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131  9 Kittens Who Run with Wolves Healthy Girl Development in Joanna Russ’s Kittatinny Sandr a Lindow Psychologists and educators have argued that the stories we tell children change how they see the world and their place in it. As a reading specialist with more than thirty years’ experience working with disabled and emotionally disturbed children I believe in the importance of giving children stories that will help them live happy, productive lives. For those who have a difficult time finding anything optimistic to say about themselves, it is important to help them re-story their experiences by providing model stories with more optimistic plotlines than their own. Girls, in particular, can get bogged down in a learned-helplessness, dysfunctional personal story. Joanna Russ’s allegorical hero’s quest, Kittatinny: A Tale of Magic is a young adult novella, a Pilgrim’s Progress for Girls that represented the forefront of feminist thought in 1978 when she first published it and still provides an excellent road map to healthy gender role-modeling today. Since the 1960s, Joanna Russ is one writer/critic who has examined traditional folktales and mythology and found them poor representatives of women ’s real lives and experiences. In her thoughtful essay, “What Can a Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can’t Write,” Russ (1995h) explains that traditional hero tales handicap women writers because “there are so few stories in which women can figure as protagonists. . . . Both men and women conceive the culture from a single point of view—the male” (80–81). Furthermore, Russ (1983b) believes, the “social invisibility” of women’s experience is not just “bad communication” but “a socially arranged bias” that has persisted long after accurate information has become available (48). When women realize that their experience is radically different from the stories told to them, they are forced to be cultural outsiders: “The problem of ‘outsider’ artists is the whole problem of what to do with unlabeled, disallowed, disavowed, not-evenconsciously -perceived experience, experience which cannot be spoken about because it has no embodiment in existing art. . . . Make something unspeakable and you make it unthinkable” (1995h, 90). Thus, it is important to create new myths where women transcend the traditional stereotypes of “modest 132 Fiction maidens, wicked temptresses, pretty schoolmarms, beautiful bitches, faithful wives”; in other words, women seen through a male lens: “Cloud-cuckooland fantasies about what men want, or hate, or fear” (1995h, 81). Kittatinny (1978a) follows the structure of the traditional hero’s tale: separation, initiation and return. Living in New York along the valley of the Delaware River in the foothills of the Kittatinny Ridge, Kittatinny Blue Eyes (“Kit” for short) is born into an early machine-age culture where rigid sex roles and family vocations define the lives of the inhabitants. Kit is a fairly normal, bright eleven-year-old girl until she becomes interested in the machinery involved in milling grain. She wants to become a miller not “marry a Miller” as someone jokes. Disgusted with hearing “girls can’t do this and girls can’t do that,” Kit goes for a walk and ends up running away from home (4). Beginning with the groundbreaking publication of Carol Gilligan’s (1992) In a Different Voice, the problems of finding authentic women’s voices and experiences have been carefully studied by psychologists as well as writers and critics. In Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, psychologist Mary Pipher (1994) describes girls’ problems to be like those of the gifted children Alice Miller (1997) describes in The Drama of the Gifted Child. They “faced a difficult choice. They could be authentic and honest or they could be loved. If they chose wholeness, they were abandoned by their parents. If they chose love, they abandoned their true selves” (Pipher 1994, 36). Pipher believes that it is not the parents but the entire culture that tends to abandon girls for choosing wholeness (37). When Kit is told what she can and cannot do as a girl, she is receiving what Pipher calls “false self-training” (44). Pipher explains that authenticity means “owning of all experience, including emotions and thoughts that are not socially acceptable” (38). Adolescent girls, however, experience considerable social pressure to be nice rather than authentic and honest, thus becoming “female impersonators” who must fit their whole selves into small crowded spaces (22). Through her practice with girls, Pipher has learned that bright, sensitive girls are most at risk for developing emotional problems in response to...

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