Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children's Novels

5. Re/constructing the Female Writer: Subjectivity in the Feminist Künstlerroman

5. R E / CON S T R U C TIN G THE FEMALE WRITER: SUBJECTIVITY IN THE FEMINIST KUNSTLERROMAN Margaret Mahy's The Tricksters examines what it means to one girl that she is a writer; so does Patricia Maclachlan's Cassie Binegar. Both of these novels depict a girl who claims the subject position by learning to use her voice, but significantly, each character learns to use her voice not only as a matter of speaking but also as a matter of writing. 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. One step in understanding such novels is to understand the conventions of the Bildungsroman, the novel of development, and of the Kunstlerroman, the novel of artistic development. In the introduction to The Voyage In: Fictions ofFemale Development, Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland note the traditions of the female Bildungsroman. Historically, the female protagonist's growth is less direct than her male counterpart's; the independence that maturation dictates for male characters is often hampered for females by the heroine's belief that she can only develop to her fullest potential if she is intimately involved in relationships with other people. As a 63 64 . RE/CONSTRUCTING THE FEMALE WRITER result, many female Bildungsromane focus on the character's development as a function of the interpersonal relationships she maintains (Abel, Hirsch, and Langland ll). Annis Pratt demonstrates how often the so-called growth of the hero of a female Bildungsroman is marked by her retreating from life rather than becoming fully involved in it (36). As a specialized form of the Bildungsroman, the Kunstlerroman is a novel of development, but the development deals specifically with the growth of the artist. In a number of traditional female Kunstlerromane , the heroine's self-identification as an artist is either balanced or negated by a love relationship. For example, Jo March gives up her perception of herself as primarily a novelist to marry Professor Bhaer. Judy Abbott "suppose[s] I could keep on being a writer even if I did marry" near the end of Daddy-Long-Legs, but since she never mentions writing as a career again, her supposition is unconvincing (181-82). In Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), Francie Nolan makes a pact with God that she will not write anymore if her mother will survive a serious illness. Francie later realizes that she need not necessarily sacrifice her writing forever, but she clearly does not perceive herself primarily as a writer by the novel's end. She concentrates more on going to college and getting married than on writing. But within the genre of the children's Kunstlerroman exists a subgenre , the feminist Kunstlerroman, which demonstrates the growth of a child whose identity is consistently formed by her desire to be a writer. Different from books like Lois Lowry's Anastasia Krupnik (1979), wherein writing is only one of the protagonist's myriad activities , the protagonist of the feminist children's Kunstlerroman is a writer whose writing is her entire being. Furthermore, she never sacrifices her writing for the sake of a love relationship. In "Portrait of the Young Writer in Children's Fiction" (1977), Francis Molson briefly surveys a collection of children's novels about developing writers, including Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy (1964), Irene Hunt's Up a Road Slowly (1968), Jean Little's Look through My Window , Eleanor Cameron's A Room Made ofWindows (1971), and Mollie Hunter's A Sound of Chariots (1972). Never once does Molson make note of the fact that the young writers of his survey are all female. That so many children's novels involve girls learning about the power RE/CON STRUCTI NG TH E FEMALE WRITER· 65 of language indicates, however, that the genre is a powerful forum for feminist writers. Harriet the Spy and A Sound ojChariots both exemplify the characteristics of the feminist Kunstlerroman. The protagonists of these novels accept language as primary to their self-creation, and they live through words, ultimately recognizing that they are powerless without them. In this regard, both of these novels are a study in the use of textual...