Ways of Being Male : Representing Masculinities in Children's Literature and Film 0415938619, 2002024912, 0415995159, 9780415938617, 9780415995153

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Series Editor's Foreword
Preface
CHAPTER 1 MAKING BOYS APPEAR: THE MASCULINITY OF CHILDREN'S FICTION
CHAPTER 2 PICTURING THE MALE: REPRESENTATIONS OF MASCULINITY IN PICTURE BOOKS
CHAPTER 3 "A PAGE JUST WAITING TO BE WRITTEN ON": MASCULINITY SCHEMATA AND THE DYNAMICS OF SUBJECTIVE AGENCY IN JUNIOR FICTION
CHAPTER 4 REDEEMING MASCULINITY AT THE END OF THE SECOND MILLENNIUM: NARRATIVE RECONFIGURATIONS OF MASCULINITY IN CHILDREN'S FICTION
CHAPTER 5 REFRAMING MASCULINITY: FEMALE-TO-MALE CROSS-DRESSING
CHAPTER 6 COME LADS AND LADETTES: GENDERING BODIES AND GENDERING BEHAVIORS
CHAPTER 7 MASCULINITY AS SOCIAL SEMIOTIC: IDENTITY POLITICS AND GENDER IN DISNEY ANIMATED FILMS
CHAPTER 8 MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE: STEREOTYPES OF MASCULINITY IN CANONIZED HIGH SCHOOL LITERATURE
CHAPTER 9 CHALLENGING THE PHALLIC FANTASY IN YOUNG ADULT FICTION
CHAPTER 10 QUEERING HETEROTOPIC SPACES: SHYAM SELVADURAI'S FUNNY BOY AND PETER WELLS'S BOY OVERBOARD
CHAPTER 11 TRIGGER PALS: A CASE HISTORY
CHAPTER 12 MASKS AND MASCULINITY IN JAMES BARRIE'S PETER PAN
CHAPTER 13 REPRESENTING MASCULINITIES IN NORWEGIAN AND AUSTRALIAN YOUNG ADULT FICTION: A COMPARATIVE STUDY
Bibliography
Subject Index
Name and Title Index

Citation preview

WAYS OF BEING MALE

Children's Literature and Culture Jack Zipes, Series Editor CHILDREN'S LITERATURE COMES OF AGE

IDEOLOGIES OF IDENTITY IN ADOLESCENT

Toward a New Aesthetic by Maria Nikolajeva

by Robyn McCallum

REDISCOVERIES IN CHILDREN'S

NARRATING AFRICA

LITERATURE

by Suzanne Rahn REGENDERING THE SCHOOL STORY

Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys by Beverly Lyon Clark WHITE SUPREMACY IN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

FICTION

George Henly and the Fiction of Empire by Mawuena Kossi Logan TRANSCENDII\G BOUNDARIES

Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults edited by Sandra L. Beckett

Characterizations ofAfrican Americans, 1830-1900 by Donnarae MacCann

History, Ideology, Pedagogy, Theory by Ian Wojcik-Andrews

RETELLING STORIES, FRAMING CULTURE

RUSSELL HOBANIFORTY YEARS

Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children's Literaure by John Stephens and Robyn McCallum

Essays on His Writings for Children by Alida Allison

THE CASE OF PETER RABBIT

Changing Conditions of Literature for Children by Margaret Mackey VOICES OF THE OTHER

Children's Literature and the Postcolonial Context edited by Roderick McGillis EMPIRE'S CHILDREN

Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children's Books by M. Daphne Kutzer A NECESSARY FANTASY?

The Heroic Figure in Children's Popular Culture edited by Dudley Jones and Tony Watkins LITTLE WOMEN AND THE FEMINIST IMAGINATION

Criticism, Controversy, Personal Essays edited by Janice M. Alberghene and Beverly Lyon Clark

CHILDREN'S FILMS

TRANSLATING FOR CHILDREN

by Riitta Oittinen THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST

Memory, Heritage, and Childhood in Postwar Britain by Valerie Krips INVENTING THE CHILD

Culture, Ideology, and the Story of Childhood by Joseph L. Zomado PINOCCHIO GOES POSTMODERN

Perils of a Puppet in the United States by Richard Wunderlich and Thomas J. Morrissey WAYS OF BEING MALE

Representing Masculinities in Children's Literature and Film edited by John Stephens

WAYS OF BEING MALE REPRESENTING MASCULINITIES IN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE AND FILM

EDITED BY JOHN STEPHENS

ROUTLEDGE NEW YORK AND LONDON

Published in 2002 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York NY 10016 Published in Great Britain by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. Transferred to Digital Printing 2008 Copyright © 2002 by Routledge All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ways of being male: representing masculinities in children's literature and film / edited by John Stephens. p. cm.-(Children's literature and culture; 19) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-93861-9 1. Children's literature-History and criticism. 2. Young adult literatureHistory and criticism. 3. Masculinity in literature. I. Stephens, John, 1944II. Children's literature and culture (Routledge (Firm)) ; 19. PN1009.5.M37 W39 2002 809' .93353-dc21

2002024912

ISBNI0: 0-415-93861-9 (hbk) ISBNIO: 0-415-99515-9 (Pbk) ISBNI3: 978-0-415-93861-7 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-99515-3 (Pbk) Publisher's Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent.

Contents

Series Editor's Foreword

viii

Preface CHAPTER

IX

1

MAKING BOYS APPEAR: THE MASCULINITY OF CHILDREN'S FICTION PERRY NODELMAN

CHAPTER

2

PICTURING THE MALE: REPRESENTATIONS OF MASCULINITY IN PICTURE BOOKS 15

KERRY MALLAN

3 "A PAGE JUST WAITING TO BE WRITTEN ON": MASCULINITY SCHEMATA AND THE DYNAMICS OF SUBJECTIVE AGENCY IN JUNIOR FICTION CHAPTER

38

JOHN STEPHENS

CHAPTER

4

REDEEMING MASCULINITY AT THE END OF THE SECOND MILLENNIUM: NARRATIVE RECONFIGURATIONS OF MASCULINITY IN CHILDREN'S FICTION 55

BEVERLEY PENNELL

v

Contents

vi CHAPTER

5

REFRAMING MASCULINITY: FEMALE-TO-MALE CROSS-DRESSING 78

VICTORIA FLANAGAN

6 COME LADS AND LADETTES: GENDERING BODIES AND GENDERING BEHAVIORS

CHAPTER

96

KIMBERLEY REYNOLDS

CHAPTER

7

MASCULINITY AS SOCIAL SEMIOTIC: IDENTITY POLITICS AND GENDER IN DISNEY ANIMATED FILMS 116

ROBYN MCCALLUM

8 MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE: STEREOTYPES OF MASCULINITY IN CANONIZED HIGH SCHOOL LITERATURE

CHAPTER

INGRID JOHNSTON AND

lYon MANGAT

133

9 CHALLENGING THE PHALLIC FANTASY IN YOUNG ADULT FICTION

CHAPTER

KERRY MALLAN

CHAPTER

150

10

QUEERING HETEROTOPIC SPACES: SHYAM SELVADURAI'S FUNNY BOY AND PETER WELLS'S BOY OVERBOARD BEVERLEY PENNELL AND JOHN STEPHENS

CHAPTER

164

11

TRIGGER PALS: A CASE HISTORY RODERICK MCGILLIS

185

Contents

vii

CHAPTER 12

MASKS AND MASCULINITY IN JAMES BARRIE'S PETER PAN MONIQUE CHASSAGNOL

CHAPTER

200

13

REPRESENTING MASCULINITIES IN NORWEGIAN AND AUSTRALIAN YOUNG ADULT FICTION: A COMPARATIVE STUDY ROLF ROM0REN AND JOHN STEPHENS

216

Bibliography

234

Subject Index

255

Name and Title Index

258

Series Editor's Foreword

Dedicated to furthering original research in children's literature and culture, the Children's Literature and Culture series includes monographs on individual authors and illustrators, historical examinations of different periods, literary analyses of genres, and comparative studies on literature and the mass media. The series is international in scope and is intended to encourage innovative research in children's literature with a focus on interdisciplinary methodology. Children's literature and culture are understood in the broadest sense of the term children to encompass the period of childhood up through adolescence. Owing to the fact that the notion of childhood has changed so much since the origination of children's literature, this Routledge series is particularly concerned with transformations in children's culture and how they have affected the representation and socialization of children. While the emphasis of the series is on children's literature, all types of studies that deal with children's radio, film, television, and art are included in an endeavor to grasp the aesthetics and values of children's culture. Not only have there been momentous changes in children's culture in the last fifty years, but there have been radical shifts in the scholarship that deals with these changes. In this regard, the goal of the Children's Literature and Culture series is to enchance research in this field and, at the same time, point to new directions that bring together the best scholarly work throughout the world. Jack Zipes

viii

Preface

In a trenchant article about boys and schooling, Richard Fletcher comments that "Feminist thinking-that girls deserve the same opportunities as boyshas become recognized as common sense. But we are still confused about directions for boys" (1995, 205). That many boys themselves find the contemporary world bewildering is often attributed to a lack of correspondence between their experiences of living in the world and a perceived demand to conform to the hegemonic masculinity of their society-that is, the form of masculinity most privileged or desired. Masculinity is always subject to amendment and change, so that at anyone time there exists a diversity of masculinities-for example, traditional macho, New Age man, gay, and queer all appear in contemporary children's fiction-but nevertheless certain masculine paradigms will always achieve dominance at a particular time and place. R. W. Connell, who introduced the phrase "hegemonic masculinity" into general academic use, defines it in Masculinities as, "the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women" (1995, 77). Although this was not Connell's intention, the phrase is often encountered as a shorthand reference to versions of traditional, macho masculinity characterized by toughness, courage, and muscularity, but also by aggressivity, violence, misogyny, homophobia, and other qualities marked as negative in the discourses of other masculinities and feminisms. The more specific use of the phrase often appears in the chapters below, because in fiction and film produced for young audiences this particular gender configuration is commonly imaged as the normative hegemonic masculinity against which fictive participants are depicted as fashioning their own subjectivities. A problem for boys, both in narrative fictions and in the world, is that this dominant form appears simultaneously to propose a schema for behavior

ix

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and to insist on their subordination as children, to conflate agency with hegemonic masculinity, and to disclose that, for them, such agency is illUSOry. These paradoxes are currently being increasingly dealt with as a theme in children's literature and film. While masculinity has been sporadically a thematic focus since at least the late 1960s, it has recently emerged as a more frequent and urgent theme across the whole range of narrative text typespicture books, fiction targeting readers of all age groups, and film. Masculinity and men's studies have been widely theorized in cultural studies and studies of general literature, and are reflected in important studies of the positioning of boys within educational systems (Browne and Fletcher 1995; Gilbert and Gilbert 1998; Mac an Ghaill 1994), but have only been incipiently addressed as aspects of representation in texts produced for children and young adults (Kidd 1996, 1998, 1999; Trites 1998; Norton 1999; Pennell 1999; Stephens and McCallum 2000). The critical and analytical discourses relating to children's literature have seemed surprisingly slow to generate a body of discussion drawing conceptually on the discourses dealing with masculinities in literary and cultural theory more generally, while at the same time maintaining a clear grasp on the more specific ontological and social issues pertaining to textual representations created for the young, such as the thematic dominance within the literature of social issues and character development. Under the influence of various feminisms, the application of gender studies to children's texts has focused predominantly on issues of female representation. This is hardly surprising, given the substantial impact of feminism on children's literature and culture during the past quarter century, and its reflection of a wider feminist agenda to understand and change the social and textual structures through which patriarchy has attempted to regulate female bodies and behaviors. The question of how the same patriarchal ideology structured representations of male bodies and behaviors seemed less urgent, and has only very recently emerged as an issue. All textual representations engage in gendering their participants, of course, and it has been an important endeavor in the criticism of children's literature to map how the characteristic humanistic narratives of that literature are apt to be endemically gendered: "man" and "woman" are gendered terms, and signify social, that is, behavioral and experiential, difference; they represent coded behaviors which must be learned. Connell writes that "Gender relations are a major component of social structure as a whole, and gender politics are among the main determinants of our collective fates" (1995, 76). The gender oppression that results from patriarchy's privileging of shifting versions of hegemonic masculinity remains a significant issue of social justice. Western social structures and literary metanarratives remain underpinned by the intersecting mythologies of "patriarchy," "Man" (masculinity), and "Woman" (femininity).

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xi

The response within contemporary discourses in the field of children's literature has been twofold, following a pathway already mapped out by feminism. On the one hand, critical discourses continue the work of feminism by looking for ways to read oppositionally. As Buchbinder puts it, "Reading a text in order to understand the gender dynamics operating within it requires us ... to read against the grain, ... to look between the lines of the preferred or obvious meaning" (1994, 48). On the other hand, as already noted, in recent literature and film addressing preadult audiences masculinity has emerged as an increasingly overt theme. Of particular note here is the propensity for such texts to engage in attempted social intervention by privileging variants of a "sensitive male" schema (or postfeminist masculinity) and pejorating the hegemonic masculinity associated with patriarchy and against which preferred masculinities are depicted. Hence child and adolescent texts participate in what is a very widespread sociocultural debate and often employ comparable strategies. For example, a strategy commonly deployed in adolescent fiction whereby a positive and desirable masculinity is delineated by privileging specific versions of masculine subjectivity within a configuration of possibilities also appears in films as diverse as Disney's Beauty and the Beast (1991) and the coming-of-age teen film Can't Hardly Wait (1998). By changing the relations within a configured pattern, it becomes possible to reconfigure subjectivities and move beyond socially determined representations. However, although the appearance of the "new man" may seem to enunciate an ideological shift, some contributors to this volume remind readers that the constitution of an alternative hegemonic masculine paradigm may not in itself be a cause for celebration if all it achieves is the idealization of another model of masculinity (Malian; Reynolds; McCallum). Herein lies a major area of unfinished business for both the literature and its criticism. A central issue is the question of subjective agency. Hegemonic masculinity perpetuates itself by denying agency to others (women, gays, children), so remodeled subjectivities may be depicted by affirming that gender norms are unstable and mutable and hence agency may take other forms. In a broad sense, the literature envisages a paradigm shift, taking place since about the 1980s, whereby the dialectic of subjectification and subjection, which in narrative fictions commonly structures identity formation as the individual emerging from constraint (see McNay 2000, 3), is reconfigured so as to depict emerging or "new" masculinities as asserted against hegemonic masculinity. At its most positive, this depicts characters responding to the challenge of difference or otherness in creative ways, and it is quite common to embody this by depicting the characters as directly engaged in creative activities, such as writing, which enact what McNay succinctly describes as "the critical awareness that arises from a self-conscious relation with the other" (p. 5). The intersubjective dynamic which represented characters must

xii

Preface

negotiate includes both material structures (patterns of behavior embodied within families, school rooms, and so on) and symbolic structures (the assumption that boys are essentially active and adventurous, for example, or symbolic meaning invested in football and the like). This means that the dynamics of representation may be grappling with a complex network of possibilities, and male characters may simultaneously have to negotiate material and symbolic orders. In other words, masculinity is not simply imposed on boys because of hegemonic masculinity, and hence patriarchal norms, but because of the historically situated embodied practices (repetitive, lived aspects of sexual identity) of adult males and boys themselves. That complex network of possibilities is now very familiar from its representations in popular film, especially where action is shown to transcend its material context. It is cogently illustrated in, for example, Gus Van Sanl's Finding Forrester (2000), where the teenage character Jamal Wallace, a talented African-American scholar-athlete, is enabled by means of his accidental friendship with a reclusive writer and simultaneous transfer to an elite school to negotiate the priorities between being constructed as an AfricanAmerican basketball player and his desire to be a writer. The creative ground of Jamal's achievement precisely demonstrates what McNay calls, "the condition of possibility of certain types of autonomous agency understood as the ability to act in an unexpected fashion or to institute new and unanticipated modes of behavior" (p. 22). This is also a precise summation of the procedures and practices pursued in children's and young adult fiction to reconfigure masculine subjective agency. Narrative is the privileged medium of this process of self-formation. Insofar as coherent fictive subjects can be represented as engaged in an active process of making sense of the existents of story (character and spatiotemporal setting) and the events which interact with those existents, they can be attributed with a capacity for self-formation and hence subjective agency. Further, narrative fictions are essentially performative. They may configure characters and events in ways structured to be meaningful and significant, but they also invite readers to inhabit those structures and treat them as models for understanding behavior in the actual world and as exemplifying desirable or undesirable behaviors. In other words, a thematic textual function is to disclose how particular schemata have become naturalized within discourse and social practice, and to advance alternative schemata thematically. At the same time, however, the strategies of narration and visual representation will tend to the illusion that the favored schema emerges naturally from within a higher ethical perspective. Chris Crutcher's polyfocalized novel lronman (\995) can be regarded as a paradigmatic example of these propensities. Framed as letters to radio host Larry King (and so foregrounding a creative element from the outset)-letters which purport to be a recount of Bo's experiences over a particular period of time-the novel also includes chapters as

Preface

xiii

Bo's first-person narration and chapters in third-person narration, and in shifting amongst these often juxtaposes different ways of recounting the same incident. This enables Crutcher to place both his character and the novel's readers in changing subject positions by contrasting enacted and recounted versions. For example, while musing on his relationship with girlfriend Shelly, Bo asks his mother why her marriage failed, and in her selfreflexive response the novel (in third-person narration) lays out some almost textbook material on the nature of masculinity and its construction in symbiosis with certain feminine behavior: patriarchal domination is here argued to be not self-fashioning but constituted historically in relation to feminine practices of submission and excessive tolerance. In the next, modally different section, a letter to Larry, Bo distances himself and his reader from his mother's self-analysis by describing it as "a five-credit graduate course in marital and family dysfunction" (p. 146). In a not particularly subtle way, the narrative thus shifts from a performative to an analytic representation of the episode, thereby enabling an overt articulation of theme. lmnman is not atypical in young adult fiction in being a virtual compendium of themes and issues which are the concern of the contributors to this book: its overarching theme is the quest for subjective agency, achieved by means of a reorientation of self to world, and figured in the anger management program Bo joins and is reluctant to leave when he "graduates"; it explores the possibility of being a "hard-bodied" male without also being a "macho numbnut" (p. 104); it raises the issue of homophobia, and incorporates alternative masculinities in the characters of the Japanese-American counselor, Mr. Nakatani, and the gay teacher, Lionel Serbousek; and in depicting the participants in the anger management program as without exception the victims of hegemonic masculinity's obsession with power and control (which it confuses with agency), the novel argues that overbearing fathers and teachers blight their relationships with younger males and women in general by their obsessive need to reproduce forms of their own masculinity. Susan Bordo (1993) wrote: The pleasure and power of "difference" is hard won; it does not freely bloom, insistently nudging its way through the cracks of dominant forms. Sexism, racism and "ageism", while they do not determine human value and choices, while they do not deprive us of "agency", remain strongly normalising within our culture. (p. 199)

Cultural formations playa role in either sustaining or challenging the existing gender configurations, and children's literature can make a significant contribution to whether or not child readers understand the conflict between the possibilities of forging a new subjective agency and the propensity of a hegemonic social structure to represent itself as always already given and inevitable. Connell argues that:

xiv

Preface Masculinity and femininity are inherently relational concepts, which have meaning in relation to each other, as a social demarcation and a cultural opposition. This holds regardless of the changing content of the demarcation in different societies and periods of history. (1995, 44)

To degender social relations requires the resignification of masculinity and femininity so that they are not bounded and oppositional concepts. This remains another matter of unfinished business for children's literature. The work has begun in making visible the operations of traditional normative masculinity and rejecting the concept of the unitary masculine subject, opposing it with diverse masculine subjectivities for which agency is premised upon intersubjective relations no longer grounded in unequal relations of power. In such ways masculine subjectivities may be reconfigured, resignified, and rewritten. Ways of Being Male assembles a body of theoretically informed criticism of children's literature and culture. Fiction is still the dominant textual form in children's studies and is therefore the focus of the majority of the chapters, ranging across preadult fiction from early reading texts to young adult fiction. Some chapters deal with other forms-picture books, for example-and some with other media, especially film. Some focus on particular works, but all do so within a framework of larger conceptual and methodological issues. The chapters embody a broad spectrum of approaches, as contributors have been drawn from a wide range of academic cultures. Their writing is nuanced by local practices, while in touch with international discourses in literary criticism, feminism, social sciences (cultural studies, education), film theory, psychoanalytic criticism, Queer Theory, and others. In short, contributors are willing to employ whatever approach or combination of approaches that will enable a productive, illuminating exploration of the texts and topics under discussion. As editor, lowe a special thanks to Jack Zipes for facilitating this volume, within a series that is making a unique contribution to the understanding of children's literature and culture. I thank all the contributors for their cooperation and patience with an editor whose criticisms of their work didn't always find the right balance between acuteness and acerbity. Not everyone present at the beginning of this project was able to continue, and I'm particularly grateful to colleagues who stepped in and gave me access to their current research at less than optimum notice so that the volume could maintain its range and depth. Special thanks here go to Kerry Mallan and Victoria Flanagan. Finally, mega-thanks to Bev Pennell-as a contributor, a collaborator, and an assiduous editorial assistant.

1 Making Boys Appear The Masculinity of Children's Fiction PERRY NODELMAN

In the children's fiction course I teach at the University of Winnipeg, I have always included texts that promote discussion of the ways that literature influences a reader's understanding of what it means to be of a specific sex and gender. Until recently, though, the sex under discussion was female and the gender was feminine. Decades of important work by feminist scholars have shown the significant ways that texts express ideas about women and thus work to shape the femininity of female readers. In recent years, in fact, my predominantly female students have already acquired strategies for reading texts in terms of the versions of femininity depicted in them. While they enjoyed using the skills they already possessed, it was no longer a challenging learning experience for them. With this in mind, I decided to choose a number of texts about boys and to focus on questions of masculinity.l The new focus distressed my students in revealing ways. They saw it as a waste of time because they were convinced that there was nothing to explore. Girls, in their minds, were clearly the victims of stereotypes. Boys were just boys, allowed to be whomever they wanted to be, enjoying a freedom from stereotyping that girls can only envy. Why bother even thinking about masculinity? The assumptions my students were making about gendered identity have a long history and are widespread in contemporary North American culture. Traditionally femininity manifests itself as a form of dress, a costume or role one puts on, and therefore something that is understood as repressing individuality (Riviere 1929; Hcath 1986). Masculinity is often understood as not being a form of dress-as resistance to the act of putting on costumes or being repressed by conventional roles. While adult males can easily impersonate females with the appropriate clothing and makeup, it is harder for adult females to impersonate males by those means-the costume is less obviously and less artificially a costume. The currently sanctioned appearance of maleness remains more or less what it always was: not a matter of 1

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Perry Nodelman

wearing a costume, but instead, supposedly, a matter of not having one on. Masculinity is taken to be somehow natural and free-the state one achieves by resisting societal norms and being one's true self. As a result, what my students and many others in mainstream contemporary culture conceive of as a desirable solution to gender inequality is the adoption of traditionally male assumptions for everybody. Females can simply reject the feminine role, take off the costume and become free to be themselves, supposedly natural and nonrestricted. From this popular viewpoint, the artifice and repression implicit in our current constructions of masculinity remain invisible. Little wonder then that my students were surprised by my attempts to focus on this issue. Ideological theory teaches us that the things that matter most to us, and that most affect our dealings with each other, are the things we take for granted-what we see as natural so that we simply assume that this is the way things should be. 2 Even those of us who are committed to noticing and undermining stereotypes of femininity tend to be unaware of the degree to which our ideas about male behavior are equally stereotypical and, I suspect, equally dangerous for boys and men. An obvious example is the common response to boys acting exuberantly or even violently. "Boys will be boys," people say, as if aggressive or antisocial behavior is an inherent and unchangeable aspect of maleness. Michael Gurian, author of a popular manual, The Wonder of Boys (1996), believes that "a boy is in large part hard-wired to be who he is. We cannot, in large part, change who he is" (p. 5). Gurian's insistence on hardwiring suggests another reason why exploring masculinity in children's books seems a waste of time: if we cannot change masculinity then there is no point even thinking about it. Despite conventional assumptions, and despite Gurian's outrageously mechanistic wiring metaphor and his assertion that the behavior of boys is an unavoidable effect of "their dominance by the hormone testosterone" (p. 60), these qualities are not necessarily natural or biologically mandated, nor are they unchangeable. What we call "normal" is usually the imposition of culturally constructed and therefore politically motivated ideals that serve to repress individual differences by identifying the supposed ideal as the norm. Normal, or normative, masculinity is repressive in exactly this way. Like femininity and being female, masculinity is a social construct that connects with but does not necessarily coincide with maleness. This is why we can have tomboys and why we can tell some boys, like the one I once was myself, that they "throw like a girl" (Connell, 2000, 86-101). It becomes important then, for us to surface our assumptions about masculinity and to decide whether these are ideas that we want to maintain. It becomes equally important to investigate how books for children express these assumptions, how they help boys and girls, both consciously and unconsciously, to develop a dangerously repressive sense of what it means to be desirably masculine.

