Young Female Protagonists Research Articles

María Victoria Menis’s María y El Araña

Middle-class children and adolescents have been represented in several Argentine films of the twenty-first century. In María y El Araña [ María and Spiderman ] (2013), María Victoria Menis tackles the representation of youth who are at risk due to both their working-class backgrounds and the absence or incapacity of any parental figures. Her film also engages with the difficult topics of adolescent sexualization, sexual abuse, and physical violence perpetrated against disadvantaged youth. While the cinematic depiction of destitution, also known as ‘poverty porn’, generally deploys realism, I argue that Menis avoids the dangers of the paedophilic gaze in María y El Araña , by briefly providing the point of view of the young female protagonist, as well as a glimpse into one of her dreams. The director also relies on fairy tales to narrate this story about the dangers of adult violence against vulnerable adolescents to educate viewers about these abuses and their threat to civilized society. Because fairy tales offer access to imaginative worlds, despite the film’s themes, María y El Araña has an unusual ending for a Latin American film featuring at-risk young protagonists.

Construction of Ideal Self in Salman Rushdie’s Victory City

Indian literature often employs mystic characters to reflect sociopolitical themes. The central narrative of Salman Rushdie’s Victory City (2023) revolves around Pampa Kampana, a young female protagonist. Through mystical direction, she builds an empire and uses poetry to pass on her cultural legacy. The objective of this research is to demonstrate Pampa’s progression using the framework of self-construal theory. Nevertheless, her interaction with diverse personalities and surrounding settings during her 247-year lifespan demonstrates her interdependent construal. Her character arc changes significantly as she goes from being a young orphan who lost her family and experienced tragedy to being a resolute queen and mother of Bisnaga City. Her pursuit of the throne within the societal constraints of gender showcases her resolute nature as an individual. External variables cause her self-construal to become unstable. Her journey, from being a vulnerable orphan who experienced physical abuse to becoming a champion for gender equality in Bisnaga, demonstrates her remarkable resilience. The research highlights how Pampa Kampana eschews independence in favour of interdependence when navigating social dynamics, familial ties, and cultural norms of human civilization. It mirrors the struggles and journey faced by most women.

" Irrémédiables étrangers ": Lifelong Trajectories of Exile in the Late Works of Linda Lê

Abstract: This article examines the lifelong trajectories of exile in Lê's late works, Lame de fond (2012) and Je ne répondrai plus de rien (2021). Departing from a critical tendency to focus on the exilic identities of the young female protagonists that featured most prominently in Lê's early works, this article analyses Lê's contemplation of exile as a long-term condition in her late works. It concludes by drawing a parallel between these fictional texts and Lê's own lifelong, non-fictional construction of a 'lettered republic' of exiled, transient, and isolated writers that culminates in De personne je ne fus le contemporain (2022).

Three Early Shaw Plays That Interrogate Marriage, the Family, and Women’s Roles (Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, and You Never Can Tell)

Three Early Shaw Plays That Interrogate Marriage, the Family, and Women’s Roles (Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, <i>and</i> You Never Can Tell)

Staging Alternatives to the Marriage Plot: Clashing Narratives of Female Agency in George Sand's La Marquise (1832)

This article analyses the narrative framing of George Sand's La Marquise to propose that the text offers an original approach to the dilemma of young female protagonists obliged to choose between love and liberty in the conventional 'marriage plots' and 'libertine plots' of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Following the narrative clashes woven throughout the Marquise's conversation with an unnamed narrator, the article identifies the points of re-entry for an alternative story to surface within the dominant cultural narrative. Here, the Marquise restages herself as sacrificing neither sexuality nor autonomy during and after her intense passion for an actor, Lélio.

Vegetal Affect: Disruptive Unfeeling in the Face of Gender Oppression in Han Kang's The Vegetarian

Han Kang's novel The Vegetarian tells the story of a woman who has a nightmare so obscene, so violent, that it fundamentally changes how she lives in the waking world. In this disconcerting dream, the young female protagonist Yeong-hye Kim kills and eats someone—or something—with her bare hands. When she awakens, she immediately adopts a vegetarian diet but her demeanour and affective expression also change. Her face defaults to a vacant expression, she begins speaking less, and when forced to interact with others she shocks them by not only behaving in socially unacceptable ways, but also emoting (or not) in non-normative ways. In doing so, Yeong-hye reveals and disrupts hegemonic gender-based power relations, particularly those relating to affective gender expectations of women such as ‘a submissive wife, an obedient daughter, an amiable person’ that keep the patriarchy intact.

