figurehead on the cheek and pushed the boat off the jetty.
She thought she saw the carved face of the woman wink, and her lips curve up
in a smile” (2001, p. 502, italics in the original). The figurehead of a woman
seems to represent Finder’s feminine personality, and possibly her soul. While
this figurehead resembles a human body, it is, of course, made of wood rather
than borne of flesh and blood, and so is not subject to the same gendered
expectations as a real woman. Still, it is likely that she would appear less
markedly female without the figurehead, so even in this instance gender is
linked with a body, albeit in a slightly unusual way.
Overall, while modern texts often play with gender markers by destabilising
the body – either by transforming it or by featuring characters that do not have
a physical body – for the most part a character’s gender is still portrayed as
being dependent on a body in one way or another. This implies that people’s
genders are mostly defined by the body they inhabit, which is a troubling notion
that excludes the existence of transgender and non-binary people entirely.
There are only two non-binary characters I have found within my sample of
texts, and neither of them invites identification with readers: the gender-fluid
Loki, who is mocked, and the agender Orannis, who is a force of evil. However,
texts such as The Ogre of Oglefort show that transformations can provide an
escape from gender roles, showing that leaving thoughts of one’s body behind
is not necessarily a bad thing, and that people should be allowed to define
themselves in their own terms.
The only way to escape gender fully in these texts appears to be by being
without a body, as Yrael and Orannis demonstrate. This leads me to an
interesting theme that I have found in several of my primary texts, namely the
effect of death on gender identity.

Ghosts and Other Undead

The “Old Kingdom” series, Coraline and Lauren Oliver’s Liesl & Po (2011) all
feature dead characters who cannot remember what gender they used to be
when they were alive. In these stories, it is implied that the characters are
losing their humanity, although for different reasons and with differing effects.
These depictions are different from those of Mogget and the Disreputable Dog,
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for example, as they show beings who were once accustomed to having a body
now navigating their existence as a soul without a body (or – in the case of
some of the undead in Sabriel – a body without a soul), rather than bodiless
entities who end up tied to a physical form to which they adjust.
Liesl & Po shows most clearly how death removes certainties, and that
everything in the world of spirits is more vague and ambiguous. When Liesl first
meets the ghost Po, she asks it: “Are you a boy a girl?” The following
conversation ensues:

“Neither,” the ghost replied.

Liesl was startled. “You have to be one or the other.”
“I don’t have to be anything,” the ghost replied,
sounding irritated. “I am what I am and that’s all. Things
are different on the Other Side, you know. Things are...
blurrier.”
“But what did you used to be?” Liesl pressed. “You
know... before?” (Oliver, 2011, p. 6, italics and ellipses in
the original)

After some thought, Po replies: “I don’t remember” (p. 6). Po also introduces its
pet, Bundle. Just as Po is neither a boy nor a girl, Bundle is neither a dog nor a
cat, but something in-between. This state of liminality is not portrayed as being
good or bad, but simply as something that just is. It does not seem to make the
ghosts sad to have lost memories of their former lives, but it does not make
them happy either. This is made clear in a later scene when Liesl is already
used to Po’s and Bundle’s liminality, but her new friend, Will, still questions it:

He had noticed... that the girl called Po “it,” and he

wondered about that. “Isn’t Po a boy or a girl?”
“Neither. And both. Those things lose meaning on the
Other Side. Just like Bundle is both a dog and a cat, and
also neither.”
Will found it all very strange. “But they must have been
one or the other at some time. When they were, um, on
this side?”
“Oh, yes, I suppose so.” The girl seemed
unconcerned. “But they can hardly be expected to
remember. They’ve been on the Other Side for a very long
time. So now they are just Bundle and Po, and my
friends.” (Oliver, 2011, p. 190)

Sadly, the text does not allow the world of the living the same liminality. There a
boy is a boy, a girl is a girl, a dog is a dog, a cat is a cat, and there is nothing in-