Making Boys Appear

3

In order to have my students appreciate the importance of this investigation, I needed them to realize that conventional masculinity is not natural. I had to make its constructedness visible, to make masculinity appear. I began by asking my students if it mattered that the main character in Gary Paulsen's novel Hatchet (l987)-the story of how a boy survives on his own in the wilds of northern Canada-is male. Being good feminists, they unanimously and immediately said no, that nothing happened to the character that would have to happen differently if he had been a girl. I then asked them to imagine that the main protagonist was a girl: Brianna, rather than Brian. Gradually the students began to see that the book would, indeed, seem different. They realized that they would characterize the reimagined Brianna as a tomboy, as unusually brave, resilient and unemotional. This then becomes a girl who learns how to use the hatchet she received as a gift from her mother and how to reinvent fire, and who single-handedly creates the circumstances for her own survival in the wild, almost never despairing and hardly ever giving way to tears. Brianna is an admirable girl, perhaps, but certainly an unusual one-one whose exceptionality would need to be commented upon, as Brian's is not. I have had numerous teaching experiences like this one with Hatchet. What is most interesting is the ease with which students perceive assumptions about femininity when they imagine a female character as a male, and the difficulty of perceiving the parallel assumptions about masculinity when they imagine a male character as a female. For instance, I asked students to reimagine Kevin Henkes' picture book Lily's Purple Plastic Purse (1996) as Liam's Purple Plastic Purse. What they accepted as natural behavior for Lily-her passion for her purse and her male teacher-immediately seemed unacceptable for Liam. When he behaves in ways we tend to think of as feminine, questions of gender confusion and sexual orientation arise. He seems unmanly because he is womanly, and his lack of manliness reveals the extent to which masculinity is conventionally understood in terms of its oppositional relationship to a more clearly marked femininity (or, sometimes, an effeminacy conventionally marked as a sign of homosexuality). Being masculine means not carrying a purse, not having a crush on a male teacher-not being feminine or effeminate (Connell 1995, 44). But when my students and I reversed the trick, and imagined Max in Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are (1963) or Beatrix Potter's Peter in The Tale o/Peter Rabbit (1902) as female children, we found at first that nothing seemed very different or odd. Girls acting as these characters did not seem to be doing anything particularly unfeminine-they were a little tomboyish but not egregiously or dangerously so. It required thought to see how implicitly these stories are about boyishness and what it means to be male. We could easily imagine Maxine in an alternative Where the Wild Things Are wearing a wolf suit and making enough mischief to infuriate her mother, but it took some effort to

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realize that we had quite a different attitude towards her than the one we had towards Max. Students admired Maxine for doing what had annoyed them about Max. His being wild was just being boyish-being loud, active, aggressive, violent and rude. We expect such behavior from boys and only hope they will eventually outgrow it. But Maxine, doing exactly the same things, seems an admirably strong, self-possessed girl, a role model for other girls to follow. What was desirable for Maxine was just inevitable for Max. Similarly, we easily imagined a girl rabbit, whom we named Honeysweet, doing what Peter does: defying her mother, going to Mr. McGregor's garden, and nearly getting herself killed. Honeysweet would seem admirably forthright and courageous when compared to her traditionally feminine sisters who obediently spend a very boring day picking berries in the hot sun. But Honeysweet would also be acting like a conventional maleexpressing what we tend to think of, even a century after Potter wrote her tale, as masculinity. The story ends with the young rabbit, having escaped from McGregor, being chastized for losing her clothes, and being sent to bed feeling ill. When this happens to Peter, most readers see it as a just punishment, warning children to obey their parents. When it happens to Honeysweet, my students admit disappointment. While it seems acceptable for Peter to be punished for being stereotypically male, punishing Honeysweet for her willingness to defy stereotypes seems counterproductive, a blow to feminism. This is strange, I think. A female acting aggressively by choice does not deserve to be punished, presumably because the choice was a wise one that should be applauded. But a male acting in the same way, we assume not by choice, but by virtue of his inherent maleness, deserves to be punished. One reason for this is that the punishment has no effect and is not really a punishment at all. Potter tells us that Peter has lost his clothes in the same way before. Presumably he will behave this way again. He is incorrigibleincorrigibly male by nature, and has no choice about it. He is therefore a hero, having undergone a male initiation, confronting the enemy on his own territory and prevailing. Seen in these terms, Peter's illness is merely a continuation of the test, something more he must suffer to demonstrate and celebrate his tenacity. What would be a defeat for Honeysweet is a confirmation of Peter's triumph, for acceptable masculinity is understood as being inherently antisocial. Being obedient, keeping safe, following the law are seen as natural female virtues while boys struggle because they are "hardwired" differently, as antisocial rapscallions. Conventionally, indeed, boys are wild things-animals. In the old nursery rhyme, boys are "frogs and snails and puppy dog's tails," animals and/or the parts of animals, whereas girls are "sugar and spice and everything nice," harmless condiments. It's no accident, therefore, that Peter is a rabbit, or that

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Max in Where the Wild Things Are wears a wolf suit and eventually imagines himself as king of the Wild Things, or, for that matter, that in Hatchet, Brian also identifies himself with a wolf: The wolf claimed all that was below him as his own, took Brian as his own. Brian looked back and for a moment felt afraid because the wolf was so ... so right. He knew Brian, knew him and owned him and chose not to do anything to him. But the fear moved then, moved away.... He knew the wolf now, as the wolf knew him. (p. 121)

Nevertheless, we have a social obligation to imbue children with a respect for the law, their elders, being good, and doing what adults perceive as "right". As well as confirming his masculinity, then, Peter's final illness does allow readers to entertain the possibility that he is a bad rabbit for not doing what his mother wants and acting like a man. In fact, we often tell boys that their wildness is inevitable, even desirable, while also telling them that to enact it is wrong. More accurately, we tell them it is wrong in a way that makes a double standard clear and also secretly allows it. The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Where the Wild Things Are, Hatchet, and many other books about boys and male animals show them as admirably triumphant on their own and selfsufficient in ways that might well be defined as antisocial. In Hatchet, Brian's survival depends on his learning to see and think as wild animals do, to survey the world with the detached eye of a hunter. As a result of these experiences, the narrator tells us, "Brian had gained immensely in his ability to observe what was happening and react to it; that would last him all his life" (p. 193). It seems that allowing oneself the detachment natural to a hunter in the wild is what produces successful masculinity in society too. For boys, being antisocial might well be socially acceptable. In Peter Rabbit, then, the male child is to his mother as the animal is to the human, the wild creature in apparent need of being civilized. The boy and his mother represent a set of opposites that define their essential meaning against each other. The essential meaning is that boys are wild things and inevitably in conflict with the anti-wild repressions of their female parents. But Peter Rabbit adds another set of opposites with an apparently contradictory implication, and a different set of cultural significances, ones that are revealed through a consideration of nudity. As I read my gender-switching Tale of Honeysweet Rabbit aloud to my class, there was some uncomfortable giggling when Honeysweet lost all her clothes and appeared in naked rabbit glory in Potter's illustration. Nobody thought a naked Peter was worth giggling about. Why? It might be because, being a male, it is appropriate that Peter loses his human clothing, the veneer of civilization that his mother has imposed upon

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him, and becomes a naturally wild thing. In fact, Potter makes it clear that this animal can only survive when he divests himself of the trappings of society. The jacket catches him in a net and the shoes slow him down. The story tells us that the repressive covering of civilization stifles his innate ability to survive in the wild. It is not funny that Peter is naked because triumphant animal masculinity is revealed. Honeysweet's nakedness carries different messages. A naked girl is a sex object, even a naked girl rabbit. She makes us uncomfortable because the revelation of her nakedness implies, not physical aggression and competence, but availability, lack of control or restraint, a dangerously or deliciously unbridled revelation of passion and instinct. In other words, the regendered book about Honeysweet appears to be invoking the traditional cultural assumption that women are lower on the evolutionary scale than men, irrational and more controlled by their bodies. In terms of this set of assumptions, we identify nature as a mother and see such things as menstrual cycles and the ability to give birth as evidence that women are more tied to biological functioning. For centuries, furthermore, dominant masculine paradigms have taken for granted that both men and women should be afraid of the female body. According to such views women must work harder to repress their natural instincts. They are spiritually vulnerable because of their natural weakness and they tempt men. Their bodies must be hidden lest men become victims of their natural powerful incitement to act in ways that overwhelm a man's better, more rational self. A naked boy rabbit is just an animal. A naked girl rabbit is a female animal, dangerous, exciting, and upsetting. Honeysweet would do better to keep her clothes on. Superficially the distinctions between masculine and feminine behavior in Potter's century-old tale seem fairly obvious, just a little old-fashioned. The girls wear pink jackets, Peter a blue one. The girls are so passively obedient as to be an indiscriminate mass, distinguished from each other only by their names. Peter insists on his independence, his separation from the family and his ability to negotiate the world on his own. Potter always draws him as distinct from the blob of girlhood. We may like to believe we have moved beyond the identification of passivity and emotional dependence with femininity, of aggression and independence with masculinity, but our different responses to the reimagined story reveal how our conceptions of gender have not changed all that much. Replacing Peter with Honeysweet reveals that we maintain the criteria of femininity or masculinity as oppositional sets. In particular, it confirms that to be appropriately male, you must be triumphantly animal-like and express your true masculine animal nature. But in doing so, you will have to be punished for defying civilized values, and you will have to "take your punishment like a man." Incongruously, the world works by using animal male power to support a structure that purports to repress and control animal male power.

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The ambiguity of The Tale of Peter Rabbit also exists in Where the Wild Thing Are, as the triumphant Max controls and represses the Wild Things because he is the wildest thing of all. These contradictions continue in current books for children. Consider Lois Lowry's comic novel Stay! Keeper's Story (1997). Keeper, a dog, epitomizes the characteristics we often associate with canines. They must express the savagery of animals in their appearance, but in their lives as pets their animality must be repressed. Keeper knows how to appear like a magnificently savage male animal. His maleness is delightfully confirmed by his obsessive regard for his "particularly magnificent tail" (p. 22), his "young but already glorious tail" (p. 28), his tail that makes him so unlike "little, cross-bred females with mottled fur and inadequate crooked tails" (p. 75). Keeper's tail makes him "well endowed" as he proudly proclaims (p. 120). Nevertheless, his tail becomes "a useless appendage" when he rolls over onto his back to signify his lack of aggression towards two cats. It "stays limp" (p. 98) when he feels an unmanly fear, even though it sometimes disconcertingly rises to the occasion: "Considering its importance as an appendage, the sad lack of control over one's tail is astounding" (p. 19). As men know, some appendages are like that. But for all his appearance of savage maleness, Keeper feels only horror when, having run off to the woods, he gnaws at a rabbit and thinks of himself as being "reduced" to a "primitive" creature (p. 81). What he wants is to be a "keeper," in safe domestic surroundings, plied with French cuisine, playing a role traditionally occupied by women and children. The irony is that he gets his wish by appearing savagely animal-like-by appearing to be, but never behaving like, a magnificent wild beast. In this way, he suggests something surprisingly similar to the paradox of masculinity we find in The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Where the Wild Things Are-he who must seem savage and yet be domesticated at one and the same time. Keeper is a contemporary version of this paradox because his aggressive male dogginess is a matter of appearance. Traditionally, women's power lay in their physical beauty, which was assumed to attract an admiring male gaze or an envious female one. Men were the observers and made the judgments about who was worth looking at. In the last twenty years or so, men have become increasingly the objects of such gaze. We now have naked male pinups in magazines, semi-naked male beauties in perfume ads, Chippendale dancers, and other male exotics. We have a culturewide fetish among females for commenting on the behinds of men they see on the street and among males for bodybuilding. The latter is about looking strong and powerful, not necessarily being so. According to the art theorist John Berger (1972, 47), the assumption behind traditional European paintings and contemporary pin-up photos of the female nude is that men act and women appear. Men now appear too-and boys must therefore learn to do so. But paradoxically, in

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order to appear desirable, they must suggest aggression, strength, and danger, like Keeper. They must, as the title of a recent book by Mark Simpson suggests, be Male Impersonators: Men Peiforming Masculinity (1994). Nowadays, to be a man is very much like being a pet dog-only apparently savage. The visibility of masculinity has another significant resonance as a manifestation of homophobia. I suggested earlier that masculinity is becoming ever more firmly defined as not feminine. Increasingly, in a North America where homosexuality has entered public discussion widely enough for hidden fears about it to become publicly apparent, that also increasingly means not gay-and therefore not looking or acting in ways commonly understood to be gay-which are, almost always, ways of seeming feminine or being effeminate. Thus, the increased importance of appearing masculine (Connell 2000, 102). These days, adult situation comedies on television such as Friends, Drew Carey, and many others endlessly repeat variations of the same joke about the horror of friendship between males being understood by others as homosexual attraction. The significance of not being gay in the culture of boyhood is a little less obvious but it is there nevertheless. The possibility of a male child having gay tendencies in early childhood is of less significance than the possibility that others, children and adults, might perceive the child as having gay tendencies-the appearance of unmanliness. In terms of having success and making friends in the culture of childhood at large, nothing could be less desirable. The sociologist Michael Kimmel, who has written extensively on the history of masculinity in America, in for instance, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (1996), speaks in an interview available on the Internet about a relatively new form of homophobia, which is the fear that other people might perceive us as being gay. This is where it ties in most directly to the ideologies of masculinity or femininity as we know them. To make sure no one could get the wrong idea that I might somehow be gay, one goes through an elaborate repertoire of behaviors, ideas, displays .... That terror that someone might see us as gay fuels all the ways in which we talk, act, dress, move in the world-to make sure no one could get that idea. As a result, homophobia becomes a real straitjacket, pushing us toward a very traditional definition of masculinity.

If that is true, then Keeper's appearance of traditionally aggressive masculinity may be working to disguise fears other than those already mentioned. What Keeper assumes about the importance of appearing acceptably doglike might well represent the importance for boys of appearing acceptably and conventionally masculine. Kimmel's remarks throw light on a range of recent texts for children about boys. In Jerry Spinelli's Wringer (1997), for instance, a boy resists taking part in his town's annual pigeon shoot, an event which also acts as a ritual

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of manhood for boys by requiring them, once they reach their tenth birthday, to wring the necks of pigeons shot but not quite dead. Palmer always knew he did not want to be a wringer, male in the conventionally acceptable way, but he nevertheless wants to belong to an aggressively masculine group of boys that thrives on competitiveness and bullying and other antisocial behaviors that distress female adults. By joining this group, Palmer learns how to appear-and believes therefore he is-successfully masculine. Then Palmer is befriended by a pigeon, the vulnerable object of the hunt. It takes up residence in his closet. He comes to feel tenderness towards it as a pet and companion. He knows it must be kept a secret from the other boys or else he will lose his standing as an acceptably manly member of the group. When I first read this novel, I found myself thinking about it as a coded story about being gay, having a secret in your closet that would destroy your macho image and prevent you from being acceptable as one of the guys. Interesting as that possibility is, it is far more instructive to realize that the image of the closet resonates with many aspects of male emotional repression. Personal vulnerability and concern for others must be kept from men in order to be considered acceptably masculine. Being gay is not the only thing boys and men must closet in our culture, but it operates as a powerful example of how these closets operate to maintain cultural norms and keep boys and men appearing safely normal in their masculinity. Spinelli wants us to admire Palmer for bringing his attachment to the pigeon out of the closet. But he also makes it clear at the end of the novel that Palmer, bravely revealing his attachment by standing defiantly alone in front of a crowd cheering on men with rifles, is a triumphant and quite traditionally masculine hero-an isolated outsider in defiance of conventional norms. As my students and I consider our society's assumptions about masculinity we find ourselves returning to the recognition that we expect boys to be contradictory things. The phrase "tough but tender" recurs. And we have found it instructive that we feel the need, for instance, to have Max in Where the Wild Things Are want to be back where someone loved him best of all-to express a tenderness, a need for nurturing, a possible sign of an inability to make it on his own, just as Keeper does so endearingly. In Hatchet Brian does not do that. He very much makes it on his own, and remains his own person at the end. He is alone, among the heroes of the books I have mentioned thus far, in expressing traditional ideals of masculinity without qualification or ambiguity. Like Wringer, a surprising number of books about boys seem to be at least superficially about how the boys learn to see through and beyond the conventions of machismo, the power of aggression, and the rituals of male bonding that are celebrated in Hatchet. On the other hand, though, we were all quite firmly convinced that a boy who didn't, as Palmer does, wish for and experience conventional masculinity before seeing through it, or a Max who expressed a need for nurturing without an

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opposite urge to wildness, would be merely depressing, not to mention quite unlikely-not a real boy at all. In his popular book Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood (1998), the American psychologist William Pollack says, "We want our boys to be sensitive New Age guys and still be cool dudes. Is it any wonder that a lot of boys are confused by this double standard?" (p. xxv). Pollack's purpose in this book is to encourage parents, teachers, and other adults to move beyond what he calls the "boy code"-a set of assumptions about how boys should hide any tender feelings of empathy, aesthetic sensitivity, and vulnerability and express no emotion but the "manly" one of rage. While Pollack calls the "boy code" a myth, his many pages of advice for adults about dealing with boys, focus on ways of encouraging boys to express their feelings through words or tears rather than through the violent actions we traditionally expect from them. The "boy code" is a cultural construct, something we impose on boys that we can move past, but Pollack implies it is so firmly in place from birth that we need to keep it in mind in all our dealings with boys from their earliest years. Even the main spokesperson of the danger of our cultural ideas about masculinity seems unable not to speak as if these values were eternally true. Gurian's belief that boys are "hard-wired" and unchangeable comes to mind again. Yet his book is subtitled What Parents, Mentors, and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Men and it is concerned with the issue highlighted by the subtitle: shaping boys, changing them, manipulating them to be what we want them to be. After insisting we can't change what a boy is, he adds, "We can teach him how to develop who he is with confidence, and towards a direction that contributes to our world" (p. 5). Gurian, too, wants it both ways. He wants to insist that boys will be boys, period. He also wants to insist that only certain forms of maleness are acceptable and that boys must and can learn to be masculine in these specific ways. In the age-old dispute about nature versus culture, Pollack represents culture, Gurian nature, but both end up saying almost the same things in the same way. Masculinity in our time is a contradictory thing. What is weirdest about it is how separate it finally is from the fact of being biologically male, even in the mind of a biological imperialist like Gurian. Just about all of us believe that real men are not born, they are made, as in the old phrase, "I'm going to make a man out of you." Traditional manhood is something that does or does not happen to males. It consists of choices and always, I think, it represents an ideal and impossible-to-achieve state of being that all males must inevitably fail to achieve. Contradictory ideas about boys and male animals permeate children's books just as they do the culture that produces those books. But until my students and I imagined Maxine and Honeysweet, we did not realize that. It took some fancy dancing and gender-switching for us to reveal our assumptions

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and thus make masculinity appear. What we learned about it once it emerged from its closet suggested a range of ways in whieh fiction for children implies and reinforces ideas about normative masculinity. First, as already suggested, many children's books focus on a solitary male bravely confronting danger and being deemed a hero as a result of it. Such books value separation, detachment and, as in Hatchet, the hunter's power of being far enough away from others to have them in your gunsight and hence in your control. We admire such heroes, but claim to despise the "boy code" that reinforces this sort of emotional detachment in everyday life. How do these books relate to, reinforce or perhaps undermine social reality? Second, many books present masculinity as a force in opposition to the law, to manners and to the social fabric. In a tradition going back at least as far as S. E. Hinton's Outsiders (1967), perhaps even back to Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), the boys who are praised tend to be the lawless outsiders, not the law-abiding plodders. In K.A. Applegate's recently popular Animorphs series, both boy and girl characters continually deal with a traditionally masculine dilemma-in order to save their world from evil alien forces, they must forgo the luxury of being soft or tender or worrying about the feelings of others or the morality and legality of their exceedingly violent actions. Boy or girl, they must be lean, mean, law-breaking fighting machines, masculine in the ways that soldiers and warriors have traditionally been masculine-thugs admired for their viciousness. Much popular literature for children and adults similarly attempts to make what was once a traditional image of masculinity desirable for all of us, regardless of sex. Nowadays, it seems, we are all supposed to be just one of the guys. Third, a lot of books about boys that purport to transcend the formulas of popular fiction are about boys seeing through the conventional constructions of masculinity, learning to be more sensitive or more loving or more openly imaginative or literate, or less caught up in the pleasures of aggressive bullying. In addition to Wringer, books such as Spinelli's Crash (1996), Diana WieIer's Bad Boy (1989), Rich Wallace's Wrestling Sturbridge (1996), and Jack Gantos's Jack's New Power (1995) fall into this category. This emphasis is not surprising. As I suggested earlier, most of the students I teach, indeed, most adults interested in children's literature whether authors, editors, librarians, or teachers-are women. In our contemporary culture, anything to do with children remains what it traditionally was, primarily the domain of women. As a result, children's literature often tends to be a maternal sort of literature, even when produced by men following the conventions of the genre. It often admires the kinds of boys that mothers might most easily love-good, safe, nonrowdy boys who do not break rules and cause maternal anxiety. Whatever the reason, books for children written by both men and women tend to admire boys who share the authors' interests in reading and writing and in valuing imagination. Bookish people tend to write books in

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celebration of bookish people. In contemporary North American culture being bookish is understood to be a girly kind of thing. Pollack cites American studies that show that "at all age levels ... females continue to outscore males in reading proficiency" (p. 234) and that demonstrate "a correlation between boys' low reading skills and their association of reading with feminine skills" (p. 246). It is instructive that the huge popularity of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books has been ascribed in part to the fact that boys are unusually willing to read them. 3 Could this willingness be attributed to Harry's display of conventional masculine attributes-especially an exuberant disregard for rules that never seems to lead to punishment? Boys might tend to associate reading with effeminacy and not read contemporary children's fiction because it often celebrates effeminacy and addresses conventional masculinity as a problem to be transcended. The portrayals of boys defying conventional machismo so common in children's fiction may have little influence on boy readers when compared to the huge power of cultural conventions which reinforce traditional desirable masculinity. When it comes to what it means to be a man, boys are less likely to listen to their mothers and librarians than to other boys and older male figures. Fourth, masculinity is always and inevitably relational (Connell 1995, 71). We tend to understand it in terms of how it is not femininity and how it is oppositional to femininity. Just as significant, normative masculinity is assumed to be heterosexual and not homosexual. Boys who resist the "boy code" are therefore popularly considered to be girly or gay. Even Wieler's Bad Boy, with its sensitive depiction of a gay teenage hockey player and the straight friend who comes to accept his gayness, replicates these stereotyped oppositions. The gay boy is lithe, quick-moving and mercurial, emotionally expressive, erratic, and passively masochistic in his sex life. The straight one is stocky, muscular, and deliberate, in control of his emotions, stolidly dependable, and aggressively sadistic as a hockey player and pursuer of women. Is the acceptance of gayness communicated here or are tired cliches about it reiterated? Indeed, is children's literature sometimes unintentionally but implicitly homophobic? Fifth, many of these books raise concerns about the relationships between fathers and sons. These often involve secrets-secrets fathers keep from boys, as in Tim Wynn-Jones's Stephen Fair (1998) and Edward Bloor's Tangerine (1997), or secrets boys keep from fathers, as in Hatchet. They often involve the acceptance or rejection of a father and a boy's right to choose who will be his father. They often depict rivalry between sons and fathers which may be understood in psychoanalytical terms. In Hatchet for instance, Brian wants to tell his father his Secret-that he has seen his mother in a car at a mall parking lot, kissing a younger man. Brian finds himself unable to tell as he feels guilty about the Secret, "the worry of the shame of it" (p. 68),

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and about his parents' subsequent separation and divorce. It is possible to interpret Brian's shame as the result of facing his own Oedipal fantasies. Here is Sigmund Freud's description of the Oedipus complex: As a result of the constant combined operation of the two driving forces, desire [for the mother] and thirst for revenge [directed at the mother for being unfaithful to the boy with the father], phantasies of his mother's unfaithfulness are by far the most preferred; the lover with whom she commits her act of infidelity almost always exhibits the features of the boy's own ego, or more accurately, of his own idealized personality, grown up and raised to a level with his father. (1918, repro in Gay, 1989,392)

A man younger than his father but older than himself seems the perfect representation of Brian's idealized personality. That man's secret, the tryst in the parking lot, becomes Brian's own Secret. After being involved in a plane crash, Brian connects the guilt-causing Secret with the crash, as if one had caused the other: "If he had good luck his parents wouldn't have divorced because of the Secret and he wouldn't have been flying with a pilot who had a heart attack ... " (p. 94). Brian learns to see properly, not guiltily but with the appropriate detachment, and proves himself a man during his adventure in the wild (using, not coincidentally, the phallic hatchet that was his mother's gift to him). He no longer needs to feel his father is a rival and appears to separate himself from what might have been his guilty desire for his mother. The last sentence of the novel reinforces the otherwise inexplicable significance of the Secret by highlighting it again: "Brian tried several times to tell his father, came really close several times to doing it, but in the end never said a word about the man and what he knew, the Secret" (p. 195). Sixth and last, if boys generally do not read, then why do these books that encourage various ways of thinking about masculinity exist at all? Most obviously, they exist for the pleasure of a large number of readers with a vested interest in critiquing the assumptions about masculinity shared by large numbers of "normal" boys. These readers include anyone marginalized or oppressed by conventional assumptions about masculinity. They are girls (and adult men and women who parent or who deal professionally with boys) who do not want to accept the supposed male right to power or testosteroneinitiated aggression or lust. They are gay boys or potentially gay boys coming to terms with their sexuality. They are supposedly effeminate boys and scholarly geeks and imaginative freaks and other male outsiders. They are anyone with a need to confirm or develop a negative view of traditional masculine values and behaviors that oppress and discredit them. Such readers are invited to understand themselves as the good guys in opposition to conventional males, to see themselves as wise and good in the ways that they are at odds with conventional masculinity. These books thereby invite readers to

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replicate the oppositional thinking that constitutes masculinity as not feminine and not gay. It is not too far-fetched to conclude that an acceptable nontraditional masculinity as constructed in such books perpetuates a demonized conventional masculinity, the rejection of which is a requisite part of successfully becoming a girl not modeled on male norms or a gay boy or an imaginative and sensitive male reader. Such books may not be anything but counterproductive in the long run. All of this suggests the dilemmas faced by those interested in getting boys to analyze the assumptions underpinning contemporary masculinity. How can this occur when masculinity is constructed in ways that undermine the value of reading and thinking, and when the act of seeing beyond almost inevitably demonizes what so many boys already have so much invested in? Answers will emerge with an awareness of the convoluted nature of the problem. The more that masculinity is made to appear as a set of malleable cultural conventions, the more we will be able to think about and possibly even revise its implications.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

An earlier version of this chapter was presented as the keynote address at "Haloes and Hooligans: Images of the Child at the Tum of the Century" symposium at The Center for the Study of Children's Literature, Simmons College, Boston, MA, July 1999. I would like to express my gratitude to everyone at the center who helped me to develop the ideas I am exploring here: Susan Bloom, Cathie Mercier, and the students enrolled in the institute that accompanied the symposium: Tamara Depasquale, Naomi DuBois, Elissa Gershowitz, Abby Harper, Karyn Hartstone, Mary Holt, Sheila Hussey, Deborah Kaplan, Mary Kielbasa, Jim Kuehl, Fiona Feng-Hsin, Liu, Kathy May, Debby Porter, Erin Postl, Deb Shapiro, Shannon Small, and Eileen Stokes. Students in children's literature courses at the University of Winnipeg have also been helpful---especially Alexis Gaston, the first to perceive Brian's masculinity in Paulsen's Hatchet. I am thinking here of ideology as understood by Louis Althusser: "It is indeed a peculiarity of ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since these are 'obviousnesses') obviousnesses as obviousnesses, which we cannot fail to recognize and before which we have the inevitable and natural reaction of crying out (loud or in the 'still small voice of conscience'): 'That's obvious! That's right! That's true!' " (1986, 245). "Harry Potter has captured the imagination of many in the most difficult group for reading-adolescent boys-and turned them into readers" (Matas 2000). As a result of appealing to those boys and many other children and adults, the first three of the Harry Potter novels not only represented a significant breakthrough-the first time texts of children's fiction figured prominently on the New York Times' bestseller list-but actually occupied the top three positions on that list for many months.

2 Picturing the Male Representations of Masculinity in Picture Books KERRY MALLAN

In this age of cumulo-nimbus male physiques, the silhouettes that satisfied earlier generations look wimpy by comparison. RICHARD LACAYO, TIME

A Crisis in Representation?

Picturing the male activates two processes-imagining and imaging. Both depend on an understanding of the subject of masculinity. In picturing the male, there is a suggestion that the subject is a universal one which assures immediate recognition and identification. Let us try to envisage this universal man: What would he look like? How would he act? What kind of ideal would he represent? The impossibility that these questions pose in terms of a definitive answer reflects the complexity of masculinity in contemporary Western societies and alludes to the crisis-in-masculinity rhetoric that pervades both academic and popular discourses. As Gilbert and Gilbert (1998, 7) suggest, such crisis rhetoric laments a kind of "paradise lost," a mythical place and time when the rites and passage to manhood were clear and the masculine idea was an unproblematic goal. However, as the opening quotation implies, there is also a crisis in the ways masculinity is represented in visual culture. The two forms of crisis are interrelated. In looking at the visual representations of masculinity in children's picture books, this chapter references imagery of masculinity in the wider cultural arena and considers the ways in which visual culture actively produces shifting gender constructions and ideologies. To separate children's books from the broader cultural context is to ignore the impact of social, political, and economic interests on children's publishing. Furthermore. to assign children's books to their own isolated space ignores their part in registering the changing historical and cultural transitions that have influenced, and continue to influence, the protean forms and circumstances of masculinity.

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Rather than mourn the loss of an authentic, unchanging masculinity, the following discussion highlights the way masculinity, like patriarchy, is always in process and subject to amendment. At any given historical moment, diverse masculinities exist, rather than a singular masculinity (Connell 1995). Despite this diversity, however, certain masculine exemplars or paradigms always dominate historical and contemporary visual culture. These masculinities can be equated with Solomon-Godeau's suggestion that there are three ages of ideal masculinity: the noble patriarch, the virile warrior, and the delicate ephebe (1997, 57). In contemporary popular culture, such diversity coexists within a range of cultural texts-books, magazines, film, and television. Thus, for example, in the same magazine images of a Calvin Klein androgynous youth are reproduced side by side with muscled, testosterone-charged bodybuilders and domesticated males who iron their own trousers, cook gourmet meals, and look after the kids. The appearances of the new mana softer, more caring, domesticated male-may suggest that earlier images of the phallic (Marlboro) man have been superseded. However, these new man icons equally idealize models of masculinity and so may not in themselves be a cause for celebrating the demise of a hegemonic masculine paradigm. If masculinity is indeed in crisis, should these opposing images be read as symptoms of that crisis (crisis in the sense of a turning point) or do they signify something else? To explore some of the implications of this question, this chapter offers a broad-based inquiry into contemporary picture book representations of masculinity. This vast and complex subject cannot be encompassed in a single chapter, so I will focus on selected male archetypes and stereotypes as a way of dealing with specific issues as they relate to the representations of masculinity within this area of children's culture. Picture books, like other art forms and cultural artifacts, are characterized by the polysemic nature of their imagery. The multiplicity of meanings, interpretations, and associations (manifest and latent) is always in excess of simple denotation. Furthermore, as picture books are a significant part of children's culture, they are produced within defined boundaries and parameters which are based on assumptions about their readership (and adult/marketplace reception). For this reason, picture book artists operate within what Jauss (1970) terms "a horizon of expectation," and hence both form and meaning tend to be conventional, despite some innovative and daring attempts to disrupt such conventions. Nevertheless, picture books, like other visual and written texts, are open to unconscious processes both in production and reception, and so by representing the materialities of masculinities and male bodies, picture book artists are in a position to open up new understandings of masculinity for their audiences. In this sense, picture books, like Calvin Klein advertisements, exemplify the shift whereby in recent years masculinity has moved slowly away from being

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a site of production (the active, heroic ideal) to a site of consumption (male bodies on display for both identification and objectification). Making Masculinity Visible One of the interesting effects of the current theorizing about masculinity in visual culture, which in part has been accompanied by feminist and gay/ lesbian interrogations of gender constructions and hierarchies, has been to render the status of masculinity visible and marked: a category which was once regarded as invisible and unmarked (Lacan 1990). This loss of transparency or invisibility signals the ways that masculinity can now be viewed as both an object of contemplation and a subject of (unconscious) identification. The discourses which construct male subjectivity call attention to the male body in much the same way as the female body has been scrutinized. This viewing of the male body recalls Mulvey's (1975) much cited paper which contends that men are bearers of the gaze and women are the objects of the gaze. Mulvey's argument has drawn attention to two aspects of visual pleasure: identification and objectification. Men engage in narcissistic identification while women are the objects of spectacle. While Mulvey's original paper did much to discredit affect and aesthetics, it also made suspect notions of narcissism, voyeurism, and gender hierarchies. With the renewed interest in masculinity as an object of spectacle and, in some cases, erotic display, the range of opportunities and contexts for viewing the male body has been widened. Men looking at men is of course not new. Sport, rock concerts, and film have been customary sites for a dual male and female viewership. The proliferation of mass culture masculine icons in (gay) calendars, as nude centerfolds, and familiar beefcake images in advertisements, constitutes a change in contemporary social attitudes, tolerance, and expectations about masculinity as well as a shrewd marketing strategy to cater for a dual readership: feminine and gay. This opening out of visual pleasure now invites such questions as: Who sees? How is the viewer positioned? What kind of gaze is being solicited? How is masculinity being discursively constructed and visually represented? The representations of masculinity encountered in picture books to some extent reflect those found in the wider cultural context. However, because of the nature (and age) of their readership, the more extreme, highly sexualized images that are available in other contemporary cultural texts are absent. While it is an easy shorthand to cite the instances of opposing or alternative masculinities found in picture books-hardlsoft, phallic/feminized-it is more useful to consider how the visuals can be read in terms of the historical, contingent, and performative nature of masculinity. To do so provides a more grounded basis for considering whether variants of masculinity reflect larger cultural crises, or whether they are merely superficial alternatives to traditional (hegemonic) masculinities which appeal to current popular discourses.