Translating satire inMafaldaandA Turma da Mônica

AbstractIn both the Spanish-language Argentine comic stripMafalda,created by Quino, and the Portuguese-language Brazilian comicA Turma da Mônicaby Maurício de Sousa, the creators’ use of political and cultural satire unveils critical global and national issues through the eyes of young female protagonists. Character naming and effective translation of these comic strips requires an expanded view of satire as a principally literary genre by examining its linguistic and cultural purposes. Thus, this study explores the cultural and linguistic significance of satire in translation along with its associated challenges, drawing on specific examples from these two comic strips to illustrate these issues.

בעקבות האב הנעדר: הגיבורה כסובייקט כותב ביצירתה של רונית מטלון

The article addresses the literary development of the young female protagonist in Ronit Matalon’s early writing, and the character’s relationship with her absent father. Despite the prevalence of this theme, little research has been dedicated to the father-daughter relationship in Matalon’s work and its influence on the daughter’s decision to become a writer. The article examines this theme in Matalon’s young adult novel, A Story that Begins with a Snake’s Funeral (1989). My main argument here is that the father-daughter relationship in Matalon’s work is central to the construction of the daughter’s ’decision to write‘, and points to the issue of inter-generational accountability, in which the daughter is entitled to an inheritance from her father despite her critical view of him. As I will show in my reading of the novel, the fictional representation of this relationship bears an autobiographical imprint, particularly in light of Matalon’s choice to quote her father, Felix Matalon, and to lend his voice to the father figure in her writing. As part of the exploration of this theme, which consists of both fictional and autobiographical aspects, I suggest that the heroine’s efforts to place her absent father in the context of her life and to cope with his absence through her writing point to Matalon’s own efforts to deal with her father’s legacy by writing about him and giving him a place in the Israeli literary canon, while maintaining a critical attitude towards him.

“But the storm, this storm, has no apology”: Extraction, Ecophobia, and the Ecogothic in Linda Hogan’s Power

Examining Linda Hogan’s Power in the context of the ecogothic, a mode emphasizing the Western world’s desire to subdue and dominate the natural world, this paper contextualizes and analyzes changes imposed upon the natural world as the result of ecophobia. Hogan’s young female protagonist Omishto—a member of the fictional Taiga tribe—struggles to come to terms with these realities. At the same time, she learns the danger of disclosing information to Euro-American institutions, specifically courts of law. In this ecophobic world, the importance (and lack) of credence given to Indigenous testimonies and the danger of relying on static, stereotypical images of “eco- Indians” as models of environmental responsibility are brought to the fore. This article also argues that Indigenous literature is often treated in the same fashion in scholarship. In such readings, Indigenous-authored texts are expected to function as resources from which knowledge and lessons can be gleaned. The implementation of the ecogothic mode in Power , however, thwarts such efforts on both an intratextual and an extratextual level.

Altered states of consciousness: Chess in the zone

The Zone is a state of mind/body coordination that is much sought after by athletes because it is so conducive to achieving peak performance. The experience of this state can be so transcendent that some have come to view sport as a spiritual practice. An immensely popular recent movie about competitive chess, The Queen's Gambit, is not overtly about the Zone, addressing such popular themes as female empowerment and chess as a replacement competitive sport in the socially disconnected time of Covid. But its popularity may also stem from its evocation of the peak performance Zone in chess matches. The film's young female protagonist is able to play inspired chess by using a range of approaches to accessing this altered state of consciousness (ASC). This essay will discuss several aspects of the Zone, including psycho-spiritual tools to elicit it, pathology-based medical explanations for its occurrence, paranormal aspects of this ASC, and its possible role in helping humanity cope with the Covid crisis.(Spoiler alert: Important plot points from the Netflix movie The Queen's Gambit will be discussed in this essay.)

Intersectionality and Empathy in Afrofuturist Feminist Dystopian Narratives

&#x0D; This article analyzes dystopian fiction’s representation, critique, and attempted rectification of oppressive social structures related to violence against women, black motherhood, and (dis)ability. The 1990s novels Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler and Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson represent what dystopian critics call “patriarchy on steroids.”. Drawing on feminist narrative theory and Afrofuturism theory, this article extends the scholarly discussion of feminist elements in both texts by analyzing representations of physical and sexual violence, which critics have largely overlooked, and the intersectional representation of black motherhood. Although Butler and Hopkinson depict violence against women and black motherhood in different ways and use different narrative techniques, both offer amplified reflections of the real-world intersectional and diverse experiences of women. Butler’s and Hopkinson’s young female protagonists challenge the societal oppressions and inequities they face through empathic reasoning: Butler’s Lauren reframes her embodied hyperempathy (dis)ability as a gift, enabling her to found an equitable community amidst violent social collapse, and Hopkinson’s Ti-Jeanne reframes her temporary zombification as an opportunity to empathize with other characters’ trauma, enabling her to defeat the violent gang leader Rudy. Lauren and Ti-Jeanne thereby imagine new positions for themselves and for women in general.