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between. Again, this is not presented as being better or worse than the Other
Side – simply different.
For most of the text Po is referred to as “it”, although the author slips up a
couple of times and calls it “he”. However, this could be because Po is talking
about what little it remembers from the time when it was still alive. At the end of
the story Po remembers that it used to be a boy called Peter, at which point his
identity seems to solidify, and he becomes, once more, Peter rather than the
ambiguous Po. He no longer appears to Liesl as a shadowy form, but as a child
with “tan brown arms and shoulders, and a ring of curly yellow hair, and a
laughing smile” (p. 296). Similarly, Bundle “turned into a small, bounding, yellow
mass of fur. A dog” (p. 296). Peter thanks Liesl for helping him regain his
identity, so this is portrayed as a good thing, although he fades away shortly
after it happens, so it is not shown how this is going to affect his existence on
the Other Side. Most likely he will lose himself again over time and become a
genderless shade once more.
The ghost children in Coraline have lost their identities as well but, in this
case, it is not portrayed as a natural aspect of death, but rather a consequence
of having their souls trapped by the other mother. When Coraline asks the
ghost children who they are, one of them replies: “Names, names, names... .
The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating
of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names” (Gaiman, 2002, p.
98). She also asks one of them:

“Are you a girl? ...Or a boy?”

There was a pause. “When I was small I wore skirts
and my hair was long and curled,” it said doubtfully. “But
now that you ask, it does seem to me that one day they
took my skirts and gave me britches and cut my hair.”
“Tain’t something we give a mind to,” said the first of
the voices.
“A boy, perhaps, then,” continued the one whose hand
she was holding. “I believe I was once a boy.” (2002, p.
99)

These children remember more about their lives than Po does, but what they
remember seems to be mostly what struck them as beautiful or interesting,
rather than what others might see as the things that define them as people,
such as their names and assigned genders. Thus one of the ghosts remembers
the clothes that it used to wear, but not the meaning that adults placed on those
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clothes. This is further underlined by the fact that this child wore both skirts and
breeches in its lifetime, as it comes from a time when infants were considered
genderless and were dressed in skirts.
When Coraline finds the children’s souls, it awakens their memories: “A
voice whispered in her mind, ‘Indeed, lady, it comes to me that I certainly was a
boy, now I do think on it’” (p. 116, italics in the original). When she first meets
them, the children are described as “three shapes, each as faint and pale as a
moon in the daytime sky” (p. 99), so they seem to be just as vague and
formless as Po when it first meets Liesl. Near the end of the story, after
Coraline has freed their souls, she has a dream about the three ghost children
in which they appear to her in what are presumably the forms they had when
they were alive (although one of them seems to have angel wings). Here, they
are confidently described as a boy and two girls, with all ambiguities removed,
just as they are in Liesl & Po when Po remembers who he was. This happens
because their souls are once more their own and not the other mother’s, and
the implication is that they can now move on to heaven as themselves, rather
than the mournful, soulless spectres Coraline first encountered in the other
mother’s realm. On the one hand, this shows that the children’s genders are
part of their soul and part of what makes them human, but on the other hand,
since they forgot their genders so easily, it seems that they are less important
than the memories of people the children cared about and things they found
beautiful.
Similarly to Po and the ghost children, spirits who appear in the “Old
Kingdom” books are shadowy and androgynous. For example, when Sabriel
has her first menstruation, she summons a spirit advisor to answer her
questions about things she does not learn at school. This spirit advisor is as
formless as any other ghost, but Sabriel suspects it to be her departed mother,
and its knowledge about menstruation and similar bodily functions at least
implies that it once had a uterus when it was alive. This and other similar
beings are natural and not to be feared. As their speech is usually limited, it is
unclear how much they remember about their mortal lives and whether their
personalities are as shadowy and ambiguous as their forms.
As the series is concerned with necromancy, there are other undead beings
that are not natural, but were created through dark magic. One such being is
Thralk, who preys and feeds on the living. Thralk is not the creature’s birth
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name, but it chose it because it is a “simple name, not too difficult for a partially
decomposed mouth to voice. A male name. Thralk could not remember what its
original sex had been, those centuries before, but its new body was male” (Nix,
1995, p. 70). As Thralk is always referred to as “it”, even while inhabiting a male
body, it is clear that it never identifies with its current physical form the way
Mogget, for example, does. As in Liesl & Po and Coraline, the implication is that
Thralk has lost its humanity, more so than Po or the ghost children, as they at
least retain some vague memories of their human lives and are capable of
human emotions and relationships. Thralk’s loss of humanity is not natural, like
Po’s, but sinister and dangerous. While the ghost children losing their names
and genders makes them sad and hollow, Thralk is turned into a monster with
no conscience and no regard for living beings.
Jones’s The Time of the Ghost (1981) approaches the subject of ghosts
and gender differently from the other three texts discussed in this section. This
story introduces a ghost who does not remember who she is. At first she
remembers nothing at all, but as she haunts her old home, some of her
memories gradually return, and she realises that she is one of four sisters,
though she is not sure which one. Even when she remembers nothing about
her identity, she seems to be certain of her gender. The text never refers to her
as anything other than “she”, and does not even pause to question whether she
is, in fact, a she. When the ghost slips through the walls of a classroom at the
boys’ school that her parents run, she feels uncomfortable and slightly
dreamlike because she knows she is intruding on a male space. This happens
before she encounters anyone she knows from her life, so she does not yet
understand where she belongs, but she is sure that she does not belong in this
classroom full of boys with “not a girl in the room” (p. 13). Unlike the ghosts in
Coraline, this ghost’s gender is the last thing to leave her memory, rather than
one of the first. It bears mentioning, however, that this ghost is not actually
dead, but simply in a coma, so while she is currently away from her body, she
retains more of a connection to it than the other ghosts I have discussed.
However, even when she is returned to her body, her memories are still patchy
and unclear, so it seems unlikely that the existence of her functioning body is
the reason why her gender identity stays intact. Rather, her gender appears to
be independent of her body and even her memories of herself. At one point she
does, however, encounter an entity that has been disembodied for far longer
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than she has. Like herself at the start of the story, it does not remember its life,
but unlike her, its gender identity seems to be lost as well, and so it is
consistently referred to as “it”.
In all of these stories, gender identity is portrayed as an important part of
being human and is tied into people’s sense of themselves, rather than simply
their bodies or social roles. Unfortunately, none of the texts allow living people
an identity outside the gender binary. Thus, it seems as though the living have
to be male or female, whereas the dead can be anything at all. This makes it
difficult for people who have a gender, but not one that fits within the strict
male-female dichotomy, to identify with either the living or the dead characters.
Still, these depictions transcend gender norms, albeit imperfectly, and so they
do raise questions about what it means to be a man, a woman, a boy, a girl, or
even just a person in general, as most of the characters mentioned are still
people, despite being dead and not quite human anymore.

