[Shelob]

if they had to read a girls’ school story with absolutely no male figures in it whatsoever?

girlie genres and books nearly always include males.

Both quotes from Lalaith.

Ah, Girly books with few male figures. To bring up Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, the class I mentioned before read that I am aware of 2 students who liked it and of the fact that more adults seem to like than do people who read it as children/teens. I tried reading it 2yrs before the class and had to give up because it was so deathly boring. Having been forced to read it though I'm forced to admit that not only was it boring beyond belief but that the main character, Janie, was by far the worst example of woman hood I had ever seen in a book before. My friend wrote her essay for that unit on why instead of having us read a book where the main female character flitted from man-to-abusive-man faster than one could imagine we should have read Lord of the Rings, for while there were few woman characters those portrayed at least did more than bemoan their fate.

And the story does not end there, the class moved straight from Zora Neale Hurston's book to How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez. Another roaring failure because yet again all the main girls (for the book centered around 4 girls growing up) completely failed to live up to what the girls in the class expected. Though as a side note our teacher assigned that book without having finished it, not a wise choice as there were parts of it not really school appropriate. The year after another teacher had us read another Alvarez book, again one focused on the lives of 4 girls (though to the teachers credit she had finished reading this one before assigning it), and again it was widely disliked for the same reasons.

I'm using those as an example because next to Little Women they are the most girl-centric books I can call to mind and none of them were widely well recieved by the girls of my class. The problem may not be that the books feature no girls, it fact I doubt it is.

In all my experience just because a book is "male" centered doesn't mean that girls will dislike it, similarly just because it's "female" centered means we will. As a whole my class disliked the "girl-centric" books we read because we disagreed with their portrayal of women. We were being asked to look at the question "What does it take to be a woman?" and the only 'official' texts we were being given all portrayed woman as flighty, weak-willed, and in essence everything we felt woman shouldn't be.

How did we react to "boy-centric" books then? Well Tarzan I described our reaction to already, and the only other two which I think qualify for this would be Henry V by Shakespeare and The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane. Henry V is harder because not only was it "boy-centric" but it was also by Shakespeare, a big deterant in a highschool class, so I'm not even sure if everyone finished reading it. For those of us who did though we didn't have a problem with it on the basis that it had few girls. Similarly I don't recall anyone becoming annoyed at Stephen Crane's novel for that reason (other reasons yes, that reason no).

I do recall one girl commenting on the fact that these books had no women (or very few, as the case may be) but this was one of the few girls who later really enjoyed the "girl-centric" books we read. It may be this is the case then; some people worry about the existance of girls in novels, on whether or not they appear regardless of how they're portrayed, while some worry more about their portrayal. "Better a book without girls than book which represents them poorly" and the like. If that's the case though I find it hard to believe you've got a class of almost entirely women who feel girls should be represented regardless of how...it seems to me that they'd be the mostly to react in this fashion but also less likely to be in the majority. I'd ask about it though, if your class had an issue with the fact that there are no women in those books probe around that issue and see how they feel about books which represent women in various ways.

Conversely if the issue's just the style or genre of the books then it shouldn't matter to them if they're "boy" adventure novels or "girl" adventure novels. They should react the same way to The Hobbit as to, say, The Northern Lights* by Philip Pullman (which I disliked and so haven't read in a while, but I recall that it could fit into the same general genre as The Hobbit and that it's main character was a young girl).


*Judging from the price I got my copy of The Northern Lights in England, unless I'm much mistaken the title's different in America...I think it's The Golden Compass or something like that here.

~~All that was written before Fordim's latest post...now to address that...

the students were very clear: they are bad books. Not just books that they don't like, but books that they stopped reading half way through; books that they say are "silly and ridiculous" and "prove" that boys and men are silly.

hmm... books that are just plain BAD, well all the books I've mentioned above (Zora Neale Hurston's, and the two Alvarez books) all fit that category for me, if I didn't have to read them for school I never would have finished them.

You have a whole class that finds them to be bad though? That's insane...

I'm going back to my theory that either the genre's putting them off it (and it looks like you did that too, classifying it for them before they read it) or that it's the age thing, and personally I'd go with the age one being the more likely.

Boy's Adventure in a Children's Literature

but I wonder if their prejudice would have been so great if it had been labelled Travel Adventure??

Ask them about Gulliver's Travels. That fits under "Travel Adventure" (albeit as somewhat a mockery of the genre) and it could even be stretched to fit under a title of "Boy's Travel Adventure" but no one would think of classifying it as "Children's Literature". If their problem's with the genre they won't like it, they'll view it as being "silly and ridiculous". However if it's because Treasure Island is a children's book and not because it's an "Adventure" novel they would be less likely to think of Gulliver's Travels in the same way. (For clarification I mean the entire novel, not just the part on the Lilliputians, since that mini-tale is often a children's story.)


As to what I love about The Hobbit, I would say that now there is nothing specific in it which causes me to enjoy it. For when I first heard it though, probably because it was travel, it was adventure, it was fantasy, it was new. Keeping in mind though that the first time I recall hearing The Hobbit I was five years old, and that my father had been reading it to me for long before that, I'm not sure I'll ever be able to pinpoint what about the story first caused me to like it. So far as memory tells me I have always liked that book.

As to why the same "travel, adventure and fantasy" which could catch the mind of a five year old and cause your class to dismiss it as "silly and ridiculous"... I'd say because to the mind of a five year old the book presented nothing strange. Hobbits, Dragons, Dwarfs, Elves, Wizards...none of this was stranger to me than things from any time and place in this world were. To me now though, and to your students, they aren't, and they can't be. There is now a difference to the world portrayed in The Hobbit and the world portrayed in, say, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Conrad's book isn't non-fiction, but it portrays a fiction of our world...a fiction which, under proper study, will tell us something real. I continue to love The Hobbit now though because I loved it before, and because I don't dismiss it immediately as being "silly and ridiculous" I can look at closer beyond the titles of "Children's literature"or "Fantasy".

(Well, I'm in shock. I can't believe I just said that much...it's almost more than I usually say in a day )