Young Girls on the Move in Charlotte Smith’s Didactic Miscellany Collections

This paper analyses the didactic miscellany collections for young female readers by the English writer Charlotte Smith. In these texts, through dialogues and conversations, the young protagonists are seen to learn from their daily experiences of walking in the natural world. Smith’s texts also offer remarkable examples of girls on the move in another sense, in that some of the young female protagonists appear to be escaping from distressing family and financial circumstances, in search of better life opportunities.

Anthropocene terror in two girl-centred narratives: The leitmotifs of mythological time, colonisation and monstrosity in the films Whale Rider and Moana

The place of children in societies is a question that we have been grappling with in many forms, maybe nowhere more creatively and visibly than in the products of our imaginary complexes, such as films. Educational theorist and cultural critic Henry Giroux (2012) describes a contemporary crisis about youth and considers youth as potential cultural and pedagogical 'border-crossers or outlaws'. Our complex contemporary engagement with the concept of youth coincides with an increasing awareness of, firstly, the genderedness of our world and, secondly, of anthropocene planetary ecological states of crises. In this article I consider two girl-centred films, both with young female protagonists, where the convergence of these discursive forces is depicted in the narrative context of the current renewed appreciation for indigenous cultures, particularly those of the global south. The films are New Zealand director Niki Caro's Whale Rider (2002) and Disney's animated film Moana (2016). There are clear similarities between the films, and the Disney creators have openly credited Whale Rider as influential in their creative process. I particularly consider how these two films, when read together, engage with ideas of cyclical mythological time, the leitmotifs of exploration, gender and colonisation, and with the trope of monstrousness or monstrosity as metaphors for paradoxical and complex living in an age of increasing complexity and anxiety.

Mafalda: A Social and Political History of Latin America's Global Comic by Isabella Cosse

Reviewed by: Mafalda: A Social and Political History of Latin America's Global Comic by Isabella Cosse David William Foster Mafalda: A Social and Political History of Latin America's Global Comic. By Isabella Cosse. Trans. Laura Pérez Carrara. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. xv + 265 pp. Cloth, $99.95; paper, $26.95. It is always a pleasure to return to Mafalda, a cultural product that has marked my life since my first residence in Argentina in 1967, when the first volume of the collected strips had just been reprinted and the creator, Joaquín Salvador Lavado (a.k.a. Quino), was on the cusp of launching a publishing empire and spin-offs associated with his cartoon figure, which he had originally conceived a few years earlier as part of an advertising campaign. But Lavado was onto something larger than just a convenient cartoon figure for selling products to the new Argentine middle class that had been created in the two previous decades by the Peronista experiment. Perón had been overthrown in 1955 and by 1966, when military authoritarianism affirmed itself with vigor, Argentina had gone through a whirlwind of social and economic fluctuations. But the middle class was firmly entrenched, and the consumerism for which Mafalda had first served generated an attitude of sociocritical analysis that the spunky and sassy little girl effectively channeled in her unfiltered and highly verbalized responses to contemporary urban Argentina and to the often extreme social and political violence that, while barely perceived directly, was part of the unmistakable backstory of the typically four-paneled strips. Suddenly Mafalda was all over the place, and there didn't seem to be any aspect of Argentine daily life that she did not eventually have something pithy to comment on. And if the genius of Quino's work was that he so succinctly captured the unique flavor and texture of Argentine urban life, what is truly astounding, sixty years after the original strips, is how Mafalda has spoken receptively to other Latin Americans and, indeed, to a global audience (English readers are [End Page 461] rather unique in not having the entire oeuvre disposable to them in translation). Quino is widely respected for very sophisticated cartoon art with other narrative threads, but he will always be identified first as the creator of Mafalda. While Mafalda has always been compared superficially to Little Lulu (for its young female protagonist) and to Peanuts (for its gallery of unconsciously "existential" children), a world separates them, beginning with the unambitious social critique of the American product and the mordant wit of Mafalda in the face of an extensively irrational and profoundly unjust world. It has been said that Quino's figure is only a mouthpiece, no matter how cutely portrayed, for adult concerns, but that sort of observation overlooks how quickly children have to mature in Latin America, even in relatively comfortable Buenos Aires, and how quickly children become uniquely independent sophisticates in that urban megalopolis. Isabella Cosse's sociohistorical study of Mafalda (which was originally published in Argentina in 2014) is an outstanding example of one important current of cultural studies in that country. Communications-based research flourished in particular in Argentina, where there was a perception of the urgency to analyze the failures of liberalism and the grip of authoritarian/neofascist governments. This meant a very close interpretive analysis of the content of cultural texts, testing them for the presuppositions they implied about the social contract, praising their ability to align with prioritized political values (that is, essentially those of the revolutionary left, but which meant often profoundly divergent principles and practices), and denouncing their "retrograde" deficiencies (which fundamentally meant traces of reformist liberalism and any defense of the status quo). It rarely meant any commitment to discourse analysis and little sense of the cultural text as fictive embodiment. The result is that Mafalda was wont to provoke critical stances that we are unused to in the world of American cartoon art. While most Argentines were delighted with Mafalda, it was denounced by the right (especially with the reactionary military coup of 1966) as "subversive," while the oppositional left saw it as pointless in its lack of...