Conclusion
In this chapter I have explored the way characters are shown transcending the
gender binary using various strategies. Cross-dressing and transformations
prove to be liberating experiences in these texts, which help the characters
escape gendered expectations and learn more about their own identities. I also
explored genderless beings, as well as ghosts and other undead characters
who have lost their gender identity. All these various groups show that gender is
more complex than a simple distinction between different types of genitalia.
However, most of these transgressions are impermanent and none of them are
perfect. As Kerry Mallan writes:

Subversion, as a strategy for destabilising gender, is one

that often fails in children’s literature and film. The
examples of gender-switching through cross-dressing... or
transformations of the sexed body..., or in drag
performance... can be seen as failed performances as
their narrative closures of reinstatement of gender norms
reinforce existing gender binarisms and sexual hierarchies
within a heterosexual and heteronormative framework... .
(2009, p. 16)

For the most part, this is true of my primary texts as well. Characters who
transcend gender distinctions tend to return to their place within the gender

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binary at the end of their story: Alanna goes back to being a girl once she no
longer needs to hide her gender, and Po remembers that he is a boy and
becomes Peter once more. There are no characters who are seen to identify
with a different gender than their body or their society dictates. Even when
characters do not have a body any more, their gender identity tends to be
linked to the body they once had. Thus, all these texts have a cissexist bias.
Alanna: The First Adventure shows this bias most clearly by having a character
assert: “You’re a female, child, no matter what clothing you wear. You must
become accustomed to that” (1983, p. 174). Statements like this can be
potentially harmful to transgender readers. By explicitly making these
connections and bringing in a transgender perspective, I have attempted to
show the limitations of a purely cisgender analysis.
But while the texts rarely free their characters completely from the
divisiveness of gender, they do play with gender expectations and so suggest
that the binary can be crossed, if only for a short time. Through the use of
cross-dressing and transformation, these texts also assert that gender identity
and gender performance are separable as concepts.
Several characters who were (presumably) assigned a female gender at
birth (Alanna, Meggie’s mother, Red, Norith, and Cousin Vivian) are seen
experimenting with masculinity, but they are all white and thin, suggesting that
androgyny or gender fluidity are only valid in people of a single race or body
type. This is a prejudice that non-binary people of size and colour frequently
face, even though non-binary identities are a part of several non-white cultures
(such as various Native American and Aboriginal Australian tribes). There is
also an unfortunate lack of characters who are assigned male seen
experimenting with femininity in wholesome ways. Thom dresses as a girl for a
short time, but the idea of him performing a feminine role for a longer period is
seen as ludicrous. Eldritch stays in female disguise longer, but he is portrayed
as deceitful and villainous. Even Loki, the most fluid of the characters, is
embarrassed by his foray into femaleness in Gaiman’s version of the story. The
only male character described as feminine appears to be a sexual predator. For
the most part, characters assigned male at birth are only permitted to transcend
their designated gender by losing their gender identity completely, the way
some of the ghost characters do. Transgender girls and gender non-conforming
boys are thus left without positive role models, and their gender identity is
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mocked and demonised, as is distressingly common in popular culture.
For all their limitations, the novels raise important questions about gender
and the way it can be deconstructed by each individual. These questions are
necessary to establish a society that is more welcoming of transgender people.

