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Originally Posted by Bęthberry
I still think that a classroom of bright female students, when given a syllabus such as Professor Hedgethistle has apparently organised, will at some point decide to have a bit of sport with the curriculum. Unless of course our esteemed BarrowDowns "pullster" is indeed pulling our legs.  |
A bit of sport indeed...
To report back: we had a look at
Peter Pan and it did much better than
TI. The students liked it in part because there were women (girls) in it, which gave me the opening I needed to address these issues head on. I asked them about the roles accorded the women/girls in
PP and let the book do the rest: mothers, wives, hangers-on, dependents etc. They pretty quickly began to think how unhappy it was to be a woman or girl in that world. And then they began to confront Peter himself and far from finding him a charming boy, they thought him selfish, cruel, and idiotic. Some even began to think more favourably of Jim Hawkins who at least grew up a bit in the course of the story.
And that's when I sprang! I pointed out how pleasant it had been in
TI to see a boy become a man
not through the sexual or romantic dominance of a woman/girl. Jim doesn't assert his manhood by becoming powerful over a woman, which is the opposite of Peter, of course, who is doomed to remain a boy forever because he refuses sex/romance. The women began to think how much better it is to have a boy mature who is not dependent for that upon asserting himself over and above women.
And so I have cunningly laid the ground work for
The Hobbit, in which we have a male story of male growth that once again is not about the conquest of the female. In fact, in a lot of ways its very much about a male adventure of male growth that leads toward the female (his home/womb/domestic space beneath the earth at the end).
Of course, this all goes only for those few students who had both done all the reading (about half of them) and thought it through carefully (about half of those) -- thankfully, that one quarter did a lot of good stuff for the benefit of the rest.
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