RehabilitationThe rehabilitation of works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth and other ‘lady
moralists’ of the Georgian and Romantic periods, is one of the major success stories of
academic feminist children’s literature criticism. Although I am going to focus on
criticism by Mitzi Myers, credit also goes to Anita Moss and Lynne Vallone.
As Mitzi Myers pointedly states, texts by Georgian ‘lady’ moralists as rendered in
standard overviews of children’s literature, suffer from ‘something like the critical
equivalent of urban blight’ (Myers 1986:31). John Rowe Townsend dismisses these
women as ranging ‘from the mildly pious to the sternly moralistic’ (1974:39). Harvey
Darton refers to ‘the truculent dogmatic leanings of Mrs Sherwood and Mrs Trimmer’
and the ‘completely dogmatic’ Mary Godwin (1982: 156, 196).
Myers offers different readings. She participates in what feminist critic Elaine
Showalter calls ‘gynocriticism’, that is, criticism that attends to ‘the woman as producer
of textual meaning, with the history, themes, genres, and structures of literature by
women’ (Showalter 1985:128). What Myers asks is how those Georgian women found
autonomy and influence in a world where those freedoms were denied. Her answers
transform lady moralists scorned for their conformity, into the founding mothers of a
feminist pedagogical tradition.
In Georgian England, where there were few roles for (upper class) women except as
wives, mothers and governesses, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth and other
women like Mrs Trimmer and Mrs Sherwood transformed their roles. They constructed
‘an almost unrecognised literary tradition’, one that ‘accepts and emphasises the
instructive and intellectual potential of narrative’ (Myers 1986:33). Maria Edgeworth, for
example, creates female protagonists as ‘desiring’ subjects, not just objects of desire.
And Mary Wollstonecraft, in her ‘Mrs Mason’ stories, redefines power in unpatriarchal
terms ‘as pedagogic and philanthropic power’ (43).
The autonomy, creativity and integrity of those Georgian women would not have been
possible without the eyes of Mitzi Myers and her knowledge of feminist theory. They would
have remained in the footnotes of what is now beginning to look like a masculinist
tradition of children’s literature.
Re-creationAlthough I’ve focused so far on the way academic critics construct feminist traditions in
children’s literature, I’m mindful of the ways authors living through the second wave of
feminism are changing what we read. Author Ursula Le Guin chronicles the change
most dramatically. In Earthsea Revisioned (1993), the published version of lecture she
gave in Oxford in 1992, Le Guin records the influence of gender politics on her Earthsea
quartet. The first three Earthsea novels published between 1968 and 1972, are in the
genre of the traditional heroic fantasy, something Le Guin defines as ‘a male preserve: a
sort of great game-park where Beowulf feasts with Teddy Roosevelt, and Robin Hood
goes hunting with Mowgli, and the cowboy rides off into the sunset alone’ (Le Guin 1993:
5).
Le Guin does not apologise for the male-order, hierarchical world in the first three
novels. But twenty years after their publication she recognises things about that world
FEMINIST CRITICISM: FROM SEX-ROLE STEREOTYPING TO SUBJECTIVITY 101