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 Conclusion
The answer to the popularity of books which seem out of
keeping with modern standards about gender and race is
to ensure that they have an audience of informed young
readers, rather than discouraging children from reading
them at all. (Pinsent, 1997, p. 12)

The purpose of this study has been to compare modern children’s fantasy
literature with older texts from an intersectional feminist standpoint. My concern
has been to consider the extent to which patriarchal values structure these
original tales and how contemporary children’s fantasy texts have addressed
this legacy. To do this I have looked at several themes and subjects from these
texts; namely, heroism, beauty, magic, and gender expression.
In the Literature Review, I discussed intersectional theory, which was an
approach advanced by black feminists to make sense of the fact that they were
often excluded from mainstream white feminism, as well as from the male-
dominated Civil Rights Movement. Today the term is used to encompass all the
different axes of oppression, exploring how these intersect to create different
life experiences for different people. As all oppressions are part of a single
system that is designed to maintain the power of an elite group of rich, white,
able-bodied, heterosexual men, it is vital that this “divide and rule” tactic,
whereby each oppressed group pursues its own insular concerns, is
challenged, which is what intersectional theory aims to do: to make clear the
commonalities of oppression and discern their overarching source in patriarchy.
This is where, I am convinced, intersectional theory can help children’s
literature scholars develop a more persuasive and comprehensive
understanding of young people’s fantasy literature than is currently provided by
readings that concentrate simply on one facet of this oppression – isolating
feminism, or race, or indeed class, sexuality, disability, fatness, and so on.
I also defined fantasy fiction as fiction involving mythical creatures and
magic. I used this definition as a guide when choosing my primary texts, even
when the magic in them was not specifically referred to in these terms, as is the
case with Shannon Hale’s books, which instead talk of “nature-speaking”,
“quarry-speak”, and “healing songs”. While I disagree with scholars who claim
that fantasy fiction is inherently conservative, I do concur with them that
medievalist fantasy easily runs the risk of replicating prejudices from the past.
As I have argued throughout, even when authors try to subvert one oppressive
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element of a medieval society, they tend to ignore intersecting axes of
oppression. For example, girls who successfully oppose patriarchy – such as
Alanna in The Song of the Lioness by Tamora Pierce – are invariably wealthy,
white, and able-bodied, and often deny opportunities to girls who are less
privileged.
Before considering my sample of contemporary fantasy stories in more
detail, though, I briefly discussed their main source material: traditional fairy
tales. In particular, I traced some of the history of their editing and censorship,
which often involved the erasure of matriarchal elements and their replacement
with narratives in which heroines are silenced and isolated.
Such patriarchal issues were then examined in detail as they emerged in
my corpus of texts. These substantive chapters began with one entitled “Heroes
and Heroines”. Here, I discovered that violence is still a common form of
heroism in modern children’s texts, though it is treated in two different ways:
sometimes portrayed as honourable and sometimes as an unfortunate, but
unavoidable, last resort. The most patriarchal of the texts discussed in this
chapter is Charlie Fletcher’s “Stone Heart” trilogy, which glorifies warfare and
makes power and leadership seem more legitimate when it comes from a male
source. The enemies in this series are allowed little subjectivity, which erases
any need for a discussion of whether destroying them is ethical. This can lead
to the type of binaristic worldview that can justify wars and other atrocities. As
most of the villains in Garth Nix’s “Old Kingdom” books are evil entities or
mindless zombies, this series can be seen to have similar problems, although
the human villains in Nix’s texts are, at least, more nuanced in their depiction.
For instance, Chlorr of the Mask, one of the villains in Lirael: Daughter of the
Clayr, is actually given a sympathetic backstory in the prequel Clariel (2014).
The Ogre of Oglefort by Eva Ibbotson, and Shannon Hale’s The Book of a
Thousand Days and the “Princess Academy” series were seen to propose a
different type of heroism, one in which war and conflict are averted rather than
won. As a result of this shift in values, friendship and cooperation, often
between very different characters is emphasised, with a particular stress on the
strength and beauty of female solidarity. Another consequence of this shift is
that class differences are seen as anathema. Princess Academy: Palace of
Stone is most explicit in this, intricately showing how the class system exploits
the most vulnerable members of society. However, the heroines manage to
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change things for the better by securing rights for the common people, without
losing the friendship between the princess and a common quarry girl.
While The Book of a Thousand Days was also seen to be ground-breaking
in that it featured two Asian girls that rebelled against class prejudice and
sexism, thereby subverting cultural expectations that Asian women are demure
and submissive, it is unfortunate that, as the author has noted, this book has
proven to be less popular than her works featuring white protagonists. Hale’s
work, then, provides a good example of the intricacies of oppression, and
shows how this can extend beyond the texts themselves; for, though this book
championed feminism and opposed both class prejudice and white privilege,
readers found themselves less able to accept such colour blindness, thereby
revealing that a tacit racism still operates in Western society. Once again, this is
where an intersectional approach can prove more subtle and revealing.
In this chapter I also looked at a few heroines who do not realise their
potential as feminist characters. For, even when they are the ones engaging in
the main action, their character arcs still rely heavily on the males around them.