‘She done Coriolanus at the Convent’: Empowerment and Entrapment in Teresa Deevy's In Search of Valour

This article explores the gender politics of a neglected one-act play by Teresa Deevy, first staged at the Abbey in 1931, that revolves around the young female protagonist's recollection of a convent production of Shakespeare's Coriolanus in which the title role was taken by a young woman. This role model offers inspiration for a character confined as a domestic servant and defiantly seeking an alternative to the stultifying circumstances of life in rural Free State Ireland. While Ellie Irwin resembles other spirited Deevy heroines, the doubling of the young servant with her memory of Charlotta Burke as a non-cross-dressed Coriolanus adds a different dramatic dimension and raises questions of gender performance that the play's critical reception has not always acknowledged.

Disabled Housewives: Impairment in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s “Las medias rojas” and “El revólver”

Abstract In both “Las medias rojas” and “El revólver,” the young female protagonists begin as beautiful vibrant women until disabling older men restrict their movement through violence and intimidation. Whereas the peasant girl in “Las medias,” brutally beaten by her father, becomes permanently disfigured and partially blind, the upper-class woman, in “El revólver”, ultimately heals from post-traumatic anxiety through a form of narrative therapy at the spa. This paper argues that the differential treatment of female poverty and affluence illustrates how classist nineteenth-century society sanctions the punishment of the peasant woman while fostering the wellness of the well-to-do señora. Permanent disability is reserved for the poor.

A “Pre-Natal Hold”: Elizabeth Bowen, Mothers and Daughters

This article argues that, faced with the disintegration of their patriarchal Ascendancy culture, Elizabeth Bowen’s young Anglo-Irish female protagonists in The Last September (1929) and A World of Love (1954) revert to the primordial mother-daughter relationship as an attempt to foster some sense of identity and stability. In The Last September, the flux and tumult of the War for Independence prompts Lois’s pursuit of maternal unity with her absent mother, Laura. This endeavour is ultimately frustrated, leaving Lois with an unstable sense of self facing an even less stable future as the Ascendancy and her projected lifestyle crumbles. For Jane in A World of Love, the posthumous affair with her mother’s dead lover, Guy, is a misdirected attempt to gain closeness with her mother. Before, the mother-daughter relationship had been tethered to an unproductive past by Guy’s memory, and only with the destruction of his memory can the future be secured.

Her Voice Will Be on the Side of Right: Gender and Power in Women’s Antebellum Antislavery Fiction by Holly M. Kent