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Despite the complex and changing definitions and redefinitions of manhood that have occurred over the centuries, paradigms and parodies of masculinity are always embodied, and hence masculinity needs to be understood as being coterminous with the body's physique and physicality. Therefore my discussion here will consider a range of picture books which show masculinity in its various manifestations with particular reference to the body.

Once Were Warriors: Reviewing the Heroic Ideal War has provided an ideal mise-en-scene for the staging of masculinity. The warring male body signifies the masculine ideal of control, dominance, and mastery, and battle becomes the ultimate test of manhood, summarily sorting out the weak and the cowardly from the strong and the heroic. In visual representations of battle scenes and warriors, the viewer is frequently presented with the trappings and physical displays of the man at war. The erect posture, military costume, weaponry, and stem facial statement of early military portraits implied a phallic (and virile) authority. However, heroic masculinities encoded through the warrior ideal have undergone massive reconstructions over the years. In one sense, the gradual technologizing of war has diminished men's identities as warriors. No longer reliant on sheer physical strength and agility, the warrior's body gradually has become less productive of the heroic figure. This feature is exemplified in children's picture books where the heroic ideal has been replaced by a pathetic parodic figure (for example, Briggs 1984; Garland and Ross 1996). Yet, in another sense, technology has played a major part in refashioning the warrior ideal by merging machine and man into a new hybrid form which is stronger, more powerful, and seemingly invincible. This is particularly evident in successful mainstream films such as The Tenninator (1984). Other recent popular films, such as Gladiator (2000), have revived the ailing warrior by breathing life into his now muscle-bound, eroticized body. In these instances, the male body is fashioned for display and becomes "an object of desirous looking" (Solomon-Godeau 1997,23). The strong, hard beauty of the ideal male warrior embodied in these filmic heroes may thus solicit the male spectator's narcissistic identification with "an image of ennobled, self-contained perfection that functions as a type of ego-ideal" (p. 87). The effects of these contemporary images on young boys are comparable to the "ego-ideals" offered by past superheroes (for example, Superman, Tarzan, The Phantom) that enchanted boys of earlier generations. Despite the phallic versions of masculinity that these past and contemporary warrior types signify, there is, nevertheless, a contradiction which runs through their psychic and cultural constructions. More often than not, these supermen embody both nonphallic and phallic characteristics, such that even Schwarzenegger's character in Terminator 2 (1991) is portrayed as a warmhearted killing machine.

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Within this general framework of both idealized and contradictory mass culture images of heroic masculinities, children's picture books can be seen as navigating their way through the same tidal shifts of historical and cultural contexts. Seeing Red (Garland and Ross 1996) is not only a gentle reminder to young readers of the part women have played in times of war, but is more overtly a comment on the ridiculousness of the military masquerade. In this story the "boys playing with toys" comment many women make about the masculine obsession with weaponry and military technology is in sharp contrast with feminine ingenuity for finding peaceful solutions (of course, the point here is made at the cost of an underlying premise which essentializes women). Set in the time of the Napoleonic Wars, the story tells how the women of an English village were able to fool the advancing French army led by "Old Boney" by flashing their red petticoats to create the illusion that the redcoats were waiting in ambush (whereas the men of the village had headed off in the wrong direction). The clever appropriation of a female undergarment as a means to repel (rather than lure) men and the act of women flashing are in themselves interesting inversions of familiar malefemale sexual imagery. The depiction of the French army presents viewers with an image of chaos and incompetence as the bumbling troops, more reminiscent of Monty Python than their idealized heroic forefathers, fall over one another and struggle to control their wayward rifles. Furthermore, their long spaghetti-like legs, contorted and knotted in various ways, and their thin, underdeveloped bodies similarly work against the heroic ideal and offer a parodic masculine display. Even Napoleon is seen as a ridiculous example of manhood: plump and small of stature, he is only able to view the land from the poop deck if his second-in-command lifts him up as a parent would a child trying to glimpse a parade. Seeing Red, through its camivalizing of a familiar battle drama, manages to invert the usual order by replacing seriousness with humor and in so doing Old Boney and his troops, the would-be heroes (from the French point of view), fail to personify the "virtues" of the military as a powerful fighting force that engenders patriotic fervor and public adulation. In a similar but more satiric way, Raymond Briggs's roman aclef picture book The Tin Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman (1984), a biting comment on the Falklands War, also deftly reveals the masquerade of militarism and the in authenticity of masculine performance. (The Old Iron Woman of the title refers to Margaret Thatcher, British Prime Minister at that time; her counterpart, the Tin Pot Foreign General, is Leopoldo Galtieri, the then President of Argentina.) Briggs's representation of the feminine and its relationship to power, authority, and the antimatemal, and the contrast this offers with the essentialized nonviolent women of Seeing Red, are in some ways more complex and tempting strands to pursue, but are the subject of a different paper.

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Briggs uses the Falklands conflict to demonstrate how political policy and war become the testing ground in which authoritative masculine discourses are enacted. He mocks such authoritative referents by depicting the two opposing protagonists, the Tin Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman, as caricatures of warring human-machine hybrids who exhibit excessive displays of warrior-like behaviors. Briggs's garish, cartoon figures, looking and acting like childish grotesque monsters playing war games in a miniature world of toy ships, function to strip the warrior imagery of its heroic (masculine) potential. The ridiculousness of their military masquerades is played out through the combative leaders' appropriation of childlike language and egocentric play: There he stamped ashore and bagsied the sad little island for his very own. "Mea baggazza el islandio!" (I bags the island!) He roared. "It's MINE!" she screeched. "MINE! MINE! MINE! I bagsied it AGES ago! I bagsied it FIRST! DID! DID! DID! DID!"

Briggs further subverts military authority by the visual strategy of depicting both leaders as perverse sexual objects (for example, the viewer is often compelled to take up a voyeuristic position staring directly between the open legs of the two figures). Such opposing child/sexual imagery serves to highlight the military masquerade as a ruse, a game of bluff, and to signify the erotic impulse of a phallic masculinity (the Old Iron Woman can be read as a cross-dressing warrior "queen"). The eroticized bodies of both the male and female aggressors are encased in similar, metal-patterned bodysuits, and are accompanied by an excess of phallic imagery (bloodied swords, missile-shaped cigars, erect flag poles, and cannon-exploding breasts). Consequently, the characters come to resemble perverse sexual embodiments of the sadomasochist/dominatrix. Such imagery, with its equivocal play with desire and (gender) identity, boldly steps beyond the usual boundaries and conventions of picture books and provocatively slips into the realm of the adult action genre. This slippage across adult-child boundaries is further compounded when, midpoint in the book, Briggs abruptly changes his style and medium from the brightly colored, cartoon-style illustrations of the two protagonists to framed charcoal sketches of the casualties of war. These hazy, impressionist drawings impart a pathos and sense of reality to the otherwise bizarre and surreal world of political leaders driven by their desire for control, dominance, and mastery. Through its ironic visual representations of the heroic subject, The Tin Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman provides a powerful pastiche of its generic reference points (the symbols of power and aggression, victory and loss). The certainty and triumphal tone which were once essential ele-

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ments of earlier warrior texts/images have been replaced by a mockery of the heroic ideal and a crisis in masculinity par excellence. Kaja Silverman, working with Lacanian notions of male subjectivity and the symbolic order, contends that war (particularly World War II) is an instance of historical trauma whereby a large group of male subjects are brought "into such an intimate relationship with lack that they are at least for the moment unable to sustain an imaginary relation with the phallus, and so withdraw their belief from the dominant fiction" (cited in Solomon-Godeau 1997,34). It is this breakdown in the dominant fiction of an impenetrable and productive phallic masculinity that characterizes The Tin Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman. Where the mocking of the heroic ideal in these picture books has shown the vulnerability of masculinity, Dragon Quest (Baillie and Harris 1996) offers a more ambivalent figure to replace the traditional warrior. Both the title of the book and its opening invitation to a boy to embark on a quest with the promise of becoming "a hero, a great warrior, an epic knight" proffer a masculinist tale of adventure: a boy's rite of passage to a hypervirile, martial masculinity. While the boy at first appears to leave the comfort and safety of the domestic setting for an unknown adventure with an aging Don Quixotetype character, there is a more subtle invitation for a reader's interrogative engagement with a text and genre. The first opening shows the boy sitting in a chair interrupted in his reading of Dragon Quest by a knight on horseback bearing a shield and lance pointing towards the distance. The reader is denied the real presence of the figure, however, as only the shadow appears projected on the wall behind the seated boy. When the page is turned, the next illustration is identical both to the cover and to the book that the boy reads, and this recall of previous images from both outside and within the narrative frame causes a momentary disruption to the reading process. The reiteration of images and metafictive playfulness provide a clue for the reader that perhaps the boy will never leave the fictive world of the book and that the tale that unfolds is either that which he reads or that which he imagines. Throughout the book the accoutrements of the warrior-knight-shield, spear, and horse-are ever present images. The shield is embossed with the head of the Gorgon Medusa and this symbolic reference and the quest which takes the two characters across distant lands to a northern destination cite the Perseus legend. The story, however, does not offer a straightforward heroic tale as its often tongue-in-cheek visual and verbal humor subvert the seriousness and dramatic impact of a traditional legend. At one point, the old knight's horse takes off in hot pursuit of a centaur, and, in the process, tosses its riders to the ground. This is not the frightened action of a "cowardly nag" as the knight suggests, but an active image of rampant lusting which otfers an ambivalent moment of sexual desire and dominance: Does the stallion mistake the male centaur for a female? Or does he desire the male centaur? Or is it a mare that has in her sights the centaur as the object of her desire?

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Further ambivalence is seen in the contradictory presence and absence of a feminine element. On the surface it may appear that the feminine is all but erased in the story and in the boy's life as depicted. However, the Gorgon image on the shield with its allusive reference to Athena, the warrior goddess of wisdom, invites a different reading. Just as Athena had given Perseus her shield to help him defeat the Medusa, the boy's carrying of a similar shield acts as an apotropaion-an evil to ward off evil. Throughout their journey, the old knight warns the boy of many imminent dangers, yet while they are closely observed by these evil creatures and pass close to them, they are never attacked. A further instance of a feminine presence occurs when the two knights-errant travel through a "tangled forest" where "three dark witches coil evil spells," recalling Perseus' encounter with the Grey Sisters. This demonizing of the feminine through one of its mythic forms ensures that the relations between the two male protagonists and their encounters with trolls, gnomes, and other evil mythical beasts are doubly charged both in a hierarchical sense (in terms of the old knight's status and experience over the young apprentice) and in terms of their own homosocial bonds. The old man acts as the boy's protector and guide, frequently reassuring him of his strength and bravery-"I'm as strong as ten elephants, brave as a score of lions." The words contradict the visual as the man is not only past his prime physically, but his wide-eyed look of fear and surprise undermines the heroic image of a man who has seen it all before. It is in the frequent isomorphic facial statements and body language of the boy and the man that readers can detect a strong resemblance. Perhaps the boy is being constructed in the image of the man as part of the quest of an unknown youth to claim his rightful inheritance as a respected and fearless warrior-knight. The path to knighthood is depicted as being littered with the remains of those who failed. Skeletons and half-buried shields lie scattered across a desert landscape, serving as both a warning of the dangers and a reminder of the legacy of failure. The open spaces which provide the setting of the story similarly signify a homosocial space-a place where men roam and battle. In the alliance between the old patriarchal figure and the young boy the narrative echoes the assertion made by populist writers on masculinity that the source of men's emotional crisis is in their separation from their fathers and their subsequent "need for initiation among men rather than negotiation between men and women" (Connell 1995, 209). Bly and other writers of the "mythopoetic men's movement" (p. 177) draw heavily on archaic archetypes and symbols-the forest, the warrior, the quest, the obstacles to be overcome. These serve as a call to arms for dispossessed and dejected males to reunite and regenerate in order to regain their center and the "deep masculine" that lies buried within the male body and psyche. Dragon's Quest employs the same archetypes and symbols.

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The story also borrows from Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605-1615). Like Cervantes' novel this too is a romance, and in keeping within the romance tradition Dragon Quest is grounded in the realms of excess and madness. While the old warrior and the boy, in their search for dragons, travel across the land evading evil beasts and struggling with the challenges of the landscape, their exploits resemble the failed and illusionary attempts of Don Quixote and his faithful companion, Sancho Panza, "to tilt at windmills," the "dragons" of a quixotic mind. There is also a subtle undercutting of heroism throughout Dragon Quest which is played out by the old man's lucky escapes, his apparent blindness to the evil beings that observe his movements, and the naivete of his quest. When the pair reach their destination, Glass Mountain, the boy cannot understand the man's desire to fight the dragon. The old knight's incredulous question to the boy ("You just want to see a dragon, to know it's there'?") is perhaps the point of transition, a crisis of representation, which signals a new/other heroic type-a more scientific, contemplative, romantic hero who has been grafted onto the old. Rather than fight battles, this new warrior seems content in the knowledge that his own ideal of manhood and heroism will be achieved through the inner resources of his mind (and imagination) and not by the combative ability of his body. This mind/body split, which is a persistent dualism central to Western thought, is somewhat misleading as it fails to acknowledge the ways that gender is both bodily and psychologically constructed. It is in its celebration of the sovereignty and autonomy of the imagination that Dragon Quest stays true to its Romantic origins. In the penultimate opening, the old warrior realizes that his quest has failed-"No dragons left anywhere. Nothing to do but go home." He questions why the boy is grinning and perhaps, too, his own inability to understand youthful rejection of old ways for a more cerebral/imaginative approach to manhood and heroism. The final page, devoid of text, shows the smiling, now confident boy holding the warrior's (upright) lance in one hand and the shield in the other. He stares into the distance while the shadow of the dragon appears on the landscape behind him. Whereas, initially, the warrior told the boy to carry his lance and shield, as is the duty of an apprentice, now the boy has ownership of the symbolic phallus. The passing on of the weapons to the boy, and the absence of the patriarch, symbolize the ephebe's succession. The rite of passage to a new form of idealized manhood (an emancipated manhood in the Romantic sense) appears complete. Born out of the symbolism of the old legends and the bonds with the quixotic older man, the new knight represents the new man with a new vision-one who has not lost sight of his historical and legendary lineage, but one who sees the benefits of a less oppressive form of patriarchy.

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Diminished Masculinities: Size Matters

The possibility of a revised visual paradigm of ideal and heroic masculinity is analogous with other images, specifically those of feminized or vulnerable masculinities, which serve as an index of the fragility of patriarchy. Paradoxically, however, these diminished masculinities may either subvert or reassert a dominant heterosexual masculine imperative. Despite Silverman's suggestion that crises in masculinity stem from particularized moments of "historical trauma," such as war, these crises are rather a recurring theme encompassing social, cultural, and historical moments of various kinds. When considered in relation to the Lacanian concepts of the phallic order and the law of the father, alternative masculinities appear diminished because they are subject to a breakdown in the imaginary relationship between phallus and penis. Picture books include representations of both feminized masculinity and images of the diminutive, infantilized male within the domestic setting. The new man increasingly portrayed in picture books-the caring, sensitive, domesticated father/partner-is a prime example of feminized masculinity. Because of the ideological framing of children's picture books and the horizon of expectations within which writers and illustrators are compelled to work, mothers are represented as either the wholly domestic mother or the busy working mother who has a loving house husband/partner looking after the children and cooking the evening meals. The genre is firmly located in the domestic arena, and, in particular, the family. It is in this site that new and old gender relations are played out for the child reader who comes to mis/ recognize what is a constructed familiar. Consequently, picture books featuring stay-at-home dads and gentle, caring fathers-for example, Gleeson's Where's Mum? (1992); Wild and Hannay's Sam's Sunday Dad (1992)-can be read as providing models of feminized maSCUlinity. The discursive visibility of masculinity that appears in these books further endorses, at a superficial level, the view that there is nothing natural or preordained about masculinity (see Solomon-Godeau 1997; Connell 1995), a view which runs counter to earlier arguments that promoted the taken-for-granted invisibility of masculinity. The picture books mentioned above, like others that contain similar images and story lines of sensitive, domestic, and nurturing male caregivers, enable children to see the variants of masculinity that coexist at this historical moment. However, such examples of the new man do not mean that more oppressive models (both lived and visually represented) have been obliterated. As McMahon's research on Australian domestic practices suggests, the new "blokus domesticus" which informs the "New Man rhetoric" may, in actual fact, bear little relationship to reality (1998,148-9). Invariably, picture book images of men in aprons with a baby on the hip may provoke gentle

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humor as the male is seen as operating within an "unnatural" zone (after all, it is "natural" that women have maternal and domestic desires and skills). These representations of male domesticity and fatherhood, with their highly appropriated feminine imagery, may be interpreted as signifying a diminished masculinity and thus add further evidence of a "crisis of masculinity." They may also "represent a fault within the structure of the masculine itself' (Buchbinder 1998, 92). Buchbinder suggests that the feminine may not be external to the masculine, something that exists "out there," but may be "within the body" of the male. This thinking moves dangerously close to affirming notions of a "deep masculine" and a "deep feminine" that can be embodied within single or separate bodily morphologies and psyches. Perhaps a less essentializing approach entails adopting a more critical sociopolitical stance that considers possible latent political implications of the notion of a feminized masculinity. For example, Modleski suggests that, "we need to consider the extent to which male power is actually consolidated through cycles of crisis and resolution, whereby men ultimately deal with the threat of female power by incorporating it" (1991, 7). Thus the emotional weight and surface humor of picture book images of "Mr. Mom" may be (unwittingly?) having an ideological impact on children which is in line with the male backlash against feminism (Faludi 1992). Perhaps, then, despite the alternative readings suggested by the visual imagery of feminized masculinity, it is through such attempts at morphological refashioning and cultural reencoding that these visual signs act as an indicator of the vulnerability of patriarchy in contemporary Western societies, as well as a cipher of its resilience and shape-changing capacity. The second form of diminished masculinity represented in picture books is that imaged by the diminutive, infantilized male. The shape-changing capacity of masculinity in visual representations of the male body can be assessed particularly in relation to size. The male nude of classical, Renaissance, and post-Renaissance periods was frequently depicted with diminutive genitalia which were consequently overcompensated for by large swords and other phallic iconography (see Solomon-Godeau 1997). The diminished size of the genitals in these works of art serves to allay any anxiety concerning the discrepancy between the ideal and the male viewer's sense of his own sex. Where the genitals are concealed and the visual aesthetic is concentrated on the muscular body (as in images of bodybuilders), a similar effect is achieved whereby fear of the ideal is defused through the fetishization of the muscular. Rather than being focused on the genitals, attention is displaced to other parts of the body. This observation relates directly to the nonequivalence of the symbolic phallus and the anatomical organ and highlights the ways that size becomes part of the register of fetishism. In Lacanian terms, the fetish creates a substitute for the penis. Whereas depictions of classical male nudes, warrior ideals, and bodybuilders negate the genital area and

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pass its characteristics to the body image as a whole via a form of metonymy (that is, the whole body is made to stand for the part), in children's texts diminished size becomes a significant feature of the whole body and not simply a part of the male anatomy. Consequently, the gap between the symbolic and the actual is recast back on to the male body (and away from the woman's body) thus invoking threats of emasculation. While the image of the physically diminutive male is a recurrent motif in folktales and other literature for children, it is its fetishization in recent picture books, such as The Man (Briggs 1992), Willy the Wimp (Browne 1984), and The Big Baby (Browne 1993), that is of particular interest here. The Man tells a story, that spans tive days, of the initial encounter and ensuing relationship between an adolescent boy and an unknown, tiny, naked, hairy man who arrives one night while the boy is asleep. The man's arrival is unexplained and mysterious and so too is his departure, though he leaves a note of thanks. Putting aside the many issues woven through this story-politics, religion, poverty, technology-the book examines contrasting masculinities and the inherent tensions that exist across and within them. One of the interesting elements in the book is how the man's body is eroticized within conflicting discourses of homophobia and homo social desire. The Man offers a site of male viewing both within the text and outside of it. The man and the boy scrutinize each other and the viewer scrutinizes the man's body. It is, after all, his size and nakedness that provide the elements of exotica and draw a voyeuristic and perverse viewing pleasure. The man's nudity at the beginning and at other points throughout the story provides a site of hypervirility despite his diminutive size and grotesque appearance. The relationship of size and virile masculinity is foregrounded early in the book when the man, despite his statement that "All size is relative," nevertheless responds vehemently to the boy's suggestion that he might be a fairy, with its connotations of effeminacy and homosexuality: How dare you! Do I look like a blasted fairy?

The man's body is muscled and brown, and his bare buttocks, which feature frequently, are firm, prominent, and well rounded. Consequently, his masculinity is assured, for as Hatt suggests, "East or West, any man could be masculine as long as he had a strong, muscular body" (1993, 58). However, his musculature, cocky poses, and aggressive manner are somewhat diminished by his nakedness, which "signals vulnerability" (p. 63), especially in the presence of the clothed boy. This opposition of clothed and unclothed connotes the boy's power over the man, despite the latter's age and demanding attitude. While Briggs' configuration of the man's body is at odds with the familiar representations of masculinity-straight lines, height, phallic imagery-it nevertheless conforms to earlier precedents of male nudes who

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were usually dark skinned with the bronzelike color of their skin resembling the hard, impermeable impression of sculpture (Hatt 1993). Further slippage occurs between the feminine and masculine in the visual representations as the man alternates between active/passive actions and postures which resonate with his phallic/non phallic states of masculinity. Despite the man's abrasive nature and blunt speech, he is coy about showing (to the outsider/viewer) his genitals which are always covered by his hands, a strategically crossed leg, or by being viewed from behind. This attempt at concealment serves to focus attention on that part of the anatomy and is reminiscent of the Venus Pudica, whereby a hand is always poised in an ambiguous (masturbatory or modest) manner over the genitals (Salomon 1996). In his alternating acts of concealment and display, the man declares himself as an object of the gaze both from the boy's point of view and from the viewpoint of the viewer/reader. While the man displays his full frontal nudity before the boy, the viewer is always placed in a position behind the subject or their viewpoint is partially obscured. The gestures of the man in his naked state, his initial demand for the boy "to find some clothes" and the tunic the boy makes for him out of an old sock provide an account of Oedipalized masculinity. The story takes place in the domestic space, yet, like Dragon Quest, there is a feminine absence (the boy's mother's occasional words come from a disembodied absent presence). It is up to the boy to take on the role of phallic mother/nanny to the perversely infantilized (and dependent) man as he sews for him, feeds and bathes him, and cuts his hair. By the third day the relations between the boy and the man have become strained, but that night the usually cantankerous man asks the boy when he is in his bed: "Can I come in for a cuddle?" The dialogue that ensues provides an ideal account of the inherent tension between homosocial and homosexual relationships whereby the latter is culturally proscribed so that the former can be retained as a powerful determinant of dominant heterosexual masculinity. Consequently, desire and disavowal coexist in order to maintain the heterosexual imperative of dominant masculinity: Can I come in for a cuddle? No, you can't! Goon. No! Get off the bed! I get very lonely. Can't you just hold me? No. Can I just sit in your hand? Please? Oh ... all right. Go on, then. Can we have the nightlight on?

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Kerry Mallan Thanks. Put your other hand round. That's better. Nice and wann. Feel safe here.

Both dominant and diminished masculinities are the explicit themes of Anthony Browne's Willy the Wimp (1984). Gentle, underdeveloped, "wouldn't hurt a fly" Willy knows that wimps are easy targets for bullies, and they never get the girls. While reading his Supergorilla comic, Willy encounters an advertisement which addresses his desire to change: a grinning, muscled (anthropomorphic) gorilla engages the reader's eye, and, with the banner headline, "Don't be a Wimp!", carries a doubly encoded message of hypervirile masculinity. Yet, its word play ("Do YOU want ... A deep chest ... A large wardrobe ... ") and visual parodying of the bodybuilding advertisements of past generations subvert and mock the traditional masculine paradigm. Consequently, Willy embarks on a bodybuilding program of exercise and diet (mountainous quantities of bananas) in order to achieve "true" masculine status. As Willy gradually transforms his body from a skinny diminutive male his confidence soars, his love life improves, and his heroic status is confirmed, that is, until he bumps into a lamppost and is immediately reduced to an apologetic, undersized wimp again. As Stephens comments, Willy's "growth into a hero figure is a process of temporary subjection to a false paradigm" (1992, 144). This picture book, through its parodying of models of idealized masculinity, reinforces the point that masculinity is coterminous with the body. It also demonstrates the performativity of the masculine masquerade (Butler 1990; Brod 1995). The conflation of these two notions of "performance" and "masquerade" is problematical in some ways, as the latter implies that under the mask there lies a "truth", a real essence of manhood, a notion which performativity theorists such as Butler could not accept as they see gender as something we do, and not something we are in a true or deterministic sense. Willy, who is a simulacrum of a man, lives in a world dominated by highly anthropomorphized gorillas. His clothes, manner, aspirations, and insecurities are representative of the ways in which masculinity is culturally codified and socially enacted. However, his attempts to simulate the bodily schemata of masculinity and masculine performance, and hence a particular kind of heroic subjectivity, are depicted with comic effect and reflect the particular kind of privileged subjectivity presupposed by New Age philosophizing, with its catch-cry of reinvention. This privileged subjectivity is of its own making, and measures the significance of others in terms of its own imagined identity, image, personality, and capabilities. This philosophy of reinvention and privileged subjectivity is conveyed in the advertisement Willy reads: "I

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was a scrawny, skinny-chested pathetic weakling. NOW ... I can order people about ... kick sand in THEIR faces ... talk VERY LOUDLY." As with The Man, Willy the Wimp draws attention to the male as an object of the gaze. Willy is both the object/subject of his own (mirrorreflected) gaze and the object of the gaze of others, particularly other males (gorillas). The transformation of Willy's body-its appearance, size, physicality, posture, and movement-shifts between diminished and ideal versions of masculinity. The visual texts highlight the playful appropriation and juxtaposition of particular masculine bodies. As Willy works out at aerobics classes, his attempts at mimicry and simulation of the dress codes and stances of the aerobic bodyworker provide visual humor as well as highlighting the futility of metanarratives of idealized morphologies. As Willy gradually transforms his body, he is inculcated with the ideals of a phallic masculinity in the homosocial arenas of the gymnasium, the boxing ring, and the open streetscape. These sites traditionally provide opportunities for a visual exchange between men. Browne playfully diminishes the status of the "cumulo-nimbus male physiques" at the gym, the sartorial conformity of the suburban gorillas' dress code and the romantic scene between Willy and Millie with its dialogue of inarticulate desire and passion. While Willy desires both narcissistic identification and homosocial bonding with the other gorillas, he will always be a chimp in a gorilla's world: a world which maintains its power relations through an instrumentalizing construction of hierarchical intersubjective relations. For the reader, the humor resides in the visual grotesquerie and incongruity of Willy's ego-ideals. Browne again takes up his familiar theme of the fragility of masculinity in The Big Baby (1993), a story about male midlife crisis. Mr. Young is boyish in appearance, wears "young hairstyles," enjoys loud pop music, has a den full of toys, cycles, and spends "AGES and AGES in the bathroom." However, at the slightest sniffle, he takes to his bed and feels miserable. His wife calls him a "Big Baby". Her words come true as one night, after returning home with "new pills and special food from health shops," he drinks a whole bottle of "ELIXA DE YOOF," thus causing his transformation into a baby. Superficially, both The Man and The Big Baby depict male characters of diminished size, but the visual transformation in the latter has a more disruptive effect, as Mr. Young's face remains adult while his body is reduced to that of a baby and he experiences a baby's lack of coordination, skill, and control over bodily functions and movements. Further, "the man," though infantilized to the extent that the boy has to assume a mothering role, nevertheless retains a certain masculine and erotic appeal in his muscular body unlike Mr. Young. The incongruity of a man's head on a baby's body disrupts the phallic imperative and causes a crisis of representation. It is Mrs. Young who takes charge of looking after the totally dependent Mr. Young. In Lacanian terms, she is the all-powerful, phallic mother of the dependent infant who