These included Maewen from The Crown of Dalemark and Polly from Fire and
Hemlock, both written by Diana Wynne Jones. Each of these novels also gives
a strange, and possibly paedophilic, view of romantic relationships. Maewen
pursues a romance with her own ancestor, while Polly’s love interest is a
manipulative child-groomer, ten years her senior. Within the respective
narratives, each of these relationships is regarded as being positive, whereas,
as I have argued, there are clearly problems with such inequalities in power,
especially given its patriarchal basis. Even in stories with strong female
protagonists, these characters are often paired with older men who patronise
them. Presumably, these pairings are meant to show that the female characters
are mature and sexually liberated beyond their years, but, in reality, they simply
reaffirm the prevailing patriarchal view that it is natural for men to have more
power within sexual relationships than the women they are with. Men who
actively seek out relationships with much younger women or teenage girls
enjoy the feeling of having authority over their sexual partners, so depicting
women in such relationships as being empowered and liberated results in a
shallow definition of feminist agency that ignores how gender intersects with
age. The fact that unequal and abusive heterosexual relationships are
considered appropriate subject matter for children’s literature, while loving
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homosexual relationships are not, also reveals the way queer people have
been pushed to the margins by heteronormative society. Finally, it is worth
noting that romances in traditional fairy tales have also often been blithely
paedophilic. Both Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood are sexualised by the
narrative, despite being children, so this is another misogynistic aspect of fairy
tales that is commonly repeated in modern texts.
Thus, while I concluded that modern heroines are usually more active than
women in fairy tales, it is still the case that too many stories depend on limiting
the character arcs of their female characters, as well as on elitist definitions of
heroism.
In the next chapter, called “Beauty”, I explored some of the racist, ableist,
and ethnocentric standards surrounding the concept of beauty. I discovered
that characters of colour are far rarer than white characters, but even in texts
that do feature people of colour, they are rarely described as being beautiful or
handsome. There are some exceptions, of course, including Khan Tegus from
The Book of a Thousand Days. Khan Tegus is notable because, within Western
media, Asian men are normally seen as effeminate and unattractive, whereas
he is depicted as being handsome and desirable. Dashti from the same book
considers herself to be plain, which might be a result of her internalised class
bias, as she feels that it is not a peasant’s place to be pretty. However, the fact
that she is an Asian woman who is allowed to be average, rather than being
depicted as an exotic beauty, is also subversive.
Like many previous researchers, I have found that while men are more
likely to be described in neutral terms, women are more commonly defined by
whether they are beautiful or not. Some of the stories attempt to subvert
expectations by putting ugly women in heroic roles (such as Violante in Inkspell
and Inkdeath by Cornelia Funke) and beautiful women in villainous ones (such
as Morwenna in The 13 Treasures by Michelle Harrison), but most of these
texts still seem to assume that beauty has universal and objective criteria, and
that these are particularly important in female characterisation. When authors
try to subvert stereotypes by presenting plain women as heroines, they often
show an antagonism between women who seek to follow society’s beauty
standards and those who do not. Thus, the aunts in Eva Ibbotson’s Monster
Mission mock their sister for shaving her legs, and Jennifer Strange in Jasper
Fforde’s The Song of the Quarkbeast is irritated by Samantha Blix’s beauty.
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Rather than empowering women who consider themselves ugly, this tactic
simply upholds patriarchy’s “divide and conquer” strategy to foster animosity
between women.
In my primary texts I particularly noted instances of fat-shaming, which are
surprisingly common. When villainous characters are fat (such as Mrs Trottle in
Ibbotson’s The Secret of Platform 13, Sybil in Jones’s The Merlin Conspiracy,
and Augusta in Lauren Oliver’s Liesl & Po), their size is presented as a reason
to be repulsed by them, though there is usually a repulsive personality as well,
to justify our reaction. Even likeable fat characters tend to be mocked, as is the
case with Biffa in The Crown of Dalemark. Sometimes fatness is depicted in a
positive manner, as is the case with a few older, motherly women, but there are
hardly any fat, young heroines. The only fat protagonist in my primary texts is
Nan from Jones’s Witch Week. While the narrative sympathises with Nan, she
proves to be the exception, as another fat girl in the novel is mocked at one
point for her size. I explained how fat-shaming is not only sexist, but also has
racist and ableist undertones, as the body type considered ideal is a European
one, arbitrarily accepted to be the paragon of health. When society treats fat
people as though they are intrinsically of lesser worth because they are
ostensibly not as healthy as thin people, this indicates that disabled and
chronically ill people do not deserve the same rights as able-bodied people. As
it can be difficult for disabled people to exercise and have access to healthy
food, there is also some overlap between conditions of disability and fatness.
In the chapter called “Magic and Empowerment”, I explored different types
of female magic and showed how it is viewed differently from male magic. I
acknowledged some cultural differences in this because, while witchcraft has
traditionally been seen in negative terms in Europe, many African cultures
revere witches and wise women. I also made a link between the archetypal
image of the witch and anti-Semitic depictions of Jewish women. Thus,
portrayals of witches that are meant to be empowering to gentile girls can
instead serve as a painful reminder to Jewish girls of an anti-Semitic history.
In the chapter comparing witchcraft with wizardry, I examined texts in which
magic appears to be gendered. It was good to see that all of them go beyond
