“The Naughty Girl Reformed:” Femininity in Eighteenth-Century Children’s Literature
Abstract
Studying the competing portrayals of young ladies in children’s books reveals, in part, the cultural contours of the eighteenth-century English Atlantic. In her 2004 article, “Stripping for the Wolf,” Elizabeth Marshall called for the exploration and analysis of competing representations of femininity in children’s literature. Diverse representations of girlhood and womanhood emerge in the interactions between female characters and in individual character's internal reflections themselves. Reinforcing the notion that literary characters reflect the cultural changes and conflicts of their period, Marshall’s analytical model also moves literary analysis beyond simple content based methodologies. Though content analysis depends upon generalizations and reliable characterizations in a binary framework of male vs. female, Marshall’s poststructuralist feminist analysis recognizes that female characterizations in children’s texts “capture not so much the lived experience of girlhood as cultural struggles around gender, sexuality, and power.” This paper will highlight the appearance of those struggles in a brief number of eighteenth-century children’s texts.