Boys in Children's Literature and Popular Culture: Masculinity, Abjection, and the Fictional Child (review)

Boys in Children's Literature and Popular Culture makes an important claim for those who study children's books: "There is a wide gap between what . . . scholars think boys should be reading and the texts they actually are reading" (15; emphasis in original). To focus critical attention onto the books that boys prefer, Annette Wannamaker explores Tarzan stories, the Captain Underpants series, Dragon Ball Z anime, and other works slighted by academics and criticized by educators and parents for their lack of literary value or low humor. Yet it is this subversive "grossness," Wannamaker argues, that attracts boys, many of whom have little interest in stories that adults believe will have an uplifting effect on their young readers. And she articulates what may be the real reason some adults are concerned: it is not the vulgar content but the attacks on their authority that they find offensive.

Wannamaker's introduction is an in-depth examination of recent discussions of literacy—what boys read and why—and it suggests that her study will take into account boys' preferences and interpretive strategies. As she reminds us, boys can be active and resistant readers whose diverse interests frequently clash with those of adults, an idea that she applies to good effect in a chapter on Louis Sachar's Holes. Yet in the first chapter, which examines Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan novels and Tarzan as an icon, she does not approach the narratives as a boy might but rather in a way familiar to academics; she exposes the novels' endorsement of "hegemonic masculinity," white superiority, American imperialism, xenophobia, and misogynistic chivalry (39). She provides significant evidence for these claims but does not consider the possibility that a boy could resist this kind of reading; he could value one of the many kinds of Tarzan stories she talks about—novels, movies, TV shows, comics—for an aspect of the narrative overlooked or criticized by scholars, educators, and parents.

Tarzan comics, for example, some of which are based on the original novels, portray a different type of masculinity than the kind Wannamaker sees as essential to Tarzan. In a Gold Key issue from the 1960s, Tarzan befriends a Muslim, saves animals from a white hunter (a frequent enemy in the comics), chastises white men who treat natives in a way that is not "sensitive" (Tarzan's word), and protects the jungle's treasure and resources from those who, like the imperialist nations they represent, are guided only by self-interest. These kinds of actions are typical in the comic book treatment of Tarzan; in other comics he cures a blind and malevolent African warrior with herbal medicine, frees imprisoned apes, and refuses compensation for his acts. Within this genre Tarzan's way of life is often stridently antimaterialist. This humanitarian and eco-friendly Tarzan appears throughout the Dell and Gold Key comics of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and is present, though to a lesser degree, in some of the novels; the comics even anticipate the "gentler . . . masculinity" that Wannamaker discusses in Disney's Tarzan (66). Like the novels and the Tarzan films, the comics certainly install the white male at the top of all hierarchies. But their depiction of a kinder manhood is not subversive, for this Tarzan was admired by millions of boy and girl readers for over three decades.

Which masculinity—Tarzan as a figure for white and imperialist authority, or as a figure of human sympathy and environmental concern—is hegemonic? These competing ways to see Tarzan, which coexist at the same historical moment and even within the same text, suggest that "hegemonic masculinity" cannot capture a culture's diverse and divergent attitudes toward masculinity: there never is a single set of values, qualities, or actions that expresses a dominant masculinity. Wannamaker helpfully reminds us that we should not view masculinity as a way of being that excludes traits traditionally figured as feminine and positive, such as the...