the traditional associations of male magic with culture and learning, and female
magic, in contrast, with nature and instinct. Rather, these works stress the
importance of sharing power and not restricting people to narrow gender roles.
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However, the fact that all the powerful characters are white and middle-class
lessens the feminist impact of the message, as it makes magic seem limited to
one race and class, even if it is not limited to one gender. A more diverse cast
would have made the feminism espoused in these works more inclusive to
readers on the margins of society. Featuring a disabled woman in The Merlin
Conspiracy, a person with great magic powers, comes nearest to achieving
this. However, she only has a supporting role. Just as fat women can
sometimes appear as sympathetic mother figures, but rarely as heroines, so it
appears to be the same with disabled women.
I found magic connected with vision and magic connected with words to be
two common forms of female magic. I explored how, when these types of magic
are used by women, they reverse patriarchal power relations. Normally men are
placed in the subject position, with the agency to look at women, who are
placed in the object position; however, women with second sight can return that
look and see things that are normally hidden. Similarly, men are commonly the
ones who control language and determine how it should be used. But women
who use word magic can reclaim that power and use it to rewrite their own
stories. Of course, both of these powers depend on physical ability, whether it is
the ability to see or to talk (although in most stories about word magic, the
power is still there when the words are written down), which can potentially be
alienating to disabled people. This is another instance where intersectional
theory can give us a more encompassing interpretation of the power relations
operating in texts.
In examining the portrayal of second sight within The 13 Treasures, I
discussed a Roma character called Morag, who is the only character whose
powers are directly linked to her race. In some ways, Morag is a stereotype of
Romani people, who are often portrayed as sorcerers and fortune-tellers.
However, these depictions are often negative as Romani are still commonly
considered to be strange and untrustworthy, whereas Morag is kind, wise, and
does ordinary things like solving crossword puzzles. Despite these qualities,
her status as a racial and social outsider earns her the demeaning nickname
“Mad Morag”, which led me to discuss how women who do not conform to
certain societal standards are often labelled insane. I found it particularly
interesting that the protagonist’s friend, Fabian, shows sympathy towards
women who have been institutionalised for sexist reasons in the past, but does
201
not realise that he is perpetuating the same sort of behaviour by calling Morag
mad, which suggests that he has double-standards about his sexism and
ableism. His views on mental illness thereby mirror the orthodoxy of an ableist
society, in that most narratives about women who are mistreated in mental
institutions feature women without mental disorders. The implication is that this
type of abuse is only cruel and inhumane when it is inflicted against healthy
people, whereas it may possibly be justified in the treatment of mental illness.
Thus mentally ill women are marginalised even within stories about their own
oppression.
Finally, in the last chapter, called “Outside the Gender Binary”, I provided a
transgender perspective on issues of gender identity and gender performance,
again showing how patriarchal control operates in ways often neglected. I found
that it is common for characters to transcend the gender binary for a short time,
but only to be returned to their own place after this brief period of liberation. In
the section on cross-dressing, I demonstrated that female characters often find
the adoption of a male role liberating and empowering, whereas the thought of
male characters taking on a female role is usually treated as a joke. This is
disheartening for transgender girls, who have few role models, and are often
mocked and bullied for transgressing gender norms. The instances of female-
to-male cross-dressing are also somewhat limited, as they all feature thin, able-
bodied, white girls. Cross-dressing narratives can provide an outlet for children
who are questioning their gender identity, but only if they are more inclusive,
not only around issues of body size, skin colour, and ability, but also around
matters of sexuality, as such narratives habitually exclude members of the
queer community. Queer people come in all sizes and colours, yet the
movement is mainly represented by wealthy, conventionally attractive, white
people, whose needs are seen as the main goals of gay liberation. Transgender
women of colour, who are the most vulnerable members of the queer
community (Avery, 2017), therefore continue to find their struggles ignored.
When discussing transformations, I found that being turned into an animal
is often seen to be a liberating experience for characters who feel trapped
within their gender roles. In The Ogre of Oglefort, being in animal form is a
happy outcome for many vulnerable adults rather than a punishment for a
beautiful princess, as is often the case in traditional fairy tales. I also looked at
the depictions of bodiless entities within the “Old Kingdom” series, most of
202
which appear to have no fixed gender. The same is true for most of the ghost
characters I discuss. They do not remember what gender they are, suggesting
that they have lost part of their humanity. The only exception is the ghost from
Jones’s The Time of the Ghost, who remembers little else about her life, but is
sure from the beginning that she was female.
Despite these interesting subversions, overall, the texts tend to link gender
with the body, and there appear to be no characters whose gender is
completely at odds with their biology. The only characters whose gender lies
completely outside the gender binary are the following: the genderless beings
in the Old Kingdom, who have no body, the ghosts, who no longer have a body,
and Loki, who can change his body to that of a mare. Thus the narratives leave
little room for transgender and non-binary people. However, they do ask
questions about what gender means and why it is performed in certain ways
rather than others.

