Abstract
This essay examines the representation of adolescent girlhood, sexual violence and agency in Francesca Lia Block’s contemporary fairy tale collection The Rose and The Beast. Focusing specifically on the tale “Wolf,” the author provides a literary analysis of how Block draws on and reworks traditional Western fairy tale variants to reintroduce repressed material about father–daughter incest and sexual violence within the family. This theoretical analysis is augmented by a discussion of how 25 students enrolled in an undergraduate young adult literature course for pre-service English education students read Block’s “Wolf.” The author concludes that despite Block’s revisionist attempts to attend to the rapacious father figure, evidence from student readings reveals that they interpret “Wolf” in ways that fit broader cultural pedagogies of femininity that position the girl as a victim who must learn to defend her body. The author concludes with a discussion of the possibilities and limitations of how gender, sexual violence, and agency can be represented, read, and taught in a contemporary context amidst conflicting cultural scripts of girlhood vulnerability and empowerment.
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Notes
Block’s representation of girlhood centers on white adolescent girls in western contexts. Clarifying that Block’s work and my analysis focuses on white-western adolescent girlhood acknowledges “girlhood” as a complex subject category through which ideas about “the girl” shift in relation to race, class and/or sexuality. For more on theorizations of whiteness in Block’s work see Richards (2008).
The rapacious father appears in a variety of tales such as Basile’s “L-Orsa” (She-Bear), Perrault’s “Peau d’ Ane” (“Donkeyskin”) or the Grimms’ “Alleruiah” (“All Fur”). In this paper I focus on the Grimms’ variant of the tale. For a full history of the incestuous father motif in fairy tales see Zipes (2001, pp. 26–27).
See Tatar (1992, pp. 120–139) for a detailed discussion of the incestuous father in the Anglo-American fairy tale canon.
See Marshall (2004) for a more detailed discussion of father–daughter incest, cultural narratives and girlhood.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Hillary Clemens, Lee Talley, Leigh Gilmore, Özlem Sensoy, Chris Richards, Theresa Rogers, Robert Johnson, and the students who agreed to participate in this project. The author also acknowledges Larry Sipe for his thoughtful editorial suggestions as well as the anonymous reviewers for their careful and critical reading of this manuscript.
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Elizabeth Marshall is an Assistant Professor in the faculty of education at Simon Fraser University, where she teaches courses in children’s and young adult literature. Her work has been published in Children’s Literature Quarterly, The ALAN Review, The Lion and the Unicorn, and Gender and Education.
Appendix A
Appendix A
Weekly Assignment
Name:
Title:
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1.
Write down your initial observations about this text. You might write about the “worth of the piece, memories it calls to mind, speculations about the writer” (Probst, 2004, p. 75).
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2.
Identify at least one passage in the text that you would like to talk about in class.
Page #:
Why did you pick this particular passage?
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3.
Identify at least two questions about the book/article (not whether the material is “appropriate” for young adults) that you would like to discuss in class.
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Marshall, E. Girlhood, Sexual Violence, and Agency in Francesca Lia Block’s “Wolf”. Child Lit Educ 40, 217–234 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-008-9083-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-008-9083-7