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does not yet realize her attributed status of lack, "castration," and subordination within a patriarchal structure. Therefore, it is significant that at the high point of Mr. Young's crisis, the turning point when he reverts "back to normal," he is depicted lying in his bed, awakening from "a TERRIBLE dream" with a framed picture of Henry Fuseli's The Nightmare on the wall above him. Instead of Fuseli's demon perched on the body of the dead woman which lies sprawled across a bed, it is the "big baby" in a blue jumpsuit sitting on top of the dead female body. In her extended analysis of this picture book, Bradford (1998, 93) suggests that "The Nightmare reproduces a patriarchal ideology in which the female is subject to and governed by the male." An oblique form of this governance emerges then when the baby Mr. Young replaces Fuseli's (demon) incubus, so that the now infantilized incubus exploits the female through "the tyranny of dependence." Furthermore, Bradford contends that "Browne plays with and mocks patriarchy" thus denying "a voyeuristic identification with the incubus." While this is a valid reading, there is also a further ambivalence which can be attributed to this moment of artistic appropriation. Insofar as the "big baby" on top of the woman's body occupies a position of dominance (which in sexual terms is compatible with the image of the incubus), the specific depiction of Mr. Young's return to his old self and the subsequent disappearance of his baby-self can be understood more generally in terms of hierarchical gender relations. In terms of my previous Lacanian reading of the "big baby," this scene signifies the point at which "the all-powerful phallic mother of the dependent infant" is also dismissed. Thus the dismissal of the maternal and the return to normalcy imply a reassertion of the dominance of phallic authority over the feminine with its corresponding hierarchical power relations. This double moment of art imitating art and life then has doubly encoded significance. On the one hand, as Bradford suggests, it "plays with and mocks patriarchy," while on the other, it reasserts phallic authority and patriarchal gendered relations. Ambivalence is further conveyed through the narrative which is predominantly focalized through the perspective of John Young's son who is named after his father (Bradford 1998, 90). This duplication of name for father and son suggests an identification with the father and a making of the boy/son in the image of the man/father. While the story is perhaps a cautionary tale of the consequences of narcissistic identification, and thus acts as a warning to the son, it also can be seen as valorizing the natural progression of patriarchal lineage within a patriarchal system-the succession of the ephebe. As the father ages, the son moves towards maturity and developing manhood/fatherhood. This transition is foreshadowed through young John's helpful actions in assisting Mrs. Young attend to the needs of the "big baby" and in his patient attempts to play with him. These instances serve to invert the usual father-son relationship by a perverse role reversal whereby the father

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becomes the son and the son becomes the father. The only words young John speaks are at the end of the book when he tells his father to look in the mirror, thus forcing him to confront his aging masculinity. In Lacanian terms (and in a metaphorical sense), this speaking moment is representative of the child's entry into the symbolic order and desire for the phallus. The final page shows a worried and less youthful looking Mr. Young who looks out at the viewer (who acts as a mirror) with his hands on his head framing "his first grey hair." The Big Baby offers several carnivalesque moments whereby the child viewer witnesses the humorous and humiliating spectacle of a man-baby sitting on the potty, throwing a tantrum, messing with his food, going for a walk in his pram, and being looked at by a pressing crowd of cooing, smiling adults. These scenes are a view into a temporary carnivalesque world whereby the normal scheme of events is inverted and the concerns of "the bodily lower stratum" (Bakhtin 1968) such as eating and defecating serve to draw attention to the body (and its elementary functions) and away from other more elevated concerns of (adult) living. Therefore, The Big Baby challenges the acceptable modes of adult behavior by forcing the adult-child hybrid to inhabit the child's world on its own terms. Such mocking of male authority enforces the split between phallus and penis by replacing the dominant masculine discourse with a disruptive and subversive other: instead of the child's body being the object of the adult gaze and regulated by discourses of parent-child relationships, it is the adult male's diminished body that becomes the object of the child's gaze and offers a spectacle of subversive viewing. Making a Spectacle of Himself: Viewing the Male Body on Display

To associate men with spectacle is perhaps another inversion of what is regarded as normal, for in the modern era such attention-making displays have been regarded as the province of the female. As Russo points out: "Making a spectacle out of oneself seemed a specifically feminine danger. The danger was of an exposure. Men, 1 learned somewhat later in life, 'exposed themselves,' but that operation was quite deliberate and circumscribed" (1995, 53). Men exposing themselves or being exposed continues to inform sexual/bodily discourses of masculinity, erotica, and pornography. Men being caught unaware of their sudden nudity or seminudity before a viewing audience provides, more often than not, a site/sight of humorous (viewer) response. For instance, being "caught with his pants down" is another moment of carnival where Mulvey's notion of the male viewer/female object paradigm is inverted. When the exposed male body is a model of male beauty, as a 1990s television commercial for a brand of men's underwear ("Underdaks") revealed, the exposed male body may elicit both a

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female viewing pleasure and a male voyeuristic/narcissistic delight (see Buchbinder 1998, 15-25). Until recently, male underwear has not expressed the same erotic message as female underwear. Now it is almost commonplace to see the previously middle-aged and dowdy Y-fronts competing as sexual icons with the more youthful G-string and other skimpy male undergarments. Once again, film provides reference points for this cultural tum to the commodification of masculinity. The resounding success of The Full Monty (1997), which has spawned a spate of imitative television commercials, reconstructed the imperfect, aging ma1e body as a sexua1 object able to incite frenzied female desire. Although The Full Monty (as with male strippers in general) seems to invite being read as a staging of carnival, where the normal relations between (clothed) men and (naked) women are reversed, this is too simplistic. Such a reading attributes an illusion of power to the predominantly female viewer and fails to acknowledge that the male stripper has not relinquished his identification with the phallus. Rather, he is the phallus who flaunts his presence before his fema1e audience reminding them through his (strip)tease of their lack and subordination. (Conversely, the fema1e stripper often relies on the traditional prop of the pole as a phallus substitute, an item which is a highly identifiable part of the performance and which no doubt acts a point of narcissistic identification and voyeuristic objectification for the male viewer.) Hans Christian Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes provides an ideal text for examining how the notions of narcissism, voyeurism, and masquerade impact on the identification/objectification of the naked male body as spectacle. While the trend in picture book versions of this story has been to allow only a bare torso view of the naked Emperor as he walks through the streets of the town, the illustrated versions by David Mackintosh (1993) and Angela Barrett (1997) show "the full monty," though in Mackintosh's case it is not quite the full monty. Both versions offer examples of camp performance and representation. While readings of camp tend to imply an association with a gay identity (Robertson 1996), it is "camp's attention to feminine artifice and excess" that makes it "a powerful means for critiquing stereotypica1 images of women and gender identity" (MalIan 2000, 33). Mackintosh gives full attention to these twin aspects of artifice and excess as he progresses through the stages of showing the Emperor's body from being dressed to excess to its final stripping down to stockings and Y-fronts. Barrett's Emperor is a1so an example of camp iconography, as her stylized illustrations flaunt a conspicuous extravagance. Though Mackintosh sets his story during the nineteenth century, his Napoleon-inspired Emperor is anachronistic as his appearance is more in keeping with late twentieth-century style. The Emperor, who is frequently depicted with his hand in his vest, is shown with long blond hair (curled and blow-dried), wearing a variety of clothes: corset, leopard print frock with knee-length socks, and fancy military uni-

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form. Barrett's Emperor is more the urbane sophisticate at the beginning of

,I the twentieth century. His black hair is short and slicked down, his mous-

tache is curled and trimmed. Barrett shows the Emperor mainly in holiday snapshots as he is portrayed as a man who is negligent of his official duties spending most of his time dressing up and showing off "his latest splendid clothes" while on his various travels. Consequently, both Emperors enjoy making a spectacle of themselves and drawing attention to their fashionably clothed bodies. The high point of the spectacle is when the Emperors take to the streets parading their new (invisible) clothes. Prior to the parade, both Emperors stand before their mirrors while the rogue tailors fit their naked bodies with the "clothes." As each Emperor admires his reflection, this autoerotic scene is constituted as a key point of representation. A comparable scene cited by Marin (1989,192-4), in which a King contemplates a portrait of himself and utters the words, "That is the King. I am the King," provides both a frame of reference and a point of departure for discussing the mirror scene in these books. As each Emperor contemplates his mirror image, the subject mis/ recognizes himself in the representation. What the male-subject sees is "the Emperor." At that moment, the individual disappears and is replaced by an external and imperial subject whose title begins with a capital letter. While it might be simply vanity and foolishness which prevent the Emperor from seeing his naked body (a reading which has some validity if he were a commoner), the fact that he is the Emperor, the absolute ruler, necessitates a distinction between the actual naked man who stands before the mirror and the clothed imperial body that he "sees" reflected. This reading is crucial for making a distinction between the scene of viewing (by the man) and the seen of subjectification (the optical and immanent displacement of the man by the Emperor), and between the representation of a body and the product of that representation (that is, whose body it is that is entitled to be represented). Whereas it was argued earlier in this paper that masculinity has become visible, thus causing the male body to be viewed as an object of contemplation (and commodification), at this narrative point in The Emperor's New Clothes, the masculine has once again become invisible by virtue of its imperial privilege and precedent. While the mirror scene is one whereby an imperial "scopic regime" (Metz 1982) operates, a seeing with and through the eyes of the Emperor, the scene that follows, the parade through the streets, is one in which this regime is destroyed by a child's vocal observation that the Emperor is naked. This seeing/speaking ruptures the subject-Emperor relation whereby the governed subject is the object of the Emperor's gaze and remains silent unless spoken to, and positions the Emperor as the object of the spectator's (that is, the governed subject's) gaze and scrutiny. No longer protected by the veil of invisibility, as was the Emperor's privilege, the now marked and visible man

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masquerading as an arrogant, vain ruler is the object of a derisive spectacle. At this point there is a tidal political shift as the spectator is transformed from a political subject to a political citizen and the absolute imperial body is destroyed through ridicule and laughter: a true crisis infof representation occurs. Mackintosh carries the notion of the now disembodied imperial figure a step further as both the recto and verso of the book show a decapitated Emperor in full military uniform. On the recto, the Emperor's right hand is placed inside his undervest in Napoleonic style, while on the verso, the right hand now holds a small hand mirror. It is significant that the mirror be part of the final image as it was through this device that the (optical) illusion operated. The decapitation signals that there is no longer a unified body politic: a voice that can speak of only one body, one moral and political viewpoint. A headless Emperor has no voice and so no presence. There is, therefore, no representation associated with the image. Apart from Mackintosh's cameos of the decapitated Emperor, both he and Barrett refuse to show, within the confines of the visual narrative, the point of disruption and disintegration of the imperial body-subject, at least in explicit terms. In Mackintosh's final scene, the chesty, arrogant Emperor, despite his nakedness, strides confidently, with fists clenched and prominent chin thrust forth (see fig. 1). He wears his white "Underdaks" with aplomb and his crown perched on his head provides the apex of the triangular, spatial figuration of his body. Mackintosh, however, provides a mocking visual metacommentary by showing beneath the framed double spread of the procession, another procession of toy soldiers led by a clown. In terms of the previous discussion on the foolishness of the military masquerade, this visual joke carries additional impact. It is also a carnivalesque moment as it mocks authority and inverts the usual order by allowing the clown to be the Emperor, and so contributes to the disruption and disintegration of the imperial body-subject. Barrett's Emperor is equally nonplussed, determined that even his nakedness will not "spoil the procession." The final scene is represented through both double spread and inset illustrations. The lavish display of color and fashion captured in the double spread illustration of the procession showing the Emperor (in profile) moving head and (naked) shoulders before the crowd is contrasted by the sparseness of the inset image of the naked Emperor (in back view). The nakedness of the image, both of the man and of the surrounding space, is further contrasted by the garland-decorated cameo frame which encases it: the frame itself and the petal-strewn path the Emperor treads, signify a mock-heroic tribute. With scepter in hand, and wearing only the royal crown and slippers, the Emperor proudly continues his parading and prominently displays (from behind) his trim, slightly sunburnt, naked body. The image represents a double exposure of the previously "invisible" male body as the pale template left behind by the now absent

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swimsuit exposes those parts of the Emperor's body that have not been exposed before. Thus, the naked male body on display in a public space becomes both the object of the gaze and the subject of ridicule through spectacle and exposure. Conclusion

As I have shown, the contemporary crisis in representation of the masculine subject in visual texts extends to picture books, where representations of masculine sovereignty show an awareness of its tensions, fragility, and elements of masquerade. However, current representations of masculinity in picture books, like other cultural texts available to children and adults, incorporate a range of masculinities which span the spectrum from phallic to nonphallic versions. Rather than celebrate this diversity as evidence of change from a less oppressive and dominant form of masculinity available to a predominantly young readership, I have attempted a more circumspect appraisal. While the advantages of past ego-ideals are becoming less tangible and accessible, there is a need to consider both the manifest and latent effects various new masculine ideals may have for young readers. Children's picture books do not simply reflect the world in images as there is no guarantee of a direct and unambiguous transfer of (intended) visual representation to the reader. Rather, picture books provide children with the frames in which to see the world in certain ways. This is not to assume that children are uncritical in their reception of images, or that there is a universal child viewing system, a juvenile "scopic regime." It does, however, highlight the ways in which images have the capacity to perpetuate stereotypes as well as to promote nonconformity, resistance, and alternatives. The examples in this chapter have shown that the traditional heroic ideal still exists and with increasing pressure from popular men's movement advocates, children's publishers could see a new niche opening up in the market for children's writers and illustrators. In a similar way, the representations of male characters that are vulnerable, exposed, or parodic examples of manhood may continue to form part of the redemptive process. Within this range of masculine representations there are also the softer versions which exhibit a form of hybridizing of masculine/feminine ideals. A conception of masculinity that is all things to all people is an unrealistic goal. To try to conflate elements of the heroic, passive, seductive, exhibitionist, and feminized into a new masculine ideal would result in another parody: a pastiche of fragments drawn from different historical and cultural contexts. Any ideal, with its essentializing and universalizing presumptions, simply replaces one set of uncertainties and anxieties with another, and suppresses the fact that masculinity will always exist in relation to the materiality of different bodies, and

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to the historical and cultural constructions that arise from and between them. It is through the negotiations that occur around these relations that new and

dynamic pictures of the male can be drawn and critiqued. Acknowledgments

I would like to thank John Stephens, Lyn Linning, and Wendy Morgan for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. Notes I. 2.

See Buchbinder (1998, 15-25) for a full account of this commercial as an example of the male body being the object of the female gaze. "Scopic regime" is a term used by Christian Metz (1982) to refer to one unified seeing.

1:

Figure I. From The Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen. Illustrated by David Mackintosh, SI. Lucia: Jam Roll/University of Queenslan Press.

So he drew himself to his full height and walked on whilst his servants clutched his invisib le train.

3 "A Page Just Waiting to Be Written On" Masculinity Schemata and the Dynamics of Subjective Agency in Junior Fiction JOHN STEPHENS

Sir, I'm no good at acting! Besides, you want someone strong. I'm not the hero type. WESLEY IN GENE

KEMp's

THE WACKY WORW OF WESLEY BAKER

And you are the Chosen One? Huh! They could have chosen me. They tried. But I was the one who listened," said Johnny quietly. TERRY PRATCHETT, ONLY You

CAN SAVE MANKIND

When boys are depicted as participants in fictions written for the youngest readers (say, ages six to ten), children's literature is already deeply imbricated in constructions of masculinity. The process has already begun with picture books, after all, although the processes of male gendering in picture books is a topic which has still received too little attention. This chapter will argue that in value judgments pertaining to the three principal male schemata deployed in junior fiction (Old Age Boy, New Age Boy and Mommy's Boy) the pivotal criterion is subjective agency. What makes the protagonist, usually a New Age Boy, preferable to his peers is that in the course of the narrative his masculinity is defined as the attainment or disclosure of an element of self-awareness which enables him both to take responsibility for his own life and to take on significant social commitments. Other components of a masculinity schema are oriented and subordinated to these key qualities of self-awareness and other-regardingness. Further, because the New Age Boy's self-awareness often leads him to an understanding of how discourse shapes the world and hence to a realization that creativity is a form of agency, text production, whether as writing, imagining, or some other form, figures agential self-constitution. Any assumption that one particular version of gendered subjectivity is preferable to another will depend on the possibility of attributing agency to

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that subjectivity, because of the concomitant assumption that whatever lacks agency cannot be desired. Although for much of the second half of the twentieth century post-structuralist theories have portrayed subjectivity as an elusive and insubstantial entity, and writing has been practiced within a climate hostile to traditional notions of agency and subjectivity, these concepts remain centrally implicated in both writing for children and the critical discourses that surround that writing. The site of enunciation offered by the mode of first-person narration, which came to dominate the literature during that same period, has seemed to guarantee an inner life and capacity for selfexpression as images of subjectivity, even if these tum out to be no more than functions of narration. Moreover, by the end of the century, as Charles Altieri has pointed out (1994, 85-96), there was widespread dissatisfaction with post-structuralist dependencies on "slippage and ideological recontainment" in accounts of subjectivity: The age seems to demand versions of the subject that can carry effective notions of agency so that we can speak theoretically of how individuals can generate resistance to the prevailing social order and sustain the moral and political values necessary to correlate our heightened senses of heterogeneity with the possibility of forming communities with which we can fully identify. (p. 86)

Altieri is referring here to versions of the subject in a very broad, philosophical context, but the components which make up this ideal are, unsurprisingly, the very components of privileged masculine subjectivity in junior fiction: a resistance to social constructionism such that allows selfconstitution; moral and political integrity; and self-awareness which enables deep interpersonal relations grounded in mutual equality. Although fiction is able to represent subjectivity often with great subtlety, I would be claiming more than is actually there if I attempted to map a body of junior fiction onto Altieri's exposition of a subjectivity beyond "behaviorist or social-constructivist analyses," so I will restrict this discussion to an application of some of his suggestions to the more specific field of the needs, concerns, and powers characteristic of SUbjective agency in fictive representations of maleness. Such representations themselves reflect subjective agency in that their purpose is not to offer a copy of the existing social order but to model how readers (might) engage interactively with that social order. Hence they offer models of subjectivity to readers. The distinction between copying and modeling is a key plank in the argument Altieri derives from Wittgenstein: When I am given a model ... , I am not given a place for me to stand but an index of where someone else stands so that I can appreciate the particular

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John Stephens tilt being given [to what a hypothetical copy would merely represent]. The model is of a situation constructed from a specific point of view in order to make visible the aspect from which it derives its relation to other contexts and concerns shaping the agent's stance. (p. 97)

Texts for young audiences are not mere narratives, but have an orientation toward models and ideologies already present in culture and, by giving these narrative form, may reinforce them and refract them back to the culture or may propose some modification of them. The former case conforms with the social-constructionist view of subjectivity, and we would then conclude that patterns of behavior are thus naturalized, and already learned attitudes and behaviors are confirmed and reinforced. This is not a necessary and inevitable process, however, and many fictions produced for readers in the early reading years recognize that represented behavior may not only reflect actual behavior but also modify it. Such writing challenges implicit models and seeks either to displace them with alternative possibilities also available within culture or to suggest that subjects (both represented characters and readers) may exercise some choice in constructing models. Fictions for younger readers in which masculine subjective agency is clearly thematized often situate boys within narratives in which performance, role-play, or the playing of games are key elements. These are often broadly comic, or incorporate comic elements, but are nevertheless deeply serious works about the nature of the self. A circumstance whereby a character adopts another subject position thematizes perceptual aspect itself and in so doing may function as a critique of culture, and where the contrast between subject positions foregrounds behavior presented as experientially male that critique will target or implicate cultural constructions of masculinity. Performance as role-play, disguise, or play-acting might be expected to displace, at least temporarily, the notion of an essential and coherent self which predominates in junior fiction, but this is not the case. Rather, it serves as a process of self-definition, a staged rite of passage which erases feelings of marginality, fragmentation, and subjective dispersal which are typically presented as a lack in a character's material circumstances, and in their place imparts a sense of agency. As with children's fiction more generally, this self-discovery is most apparent as an aspect of euphoric closure, but is all the more evident in a book for readers aged about six to ten, in that such a book is apt to be a single-stranded narrative presented from the perspective of one narrating or focalizing character. Even when story motifs are doubled by depicting characters in parallel situations, as in Gene Kemp's The Wacky World of Wesley Baker (1994) or James Moloney's Swashbuckler (1995), the novels present a single thematic significance from a single character perspective. The positionality of variant points of view enabled by play-acting or other roleplaying is thus always clear.

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Central for an understanding of how performance relates to gender structures in these books is the crucial distinction made by Judith Butler between expression and perfonnativeness in the production of selves (1990, 134-41). On the one side, Butler identifies expression as "a substantial model of identity," that is, identity as stable or a locus of agency (p. 141). This is an assumption about grounded identities that is virtually universal in literature for children and young adults, and underlies humanistic versions of agency. In opposition, Butler places the concept of "constructed identity," that is, identity as the performance of attributes which are constituted within time and place and which imitates "the ideal of a substantial ground of identity" by the process of repetition (p. 141). Gender identity is constituted by the performance of its associated "acts, gestures, and desire," which in tum "produce the effect of an internal core or substance ... on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause" (p. 136; emphasis in original). When Butler's distinction is applied to fictional representation, performativeness is consistently passed off as expression, and where performativeness is foregrounded by the exigencies of performance (play-acting, make-believe, disguise, impersonation, and the like) it represents a temporary subject position which functions to enable the player to affirm his substantial identity. These formally designated performances draw attention to two of the key aspects in the constitution of subjective agency: point of view and intentionality. First, the particular effect of point of view is to foreground the eye that looks at objects or situations and, by disclosing that the perception of a given entity may change while the entity "remains the same," "gains the possibility of linking eye to an T constantly reworking and refiguring what in any situation we need to take as given, what fluid" (Altieri 1994, 95-6). Second, the overt adoption of another subject position makes obvious the function of intentionality in subjective agency. Altieri suggests that "intentionality consists in the ways that agents shape routes within the world and thus provide the bases for defining convictions, expressing priorities, and ultimately accepting responsibility for the routes chosen" (p. 96). When a fictive character is depicted as playing a role, what tends to be placed before readers is a knowing and self-aware actor, capable of using discourse with intention in spite of an inability to control the effects of language use. The role-play gives the actor ostensible power over public discourse, which is manipulated in the service of personal expression: the ground of enunciation is that discourse which imparts form and meaning to objects and events even as it enables the operation of will and imagination to transform that form and meaning into personal expression. The resultant dialogic relation between public discourse and personal expression is thereby instrumental in gaining assent from the implied community of address to new forms of subjective agency.

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An example demonstrates this clearly. In Odo Hirsch's Antonio S and the Mystery of Theodore Guzman (1997), Antonio wishes to attract the attention of the elderly retired actor Theodore Guzman and so decides to perform a play and recruits four other children as actors. When, not having a play to perform, the five begin musing on the kind of play each would like to put on, each of the would-be actors imagines a situation which would endow her or him with subjective agency. Paul Snee, for example, who "was as round as a ball and his face was as red as a tomato. He made excellent jokes and no one laughed at them more than he" (pp. 55-6), envisages a play "about a short boy who told jokes, who told such good jokes that people stopped laughing at him because of how short he was and just listened to the jokes he told" (p. 74). That is, the boy gains mastery within public discourse. But dramatic discourse hinges on dialogue and conflict, so the four personal stories begin to intersect and shape themselves into the play Antonio envisages, "a play about someone who puts on a play. He puts on a play because it's the only way to do something really special" (p. 76). As the play's only performance unfolds, the process of dialogic interaction begins to transform the actors, "something that came out of the play itself': They were acting the parts they had invented by the duck-pond, but somehow the parts weren't exactly the same as the ones they had invented ... Antonio was fascinated by the effect the play was having. It was as if he were watching real people out there on the stage, real storiesand not just the stories they had imagined beside the duck-pond, but different stories. These weren't the same four people he had juggled with beside the duck-pond. They were, but they weren't. (p. 100)

Each of the actors has begun with a situation he or she thinks expresses something essential about the self, but then dialogic exchange within the demands and constraints of dramatic discourse and the hearing of the audience has a profoundly transformative effect. The success of the performance gives each of the actors the freedom to discover abilities hitherto masked by social interpellations as "a greedy boy," "a girl who is too loud," "a shy girl," and "a short, fat boy," and each subsequently projects a future self translated into, respectively, the specific professions of comedian, singer, poet, and novelist. Participation in the play bestows subjective agency not only in that the interlocked stories constitute values in the form of qualities of concern and commitment within each agent's actions and reactions, but also in so far as it models positive resistance to oppressive discourse-each participant gains "freedom to" as much as "freedom from." There is evidently an underlying assumption that "being" has always already preceded "doing," and hence subjectivity is interior, but "freedom to" has finally only been enabled by social interaction.

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During the play episode, the text stresses that the scene is viewed predominantly from Antonio's perspective and that it is he who comprehends the unfolding, dynamic relationship between cultural discourse and individual agency. So while the novel does not obviously thematize masculinity, there is no doubt that for each of the young male characters, and especially Antonio, the only focalizing character, readers will ask, What kind of boy is this? Antonio is a thoroughly New Age Boy, who attracts epithets such as: sensitive, creative, imaginative, other-regarding, negotiative. These qualities are emphasized by contrasts with his opponent during the playmaking episodes, a self-regarding Mommy's Boy named Simon Greene. When characters perform roles outside their interpellated cultural identities they have to contend with conservative forces within the culture which try to prevent them from exploring possible new identities or roles within sociality. In Antonio S Simon performs this negative role by trying to use intimidation and ridicule to return the playmakers to their previous interpellations. When the play is a success, however, and difference is stamped with cultural value, Simon changes his attitude and clumsily attempts to take over artistic control of the play by offering to rewrite the script. He then cannot comprehend that the dynamic that produced such a powerful embodiment of subjective agency can be neither scripted nor mechanically repeated. The representation of gendered participants and behaviors involves more than a reflection of identifiable gender patterns as an element of story (that is, in a story's character functions, events, and outcomes), though that is the primary vehicle in junior fiction. As a story element, however, gendering inheres systemically in the cultural formations in which represented participants live their everyday lives, especially family and school, and thence the power structures and peer relationships which shape being-in-the-world and interpellate participants into gendered roles. In the books with which I am concerned, an author typically writes with an overt awareness that there is a range of masculine schemata to select from and thence fashions the narrative so that disapprobated masculinities are interrogated and the erstwhile marginalized masculinity of the hero is vindicated. A key element in this process is participant self-constitution, enabled either by deploying the common convention in children's fiction of removing parents from the scene of action or, less frequently, by a need for a character to define himself as different from his parents. The self that is fashioned, however, depends on an implicit distinction between selves produced by systemic social processes and essential selves. In other words, there is a propensity for social formations narratively marked as undesirable to be depicted as constructed and inauthentic, their imposition resulting in a loss of subjectivity, whereas privileged formations are attributes of an authentic self and hence function as an affirmation of subjectivity. This strategic distinction between socially constructed and innate selfhoods is both profoundly ideological and strangely at odds with most

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contemporary discourses about gender, which are more likely to privilege constructionist rather than essentialist theories. Ironically, the effect is that the literature seeks to normatize gendered male behaviors that are the product of recent historical, cultural, and social factors as if only some behaviors are socially produced. In this regard, Anna Fienberg's Dead Sailors Don't Bite (1996) is unusual in not only taking a wholly constructionist position but also mining it as a source of comedy. While it is possible to speak of a range of masculinities, junior fiction generally organizes these within the three schemata of Old Age Boy, New Age Boy, and Mommy's Boy. The first two have clear parallels in adult masculinity, and I have drawn their names and some of their incipient traits from David Buchbinder's encapsulation (1994, 2): The rise of the New Age Man has ... blurred older, more traditional distinctions between what is considered manly or masculine and what is therefore unmanly, unmasculine. This variety of man is supposedly gentler and less aggressive than Old Age Man, more in harmony with the earth and with nature, less convinced of the authority and rightness of traditional male logic, and more amenable to alternative ways of thinking. He attempts to get in touch with his feelings, and is willing to make himself vulnerable, emotionally, to others. Such a man is very different, obviously, from the aggressive, self-contained, independent man whom our culture tends traditionally to associate with the idea of masculinity.