In this thesis I have tried to demonstrate that an intersectional approach gives a

fuller view of the way sexist tropes are constructed, both in traditional fairy tales
and in modern fantasy literature. Intersectional feminism examines and
questions the ways in which the status quo favours the powerful in society and
how this viewpoint is reflected in the stories we tell. A feminist approach that
takes only the experiences of rich, white, able-bodied women into consideration
is often insufficient in such examinations. For example, it is only through
intersectionality that we can fully understand the way Western beauty
standards are constructed to elevate whiteness, able-bodiedness, and gender
conformity, while demonising anyone who falls outside of this norm. This is why
modern fantasy texts that attempt to subvert fairy tale tropes that centre around
beauty standards fall short of their intended feminist goal unless the question is
asked: why do such standards exist in the first place? Even when these texts
turn beauty standards on their head, by claiming that traditional beauty is ugly
and vice versa, they still end up branding someone as ugly, rather than
celebrating diversity.
As indicated in the quotation at the start of this chapter, when encountering
problematic elements in popular children’s fiction, the solution is not to censor
or ignore them, but to give children the tools to think for themselves and
question the media they encounter. As Pat Pinsent writes:
203
 We need to help children appreciate the fictional nature of
literature, so that they don’t believe everything which is
presented to them. They need to be aware that an author,
with a full range of normal human prejudices, has written
the book, that a publisher has decided it is economically
worth publishing and a bookseller that it is worth selling.
(1997, p. 142)