Reviewed by: Her Voice Will Be on the Side of Right: Gender and Power in Women’s Antebellum Antislavery Fiction by Holly M. Kent Kara B. Clevinger HER VOICE WILL BE ON THE SIDE OF RIGHT: GENDER AND POWER IN WOMEN’S ANTEBELLUM ANTISLAVERY FICTION, by Holly M. Kent. American Abolitionism and Antislavery. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2017. 216 pp. $55.00 cloth; $46.99 ebook. Was the nineteenth-century woman empowered by the ideologies of true womanhood and separate spheres, or was she confined within the home? This question has defined a persistent debate for scholars of nineteenth-century American women’s literature since it was proposed by Ann Douglas and Jane Tompkins in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Douglas’s critique of the anti-intellectualism of much of women’s literature, clustered under the broad term “sentimentalism,” and Tompkins’s reclamation of that literature and the cultural work it performs, as well as the opening up of the canon of American literature, have inspired countless critical studies of women’s writing that have spanned the range of women’s empowerment. At this point, scholars of the nineteenth century agree: it is complicated. Holly M. Kent’s Her Voice Will Be on the Side of Right: Gender and Power in Women’s Antebellum Antislavery Fiction makes a significant contribution to this debate and the field of antebellum literary scholarship, as Kent explores how women writers intellectually and imaginatively considered the position of women as abolitionist activists and agitators in the United States between 1821 and 1861, arguing that white women writers conceived of gender, not race, as the most significant barrier to social justice and equality. Beginning with early antislavery fiction in the 1820s and the optimism of women writers’ belief that morally superior women could abolish slavery and de-corrupt men, Kent traces a decline in the hope for white women’s ability to effect change in a patriarchal society during each decade leading up to the Civil War. Much of the antislavery fiction Kent analyzes has received little attention from literary scholars, and thus her book is as much a recovery project as it is a compelling assessment of the productions of female antislavery fiction writers. Kent reads short and long-form fiction from well-known authors like Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, Lydia Maria Child, E. D. E. N. Southworth, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. She also introduces readers to a valuable sampling of lesser-known and [End Page 453] anonymous authors, such as African American writer Sarah Mapps Douglass, who contributed fiction for young readers to The Liberator, including a piece in August 1832 in which she does not reveal that the virtuous young female protagonist is African American until the end, hoping her young audience will learn a moral lesson in shame for their racist assumptions. Kent places Douglass’s short story within a fascinating comparison of African American and white women writers of antislavery fiction to demonstrate how African American authors took up debates about what society might look like after emancipation, while white authors focused on the liberation plot and held back from writing what came after emancipation. One of the more intriguing conclusions Kent comes to is that white women authors became increasingly uncomfortable with relinquishing conventional ideals of white middle-class femininity and could only imagine African American female characters embodying or desiring these traits rather than portraying new and diverse models of womanhood. The triumph of Kent’s book is the valuable contributions it makes to a number of scholarly conversations about the nineteenth century: antislavery fiction and abolitionist activism, domestic literature and separate spheres ideology, theories of public and private spheres, and the historiography of women and authorship. Kent intervenes in each of these conversations, placing her magnifying glass over fiction and examining how women imagined antislavery action rather than speculating on women’s lived experiences at the time. The result is an insightful and pure literary studies monograph, which is thoroughly researched with expert attention to secondary sources and a rich array of primary sources that made use of wonderful collections at the Boston Library, Smith College, and the Historical Societies of Massachusetts and...

Responding to Patriarchy in India: Resistance and Complicity in Samina Ali's Madras on Rainy Days and Anita Desai's Fasting, Feasting

This essay examines the ways in which female characters respond to patriarchy in two novels by Indian women writers: Samina Ali’s Madras on Rainy Days (2004) and Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting (1999). It argues that although the term “patriarchy” is less used in contemporary feminist scholarship than other terms and concepts like “gender,” it is still useful for analyzing family power dynamics in many parts of the world. Ali focuses in Madras on Rainy Days on the patriarchal control of female sexuality, while Desai in Fasting, Feasting emphasizes the patriarchal restrictions on female autonomy. Both novels portray older women as mostly complicit with patriarchy and younger women as victims who react in various ways, from the resentful resignation of Uma in Fasting, Feasting to the final escape of Layla in Madras on Rainy Days. Although the focus is mostly on the young female protagonists, both novels hint at the ways in which young men can also be oppressed by patriarchy

Plotting New Womanhood on Either Side of the Channel: A comparison of Tinayre's La Rebelle and Dixon's The Story of a Modern Woman

Abstract This is a comparison of Ella Hepworth Dixon's 1894 novel, The Story of a Modern Woman, and Marcelle Tinayre's La Rebelle, published in 1905. Arguing that these two examples of British and French New Woman fiction contain striking parallels in their incorporation of young female magazine journalists negotiating romance and reportage and attempting to balance public and private lives, this article suggests that Tinayre's novel reflects and modifies details found in the French translation of Dixon's text. The result is an analysis of the strategies employed by both writers, who provide their readers with young female protagonists who resist social and narrative norms, yet who offer relatively modest and acceptable forms of rebellion; focus thus falls on the connections and contrasts between French and Anglophone representations of the New Woman or the “femme moderne” in the fiction of the fin de siècle period, and the comparative female bildungsroman plots at work in the different cultures.