The New Age Boy, a male child in his primary school years who is beginning to display the traits of the New Age Man, has become a familiar figure in junior fiction. He is not yet the Everyday Boy, but is depicted as different, often an outsider. He stands in contrast hoth to the Old Age Boy (the child who is either aggressive or something of a rascal, self-regarding and physically assertive) and to the Mommy's Boy (the pampered and privileged child who is to an excessive degree fashioned by his parents, especially his mother, and who is implicitly still marked as "unmanly, unmasculine"). The dichotomy between manly/masculine and unmanly/unmasculine is thus broken by the presence of a third category, the New Age Boy. He is characteristically the boy who reads for pleasure and may aspire to become a writer himself, and this endows him with a mastery over discourse which is germane to subjective agency; his relationships with peers are other-regarding, so that he can act without self-interest; he tends to lack physical prowess and physical courage, though his moral courage and other-regardingness will prompt him to act courageously. It is tempting to overschematize these concepts, and there is no doubt that books are still being written which rely on the dichotomy of Old Age Boy and Mommy's Boy. This may be because a more conservative construction of masculinity surfaces when an author's focus lies elsewhere, or it may

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be a deliberate reassertion of traditional masculine values. For example, a more traditional conception of preteen masculinity is thematized in Booker Prize winner Peter Carey's first foray into children's fiction, The Big Bazoohley (1995). This novel turns on the distinction between appearance and subjectivity, and the propensity of human beings to confuse these by assuming that subjectivity is inscribed on the surface of the body. In this third-person narrated novel, the only focalizing character, nineyear-old Sam Kellow, arrives in Toronto with his parents, Vanessa, a painter of miniature landscapes, and Earl, a professional gambler. They have come to sell a painting to the reclusive millionaire Edward de Vere, but de Vere cannot be found and the family is caught without any money and staying at an expensive hotel. The hotel is also the venue for a monstrosity known as the Perfecto Kiddo Competition, in which children are dressed as miniature adults and judged on deportment, demeanor, table manners, and so on. The plot depends on Sam's dismay at the family situation and the triple game he is consequently drawn into. He is the victim of a spur of the moment kidnapping, when it occurs to Muriel Mifflin that, after a thorough makeover, she could enter Sam in the Perfecto Kiddo Competition as a substitute for her son Wilfred, who has chickenpox. But once Sam sees that cooperation with Muriel offers a chance to pay the hotel bill he becomes involved in a complex game indeed: he agrees to impersonate Wilfred, schemes to double-cross the Mifflins and keep the prize money for his own family, and, in failing to conform with the Mommy's Boy type predicated by the competition, performs a version of the Old Age Boy which catches the eye of the renegade chief judge (an actor, of course) and wins him the $10,000 prize. Sam is rewarded not because his impersonation of a Mommy's Boy succeeds but because it fails comprehensively. He is independent, resourceful, careless of appearance and deportment, and prone to mischief-all in all, a rough diamond with a heart of gold-and these Old Age Boy qualities preclude him from the assumed docility expected of the Mommy's Boy. The Mommy's Boy, a figure in desperate need of a makeover of a different kind, is defined parodically by Muriel's obsessive cleaning of Sam-this she starts doing before she hits on the idea of substituting him for Wilfred because, "I see a filthy boy, I've got to make him nice. It's me. It's who I am.... I'm a mother. I was born to be a mother" (p. 30). The Mommy's Boy lacks subjective agency, but is simply produced by mommy. He is a simulacrum of a "real" boy-in the judge's words, no more than "a fake" (p. 85). Muriel manages to tum Sam into a simulacrum of Wilfred, but his conscious role-playing preserves his agency and protects him against subjection to the discourse. After devastating the competition by spilling water and, finally, throwing food at another contestant, Sam and his partner are judged to be "the real McCoy": "No one would mistake them for adults. They have been into mischief. They have messed up their hair. One has spaghetti sauce on his face.

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Who cares?" (p. 85). Hence Sam's Old Age Boy masculinity is affirmed, and as in the novel's closing chapters he goes on to demonstrate mastery of other social discourses, his mother is "amazed at how grown-up he had become" (p. 87). In Carey's novel, then, it is a version of the Old Age Boy who takes responsibility for his own life and takes on social commitments through his care for his family and, to some extent, his concern for Wilfred's plight. The privileging of a particular masculine schema by associating it with subjective agency is thus radical in Sam's case, and underscored by Wilfred's lack of agency. Significantly, the close of the novel focuses on Wilfred and the question of his future. Sam had shown Wilfred a pathway for redeeming his masculinity, not least because after the debacle of his performance there were no more Perfecto Kiddo competitions, so that, in the novels closing words, "to that extent the world that Wilfred lived in was a much, much better place" (p. 95). The conclusion to be extrapolated from this close is perhaps that if Mommy's Boy is to be saved and invested with Old Age attributes and hence agency, the social structures which have shaped him will need to be dismantled. More symptomatic of junior fiction is the quintessential example of the New Age Boy found in Gene Kemp's The Wacky World of Wesley Baker (1994), a story about Wesley's struggle to free himself from the athletic masculinity of his father and two older brothers. Wesley is "little, thin and weedy" (p. 23) and wants to be a writer rather than an athlete. In a parallel, interlocked story strand, Agnes Potter Higgins, Wesley's would-be girlfriend, wants to be freed from her eccentric mother's determination to make her a musician, and instead to be allowed to cultivate her athletic ability. What the book shows about Wesley and Agnes is that against the grain interpellation into dominant forms of masculinity and femininity produces fragmented subjectivities. Wesley can see that this is happening to Agnes-" 'You see, she's got a split personality,' I told Kevin .... 'Not split. Splatted,' he said, and ran off to play football. He's always running off to play football" (pp. 3-4)-but as first-person narrator cannot articulate his own fragmented condition. Kevin, on the other hand, simply dwells within the masculine habitus, as the repeated reference to his football playing indicates. Sporting accomplishment stands in metonymic relationship to masculinity, and so that he can perform the masculinity that is so alien to his being, Wesley has to endure a daily exercise and bodybuilding program imposed on him by his father, with the objective of transforming his physique and skills into those of a successful sportsman. Mr Baker's ideal is a model of hegemonic, rational masculinity which is spelled out in rebuttal of Mr. Ie Tissier, Wesley's teacher, who had praised Wesley as "a bright boy who works well." Mr. Baker simply brushes this aside and demands conformity to a "proper" masculine schema. That his formulation pivots on the emphasized word

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WIMP suggests a particular sense of the body informing male being-in-theworld and hints at an underlying homophobia:

"But what about his athletics?" said my father. "What about sports and games? I know he can do his work, he gets his brains from me-but he's a WIMP, and I don't think you get tough enough with him. Plays and poems and art and craft, they're fine in their places, but more importantly, get him to do his math, spell properly, know a bit of science and learn to win at races. Learn to be competitive. That's what he needs." (pp. 90-1) Wimp is the epithet most commonly used about Wesley, whether by his family or himself, so that while he craves a different schema to live by he has nevertheless internalized his father's schema, and this is reinforced by, for example, one of his teachers who insists that creative imagination is a female attribute. Mr. Baker's schema for masculinity is tightly networked, so that its constituents and their interrelationship might seem to be both coherent and essential. When Kemp sets it out so overtly, however, it is very evident that it is quite inadequate as a concept about the world and very inappropriate as a life model for Wesley himself. The noncompetitive areas of human activityplays and poems and art and craft-are not only where Wesley's interests lie, but also are a medium through which he can reshape his subjectivity. So when as part of the school's "dragon week" he is cast as St. George in his class's dragon play, he is propelled into an imaginative reconstruction of his own being. Thus the conventional hero story he sketches out in Chapter 9, in which "Wesley Baker, great hero" is rescued from drowning by Agnes on dragon-back, deconstructs traditional hero stories by implicitly transposing character functions in the story of Perseus and Andromeda and hence transforms patterns of behavior, participant interactions, and narrative closure in the hero narrative. The fantasy of heroic agency is here displaced by selfawareness, as Wesley's story shows him that his strength lies in creative mastery over discourse. His imaginative power subsequently swells up from his unconscious when, suffering concussion and unable to distinguish reality and fantasy, he extinguishes a fire which had broken out beneath the stage in the school hall, while imagining that he is St. George overcoming the dragon. Having thus become an actual, if accidental, hero, Wesley casts off the wimp label and his father releases him from his Old Age Male expectations and instead encourages him to develop as a New Age Boy. A form of subjective agency of particular importance for the privileging of a particular masculine schema is an orientation toward situations which valorizes a participant's reasons and gives purpose to his actions, even if these lie beyond the participant's self-awareness. Indeed, in junior fiction a common strategy for instantiating New Age boyhood as agency is to depict

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behavior, which demonstrates qualities of unreasoned concern and commitment. Values are hence constituted as surface manifestations of internalized qualities, and are reinforced by outcomes. This strategy is particularly evident in Wesley's case when his concussed state produced purely intuitive behavior, but it also underpins characters as diverse as Johnny Maxwell in Terry Pratchett's Only You Can Save Mankind (1992) and Anton in Moloney's Swashbuckler (1995). In all three novels, subjective agency takes a form firmly differentiated from a traditional patriarchal notion of agency as heroic action. Only You Can Save Mankind constitutes an extreme example because of the way Pratchett has characterized Johnny and the contexts into which he has placed him. Johnny feels an acute lack of subjectivity ("Everyone had these pictures of themselves in their head, except him.", p. 126), which is exacerbated by a sense of alienation and isolation produced by his parents' ongoing marital breakdown, and by a reaction of existential angst in the face of the world's meaninglessness. How, then, can an ordinary boy inhabiting a stressful situation gain any modicum of subjective agency? The immediate challenge that Johnny has to face comes from a computer game in which the player shoots down alien spacecraft: in a rupture of the difference between human space and "game space," Johnny dreams his way into the game, where the Captain of the alien fleet (the ScreeWees) engages him in dialogue and offers to surrender in return for safe conduct across the "border" (the end of game time/space). This is a puzzling offer, because Johnny knows that the roles for players of such games, pivoting on aggression and violence, are grounded on the myth of heroic agency, in which "the only way out" is to "fight until you die" (p. 82). Pratchett valorizes other-regardingness and negotiation and undermines the hero myth in three main ways. First, he discloses the absurdity in the masculine focus of the hero myth by mirrored parallels: in ScreeWee society, the fighters are normally female, and it is a male officer who leads a mutiny against the Captain's decision to retreat; on the human side, Johnny finds another player, Kirsty, who is obsessed with excelling in "male" domains ("Of course I take it seriously. It's a game. You've got to win them, otherwise what's the point?", p. 123). Second, a recurrent element in Johnny's contextual background is television reporting of the Gulf War ("more pictures of missiles and bullets streaking over a city. They looked pretty much the same as the ones he'd seen last night, but were probably back by popular demand. He felt sick.", p. 26), and this functions in parallel with the computer game to emphasize the inversely proportionate relation of violence and a dehumanized enemy. Third, heroic action is linked with insanity: in the mutinous ScreeWee's suicidal desire to fight; in Kirsty's renaming of herself as "Sigourney," her obsessive patterning of her behavior on Sigourney Weaver's role in Alien (1979) (she "dreamed of being Sigourney and forgot that she was trying to be someone who was act-

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ing," p. 172), and textual marking of her role-playing through switching of speech reporting tags ("said Kirsty"'''said Sigourney"); and in the ScreeWee Captain's notion of what it is to be human (that is, to be in the hero role):

She needed a new idea. Humans seemed much better at ideas. They always seemed to be on the verge of being totally insane, but it seemed to work for them.... How do you think like a human? Go into madness first, probably, and then out the other side. (p. 111) Johnny's antiheroic demeanor enables him first to embrace the different role required of him when the ScreeWee asks to change the rules, and then, with the legitimizing ground of action thus dismantled, to be willing to take responsibility for making judgments and performing actions solely on the basis of altruism and other-regardingness. These actions include, finally, facing up to the mutinous officer and shooting him. And the ScreeWee fleet escapes across the border. Johnny does, of course, evidence subjective agency and realizes that self-awareness and altruism allow him to negotiate his way in a world where "Nothing actually was better, probably" (p. 172). The Captain sums up his achievement as, "You never thought of yourself. You tried to work things out. You made choices" (p. 157). Altieri observes that one of the constituents of agency lies in "the role that first persons play in the process of assenting and dissenting," and that these processes can be engaged "without on every level appealing to criteria or yielding to concerns for what can be known" (1994, 91). These are the very terms of Johnny's agency, albeit expressed more simply: "You might never win, but at least you could try. If not you, who else?" (p. 173). I want at this point to consider further how intention functions within the dynamics of agency in two novels in which traditional heroic roles are enacted-James Moloney's Swashbuckler, which I have already mentioned, and, in an entirely different genre, Katherine Paterson's Parzival: The Quest of the Grail Knight (1998). In the contexts of social interactions and individual desires, both of which often allow too little time for reflection, states of mind which ground effective agency will depend on the ability to control conduct and to make reasoned extrapolations from one experience to another. Such states of mind pivot on intentions. It is here that Paterson's Parzival illuminates the relationship between masculinity and subjective agency. Following the early-thirteenth-century Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach, Paterson depicts a young male raised by his mother as a rural naIf (a medieval Mommy's Boy) in order to exclude him from the violent world of men. Once he discovers that world and desires to become part of it, his ambitions are constrained by his inability to formulate effective intentions, so that

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he is only in the role of a knight, a signifier persistently sliding away from its signified. Thus while he accumulates the bodily accoutrements of heroic masculinity, as embodied metonymically in the knight-errant, this masculinity is invested in what Bourdieu refers to as "the seemingly most insignificant details of dress, bearing, physical and verbal manners" (1977, 94). Bourdieu is here arguing that societies "that seek to produce a new man through a process of 'deculturation' and 'reculturation'" will treat the body as a metonym, entrusting to it "in abbreviated and practical, i.e. mnemonic, form the fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of the culture. The principles embodied in this way are placed beyond the grasp of consciousness." Now in her Parzival Paterson seems to grasp that this constructionist view implicates lack of agency. Thus, again metonymically, Parzival is doomed to wander the world for years, never knowing where he was, and finding no savor in the physical encounters that invest knighthood with meaning. He does not achieve subjective agency until the very close of the novel, when, at last becoming the Grail Knight, he "in his compassion asked the question" (p. 122) and thereby healed the suffering of the Fisher King. For Paterson, as for Wolfram before her, agency is to be equated with aligning intentions with Christian faith, but, regardless of that positioning, she does implicitly show that a masculinity suffers from a disabling lack of agency if it is not informed by intentions in tum shaped by other-regardingness. The problem had been sharply defined in the incident of the lark, which occurs just before Parzivalleams of the existence of knights. He kills the lark because his current schema for masculinity is that of huntsman: One bird rose high into the air, singing a song so beautiful that it pierced the boy's heart. Without thinking, he raised his bow and shot his arrow into the sky. The song ceased mid-note, and the singer dropped like a stone to the earth. When he saw that his arrow had killed the bird, the boy cried out and broke his crude bow over his knee. Indeed, for many days, whenever he heard the song of a lark, he burst into tears, remembering his thoughtless act. (p. 5)

The schema underlying this incident is "bad" Old Age masculinity. The action of shooting the lark embodies innate violence and destructiveness, fueled by self-regardingness, possessiveness, and thoughtlessness. There is an implicit causal relationship between the first two sentences of this extract-because the lark's song "pierced the boy's heart" he shot it-which bespeaks traditional male behavior. The grief Parzival consequently experiences is the beginning of his education, but is also the first of many griefs that will flow from comparable actions. Where, finally, does intention lie in this incident from Parzival? There are two kinds of intention here: first, there is an intention to do something,

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the intention linked to the implicit desire to possess the lark's song, which gives rise to the "thoughtless act"; and second, there is an intention in the action, which inheres in the possession of the bow and the huntsman schema it instantiates. This latter "intention in" models a form of subjectivity, though in this case it is evoked as a lack. Altieri comments that: If we want to understand subjective agency in actions it often proves less accurate to speak of an "intention to" do something than of an "intention in" an action that gives it a distinctive character. In the first case the intention is something separate that we think we can identify and whose causal force we can trace. But if we conceive the intentionality as evident within the activity, we treat it as an aspect of the action itself-not a cause but ... a purposive process. (pp. 98-9) A remarkably expressive example of this distinction appears at the beginning of Moloney's Swashbuckler. Through its two interlocked strands, this novel examines the struggle for subjective agency of two boys who are losing their fathers. At the opening, Peter, the narrator, appears to have lost his father to compulsive gambling and is living with his mother and sisters in impoverished circumstances. One consequence is that the family has moved to a rented house and Peter has had to change schools. The father of Anton, the other boy, is terminally ill, and Anton's response has been to retreat into imaginary swashbuckler roles and their illusion of agency. The two boys meet for the first time when, leaving school after his first day, Peter is bailed up by the two school bullies and Anton attempts a rescue: "Cease and desist!" called a voice from the surrounding scrub. "Stand fast and release your prisoner." ... The next moment, a blood-curdling roar went up, scaring the birds out of the surrounding trees. As all three of us watched wide-eyed, a boy ran out from behind the bush holding the end of the rope. When the rope went tight, he launched himself into the air swinging round towards us in a wide arc, legs flailing, still bellowing that mighty war-cry. This was startling enough, but the real surprise was his clothing. He wore a red-and-white striped T-shirt, long black pants that clung to his legs, and flapping out from behind his shoulders, a purple cape. Topping it all was a black mask tied at the back like a scarf. The wild intruder hurtled round towards us. Unfortunately, he landed awkwardly and fell in a colorful heap a few meters from where Rex had me crushed against the tree. He stood up instantly, then trod on his cape and tumbled over again. These falls were taking the edge off his impressive entrance. The cape, I saw, now that I'd had time to take a closer look, was an old bed-sheet knotted into the sleeves of his shirt. "Unhand that innocent young traveler, you blackguard," demanded my savior, now firmly on his feet at last. (pp. 4-5)

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Told in retrospect, Peter's narrative plays on the melodramatic comedy of Anton's entrance and draws readers' attention to images and processes, and hence to the wide gap here between apparent intentions and probable outcomes. The bullies had been aligned from the outset with the Old Age schema, and now Anton offers himself as an opponent who instantiates a particular version of that schema, the superhero. The narrator's perspective, however, together with Anton's clumsiness, establishes that this is rather a parodic enactment of the superhero schema. As the episode continues, Anton only escapes a beating because a woman in a nearby yard notices the situation and intervenes. In the cited extract and its larger context, the difference between intention to and intention in suggests the possibility of subjective agency. Anton's spoken words disclose an intention to rescue Peter, and this is reflected in his actions; and inhering in his costume and theatrical approach to the rescue is a purposive process, an intention to identify himself with a particular type of role and hence to adopt an agential discourse. This is a tantalizing example, because Anton's swashbuckling folly cannot yield agency in the sense of any positive material outcome, though he does manage to confuse the slowerwitted of the two bullies. On the other hand, he has chosen his action, and inhering in it are the qualities of altruistic concern and commitment to another which are the prerequisites of subjective agency. Anton's swashbuckler schema is motivated by a basic superhero code: "To fight demons and dragons and evil of all kind wherever we find it, to beat it back, to take on any challenge no matter how difficult or dangerous .... To fight and fight and never give in, no matter how dreadful the foe we face" (p. 36). The reciprocating quest which Peter takes on is to work out how to draw the otherregarding element of Anton's schema out of the role-playing into the real world, and hence help him find the courage to visit his dying father and accept his death, to achieve true subjective agency. At the same time, Peter has to learn to forgive his own father and assist with his rehabilitation. As in the other novels I have been discussing, role-play here functions to model the possibility of subjective agency which is then realized in the novel's actual world. Creative, sensitive, with an articulate command of contemporary discourses, and evidencing an agency grounded in choices shaped by concern and commitment, the New Age Boy is now well established in junior fiction. He is still apt to be represented more as a desideratum than a norm, but he can now also be depicted as a source of comedy. In Dead Sailors Don 'I Bite (1996), which, as I remarked earlier, takes a constructionist position on all male schemata, Anna Fienberg makes fun of the idea of the New Age male and the literature about him, even as she instantiates the schema as a means for solving problems and resolving conflicts. Wiggy, the novel's New Age Boy, is once again a budding writer and also happens to suffer from vertigo,

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claustrophobia, and seasickness. Picking up from a much earlier novel, Wiggy and Boa (1988), Dead Sailors tells of Wiggy and Boa's adventures with four pirates who had come to live with them after being marooned on a desert island for thirty-five years. The pirates embody an extreme version of Old Age masculinity and this, together with their long isolation, makes them in great need of socialization. There is, I think, a joke here about the contemporary imperative to socialize boys away from Old Age masculinity. The pinnacle of the joke is the deculturation and reculturation of Tiger. Attracted to a neighbor, Miss Watson, and invited for tea, Tiger runs into disaster because he is unable to negotiate her feminized space of antique furniture and delicate tableware, and has no conversation other than the "men's business" of piracy and brawling. The nadir of his disaster comes in a witty parody of Old Age masculinity: Frantically, he tried to think of something interesting to say. Then he remembered the jar in his pocket. Inside, pickled in brine, was the Mexican ear. He'd brought it along in case conversation flagged. Now was surely the moment. Proudly he put the jar in Miss Watson's lap. ''There it is, an' all," he said. "My trophy." (p. 68)

Wiggy subsequently takes Tiger in hand and teaches him how to be a SNAG, a "Sensitive New Age Guy". Explaining that Miss Watson has "never been to sea, or seen an ear sliced off' (p. 72), Wiggy advises him to "be sensitive to her needs. Ask her about her life, what she likes to do. Find something in common" and lends him some books, one about antique furniture and another titled Relationships-Being a Man in the Modem World. With the introduction of the latter book, the joke slips into genial satire: "It'll tell you all about the feelings you have inside you, and how to express them to the Other." "Other wotT "The Other important person in your life. Miss Watson." (pp. 73-4)

Fienberg's game here becomes very obvious with the misappropriation ofthe central relationship term "the Other." Nevertheless, Tiger becomes a new man, "awash with new-age and sensitive emotions" (p. 121), and the schema is parodied whenever Tiger appears in the rest of the book. Tiger's behavior as a New Age male does nevertheless imbue him with subjective agency, enabling him to win the heart of Miss Watson and to open communications with another example of "bad" masculinity, the children's teacher Mr. Rocke, who embodies authoritarian, unimaginative, linear thinking. In effect, Fienberg's playful representations of the New Age male schema obliquely affirm it, and this is no more evident than in one of the

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novel's framing elements, Wiggy's desire to write. For much of the novel this desire is misdirected by an attempt to write the pirates' story, but his efforts are conventional and derivative, lacking insight into experience. At the close of the novel, about to embark on a sea voyage which will give him some firsthand experience and hence enable his pirate novel to become a dialogue of Other and Self, Wiggy lies floating in the sea with Boa, "looking up at the seamless blue sky": It's like an enonnous page, Wiggy thought happily, just waiting to be written on. And I think, at last, I'm ready. (p. 127)

This is one of the most overt examples of a character's writing standing metonymic ally for self-constitution and subjective agency. When the New Age Boy writes, his command over discourse articulates subjective agency as a force for expressing emotions and responsible judgments, for embodying the qualities of concern and commitment which are the ground of that agency. In short, he fashions the self.

4 Redeeming Masculinity at the End of the Second Millennium Narrative Reconfigurations of Masculinity in Children's Fiction BEVERLEY PENNELL

Redeem-a suitably moral-sounding word, he thought sadly, pulling the cord and getting off the bus, although it was he who needed the redemption. URSULA DUBOSARSKY, BRUNO AND THE CRUMHORN

R. W. Connell's Masculinities (1995) supports the research of feminist scholars like Sally Robinson in Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women's Fiction (1991) in arguing that cultural formations, such as the metanarratives of our society, play a role in either sustaining or challenging the existing binary gender hierarchy. Children's literature can make a significant contribution to whether or not child readers understand the patriarchal social order and oppositional gendered social relations to be immutable. The degendering of literary texts has proved to be a multifaceted problem to which writers have needed a continuing commitment. I intend to argue that a key concept for representing a new degendered pattern of intersubjective experience in literary texts must take account of Connell's finding that: Masculinity and femininity are inherently relational concepts, which have meaning in relation to each other, as a social demarcation and a cultural opposition. This holds regardless of the changing content of the demarcation in different societies and periods of history. (p. 44)

This implies that degendering social relations requires the resignification of "masculinity" and "femininity" so that they are not bounded and oppositional concepts. Reconfigurations of many of the constituents of literary metanarratives are needed in order to represent Connell's "democratic gender relations" (2000, 225): relations that are empathetic and degendered

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rather than oppositional and hierarchical. Connell's argument explains why profeminist fictions, which make the feminine subject visible and reformulate feminine gender schemata, founder in their attempts to represent ameliorative engendered intersubjective experiences. These narratives often remain tied to patriarchal coherences and closures which privilege the character who "wins" or is triumphant and who, thereby, accrues symbolic and actual power. This chapter traces some of the important steps towards degendering children's literature already achieved by scholars and writers in the field. It draws particularly on Peter Hollindale's "Ideology and the Children's Book" (1988) and John Stephens's "Gender, Genre and Children's Literature" (1996). The latter expands the discussion of engendered fictions by focusing on the implicit gendering of certain literary genres and discursive practices. Analysis of profeminist fictions which regender-reformulate gender schemas-within patriarchal metanarratives shows that they are often complicit in the maintenance of gender binarism and misandric in their resignification of the characteristics of masculine subjects. It is undeniable that feminine subjectivity had to be made visible in fictions in order for the representation of changed social relations. Unfortunately one outcome of such narratives is the perpetuation of a rent in gender relations: the process of pluralizing and resignifying feminine subjectivities often meant a concomitant demonizing of masculine subjectivities. To redress this pejoration of masculine subjects in profeminist fictions, masculinity needs to be redeemed in two important ways. First, both story and discourse must mark the traditional schema of "hegemonic masculinity" (Connell 1995, 77) as a construction rather than as "natural." Just as feminist texts repudiate patriarchal metanarratives where the female subject is constructed as the inferior other to man, so too the operations of traditional normative masculinity must be made visible. In order to examine the ways that children's fictions have increasingly made masculinity visible, I will discuss Anne Fine's novel Bill's New Frock (1989) and her short story "Fabric Crafts" (1990). The second requirement for the redemption of masculinity in fictions is the rejection of the concept of the unitary masculine subject. This concept needs to be replaced by a diverse range of self-reflexive masculine subjectivities whose intersubjective experiences with women and girls are not premised either implicitly or explicitly upon unequal relations of power. The reconfiguration of masculine subjectivities is particularly difficult because the masculine has been the natural site of enunciation in literary discourse and superiority is ascribed to those character attributes that comprise the traditional schema of masculinity.l To this is added the unlikelihood of masculine subjects relinquishing their birthright to power because in the metanarratives of Western society such renunciation means abjection and vilification. The final part of this paper examines the use of metafiction in

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children's literature as a means of resignifying masculinity and rewriting the engendered metanarratives of patriarchal and profeminist fictions. Brian Doyle's Covered Bridge (1990) and Ursula Dubosarsky's Bruno and the Crumhorn (1996) interrogate gender binarism and satirize its perpetuation in texts of all kinds. Feminist theorizing problematizes hegemonic masculinity by arguing that it interpellates subjects with a relentless impetus to distinction with competitiveness being the essential masculine experience and "winning" being the means of establishing self-worth. Feminism also foregrounds the hierarchical and oppositional nature of patriarchal social systems. Within these systems "difference"-whether of embodiment, sexuality, race, religion, social class, or ethnicity-becomes a rationale for domination (Connell 1995,71-86; Walby 1989; Mitchell 1971, 1975). When these insights are transferred into children's fictions negative consequences result for the representations of men and boys. Profeminist story lines subvert patriarchal emplotments by representing masculine subjects in traditional roles of authority as domineering and emotionally inarticulate or unavailable (Pennell 1999; Coward 1999, 136; Hollindale 1988, 13). The actions of such characters have horrific effects on their partners and children. 2 This "crisis" in hegemonic masculinity is frequently manifested by placing literature's transgressive men inside the domestic household (Connell 1995, 234). Despite the misandry of such profeminist texts they remain valuable as part of "pressure towards that historical change" required for the reconfiguration of gender relations (p. 238). While they undermine aspects of patriarchal metanarratives they do not offer patterns of degendered sociality and they rein scribe oppositional gender binarism (Murphy 1994, 1-17; Stephens 1996c, 28; Scutter 1999, 195-222, 205). These fictions certainly establish feminine subjects as sites of enunciation and succeed in recuperating many negative feminine stereotypes. They also successfully foreground those patriarchal practices which disempower women and circumscribe their lives. Nevertheless, oppositional gender relations are rein scribed and masculine subjects are often represented as beyond redemption. Critiques of those profeminist fictions that address the elision of the feminine only by reversing gender prejudice indicate that attention must be paid to the engendered nature of literary genres and discoursal conventions. 3 In the field of children's literature Peter Hollindale's paper "Ideology and the Children's Book" (1988) alerts writers and scholars to the sexist ideologynow anti-male-inscribed in many pro feminist children's fictions. His paper examines the multilayered functioning of ideology in fictions for children and highlights the need for a reading pedagogy that enables students to locate the levels of ideology operating in all kinds of texts. Hollindale stresses the narrative and linguistic complexity of successfully constructing a socially progressive ideology in a fiction and argues that often "the more gifted

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writer" produces a text which may "carry its ideological burden more covertly." Hollindale stresses the risk inherent in a writer adopting this approach: a reliance on readers knowing "how to read a novel" so that its ideological burden is unambiguous (p. 12). Hollindale argues the need for pedagogical practices that ensure young readers develop the skills to recognize the codes and conventions that construct the dialogism of fiction. He is also concerned to teach children to identify the operation of ideology in texts, progressive or otherwise, so he concludes his paper with some key questions that will assist readers to determine a fiction's ideology. Regarding gendering he suggests that readers ask: "What happens when the components of a text are transposed or reversed ... '? ... Is this 'anti-sexist novel' in fact sexist itself, and merely anti-male'?" (p. 19). The antisexist terminology is outdated, but Hollindale foregrounds the problem of identifying oppositional gendering in a text where the surface and passive ideologies conflict. Furthermore, there exist the pervasive and unquestioned values that form "the climate of belief' in any text. These unmarked cultural assumptions reveal what is considered natural at any particular historical moment. Hollindale characterizes this "climate of belief' as "vague, and holistic, and pliant, and stable, and can only evolve" (p. 19). Clearly this definition offers space to resist norms and to pursue change. Connell too, argues that "Practice constitutes and reconstitutes structures" (1995, 65) bringing "new social arrangements into being (however partially)" (p. 229). Arguably then, fictions as social practice can offer transformed representations of gender relations if narrative strategies are deployed with sufficient skill. Hollindale nearly identifies the need to make masculinity visible. He briet1y mentions Gene Kemp's novel The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler (1977), commenting that the novel's "astonishing effect" as "an antisexist story" is largely due to its "ingenious self-disguise" (1988, 11). Another way to account for its success is to note what it discloses rather than what it hides: it shows the masculine as the natural site of enunciation in literary discourse. Rather than disguising, the novel reveals the literary schemata for adventurous boyhood employed in a school story genre. The Tykeffheodora protagonist docs nothing that is physically impossible for a feminine subject, nor is her leadership unreasonable, but the reader invokes a default schema of masculinity because Tyke is not specified as a feminine subject. The conventional implied reading position assumes that Tyke's unmarked character attributes are those of a masculine subject (Stephens 1996c, 18). This is why a girl/woman when reading patriarchal literature is so regularly "required to identify against herself' (Stephens 1996c, 20). While Hollindale's paper problematizes the profeminist reformulation of gender schemata it does not suggest ways that narrative strategies should change. Stephens's paper (l996c) focuses specifically on the engendered discursive practices of children's literary genres. For instance, Stephens