She also acknowledges that “there are very few totally ‘safe’ books” (p. 142),
which means that it is impossible to shield children from all problematic content.
Being a consumer of media while also being a feminist means being willing to
criticise certain elements of the works that we otherwise enjoy.
As I have shown, modern texts are certainly better than most earlier
collections of fairy tales in presenting strong and active female characters.
However, these characters are usually privileged in many other ways, too. Most
contemporary heroines are white, able-bodied, and conventionally attractive.
They are also, predominantly, middle-class, though there are several working-
class characters whose struggles are directly linked to their poverty. People of
colour and disabled people rarely appear in the texts I have examined, and
when they do, they are usually supporting characters, though there are some
exceptions (namely Fabio from Monster Mission, Tanya from the “Thirteen”
series, Dashti from The Book of a Thousand Days, and Abdullah from Castle in
the Air). The existence of transgender and queer people is not even
acknowledged. While it is rewarding to see so many strong female characters,
the texts would be even more inclusive and empowering if they featured more
diverse heroines. For white, able-bodied, cisgender girls see themselves
represented in stories every day, but girls of colour, disabled girls, and
transgender girls have far fewer positive representations, particularly if they
happen to belong to more than one marginalised group.
Fantasy literature has the potential to be truly radical as it has the freedom
to present worlds that are not bound by the power structures that operate in the
real world. Rather than being circumscribed by these prejudices, then, fantasy
authors could create visions of society that are truly diverse, including the
experiences of those who are normally invisible. My thesis has demonstrated
that this potential is currently not being realised. That is why I have argued for a
more inclusive, intersectional approach which, in turn, should result in a more
progressive and inclusive literature. Current approaches that focus on only one

204
issue at a time will continually fail to see many of the intricacies of patriarchal
power structures and how they intersect, affecting all areas of life. It is on this
basis that I have championed this more nuanced approach, which I consider a
valuable contribution to knowledge in the way that it allows the children’s
literature critic to engage more holistically, productively, and often adversarially
with the subject matter; in this case, with contemporary children’s fantasy
literature.
The goal of intersectional feminism is to dismantle oppressive power
structures and create a society that upholds the rights of all women, men, and
non-binary people. This requires cooperation between the different minority
groups, making them see that, collectively, they constitute a majority. Therefore,
the texts that I have praised the most in this thesis are the ones that develop
themes of friendship and solidarity, particularly between girls. As Stephanie
Hodgson-Wright states: “One of the crucial features in feminist activity is that
women come together as women in order to provide mutual support against
patriarchal oppression” (2001, p. 12). Similarly, Audre Lorde writes: “For
women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but
redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered.
It is this real connection which is so feared by the patriarchal world” (1984, p.
111). Friendship and solidarity have always been regarded as core elements of
mainstream feminism, but discourses of difference have tended to erode that
solidarity, and thus feminist spaces are not always open to women of colour or
working-class women or transgender women. Of course, solidarity is not the
same as similarity. There is no single unifying experience of womanhood, so
differences between women should be celebrated rather than ignored.
Intersectionality, as a discourse of difference, is needed to challenge the
“essentialism” of patriarchy, which flourishes by promoting hierarchies and
asserting fixed identities. The greatest challenge to its power structure is to
unite across the divides. Potentially, fantasy literature would seem the obvious
vehicle for proffering alternative futures because it can rewrite existing
antagonisms. Thus, rather than antagonising one another and upholding racist,
ableist, homophobic, or transphobic power structures, women should work
together to celebrate womanhood in all its myriad forms and create a world in
which girls and, indeed, boys can grow up in safety and have their choices
respected. This is the kind of world that I want to see represented in feminist
205
fiction, including fiction aimed at children.

206
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