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examines Russell Hoban's The Mouse and His Child (1969) in order to show how the traditionally engendered interactions of characters and the conventions of some literary genres "overlap almost inextricably" to reinforce gender binarism as natural (p. 17). Stephens states that "There is a tendency for traditional stories and genres to devolve always back into patriarchal discourse" (p. 20). He argues that constructing fictions that represent a degendered sociality is complex because it requires the reformulation of a matrix of narratological processes. Making a difference to gender representation is not just reformulating gender schemata because traditional social relations are reinstated by genre conventions such as story line and closure. Stephens demonstrates how "ideological drift" (Pennell 1996) occurs in Terry Pratchett's Truckers (1989) from a profeminist surface ideology to a conservative passive ideology. His analysis identifies a twofold problem. First, there is the engendered nature of the mock-heroic genre where the conventional focalizer is a masculine subject. The main character, Masklin, despite a somewhat reformulated sensitive masculinity, is still valorized as the leader, the thinker, and the link with supernatural power. Stephens writes that "it seems much easier for the children's book to strip away some of the attributes of masculinity and to enhance the remainder with some attributes from the feminine" (l996c, p. 22). Several comments are pertinent here. Many profeminist texts enhance feminine subjects by adding attributes from the masculine set. This no longer surprises readers as long as masculine and feminine subjects are not shown in relational situations. When not being viewed relationally, most of the gender attributes in traditional gender schema have positive significations so it is certainly not difficult to enhance a character's profile by adding attributes from the opposing gender set. It is the arbitrariness of the traditional gender schemata that is exposed by decades of sex role research (Connell 1995, 21-7) and foregrounded in fictions like The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler. This is why Connell argues that the degendering process is benign unless the underlying hierarchical power relations of gender binarism are also reconfigured (p. 234). In Truckers it is this failure that presents the second significant problem. The dialogue quoted from the novel has the feminine character, Grimma, and the authoritative masculine character, Gurder, failing to communicate about why Grimma should, or should not, accompany the men on an expedition. Grimma enunciates a feminist victim discourse and the pseudopriestly Gurder responds in a beleaguered parent/authority discourse. Gurder eventually accedes to Grimma's demands because of her persistence rather than because of her persuasive rhetoric or her skills (Stephens 1996c, 23). Stephens argues that the humor of the dialogue succeeds because the traditional comedy of the nagging woman is enhanced by the subversion of feminist aspirations. That is, the profeminist surface ideology, offered by the representation of a reformulated female

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character, is undermined by a passive ideology invoked by the engendered comic mode with its pejorative feminine stereotypes. A more proactive feminist discourse could construct dialogue for Grimma that is self-enhancing and self-promoting rather than ironically self-deprecating, but that possibility foregoes the certain success of sexist humor. This episode from Truckers presents nothing surprising in terms of its "climate of belief' because the patriarchal gender order is maintained, although contested, and power relations remain unchanged, " ... We'll make the decisions, all right?" says Gurder, having the last word. There are other narrative choices that Pratchett could make so that the dialogue represents empathetic gendered relations. Masklin could enunciate his disagreement with Gurder's misogynistic views or Gurder could affirm Grimrna's capabilities. However, these options would undermine the traditional representation of women as having only supporting roles in action/adventure genres and as being the prizes for masculine heroism. Masculine readers could even be required "to identify against" themselves. Changes would also be needed for story coherence: closure may require representation of power being shared by masculine and feminine characters. Such an outcome would, of course, be remarkable rather than natural. Bill's New Frock, discussed below, similarly succumbs to traditional generic expectations about climax and closure because, as Stephens argues, it is natural to fall back into traditional narrative patterning. Pratchett's humor depends upon patriarchal discursive practices that represent feminine subjects as garrulous, overbearing, and practically ineffectual. This leaves them dependent upon masculine leadership, expertise, and ingenuity and perpetuates the mythology of masculinity as the legitimate site of action and power. Stephens clearly demonstrates that "attempts to introduce affirmative representations of women can stumble into a tension between one kind of gendering at story level and another in the discourse" (l996c, p. 21). When writing of "affirmative representations of women" Stephens addresses only half of the problem. Affirmative representations of nonheroic masculine subjects are equally necessary, as well as representations of empathetic intersubjective relations regardless of gender. Hollindale argues that "Our priority in the world of children's books should not be to promote ideology but to understand it, and to find ways to help others to understand it, including the children themselves" (1988, 10). While Stephens agrees with Hollindale that children should not be at the mercy of what they read (1992, 4), he would regard Hollindale's claim that "ideology is an inevitable, untamable and largely uncontrollable factor in the transaction between children and their books" (1988, 10) as too open. Stephens demonstrates the availability of "methods which enable both finer linguistic evaluations and more sophisticated narratological insights" which can empower readers in their decoding of literature and assist writers to anchor the ideological burdens of their fictions (1992, 11). He shows that an

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alignment of story constituents with discoursal processes ensures that the surface and passive ideological intentions of a writer are coherent and consistent throughout the narrative. Reformulation of character attributes alone is not a sufficient change as these do not result in shifts in power relations among characters nor alter story coherences or closures. Most of the texts that Stephens (1996c) critiques do not offer degendered social practices nor do they represent empathetic intersubjective relationships between masculine and feminine subjects even as an ideal, let alone as "predictable everyday behavior" (Hollindale 1988, 11). In attempts to regender fictions, women/girls may be represented as agential protagonists while men/boys may "have a tendency to be self-effacing, to be caring, to be vulnerable" yet gender binarism persists (Stephens 1996c, 22). Narrative strategies-character dialogues, for instance-that reproduce these conventional gendered power relations need to be rewritten so that story coherences and closures can change too. Connell argues that altering relations of unequal power is the crux of degendering sociality. While the material practices that constitute "hegemonic masculinity" may shift over time, the power relations embedded in the binary gender system do not. The benefits that accrue to men from the "patriarchal dividend" range from the attribution of status and authority, to wielding economic and political power and controlling the means to violence (Cixous 1980,90; Rubin 1984,267-319; Connell 1995, 82-3). This leads Connell to argue that the advocacy of social difference and the process of degendering must proceed hand in hand. He states that "the idea is to recompose, rather than to delete, the cultural elements of gender" (Connell 1995, 234), so that the positive human attributes formerly cast as binary opposites, as either masculine or feminine, become potentialities for everyone. Ultimately "men's relational interests in the welfare of women and girls can displace the same men's gender-specific interests in supremacy" (p. 242). Here then is a possible impetus for change even if the realization of such a possibility seems utopian in the contemporary sociohistoric context. Connell's apparently straightforward statement entails overturning the current structures of power in most aspects of social relations (Connell 2000, 35-6). Perhaps it is not surprising that the appearance of literary representations of reconfigured masculine subjectivities proceeds slowly. Discussion now turns to Anne Fine's fictions to show transformations in the ways that writers interrogate the engendered nature of fictions and, by implication, sociality. The framing situation of Bill's New Frock presents a comic and radical experience of regendering: Bill awakes one morning to find that he is a girlhe thinks that he might be dreaming but he is never quite certain. The closely aligned narrator/focalizer viewpoint allows the traditional masculine subject position to become visible in the primary level of story. Its opposition to patriarchal femininity is clear as we read of Bill's reactions to the expecta-

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tions others have of him when he spends a day at school in the feminine space of which the frock is metonymic. The treatment he receives as a female student makes him desperate to escape this construction of subjectivity. Teachers interpellate a subject position for him with expectations of personal cleanliness, cooperation, obedience, and a concern for the welfare of the group above personal interest. Bill is surprised by the unquestioning acceptance of this gender regime and angered by the prevalence of institutionalized inequity in the school organization: demands for superior written work from girls (pp. 16-7), delegation of menial tasks to them (pp. 47-52) and their marginalization in the playground (pp. 31-2). While none of the girls in Bill's class actually wears a frock to school it is nevertheless clear that the signifier "frock" invokes a semiotic system of idealized femininity that operates in Bill's spatio-temporal framework. Many readers will recognize this to be the case in their own social situation. More importantly, readers will see that, in the school context, regardless of changes in styles of dress, being a girl interpellates subjects who are passive, compliant, and who only occupy those spaces not required by boys (p. 31). In Bill's New Frock, as in Truckers, genre conventions limit the novel's advocacy of degendered social relations. The surface ideology and thematic concern of the novel is to have a masculine subject experience the materiality of patriarchal femininity. The climax in the primary story level is achieved with Bill's outraged yell of "I am a person!" after he is "wolf whistled" by Mean Malcolm for a second time (p. 92). There is humor in Bill's realization that being whistled at is tantamount to being reduced to the status of a dog. When Mean Malcolm wolf whistles him in the opening of the novel, the humiliation is represented as being worse than physical abuse (p. 11). Bill refuses a second experience of abjection and, following a patriarchal story line, attacks the school bully. He becomes a traditional winner by defeating the villain rhetorically and physically. The reward for the hero/heroine in this story line is his escape from the space of the frock. While the climax of the story makes the masculine viewpoint visible, the reading position for a girl is rather problematic. Is the implication that transgressive masculine behaviors like Mean Malcolm's can only be defeated by traditional patriarchal methods? As Stephens found with Truckers, so here too, the conventions of narrative reveal a gendered passive ideology. It is certainly ideologically progressive for masculine readers to be made aware of the indignities meted out to girls by some menlboys. Empathy as well as comic irony is shown when Bill is so outraged on behalf of girls that, as a girl, he defeats the bully. The extent of his indignation is reinforced by the fact that as a boy Bill had never dared to challenge Mean Malcolm's power. Nevertheless the story suggests that feminine subjects do not have their own ways of dealing with such gendered behaviors.

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Bill's rejection of the space of the frock, when read as thematic closure, subverts the legitimation of patriarchy. His experiences in that space can be understood as an argument for the alignment of masculine subjects with women/girls in order to repudiate the marginalized and subordinated position assigned to feminine subjects under patriarchy. Bill's actions construct a masculine subject who temporarily places his "relational interests in the welfare of women and girls" above his "interests in supremacy." Unfortunately a real possibility exists that readers who do not know how to read a novel will focus only on the gendered closure of the primary story and miss the more progressive reading. After all, the surface ideology may be read as a rejection not of hegemonic femininity but as the superiority of the masculine subject position and traditional masculine attributes. When read this way the text contributes to oppositional gendering and misogyny. Story closure, as distinct from thematic closure, is most powerful in this regard as the following extract makes clear: She peeled the offending dress up over his head, and gave him a push towards the stairs. Bill needed no prompting. He ran up to his bedroom and pulled on a pair of jeans and a shirt. Then he took the tiniest, sideways peep in his mirror. And then another, slightly longer peep. And then a good, long stare. He was a boy! Some people might have said that he could have done with a bit of a haircut. ... But he was definitely a boy. Never in his life had Bill felt such relief. (pp. 94-6)

This closure powerfully states the undesirability of being in the feminine space. Bill's need to confirm repeatedly that he is a boy, combined with his sense of deliverance, reinscribe androcentrism by advocating masculinity as the desired and superior gender identity. His day as a girl has been "the most horrible and frustrating day in his life" (p. 92), a "curse was on him" and, self-reflexively, the reader is told that like "poor Rapunzel trapped in her high stone tower" Bill waits "hoping for rescue" (p. 40). The obvious achievement of Bill's New Frock is that the unitary masculine subject position is made visible by the oppositional representation of the space of the feminine. But there is no representation of empathetic gendered social relations between the characters and no dialogue about gender issues across the gender boundary. The girl reader is expected to identify against herself because the implied reader is clearly masculine. Bill's New Frock successfully problematizes the disempowered feminine subject position in the binary gender system but arguably the traditional closure of the primary level of story works more powerfully than does the thematic closure which advocates

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the rejection of the gender inequities inherent in patriarchy. Indeed it would seem surprising to readers if Bill were to refuse the patriarchal dividends that traditional metanarratives construct as his birthright. Confirming Hollindale's view about the evolutionary nature of sociocultural change (p. 19), a major paradigm shift occurs when we move from Bill's New Frock to the satirical "Fabric Crafts." The short story constructs a spatio-temporal framework where some degendering of everyday practices is evident in home and school. The reformulation of traditional gender schemata is considered natural by masculine and feminine adolescent subjects and is accepted and approved by many adults. Unlike the endemically gendered primary school experiences depicted in Bill's New Frock, in this setting "customary behavior" is a degendered school curriculum. The narrative asserts that some evolutionary change occurs generationally but in ways that deal with surface issues rather than in ways that fundamentally alter power relations in gendered social structures. "Fabric Crafts" indicates the limited etIectiveness of pro feminist oppositional literary discourse because regendered, or even degendered, material practices may have no impact on the masculine subject's impetus to distinction, nor his assumption of power and recourse to violence. Blair, the main adolescent character, finds the impetus to distinction irresistible, even competing with his mother about how many pieces of bacon can fit into a frying pan (p. 416). While in Bill's New Frock the generic outcome places Bill in the position of becoming a traditional hero and winner, in this story Blair is so used to viewing the world competitively that he claims "I didnae hear myself' after yet another automatic proclamation of superiority in whatever activity is to hand. This impetus to distinction means that he enters the school's embroidery competition determined to excel at a skill which traditionally belongs to the feminine space. It is Alastair, Blair's father, who mistakenly believes that this will undermine his son's masculinity and make him ridiculous to his peers (pp. 417-9). The father's opposition ally gendered and violently hierarchical view of social relations is satirized by implying that society, represented by the mother and the children, has already ousted traditional gender binarism in many everyday practices. However the narrative structuring makes it clear that committed shifts to reformulated gender schemata have not checked patriarchal power. The limited etIect of the reformulation of gendered behaviors is demonstrated in the following extract as Blair now claims superiority over his sister, Annie, in embroidery. The dialogue shows Blair quite unaware that Alastair is distressed by his son's sincere interest in the now degendered school subject of fabric crafts. "I cannae believe it," he said in broken tones. "My ain laddie, the son and grandson of miners, sits in a sewing circle and chats." "I dinnae just chat. I'm very good. I've started on embroidery now I've finished hemming my apron!"

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Alastair groaned. "His apron!" "Dinnae take on so," Helen Macintyre comforted her husband. "Everyone's son does it. The times are changing." She tipped a pile of greasy dishes into the sink and added: "Thank God." "Not my son!" Alastair Macintyre cried. "Not my son! Not embroidery! ... I didnae make a fuss when my ain lassie took up the metalwork. I didnae like it, but I bore with it. But there are limits. A man must have his sticking place, and this is mine. I will nae have my one and only son doing embroidery." "Why not?" demanded Blair. "I'm very good at it. I bet I can embroider much, much better than wee Annie here." (p. 417)

The dialogue shows that for Alastair the words "embroidery," "apron," and "chatting" have a penumbra of associations to do with women's experiences and productivity in the domestic household. They connote passivity and dependence, marginality, and disempowerment which are abject attributes in the traditional schema for masculinity. Metonymy operates across the story to resignify the word "embroidery." Blair's successful engagement with embroidery-he wins the competition-foregrounds the ideological problem of gendered social relations having to do with power structures rather than with a particular set of attributes or material practices being ascribed as either masculine or feminine. In the story's denouement Blair is comically transformed by his undertaking embroidery because the skills required proved a genuine challenge for him. Alastair can hardly believe that Blair, as he talks to his male friends about embroidery skills, is finally displaying humility and an awareness of the painful effect that careless, arrogant words can have on others. Blair's redemption means that Alastair must degender the word "embroidery," resignifying it to connote qualities such as manual deftness, creativity and perseverance. However, as this is a comic narrative it is possible to read the denouement as an inversion of everyday experience and not as representing "customary behavior." The latter reading does not necessarily undermine the text's progressive ideology for a number of reasons, not the least being that in the context of the story Alastair's redemption is as important as Blair's. Despite the possibility of a conservative reading of the closure of "Fabric Crafts," the story undermines traditional patriarchy because Alastair's exaggerated physical and verbal abuse of his son distances readers just as effectively as Blair's farcical arrogance does. The text problematizes gendered social relations in significant ways with the viewpoints of feminine subjects being enunciated and valued. (This is what Truckers fails to do.) Helen McIntyre's more progressive views about degendering align her with her children in opposition to Alastair and even though her everyday experiences show her as still "chained to the sink," she realizes the inequity of her

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position in her comment that "The times are changing .... Thank God" (p. 417). Annie is represented as embracing the opportunities offered by a degendered sociality as she is able to tune the family car and referee football games. Alastair wants car tuning to provide a father/son bonding ritual but Blair is too committed to his embroidery to be distracted. When the job devolves to Annie, she is left to do it alone. Her refereeing is also devalued relationally because her expertise is required only when a boy is not available (p.423). The use of the comic mode in the story closure problematizes the possibility of real change in the operations of patriarchal power and hegemonic masculinity. After all, Blair wins the embroidery competition beating Annie and all the other students of both genders, and being a gracious winner is hardly a repudiation of the impetus to distinction. In the penultimate paragraph the reader is not surprised by Alastair's despair when he learns that it is his son who will be sewing the logos on the football shirts. The comic twist in the last sentence tells the reader that the team name is "KIRKCALDY KILLERS." Here again is the irresistible sexist humor that starkly reinscribes violence as natural in masculine subjects, even those that take up sewing. The androcentric "climate of belief' revealed by this closure suggests that a continuing battle is engaged when confronting the gendered nature of lived experience within patriarchal social structures. It is, of course, possible to read the joke-the surprising reversal of traditionally gendered behaviors, from sewing to killing-as the significant aspect of the closure. This reading is more open-ended as it serves to humorously foreground the complexity of the issue of gendered social relations. Even when its closure is read conservatively, the achievement of "Fabric Crafts" with regard to the process of degendering children's literature is its problematizing of hierarchical gender binarism: the story represents the complexity of the social matrices that continue to interpellate gendered subjects despite the reformulation of gender attributes. It satirizes pejorative profeminist representations of hegemonic masculinity and constructs a dialogue between masculine and feminine subjects about gender binarism. The story distances readers from the masculine subjects, positioning them to question the masculine behaviors that are made visible. Masculine readers are required to identify against themselves at many points. The comic representation of Alastair and Blair means that they are not demonized despite their often reprehensible behaviors and they both possess attributes that redeem them for most readers. The narrative represents intergenerational changes occurring in understandings of masculinity and femininity confirming that these concepts are mutable and embedded in particular historical moments. It identities power as the central issue to be addressed in altering gendered social relations even though thematic closure satirizes the possible success of such change.

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"Fabric Crafts" delineates the challenge for progressive degendered children's literature in our own historical moment. Reconfigured representations of masculinity in literature may be under way but these remain problematic because the schema of masculinity still claims the most socially desirable attributes, except in profeminist discourses. Schemata of masculinity underpin patriarchal ideology and legitimate men's power in society. Is it possible that the traditionally superior and presently dominant gender identity may be represented convincingly in narratives as relinquishing power? Connell's crucial argument is that the diversity of masculine subjects must be recognized so that whatever is posited as the current hegemonic form of masculinity is contestable. Connell's life history studies demonstrate this diversity so he writes that, "Men's interest in patriarchy, then, does not act as a unified force in a homogeneous structure" (1995, 242). Not only must social relations between gendered subjects be reconfigured, as "Fabric Crafts" suggests, but the differing states of relations between groups of men must be foregrounded. Power is at stake if the mythologies of a hegemonic masculinity and the unitary masculine subject are not to be perpetuated, but Connell argues that men's interest in maintaining this is fissured by all the complexities in the social construction of masculinity.... There are differences and tensions between hegemonic and complicit masculinities; oppositions between hegemonic masculinity and subordinated and marginalized masculinities. (p. 242)

Connell argues that the complexity of the power matrix of masculine social relations opens up the potential for alliances across the gender boundary. From this it seems that redeeming masculinity in literature requires not only the representation of empathetic social relations between masculine and feminine characters but also between masculine characters who are very different from one another. The formerly powerful unitary masculine subject must be pluralized in order to represent a range of valued masculine subjects reflecting the diversity familiar to readers from their everyday experiences. The character attributes from the traditional schema of femininity which are deemed abject in masculine subjects must be redeemed as valued qualities to be displayed by all members of society in the appropriate contexts. Stephens argues that of the fictions he examines only Allan Ahlberg's profeminist text Ten in a Bed (1983) successfully subverts the engendered literary conventions of story and discourse (1996c, 21-2). Its success depends upon the use of metafictive strategies which foreground the instability of linguistic signs and rupture narrative conventions. Such strategies enable the interrogation of the traditional feminine gender schema and feminine stereotyping constructed in the fairy-tale genre and enable the subversion of traditional fairy-tale closures (Ommundsen 1989, 272). I want to extend

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Stephens's study to show that metafiction is a powerful tool for representing transformed power relations between gendered subjects (McCallum 1996, 398). Metafictions make the constructedness of gendered subjectivities clear and represent masculinity and femininity as relational concepts allowing both to be sites of enunciation. Bruno and the Crumhorn and Covered Bridge represent a shift away from the ideological and political need of both patriarchal and profeminist texts to either efface or pejorate the gendered other. They support Connell's arguments that constructions of hegemonic versions of masculinity are "inherently historical" rather than universal and natural and that masculine subjectivities are diverse, relational and are able, often at some personal cost, to resist the impetus to distinction. By their repudiation of oppositional hierarchical gendering, both of these fictions redeem masculine subjects in intersubjective relationships. As typical metafictions, Bruno and the Crumhorn and Covered Bridge foreground the polyphony of the novel by representing a wide range of masculine characters so that the significance of their commentary on masculinity is dialogically constructed. In this they reflect Connell's argument that masculinities are dialectically constructed in sociality (1995,37). Both Bruno, in Bruno and the Crumhorn, and Hubbo, in Covered Bridge, are represented in a wide range of social contexts where schemata of masculinity and femininity are instantiated, interrogated, reconfigured, and transgressed. The characters are interpellated into a range of subject positions where they recuperate qualities that are traditionally devalued as defining the feminine subject or even the effeminate, hence abject, masculine subject. Bruno and Hubbo are represented as valuing cooperation in contexts of work whether in the public or domestic sphere, and they are explicit about their emotional vulnerability and their need for articulate intimacy in intersubjective relations. Both characters resist normative masculine behaviors and the impetus to distinction. Their relationships with feminine subjects are varied and valued although heteronormative desire prevails as a marker of "normal" masculinity. While they employ different distancing strategies, both position implied feminine and masculine readers to question the representations of masculine subjectivities and invite a comparison of fictional masculinities with those encountered by readers in their everyday experience. The predominant thematic concern with masculinity in a gender relations framework is evident in Bruno and the Crumhorn from the narrator's intrusive introduction of the main protagonists: "This book is called Bruno and the Crumhorn, but it's not just about Bruno. It's about Sybil. Sybil? And a thing, of course, the crumhorn" (p. 5). This discussion immediately interrogates engendered hierarchies, such as titles and the selection and ordering of story constituents, that are naturalized in literary conventions. The narrator deems that both the masculine and the feminine voice are sites of enunciation and that both are valued. The narrator decides to tell Sybil's story first

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because Bruno is mentioned in the title "quite unfairly, really" (p. 5). The narrative convention of the defamiliarized gaze of the child has twelve-yearold Sybil musing on some of the dominant masculine stereotypes with which she is familiar from her everyday experience and from the representations of masculinity in media and films. Sybil ironically inverts the patriarchal hierarchy and satirizes normative behaviors as she challenges what may formerly have seemed a natural order within masculinity. She pities the captain of the Titanic, parliamentarians, and military leaders, while transvestites are represented as fortunate because they can escape being men for at least part of the time. Readers are distanced most effectively. The power of traditionally dominant masculinities is problematized and the traditional view of the gender system constructed in a text like Bill's New Frock is challenged. The materialization of Bruno's subjectivity is fraught because he refuses to be interpellated into hegemonic masculinity as demanded by his mother and refuses the impetus to distinction that she endorses. His mother's active pursuit of distinction for Bruno leads to him learning to play the crumhom. Escaping the impetus to distinction is as vital to Bruno's intrapsychic world as achieving it was essential to Blair in "Fabric Crafts." If only he'd had the courage to protest-to shake his head and say no! I won't! It's wrong and it shouldn't be! I don't want to learn the crumhorn! I don't want to learn anything! Can't Ijust be? Just be Bruno? (p. 34)

Bruno lacks models of emotional articulacy since normative masculinity valorizes emotional restraint (Connell 1995, 64). Honest, reciprocal intersubjective relations between Bruno and his parents are impossible because of his mother's reiteration of the desirable unitary form of masculinity exemplified by Bruno's brother, Max: "Now Max was different-always on the run, always occupied-swimming, jogging, skating, football, basketball, cricket-three different varieties of that-even hockey. There was no need to worry about Max." (p. 28) The excess here is humorous and if it were oot, the reader realizes, there may be reason to worry about why Max is compulsively on the ru~. His mother despairs of Bruno: But as for Bruno! This was one of her phrases-but as for Bruno! And how it made Bruno sad. The four words rang in his head at night, and if the tears started to growl from deep behind his eyes, he would quickly start to think about something else. (p. 28)

The reader now understands why in his prologue Bruno, who is awake during the storm, "pushed his hands tight against the plaster walls next to his bed, as if he were holding the whole house above his head, like Samson" (p. 3). There impinges upon him a social structure so rigid that epic strength is required to withstand its force. In the representation of Bruno's subjectivity

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we see marginalized masculinity attempting to negotiate a space in sociality. Situated in the hierarchical patriarchal family and with his mother complicit in patriarchy, by embracing passivity Bruno chooses a subordinate masculinity and that means he is a failure (Connell 1995,242). The narrative reveals that traditional patriarchal patterns of social relations serve the interests of privileged feminine subjects like Great Aunt Hma, who owns the crurnhorn, and Bruno's mother just as much as they serve the interests of those men who successfully promulgate hegemonic norms. The patriarchal dividend, represented in Bill's New Frock as a birthright, is problematized in Bruno and the Crumhorn. When Bruno again asks himself "Can't I just be? Just be Bruno?" (p. 34), the rhetorical answer is "No" because, as his mother explains, " ... boys do things" (p. 29), so Bruno's passivity is as unacceptable as his fragmented subjectivity. He longs for that apparently unitary selfhood and drive that allows individuals like Max to control all aspects of their lives because Bruno "had nothing to justify himself. This is what I do, this is what I'm good at, this is what I am" (p. 158). After he loses the (replica) medieval crumhorn on the bus, Bruno is desperate as he considers the hopelessness of finding it anywhere, even in a pawn shop: "Redeem-a suitably moral-sounding word, he thought sadly, pulling the cord and getting off the bus, although it was he who needed the redemption" (pp. 88-9). Bruno's redemption lies in resisting the power of those traditional social structures like the family where hierarchical gendering is implicit. He must also reject the interpellations to hegemonic masculinity constructed in the gendered discursive practices of society in its cultural formations like literature, film and other media (Connell 2000, 208). From his marginalized position, Bruno, and the reader, contemplate the various versions of masculinity that he encounters: bus drivers, lost property officers, barbers, musicians, school friends, as well as his father and Max. There are also the four imagined versions of Victorian manhood-Great Aunt lIma's four ex-husbands-"all extant" in faraway North America. Bruno's historical imaginings are influenced by the 1980s constructions of Victorian gentry manhood in the film The Bostonians based on Henry James's antifeminist novel of the same title. The link here is that eighty-two-year-old Great Aunt lIma is from Boston, a city that identifies itself with the tagline "The Hub of the Universe." These varied representations of masculine subjectivities and stereotypes ensure that the reader is positioned to acknowledge the diversity of masculinities operating in society countering the unitary view of the masculine subject demanded by Bruno's mother. The fiction accurately demonstrates Connell's "oppositions between hegemonic masculinity and subordinated and marginalized masculinities" showing that patriarchy is not a "homogeneous structure" (p. 242). The fact that Bruno and Max are diametrically opposed in interests, educational achievements, and in "commonsense" negotiations of the world suggests to readers that resisting the norms

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of hegemonic masculinity is both possible and sometimes desirable. While in Bill's New Frock Bill waits "hoping for rescue" from the feminine space, Bruno longs to be rescued from hegemonic masculinity. This paradigmatic shift in the literary representation of masculinity is significant. Covered Bridge works very differently from Bruno and the Crumhom in addressing issues of story, discourse, genre, and the materialization of Hubbo's gendered subjectivity. By constructing a 1950s pseudohistorical spatio-temporal framework, the narrative avoids any need to deal with the feminist critique of patriarchy. It surmounts the problem that pro-feminist texts often exacerbate by portraying patriarchy as "a timeless dichotomy of men abusing women" (Connell 1995, 238) and lends weight to Connell's view that historical consciousness is "the distinctive feature of contemporary masculinity politics" (228). The narrative reversions history to construct a metanarrative that valorizes rural and working class versions of masculinity. In this framework such masculinity values collectivity, mutuality and comradeship among men and women. Competitiveness and individual success are devalued in favor of promoting community welfare. Hierarchical patriarchal organization in the public sphere is overthrown symbolically by the rejection of inflexible religious authority represented by "Foolish Father Foley from Farrelton" (Doyle 1995, 56). Hubbo's intrapsychic world is far more stable than Bruno's because he has already made many decisions about his ways of being male. These are based on his past experiences in the city as well as on his recent experiences in the rural world near Mushrat Creek, the site of the historic covered bridge. He is sensitive to the emotional needs of others and able to articulate his own desires for positive intersubjective experiences. His desire for mutuality and reciprocity in peer and familial relationships makes him aware of the range of views that can be found on any social issue. This enables him to be considerate of the feelings of others within his community. Hubbo is represented as being very aware that negotiation and consensus are essential in order for all community members to be valued and empowered. Patriarchy'S need for hierarchical social relations is thereby repudiated and Connell's concept of "democratic gender relations" is clearly in place (Connell 2000, 225-6). McCallum writes that "Underlying much metafiction for children is a heightened sense of the status of fiction as an elaborate form of play, that is a game with linguistic and narrative codes and conventions" (1996, 398). In Bruno and the Crumhom thematized wordplay foregrounds masculinity with word association games that examine diverse historical and contemporary masculine stereotypes and cliches (McCallum 1996, 82). Both Sybil and Bruno focalize these narrative digressions which means that readers are offered interpretations of masculinities from both masculine and feminine viewpoints. Bruno's digressions consider cliches like "a gay blade," masculine spaces like the barber's shop (p. 62), and men's workplaces (pp. 78-82).

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Bruno's four imaginary stereotypical Victorian gentlemen represent successful wealthy "men of the world" with interests in business, politics, fine food, and horse racing. "Newland and Arthur were business rivals and always trying to outdo one another" (p. 64), while Harrison is given to "carousing": Carousing. Bruno rather liked that word. He looked forward to the day when he would be old enough to go out carousing. He despaired as he sat in his room, crumhorn to his lips, thinking about Great Aunt nma's four husbands, his shoulders hunched. Would he ever escape from Great Aunt lima as they miraculously had? (p. 42)

The reader is being shown, comically, that a gendered subjectivity, in this case becoming masculine, materializes from the appropriation of schemata of normative behaviors that must be reiterated in order to maintain their regulatory function (Butler 1993, 15). In the context of this crumhom lesson, the masculine conviviality connoted by the use of "carousing" is constructed as oppositional to the power patriarchy devolves to women in the domestic sphere. The reader sees Bruno "question dominant social and cultural paradigms of identity formation" related to schemata of masculinity (McCallum 1999,99-129). Bruno rejects the burden of materializing this cliched masculinity by blaming Great Aunt lIma for circumscribing his activities. But ironies proliferate with regard to gendered identities because Great Aunt lIma has stolen the crumhom from the man she wants to be her fifth husband; she is teaching Bruno music under false pretenses; she does not fultill the "nurturing grandmother" schema that Bruno's mother instantiates when she first asks Great Aunt lIma to teach Bruno to play the instrument. While Bruno feels alienated and disempowered, Sybil's understanding of Bruno, whom she does not meet until the final chapter of the fiction, is based on Aunt lIma's demonizing of him. In her narrative digression below, Sybil contemplates the different connotations of "Bruno," "boy," and "youth." The stereotype of transgressive masculinity represented by "youth" is a part of the stigmatizing of subordinated masculinities: Bruno-such a teddy-bear of a name. He should be round and friendly with his hands in a honey jar, Sybil decided, although this was plainly not how Great Aunt nma saw him. Her dark references conjured up a "youth" rather than a boy: delinquent, self-seeking, deceiving, negligent, perverse .... In fact, Sybil came to feel that she had never known a child of her age with so many monstrous qualities. She pictured his swollen, sullen face, snarling at her, his fingers stained with black bicycle grease, kicking a wall with rage, flexing tattooed biceps ... (p. 101)

Sybil's instantiation of the schema of transgressive masculinity foregrounds violence, both physical and verbal, instigated to instill fear and to maintain

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dominance. Again there is irony for readers because Sybil describes Bruno more accurately by the connotations of his name. While Bruno's economically privileged family is regulatory and normative in terms of hegemonic masculinity and heterosexuality, the spatial framework for Sybil is a central city lane and visitors "did not imagine anyone lived there, let alone a child" (p. 5). She has regular contact with homeless men and men who are affiliated with the gay lifestyle of Sydney's Oxford Street. In terms of the extended range of subject positions offered to the implied reader, the polyphony that results from the shifting character focalization is most significant. Readers are likely to be distanced from the family habituses of either Bruno or Sybil and from their idiosyncratic musings because of the bizarre nature of their imaginings (Stephens 1992, 122-3). Even more important, there are moments where gendered readers, both masculine and feminine, must identify against themselves. Some episodes problematize the concepts of stable gender and sexual identities. Sybil's neighbors, for instance, include three men "who when they go out to parties, put on make-up and shiny red dresses and wore flowers in their hair" (p. 8). There is also the man "in a lavish white bridal gown" who arrives in a cafe where Sybil and her family are having breakfast (p. 134). Linguistic play foregrounds issues of masculinity in Covered Bridge too. The mixing of genres and discourses-of romance, crime fiction, gothic horror, court room drama-is a particularly important form of play for interrogating traditional patriarchal genres. There is also parodic subversion of extraliterary texts like newspapers. Games with nomenclature are another playful metafictive marker: there is Rubbo's absent girlfriend, Fleurette Featherstone Fitchell, or F;3 Mickey Malarkey, the great raconteur; and Foolish Father Foley from Farrelton. These examples show the active interpretive roles assigned to implied readers by the text and lay bare the discursive and narrative structuring of fictions. Naming is also used in more compelling ways to represent intersubjective relationships. The narrative recapitulates some of the events from the closure of the pretext Easy Avenue (1988), Doyle's earlier novel about Rubbo. Most significant is the inclusion of the statement about Hubbo's love for his foster mother, Mrs. 0' Driscoll. Only one phrase (about school) is omitted in the Covered Bridge version. The short paragraph is a key statement about mutuality and reciprocity in gendered intersubjective relations: I lived with Mrs. O'Driscoll. She was married to a distant cousin of my dad's. I thought of her as my mother and I loved her and at school and everywhere I said she was my mother but at home I always called her Mrs. O'Driscoll. It was a warm little joke we had between us. (Easy Avenue, p. 16, Covered Bridge, p. 11)

As Hubbo explains this complex, caring relationship, he displays an emotional articulacy often not allowed masculine subjects in traditional narra-

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tives or in profeminist texts. He repudiates the wicked stepmother stereotype and hierarchical social relations between adult caregivers and children. Stephens argues that avoiding the androcentrism of traditional fictions requires transformations of narrative outcomes and closures to remove "gendering at story level" (l996c, 20-1). Multiple closures are needed in Covered Bridge because genre-mixing is a key strategy for ironizing literary conventions. The text transforms the usually tight closure of the bildungsroman genre because of the many secondary level stories that require an outcome. Usually generic expectations for each genre are instantiated only to be subverted. The death of Foolish Father Foley from Farrelton requires a murder mystery to be solved. There is a revenge tragedy involving the long-dead Ophelia Brown and her lover, Oscar McCracken, the mailman. The courtroom drama of the falsely accused Oscar McCracken reveals that the goat did it! There is the story of environmental activism that saves the historic covered bridge with a ruse devised by Mrs. O'Driscoll. Finally there is a happy ending to the primary level romance story when Hubbo receives a letter from his absent girlfriend, Fleurette. The fictionality of the tight closure of this happy ending is foregrounded by the contrast with the complex negotiations required to find consensus resolutions to all the complications of the second level stories. The multiple generic closures for the interlinked stories show simple linear coherences and tight closures are indeed fictions. The historical fiction genre employed in Covered Bridge makes masculinity visible and asserts that subordinate masculinities have always existed with democratic codes of behavior that resist hegemonic masculinity. The fiction constructs masculinity and femininity as relational and rejects the need for hierarchical power relations to operate between men or between women and men. Story closure and thematic closure cohere more successfully in Covered Bridge than in Bill's New Frock and "Fabric Crafts," offering a postfeminist revision of working-class masculinity. Ideologically, closure in Bruno and the Crumhorn is more radical than Covered Bridge in its problematizing of hegemonic masculinity and its subversion of the concept of a core gender identity. It is also subversive in its interrogation of mothering and women's power over children under patriarchy. This power continued largely unchallenged throughout the decades of feminism's ideological ascendancy. In Bruno and the Crumhorn literary redemption is ironically made possible by the feminine subject's interpellation of a subject position: Sybil, the feminine subject, speaks the words that bring Bruno into being: Just be Bruno, that's what she said. Sybil said that. Just be. Don't play the crumhom. Don't play anything. Don't do anything. Just be Bruno. Why had no one said this to him before? Sybil said it. Sybil. Like a fairy freeing him from a curse. (p. 160)

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This is a comic and symbolic bildungsroman epiphany for Bruno. The narrative humorously evokes and then undermines the magical powers of feminine literary characters like fairy godmothers. This is a significant metafictive element because in Sybil saying the magic words that redeem Bruno, she is pursuing her own ends and not acting benevolently. The reader also knows that she only states what Bruno has been telling himself throughout the narrative. Here then the narrative asserts the importance of intersubjectivity for framing the self. On the primary story level, and thematically, it remains significant that Sybil frees Bruno as this redresses the negative representations of his mother and Great Aunt lima. In this the story closure represents the evolutionary nature of sociocultural change. Sybil and Bruno have a tug-of-war over the crumhom because they both believe that playing in the concert is important but for quite different reasons. Bruno releases the crumhom and "He didn't really notice Sybil tumbling onto the floor" (p. 158). After negotiations, an alliance is forged across the gender boundary in order to deal with the need for one of them to perform at the concert. By negotiating a solution, Bruno refuses the impetus to distinction and the other imperatives of hegemonic masculinity. His desire for mutuality and reciprocity with Sybil allows him to articulate his own desires for positive intersubjective experiences. Negotiation and consensus are represented as essential in any new gender regime where power is not hierarchical. Bruno's "gift," the narrator tells us, is to become emotionally articulate and to form successful intersubjective relationships across the gender divide (p. 160). A traditional narrative structure is apparent in the architectonics of Bruno and the Crumhorn where symmetry is achieved with three character epilogues that match its three prologues. Thematically, however, these closures are open-ended and powerfully metafictive. The epilogues show that the meanings of everyday experiences are interpreted differently by each of the participants. In Bruno's epilogue he escapes from the confinement of the fantasy world of the Victorian drawing room into a more exciting world of the imagination. This world is free from the regulatory power of his family and the norms of hegemonic masculinity: Bruno looked about him-on the bookshelf lay a pipe still smoking in a dish; on a side table a folded over newspaper; on the floor a bowl of app\ecrumble, half-finished; and on the open piano a book of music, a songBruno bent down to read the title-The Triumph of ... -but he was distracted by a noise on the street, a clattering, a spinning, freedom! Bruno stepped up on the windowsill, and down from the drawing room and away, following the others into the hub of the universe. (p. 181) Metonymy proliferates the range of meanings offered by the stereotypical masculine artifacts-the smoking pipe, the newspaper, the dessert left on the

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floor, the piano, and the song book. These associate traditional masculinity with symbolic power in the public sphere, with economics, politics, and artistic life. The rejection of the word "triumph" repudiates the impetus to distinction and reminds the reader of the humorous use of this musical intertext. It is the first musical piece that Sybil and Bruno are required to learn on the crumhorn. Great Aunt Hma tells Bruno that it is The Triumph of Time and Truth "Lightly adapted, of course .... For the juvenile player" (pp. 122-3). Earlier Sybil recognizes it immediately as the melody of the nursery rhyme Three Blind Mice. This comments ironically on the problematic state of the intersubjective relationships between the three characters as well as on their intrapsychic states. It is also linguistic play, of course, as the reader sees the misandric power games Great Aunt Hma inflicts on Bruno. His closure highlights the desirability of escaping from the metanarratives of hegemonic masculinity and its oppositional hierarchical gender binarism. The "hub of the universe" is revealed as a shifting signifier in an unstable relationship with a plethora of signifieds. Masculinity is another such shifting signifier whose "semantic duplicity" is revealed (Ommundsen 1989,272). Closure in Bruno and the Crumhom offers vastly different insights about the engendered nature of literary texts from those constructed in Bill's New Frock and "Fabric Crafts." It is arguable that the most important change these metafictions demonstrate is that the implied readers of fictions in which gender is thematized are no longer assumed to be masculine subjects. Reading positions are pluralized for both masculine and feminine readers. Readers are distanced from these fictions by having to evaluate conflicting viewpoints from within gendered subjectivities and between gendered subjects. This means that all readers will identify against themselves at some stage. The intrusive narrator in Bruno and the Crumhom explicitly canvasses diverse reader reactions. Hubbo, too, in Covered Bridge expects both masculine and feminine readers to be responding to his dilemmas. I would argue that Bruno and the Crumhom implies that harm is done to children by the imposition of regulatory gender norms which circumscribe ways of being masculine and feminine. While much has happened in society regarding gender binarism, and its representation in literature since Hollindale's paper (1988) was published, his comment about a degendered sociality being an ideal rather than a reality still pertains in Western society. Our reading pedagogy must provide contexts for the child to become familiar with the codes and conventions implied by Hollindale's catchphrase, knowing "how to read a novel." He argues that the child reader thus empowered is enabled to identify the sexist text as well as being able to interrogate the representations of sociality in which reconfigurations of gendered practice are represented. Stephens (1996c) demonstrates that when writers attend to a wide range of narrative constituents and not just to reformulating gender attributes, they can effect greater control over the

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ideological significances constructed in all levels of their fictions. Most importantly, writers can employ narrative strategies that construct texts offering a range of implied reading positions rather than just the traditional masculine one. Metafictive and comic modes generally seem to offer important strategies for representing the transformation of social structures. From The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler to Bruno and the Crumhorn, self-reflexive texts offer shifting representations of feminine and masculine subjectivities and their social relations. The androcentrism of patriarchal discursive practices and the misandry of profeminist texts can be challenged and redressed both thematically and narratologically, but this remains in many ways "unfinished business" (Stephens 1996c, 29). Advocacy of "difference and degendering" (Connell 1995, 253; 2000, 202-11) in literary narratives requires the representation of subjectivities that redeem and valorize difference within and between gendered subjects, repudiating traditional gendered subjectivities where difference means disempowerment if not abjection.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

Stephens's "Gender, Genre and Children's Literature" (1996, 18-9) offers a table showing a traditional schema for contemporary oppositional masculinity and femininity. The ideal masculine schema includes such characteristics as being strong, tough, independent, active, aggressive, violent, unemotional, competitive, powerful, commanding, and rational. The feminine schema includes such characteristics as being beautiful, soft and yielding, passive, self-effacing and caring, vulnerable, powerless, and intuitive. The latest fad offers narratives that represent fathers in Witness Protection Programs: David McRobbie's See How They Run (1996) and Alan Baillie's Last Shot (1997). The actions of fathers in these narratives devastate the lives of their children. See Lanser (1986, 341-363); Robinson (1991, 198 n. 23); Cranny-Francis (1992,28).

5 Reframing Masculinity Female-to-Male Cross-Dressing VICTORIA FLANAGAN

For several introspective years I juggled the predicates of gender and wondered constantly: Am I receptive, nurturing, intuitive, sensuous, yielding-"feminine" enough? Am I initiatory, decisive, rational, aggressive"masculine" enough? SAM KEEN, CITED IN MARJORIE GARBER, VICE VERSA

... I opposed those regimes of truth that stipulated that certain kinds of gendered expressions were found to be false or derivative, and others, true and original. JUDITH BUTLER, GENDER TROUBLE

Masculinity is a peculiar commodity in children's cross-dressing narratives. When boys put on female clothing in children's literature, they generally do so in a gesture of male rowdiness. The results are humorous-often overtly so-and are rarely perceived as sinister or sexually deviant. Despite any suspicions that cross-dressing and trans gender issues are topics unsuitable for children's literature, a rich history of cross-dressing exists in that literature. Although contemporary conceptualizations of cross-dressing invariably involve adult males and sexually deviate motivations, the male cross-dressers in children's literature are distanced from such associations by the specific form of traditional masculinity they project. The masculinity of the majority is never questionable, a testament to the way in which hegemonic masculinity has traditionally maintained a position of dominance in all aspects of society and culture, thus producing comic situations when these palpably male characters dress themselves in women's clothing and are suitably uncomfortable (and unconvincing) when doing so. Representations of female-to-male cross-dressing are radically different, because in these cases girls dress them-

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selves as boys in order to escape societies which seek to repress and limit femininity. Cross-dressing allows them to inhabit the male world and experience many of the liberties denied them in their female form. Female-to-male cross-dressing therefore facilitates an analysis of gender itself, and of the constructs which constitute and divide masculinity and femininity. The discourse of female-to-male cross-dressing in children's literature thus offers unlimited potential in its ability to question and challenge traditional gender constructions, providing a spectrum of gendered alternatives. There is, then, a sharp disjunction between representations of the male and female cross-dressing experience in children's literature. For females, the cross-dressing experience is liberatory. It exposes the artifice of gender constructions, permitting the female cross-dresser to construct for herself a unique gendered niche which is not grounded within a single gender category, but incorporates elements of both. This phenomenon is evident in a range of female-to-male cross-dressing texts. The most comprehensive collection of stories in which female-to-male cross-dressing appears in this specific way is Shahrukh Husain's Women Who Wear the Breeches (1995). I will discuss the tale "What Will Be Will Be" as the most symptomatic example of how such narratives can deconstruct traditional notions of gender by using cross-dressing to interrogate the social construction of gender and to introduce empowering feminist agendas. For male cross-dressers, however, the attempt to perform a feminine role is rarely approached in a similar manner. The masculinity of male cross-dressers is seldom as fragile as the femininity of female cross-dressing subjects, nor is it so easily forsaken. Because their behavior presupposes the superiority of masculine over feminine, their selfassured masculinity permeates every aspect of their cross-dressing experience, rendering comic their inability to comprehend femininity as separate to their own biologically male experience of gender. The chasm between male and female cross-dressing experiences in children's literature is slowly beginning to be addressed, although not explicitly through children's literature itself. Representations of cross-dressing in contemporary media, which until relatively recently have focused on adult protagonists (and often in comedic fashion, for example Some Like It Hot (1959) and Tootsie (1982), are only now beginning to approach this somewhat taboo subject in a manner which recognizes that transvestite behavior does not only occur in adulthood. Films such as Ma Vie En Rose (1997) and Boys Don't Cry (1999), and Shyam Selvadurai's novel Funny Boy (1994), recognize that cross-dressing behavior is a phenomenon not limited to adulthood. The exploration of cross-dressing in these particular examples has much in common with the female-to-male cross-dressing paradigm in children's literature. Although these texts depict cross-dressing as a precursor or product of homosexual/transsexual inclinations, each presents cross-dressing as a form of questioning or rebellion against socially ingrained and constructed notions

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of masculinity and femininity.l The protagonists cross-dress because of an inability to fulfill the conventional gender expectations attached to their biology, and in doing so are actively involved in a critique of traditional gender constructions. Hence they are analogous to female-to-male cross-dressers in children's literature, who prompt a similar reevaluation of the socially constructed nature of gender. The cross-dresser's unique ability to deconstruct gender through hislher perception of what is required in a performance of the gender which is other to their biological origin, and in the response which their behavior engenders in others, is only now being realized in contemporary literature and cinema. This phenomenon, however, has occurred systematically in a wealth of children's literature which spans genres, cultures, and historical positionality. Female-to-male cross-dressing nalTatives, despite the fact that many long precede modem feminism or social acceptance of transvestite practices, are invariably concerned with the rejection of traditional gender stereotypes. They seek to destabilize the polarized conceptions of masculinity and femininity and to create a gendered realm outside conventional expectations and stereotypes. Not every female cross-dressing text, however, achieves this with absolute conviction. Sometimes the ability to challenge gender stereotypes is hindered by the prevalence of conventional gender constructions. Robin McKinley's Rose Daughter (1998) is a clear example. In this second novellength retelling of the Beauty and the Beast myth, cross-dressing is secondary to the main events of the tale and is less successful in reassessing conventional gender codes than the gender-bending tales in Husain's collection. Rose Daughter confirms traditional gender stereotypes in its portrayal of a Beast who personifies conventional masculinity in many respects and a female character who cross-dresses yet never totally escapes her essential femininity. Despite this relatively unsuccessful female cross-dressing, the treatment of gender in Rose Daughter is nevertheless more accommodating of individualism in gender categorization (or noncategorization) than the majority of portrayals of male cross-dressing available in children's literature. The representation of masculinity within female-to-male cross-dressing nalTatives in children's literature offers a unique conceptualization of masculinity and the processes of gender construction, and will be the focus of the rest of this chapter. These nalTatives provide an arena in which gender constructions (as they appear in each individual text) are laid bare and essentially (re)constructed in the cross-dresser's performance. There are three paradigmatic structures for children's cross-dressing nalTatives: the transsexual model, male-to-female model, and the female-to-male model. The transsexual model, in which a character's sexual biology is adverse to their mental gender is highly unusual, and as far as I am aware Husain's retelling of the Middle Eastern folktale "The Mouse, the Thing, and the Wand" is the only

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literary example (1995, 117-44). The male-to-female model, however, in which a male character adopts the clothing of a female for a brief interlude, often for comic effect, occurs in a disparate range of children's literary genres. Familiar examples are the Wolf disguising himself as Grandmother in "Little Red Riding Hood," and Toad dressing himself as a washerwoman in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908). Recent examples are the film Ladybugs (1992), in which a boy is forced by his stepfather to dress as a girl so that he can guide a female soccer team to victory, and a recent episode of the animated series The Simpsons (2000). Within this model, the authenticity of the masculinity of the cross-dressing male subject is never in doubt. The characters are first and foremost male and their inherent masculinity permeates the cross-dressing context, even though they may appear outwardly female. The form of masculinity which these characters embody, in spite of their brief transvestite transgressions, is characterized in terms of traditional gender values. It is defined against femininity and encompasses the range of specific behaviors (physical strength, aggression, self-sufficiency, control) that have become symbolic of "hegemonic masculinity" (Connell 1995,77). One of the most significant features of this masculinity is that it is never presented as vulnerable, precarious, or subject to any form of fragmentation. The gender of the male subject, regardless of playful forays into transvestism, is always upheld and never attains the same ambiguity which is created in relation to female cross-dressers in children's literature. Psychoanalyst Robert Stoller even claims that actual adult male transvestism is grounded in such a presupposition: The whole complex psychological system that we ca11 transvestism is a rather efficient method of handling very strong feminine identifications without the patient having to succumb to the feeling that his sense of masculinity is being submerged by feminine wishes. The transvestite fights this battIe against being destroyed by his feminine desires, first by alternating his masculinity with the feminine behavior, and thus reassuring himself that it isn't permanent; and second, by being always aware even at the height of feminine behavior-when he is fu11y dressed in women's clothes-that he has the absolute insignia of maleness, a penis. (cited in Garber 1993,95)

Although the circumstances in children's literary male cross-dressing are quite different, devoid of explicit sexual connotations, a similar assertion of phallocentrism is inherent within the cross-dressing performances of male protagonists. As Garber remarks apropos of Stoller, "The concept of 'male subjectivity' to many custodians of Westem culture-whether literary critics, psychoanalysts, or rock musicians, should they ever have recourse to the term-is in a sense redundant. To be a subject is to be a man-to be male literally or empowered 'as' male in culture and society" (p. 94).

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Evidence of this gender status quo is equally visible in illustrated versions of The Wind in the Willows and "Little Red Riding Hood," where although Toad and the Wolf may be dressed in feminine apparel, their masculinity remains overt: they are not convincing "women." The male protagonist in Ladybugs is equally ill at ease in his feminine apparel, and despite his youthful appearance is instantly detected, through his awkwardness, as a male. This phenomenon is also explicit in the cross-dressing episode of The Simpsons. The series is renowned for its double entendres and ability to speak to both child and adult audiences, but again the authenticity of masculinity is emphasized for both audiences. This is explicit in Bart's adultlike reaction to the suggestion that he cross-dress: "Wouldn't that make us kind of fruity?" He draws attention to the fact that such behavior could be interpreted as homosexual or sexually deviate, yet the response of Bart's father Homer when he finds the boys restores the gender equilibrium, or lack thereof. He asks the boys to explain what they are doing: "I want the nongay explanation!" Bart's best friend Millhouse quickly reacts by shouting, "We're drunk. Really drunk!" and this rationalization is perfectly acceptable to Homer. In fact, the episode quickly diverts to an unrelated story line, and Bart's foray into cross-dressing is forgotten. The series' writers thus adroitly sidestep the complex issues of (trans)sexuality raised by Homer's "nongay" comment. Millhouse's assurance that they were simply mischievous, drunk boys reasserts the boys' masculinity-which for a split second had the potential to be presented as dubious. After all, what could be more legitimately male than this? (Except for the fact that the boys are only ten years old, have been enjoying themselves immensely, and the viewer is perfectly aware that neither has consumed any alcohol.) The third cross-dressing model is the female-to-male paradigm. This is the usual children's cross-dressing model, found across the spectrum of children's literature genres, yet almost exclusively used as a form of feminist rebellion against rigid patriarchal social structures. This typically occurs when a female protagonist finds herself severely constrained by patriarchy. In order to transgress its boundaries, she adopts masculine attire-an action which effectively reverses her social capabilities by providing her with potent access to all that had been formerly denied to her while positioned as feminine. In children's female-to-male cross-dressing texts such as "What Will Be Will Be," a fairy tale retold from Swynnerton's Romantic Talesfrom the Panjab with Indian Nights' Entertainment (Husain 1995, 195-229); Tamora Pierce's Alanna (1983), the first book in The Song of the Lioness tetralogy; and the animated Disney feature Mulan (1998), the heroine initially embarks upon a process of learning how to perform masculinity. Despite some preliminary stumbling, each female protagonist achieves a genuine masculine performance that is acceptable to the outside world, and is so successful in her role-playing that she is able to outperform those males

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she originally wanted to emulate. Her masculinity is therefore more authentic than the masculinity of her biologically male compatriots-a very anomalous phenomenon in the context of the pervasive patriarchal social structures that have long dominated societies the world over. This outperforming of masculinity by the cross-dressing heroine can be attributed to a number of factors, such as feminist concerns with the promotion of female autonomy and self-determination and the reassessment of the socially constructed notion of gender as the most essential definer of individual identity. But the most compelling reason is that the versions of masculinity confronted by the heroine are often inadequate and unconventional. For example, Mulan's father is too old and frail to go to war and this is her motivation to dress as a male and go in his stead. Similarly, Alanna's male twin abhors the masculine pursuits of swordsmanship and horseback riding, and is only too happy to exchange destinies with his sister. The male characters within these narratives rarely fulfill the conventional expectations of masculinity, and it is in the context of these failed performances of traditional masculinity that the cross-dressing protagonist is able to carve her/his own gender niche, which falls outside of the socially condoned categorizations of "masculinity" and "femininity." That her performance is immediately noticed and appreciated by other males, who admire their new acquaintance without any trace of suspicion as to herlhis biology, indicates how these children's texts seek to deconstruct and recreate the idea of gender itself. "What Will Be Will Be" also conforms to the female-to-male crossdressing paradigm. It tells the story of a princess who is abandoned by her husband and his royal parents yet whose resilience and courage enables her to tackle her fate head-on-by dressing as a man and winning favor with the king and influence in the palace. This she ultimately uses to discover her family'S whereabouts and initiate a reunion. Husain's retelling of the story is contextualized by a collection of stories sourced from cultures and literary traditions as diverse as Angela Carter's contemporary fairy tales, Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, Jewish folklore, and traditional Tibetan allegory. Although each text differs markedly in narrative style and genre, their common ground is that each tells the story of a female cross-dresser. They cross-dress for varying reasons and with varying outcomes and in doing so these women put themselves at risk. They demonstrate courage and audacity in their decision to transform their gender, responding to a need that cannot be ignored, and which they embrace wholeheartedly and with resourcefulness. The ability of cross-dressing heroines to traverse gender boundaries is one of their most remarkable achievements and the key to their success as an ungendered subject-with whom readers of either sex can empathize on a multitude of gendered levels. The cross-dressing protagonist reworks and

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reconstitutes the very idea of gender, appropriating it for her own purposes. Her true biological status is not discovered for at least a portion of the text and, perhaps most significantly, she is considered to be a genuine male by the other characters with whom shelhe interacts. A necessary strategy of the narrative is the constant comparison that occurs between her own male behavior and the behaviors of the other biological males who surround her. The comparison occurs to the heroine herself, who in some cases overtly modifies and internally measures her performance against her new male peers, as in the case of Mulan, but is also evoked during each encounter with a biological male. This is equally true in Alanna, where the female cross-dressing protagonist must perform her version of masculinity within the most challenging of contexts-a medievalist school for knights in training. Alanna must prove her masculinity in terms of strength and military prowess, and is invariably placed in a position where despite being smaller in stature than her male peers, she is capable of fighting valiantly and often claims victory over genuine males. The implications of the atypical manner in which gender is conceptualized in children's female-to-male cross-dressing narratives must be acknowledged, as should be the benefits of this remarkable representation in the wider sphere of gender politics and theory. According to Jody Norton, children's texts which portray subjects whose "experience and sense of their gender does not allow them to fit their sexed bodies into seamless accord with a congruent, conventional gender identity" playa "liberatory" role: creating interpretive strategies, curricular revisions, and pedagogical interventions that will contribute substantially to the amelioration of the condition of cultural, institutional, and political neglect through which transchildren have been denied their reality, and their worth. (1999, 415-6)

Norton's focus, however, is those particular children's texts which portray trans gender potential in a form that is complicit with the general social incomprehension of sex outside the traditional binaries of masculinity and femininity. Thus the situation depicted in Mark Twain's "Hellfire Hotchkiss" is vastly inconsistent with the representation and experiences of female-tomale cross-dressing heroines in the children's texts discussed so far. Thug Carpenter is out of his sphere. I am out of mine. Neither of us can arrive at any success in life, we shall always be hampered and fretted and kept back by our misplaced sexes, and in the end defeated by them, whereas if we could change we should stand as good a chance as any of the young people in the town. (cited in Norton 1999,423)

The futility and despair of Twain's transgendered character are absent from the texts within the female-to-male cross-dressing paradigm. Social intoler-

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ance and rejection play no such role in these texts, as the widespread acceptance of the cross-dresser's male performance constitutes an integral component of the narrative-it is the very essence of these children's cross-dressing tales. The heroine's role in the female-to-male children's literary model is one which explicitly involves the successful assumption of a male persona to the extent that the biologically female subject is considered to be a male by secondary characters in the context of the narrative. She does not fall victim to the socially contrived categorization of oppositional gender binarism. In Vested Interests-Crass-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (1993), Marjorie Garber calls attention to examples of female-to-male cross-dressing in canonical adult literature, like Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, where the crossdressing exploits of the heroine are never quite as revolutionary as they first appear, with attention drawn to the character's biological origin: All the more striking were the transvestite heroines, whether dressed as pages, country boys, or clerks. Theirs was a recuperative pattern: however outspoken they were, however much they challenged authority in the form of wicked dukes or moneylenders, they took pains to let their femaleness show. Rosalind and Julia swoon at moments of stress, Viola, facing the prospect of a duel, laments "a little thing would make me tell them how mueh I lack of a man." (TN 3.3.307-9)

And in The Merchant of Venice Portia remarks to Nerissa that in their male disguise "they shall think we are accomplishedlWith that we lack" (MV 3.4.61-2). Rather than reminding the reader of the protagonist's biology, children's texts strive to elevate the notion of gender to a level where the fact of biology becomes insignificant, or temporarily misplaced, in relation to the cross-dresser's ability to successfully subvert gender stereotypes. The extent to which this is accomplished is demonstrated by the choice of pronoun which is used to identify the cross-dressing character. Although not always the case, in female-to-male cross-dressing narratives the more radical examples such as "Secure At Last" (Husain 1995, 33-75) change the pronoun from "she" to "he" once the protagonist adopts a masculine persona. The cross-dressing heroine of this text also assumes a male name, thus erasing the relationship between her/his new masculinity and former femininity. In fact, when Sicurano (the name of the male character in "Secure At Last") dwells upon the incidents that once occurred in the life of Zinevra (the original female character) and prompted his "birth," it is as if Sicurano and Zinevra are two distinct persons. This not only cements the cross-dressing character's gender transformation, but also negates any possibility of the phenomenon described by Garber in adult texts. Wahda, the heroine in "What Will Be Will Be," also demonstrates the children's literature paradigm, but now fills the roles of both hero and

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heroine, toying with the traditional notions of ma&culine and feminine literary roles as her narrative progresses, and (re)creating a position of gendered subjectivity outside and beyond the constructed artificialities of conventional masculinity and femininity. A typical fairy tale, the story has gloomy prophecies, an ill-fated king, vampires, ogres, and closure where good triumphs over evil. It opens with a witch revealing to the king that he is destined to meet ill fortune at some stage in his life and he decides to meet his fate immediately. He takes the queen and his sons but abandons the sons' wives. The two princesses thus awake one morning to find their husbands and family gone. Wahda quickly assumes control of the situation journeying with her sister to the next town, selling jewelry so that both can buy clothes, food, and a place in which to live. In a further demonstration of her resourcefulness, Wahda dresses herself "as a man, because cities are full of people of both good character and bad and two beautiful, inexperienced women on their own would not have been safe ..... (p. 199). What proceeds is a magical tale of courage and fortitude, in which a young woman considered to be worthless by her husband and family achieves wondrous feats of bravery and wit in her quest to be reunited with the man she still loves, despite his actions in abandoning her. Wahda is eventually chosen to be the king's bodyguard. She encounters a vampire and in the struggle with it, manages to tear a piece of cloth from its garments. When she presents this material to the king, his queen is so enamored with its beauty that she demands the source of the cloth be discovered. Wahda sets out to find the vampire, encountering many different monsters and people, all of whom accept the authenticity of her masculinity and never fail to be impressed by her wondrous behavior. When Wahda at last returns with the magical cloth, the king is so delighted that he promotes her to the position of prime minister. Her new status allows Wahda to form an ingenious plan that reunites her with her family. The construction of masculinity in this tale is perplexing because of its contradictory nature. The text weaves the usual gender conventions of fairy tales with its own oppositional gender frameworks, resulting in a construction of gender that refuses categorization. The narrative begins with a king positioned as its primary character. However this king displays a form of masculinity that juxtaposes conventionality with a more challenging and atypical gender construction. When told by the witch that he must make a fundamental choice regarding his destiny, [t]he King hesitated. It was a difficult question and how could he answer it without asking his Queen? After all, her life would be affected and so would that of their two young sons and the two sisters, their wives. Though of course, the young princesses would go where their husbands went and do as they were told. (p. 196)

The king's behavior in this instance would not be considered traditionally masculine. Rather than being headstrong and decisive, he declines to make

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his choice before consulting his wife. He also displays the virtue of empathy in his acknowledgement that the decision will ultimately affect his wife as much as himself, as well as their family, and that therefore she should play an equal part in its making. The king's capacity to consider the implications of this decision for his loved ones is also an ability not generally associated with masculinity, but rather with the feminine values of sensitivity and emotion. These interesting beginnings, however, are overshadowed by the patriarchal comment which follows them, and which restores the traditional gender hierarchy: "Though of course, the young princesses would go where their husbands went and do as they were told." In spite of this, the potential for interrogating gender binaries has been shown, waiting only for Wahda to develop it. Until this incident, "What Will Be Will Be" unfolds as any fairy tale should. Yet instead of continuing to narrate the king's ordeal, the story dramatizes the fortunes of the two abandoned women. The king's narrative is never revisited. In contrast to the foreshadowed gloom that permeates the text thus far, an entirely different tone is created once the tale's protagonist has changed. Defying the conventional behavior appropriate to her gender, Wahda (who has previously been referred to only as the "older sister") assumes control of what appears to be an ill-fated and hopeless situation and is finally given a name: "We must find them," declared the older sister immediately. "But they have left us here to fend for ourselves." "Ah," replied the older one dismissively, "we would have done the same in a few days. Besides, we can do better because without them no one will recognize us." "But where will we find them?" asked the younger, feeling hurt and frightened. "Leave it to me," responded the older. (p. 199)

This conversation between the two sisters facilitates Wahda's cross-dressing decision, establishing her detennination to fulfill a masculine role. She consoles her sister as a father would a daughter; a brother a sister; or a husband a wife. She is the protector and decision maker, and her authoritative, masculine behavior is unquestioned. Unlike the cross-dressing characters of Mulan and Alanna, whose male performances take some time to perfect, Wahda's transformation to a masculine identity is effortless. Admittedly, Wahda's masculine performance is not exactly conventional. It is, however, convincing. Hislher gendered performance is noticed as exceptional: Each morning Princess Wahda would dress herself in men's clothes and visit the court of the King .... And every day, the King saw this delicate and noble-looking young man come into his court, greet him with the utmost courtesy and the air of one who knew about courts and kings, and

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Wahda's masculinity is accepted and admired by all shelhe meets in herlhis adventures. The King is so impressed by Wahda that he makes herlhim his personal bodyguard, a position of great honor. The King bestows on herlhim "a mansion befitting a personal aide of the King" and "barely let his bodyguard out of his sight" (pp. 200--201). Wahda's masculine persona also impresses the women whose village she cleverly rescues from the clutches of the human flesh-eating ogre. Not only are these women in awe ofWahda, the young man, but they also find him to be sexually attractive-which is surely one of the most difficult aspects of masculinity for a cross-dressing female to embody. The challenge of this feat is emphasized within the text, which selfconsciously reminds the reader that Wahda is not a male, but a woman: Then Wahda returned to the old woman, who was now a different person, all cuddles and kisses and blessings and her daughter all smiles and guiles and flirtation-because, don't forget, she thought Wahda was a young man. What a well-favored young man and how brave and big-hearted! (p. 206)

This emphasis on Wahda's biological sex serves to constantly remind the reader of the fact that Wahda is a female cross-dresser who has successfully assumed the guise of a male. It also explicitly demonstrates the fact that not only has Wahda succeeded in her cross-dressing goal, but that she has accomplished a male performance so well that both men and women are attracted to the identity she creates. On the night of her wedding to the ogre and ogress's foster daughter, "the young woman was waiting for Wahda decked in gorgeous clothes and jewels from top to toe .... When she saw her future husband enter, she rose slowly from her bed, walked over and threw her arms around his neck" (p. 219). To this woman, Wahda is the perfect incarnation of masculinity. When Wahda does not return her initial embrace, she is discouraged only because she thinks that it may be through a fault of her own. Wahda proceeds to tell her that she is a female, not a male, but the young woman refuses to be disheartened: "I feel what 1 feel," she declared, "whether you are a man or a woman" (p. 221). The strength of feeling which Wahda generates in the hearts of those she encounters is so great that even upon the revelation of her true biological status she is still revered. In the context of this narrative, gender is never quite what meets the eye. The feminine becomes the masculine; heterosexual attraction becomes homosexual; and the traditional indicators of gender become obsolete in relation to the perceived sex of the protagonist and the varied responses that her crossdressing performance inspires. The gendered relationships portrayed in "What Will Be Will Be" never conform to established social conventions,

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seeking instead to disrupt preconceived notions relating to masculine and feminine gendered persons by demonstrating the artificiality of such constructs through the behavior and actions of a cross-dressing subject-a subject who essentially belongs to neither category, yet also belongs to both in hislher amalgamation and reconstruction of masculine and feminine gendered behaviors. The extent of Wahda's cross-dressing success can be measured, somewhat ironically, at the point in the text when her biological identity is revealed and her masculine persona exposed as a cross-dressing performance. This revelation is made to the King himself, whose apparent homoerotic feelings at least in part informed his motivation for promoting Wahda to positions which required constant contact with him, and it is this intimacy which further confirms the authenticity of Wahda's male performance. When she informs him that she is a woman he is astounded: Well, the King was beside himself with a flurry of different emotions and thoughts and questions. What was happening? How had she concealed her true self for so long? Who was she? Why was she disguised? (p. 229)

Wahda's cross-dressing accomplishments are absolute, and her success is almost unparalleled within the realm of children's female-to-male crossdressing narratives. The revelation of Wahda's biology is voluntary, rather than being discovered by other characters in the text, though the voluntary disrobing and self-chosen moment of biological honesty do seem to be facilitated by the relative brevity of the fairy tale form. In novels with female-to-male cross-dressing, such as Alanna and Rose Daughter, however, the length of the narrative necessitates a more detailed portrayal of the heroine and her exploits. Her cross-dressed persona must be sustained over a greater period of time which provides more opportunities for her gender deceit to be discovered. These texts provide an interesting counterpoint to the totality of cross-dressing success in "What Will Be Will Be." Rose Daughter, in particular, is a text which fulfills several criteria of the female-to-male cross-dressing paradigm, yet produces a significantly different result in its representation of masculinity and its level of crossdressing triumph. The cross-dressing in Rose Daughter is not enacted by the main protagonist, Beauty, but by her sister, Lionheart, a peripheral character who cross-dresses for a brief period. McKinley's text follows the familiar storyline with Beauty forced to leave her family for her father's sake, joining the Beast and eventually learning to love him, at which point, of course, the spell cast on him is lifted. McKinley tells the story adeptly and with great charm, most notably elaborating on the details of Beauty's life prior to her sojourn with the Beast. So intrinsic are Beauty's family to the tale that they provide an interesting twist to the conventional fairy tale ending. When the spell is finally lifted, Beauty chooses to shun the life of a queen or princess

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(depending on which version of the story you are accustomed to) and brings her new husband home to live in the family's cottage, where he retains his beastly shape. The decision is the result of Beauty's great affection for her father and sisters and the prominence they have played throughout the tale: she refuses to forsake them for the life of a princess. McKinley breathes life into the characters of the two sisters, Lionheart and Jeweltongue, thus foregrounding Beauty's relationship with her sisters as a paramount concern of the text. Lionheart's cross-dressing is a unique inclusion in Rose Daughter, and also in terms of the female-to-male cross-dressing paradigm. Unlike the female characters in Mulan and Alanna, Lionheart's crossdressing does not originate from a position of ostracized femininity, constrained by patriarchal social structures. In Alanna the female protagonist is disillusioned by the expectations of femininity, unable to comprehend why she should be locked up inside, learning to sew and dance like a lady, when she would much rather be outside riding horses and practicing to wield her sword. In Mulan, the protagonist fails to be feminine. She is unable to master feminine skills, culminating in her disastrous performance at the matchmaker's ceremony. Mulan is not particularly masculine-in fact she is presented on screen as a typically pretty young woman-she simply falls short of standards of femininity which the film depicts as comically absurd and conformist. Lionheart, in contrast, is not portrayed as failing or lacking in any respect. Unlike Mulan or Alanna, she finds herself in the unique position of being permitted to act as she pleases-without criticism or aspersions being cast upon her femininity. Allowed to behave as she chooses, she willfully embodies many of the attributes that are stereotypically considered to be masculine. She storms in and out of the text, raising her voice, gesturing aggressively, and generally creating a certain degree of havoc. McKinley uses military metaphors to describe her, emphasizing Lionheart's warlike aggression and manner: "I didn't know flowers could look like this!" roared Lionheart, and threw up her arms as if challenging an enemy to look at her, and laughed" (p. 9). Lionheart is audacious and free spirited, yet this does not cause her femininity to be compromised. In Mulan, the prospect of Mulan never being able to marry is the greatest disgrace in the eyes of her parents and the village community. In Rose Daughter, however, Lionheart's impending marriage to an incredibly eligible young man-a match without problem or drama-is made mention of in the text's opening scenes. Lionheart is also perfectly capable of performing traditional feminine tasks, such as cooking, although she does so in a characteristically aggressive manner. Lionheart's decision to dress as a man in order to obtain employment to support the family is not greeted with horror or dismay by her tolerant family. In fact, Lionheart confides in her sisters almost from the beginning, and they assist with her disguise: "Beauty trimmed her sister's hair and then swept the silky tufts into a

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tiny pile ... " (p. 32). Other female-to-male cross-dressers, such as Mulan and Alanna, may not be afforded the lUxury of being able to confide their cross-dressing secret to others, adding a further element of isolation (similar to that which they experienced while women) and anxiety about having their biological sex discovered. The most significant disparity between Lionheart's cross-dressing and the female-to-male cross-dressing depicted in other texts is that Lionheart is never presented as a convincing male, despite enjoying freedoms that may have accommodated a genuine male performance. This stems from the fact that her sisters are aware of her cross-dressing from its outset, and so continue to treat her as female whenever she returns home. Her disguise is relevant only to her employment, and thus never effects her interactions with her family, where most of the narrative occurs. This said, her portrayal does not commandeer enough textual representation to be overly complex and radical in terms of its feminist possibilities. In many respects, Lionheart is a relatively two-dimensional character. She is wayward and destructive, and capable of defying certain feminine stereotypes, but is also essentially womanly, as is evident in her failure to present as an authentic male-a failure so complete that it results in a romantic bond with a heterosexual male. In similar situations which take place between a cross-dressed woman and male in more radical texts such as "What Will Be Will Be" and "Secure At Last," the resulting relationships are much more elaborate, prompting more serious questions about the (homo )sexual nature of the bond between the crossdresser and her male admirer. Lionheart's failure as a male, however, is related to the general conceptualization of masculinity in Rose Daughter. Although a small number of males feature in this text, masculinity is represented almost entirely in terms of the character of the Beast. The masculinity of the Beast permeates every page and is constructed not only in terms of his description throughout, but also through the reader's prior knowledge of the fairy tale on which Rose Daughter is based. His presence is anticipated from the outset, and thus gains potency from the expectation and legend which surrounds it. The Beast essentially represents masculinity in its most powerful form, and the reader's expectation of this portrayal is linked with various masculine expectations that have arisen from retellings of this story over several hundred years. The Beast is both man and animal: enormous, hairy and terrifying. He personifies physical power through his animalistic strength and stature, yet is also representative of male sexual power. He has demanded Beauty, a young woman, as compensation for her father's theft, and installs her in his deserted palace, over which he has complete control. Beauty's family are terrified that the Beast will kill or injure her, and their fear and her own assist in the construction of the Beast as a predator, both in terms of his strength and domineering masculine sexuality. Despite the fact that Beauty soon learns that the Beast

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wishes her no harm, and treats her tenderly and with the utmost respect, her own fear of him is palpable. Although he treats her with great kindness, and soon proves himself to be articulate, intelligent, and deeply contemplative, his outward appearance and potential for violence always poses a mask that it is difficult for Beauty-or the reader-to look behind. In terms of this representation, Lionheart's attempts at creating any form of realistic masculinity are destined to fail, overshadowed as they are by this basic construction of animalistic maleness. The fact that Lionheart's cross-dressing is not successful does not necessarily detract from the central tenet of the female-to-male cross-dressing paradigm in children's literature. Texts within this model use female cross-dressing as a means to reevaluate gender categories and their social construction, challenging the fabric from which such divisions are constituted and historically perpetuated, and offering alternatives based on individual autonomy and choice. While Rose Daughter does not achieve this result through the cross-dressing escapades of Lionheart, it is successful at destabilizing traditional gender binaries on several levels. It revolves around the premise that things are not always what they initially appear to be. It warns that outward appearances can be deceptive and the old adage, "Don't judge a book by its cover," is a central theme of this text. This is personified in the character of the Beast, who inhabits a horrific body within which lives a gentIe and intelligent man who does not warrant the fear generated by his outward appearance. Beauty must learn to look beyond outward signifiers and see the Beast for the man he truly is. Traditional versions of "Beauty and the Beast" also ofTer this basic theme but their purpose is always to reinforce gender divisions rather than to oppose them (Zipes 1983,37). McKinley's skill in retelling and reworking this fairy tale is that she deconstructs its original gender ideology (and mythology) to the point that only the most fundamental principle remains-that outward appearances can often create an illusion far removed from reality. Her approach is subtle rather than radical. The conclusion of Rose Daughter is reworked into one of feminine victory and superiority, as it is Beauty who chooses her own and the Beast's decidedly unconventional fate. These changes to the traditional text are foreshadowed by McKinley's treatment of gender throughout, a treatment which specifically focuses on each character's lack of traditional gender conformity. Beauty herself is an alienated outsider-a young girl who shuns the feminine frivolities of her sisters' lives. Her father is introduced as a man who has similarly failed to live up to the conventional expectations of masculine success, as he has lost his fortune and is responsible for his family's financial ruin. Lionheart is a woman who refuses to be limited by traditional feminine expectations and lives up to the metaphor of her name through her willfulness and disregard of feminine propriety. These characters each present challenges to gender stereotypes, and their eventual encounter

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with the Beast provides the ultimate challenge to preconceived notions regarding physical appearance and biological makeup. The character of the Beast is a metaphor for the fact that a person can essentially be very different from their outward, physical projection-and it is around this exact theme that female-to-male children's cross-dressing narratives revolve. Texts such as Alanna, Mulan, and "What Will Be Will Be" tackle the notion directly through the actions and behavior of the cross-dressing heroine, who must convince both the reader and other characters that she is capable of a genuinely male performance despite the impediment of her feminine biology. Her triumph necessarily invokes a rethinking of what it is that the crossdresser herself, the other participants within the text, and ultimately the readers consider to be the determining factors that constitute masculinity and femininity. Rose Daughter approaches this issue in an indirect form, yet its effects are ultimately the same-initiating a reevaluation of the processes we use to read and interpret identity. Although gender is not the most important factor in Rose Daughter (as the most significant reevaluation of initial impressions, based on what is signified visually, takes place in relation to the Beast), its involvement in this process of interpretation is valid and crucial. Children's female-to-male cross-dressing texts emphasize the fallibility of visual cues, the most important of these being the assessment of gender. They achieve this through the endless portrayal of characters who are not conventionally masculine or feminine. "What Will Be Will Be" tells the story of a successful cross-dressing male, but at the same time also tells the tale of a husband and father-in-law who initially espouse masculinity in the traditional sense yet are ultimately reduced, in the text's conclusion, to men riddled with regret, poverty and a complete lack of self worth. This text also portrays an Emperor unable to make or fulfill political strategies without assistance, which is then rendered by the cross-dressing protagonist. Rose Daughter contains characters who are similarly positioned outside conventional gender categorizations. The effect which these versions (one of cross-dressing triumph, the other of lesser direct success) of the female-to-male children's cross-dressing paradigm have in relation to the manner in which gender is represented and constructed according to the characters of the texts is unconventional and even extraordinary. Perhaps the most appropriate way in which to describe this effect is to quote from Husain's "Secure At Last": "I am a woman," she repeated. The Sultan watched the transformation in amazement. He had never once doubted that Sicurano was who he appeared to be: a man-a very talented man. He waited a moment, expecting the wisps of confusion to disperse and clarity to come. This was perhaps a dream from the early hours of morning.

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Victoria Flanagan Any moment now, he would wake up and find that he had experienced a strange and detailed dream-a vision, almost. But when a few moments later the scene did not change or vanish and he found himself still on his throne and not in his bed, he knew he was firmly in reality ... as he forced his mind to ingest and process the transformation of a man-and a pretty constant companion of his, at that-into a woman, he realized quite what a magnificent man Sicurano really was. And that this exceptional man had really been a woman meant that the woman was truly twice the paragon of virtue that anyone had ever claimed she was, for to be a woman and yet to be twice as good as a man ... oh, stop! (pp. 73-4).

The profound nature of the sultan's reaction to the revelation that Sicurano is biologically female belies the depth of his affection for this young man/woman. His feelings are presented to the reader almost as if he were Sicurano's lover-a lover presented with a dilemma about his beloved, but whose adoration is so great that the discovery not only fails to jeopardize his love, but simply increases its depth. Unlike "What Will Be Will Be," the homoerotic undertones of "Secure At Last" are implicit rather than explicit. The Sultan's reaction is intended to be illustrative ofthe text's deconstructive approach to gender, and revision of gender myths as they apply to the construction of individual identity. In this context, the Sultan's response is an affirmation of the fallibility of socially constructed gender stereotypes. The uncovering of Sicurano'slZinevra's true identity makes no difference to his estimation of Sicurano's/Zinevra's worth as a human being, serving only to make him admire the character even more. The exclamation "oh, stop!" which recalls the Sultan's reverie from an absurd aporia, is precisely illustrative of the response which children's female-to-male cross-dressing texts wish to engender in relation to the application of conventional gender classifications and signifiers to their cross-dressing protagonists, and to a lesser extent the secondary characters of the narratives. Although texts such as Rose Daughter are unable to fulfill this criterion in as specific a fashion, the issue of gender is nevertheless constantly raised in relation to the way that we read, interpret, and evaluate the behavior of others. Gender remains a primary marker of identity and, as Sigmund Freud commented, "when you meet a human being, the first distinction you make is 'male or female?' and you are accustomed to make the distinction with unhesitating certainty" (cited in Garber 1993, 1). Children's female-to-male cross-dressing texts, however, are actively involved in challenging and destabilizing this notion. They strive to prove that the distinction between masculinity and femininity is never as clear, or as readable, as it may initially seem. Within these texts gender is removed from the traditional and limiting categories of masculinity and femininity, divisions created out of artifice and unworkable expectations, and reconstructed into a notion that is unfettered and autonomous. The "unhesitating certainty" of which Freud speaks is

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replaced by ambiguity and nuance, as each character within this paradigm asks only that they be considered on their own individual, ungendered terms. "Oh, stop!" is exactly what these children's cross-dressing texts ask of their readers in relation to interpreting the story of the cross-dresser in accordance with prevailing gender assumptions and categorizations. They demand instead that masculinity and femininity, and the supposedly essential behaviors, skills, and attributes associated with these two genders, be reassessed and reconstructed into something new and meaningful-a notion of gender based not on differences and divisions, but on intrinsically interwoven shades of gray, where lines can and will be crossed by autonomous individuals who exist above and beyond the limitations of "male" and "female." Note 1.

See further Beverley Pennell's discussion of Anne Fine's Bill's New Frock, in chapter 5, above.

6 Come Lads and Ladettes Gendering Bodies and Gendering Behaviors KIMBERLEY REYNOLDS

Girls will be boys and boys will be girls, It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world, "LOLA," THE KINKS,

1970

When Randolph Caldecott produced his illustrated version of "Come Lasses and Lads" in 1884, many pundits were predicting the demise of womanhood as it was then constructed. Caldecott's graceful, yielding figures, who spend a May Day dancing round the maypole with a variety of more and less eligible male partners, embody the idealized vision of femininity constructed, refined, and disseminated during much of the nineteenth century. No matter how inappropriate or unrealistic the match between what women were expected to do, in terms of work, child rearing, and contributing to the success of family and country, and what they were expected to be, an ideal of femininity predicated on self-sacrifice, service, passivity, maternity, and angelic beauty prevailed. l But by 1884, British women were becoming increasingly vocal about the way the pressure to conform to accepted notions of femininity was affecting their health, well-being, education, and ability to function. Even Caldecott's deeply conservative text shows women momentarily taking the upper hand as they overrule the men's choice of dance, and give or withhold kisses under the May Queen's watchful gaze. But "Come Lasses and Lads" is a carnival interlude-time out from the rules and conventions of every day-and the farewell kisses at its conclusion signal the return to reality as the girls are reinserted into the domestic setting. By contrast, in late-nineteenth-century Britain, each suffragette banner raised, each bloomered leg thrown over a bicycle, and each rap of a female finger on a typewriter key, triggered ripples of anxiety about the future of feminine womanhood, as the many cartoons and diatribes against the "new woman" and the "girl of the period" bear witness.

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The reasons for this anxiety were many and complex, but at their root is the fear that changes in the role of women would adversely affect men's place in the social hierarchy. This is significant because underlying such thinking is the understanding that the way femininity was acted out was not so much a product of biological necessity but of social convention (hence the ease with which custom is overthrown each May Day), and if this were true for females and femininity, then it must also pertain to the performances associated with the male role and the masculine self.2 Waspish cartoons highlighting the grotesque appearance of women who refused to embrace the dress, manners, and attitudes of the feminine ideal (at least until the trial of Oscar Wilde, men's behavior was less vigorously monitored and less frequently ridiculed3 ) seek to hold change at bay by making publicly powerful, independent women seem monstrous. In fact, to modem eyes these women who ape the manners and fashions of men seem to suggest the influence of Darwinian thinking: that some groups of women were failing to conform to the prevailing gender stereotype is represented as a mutation of the species brought about by the superabundance of "odd women," as novelist George Gissing (1857-1903) described those women for whom, as a consequence of war, disease, and poverty, there were no husbands or male protectors. While such an immediate cause-and-effect interpretation of changes in gendered behavior now seems absurd, the debate over the origins, nature, and relationship between sex and gender continues, and much current thinking seems in many ways to map the attitudes of the late-Victorian period. After years during which feminists and social scientists tried to separate sex, sexuality, and gender, there is increasing evidence, often used in reactionary ways, that gender identity is not just socially constructed, but closely linked to biological makeup as well. This is the argument put forward in the popular British television series and accompanying book, Why Men Don 'f Iron: The Real Science of Gender Studies (1998), in which Anne and Bill Moir, a husband and wife team, claim to demonstrate that masculine and feminine behaviors result primarily from the amount of testosterone to which the fetus is exposed in the womb and not from social conditioning. 4 However, the Moirs' analysis is deeply subjective, and though other forms of evidence such as changes in physical development as a result of improvements in nutrition, hormones in food, and other kinds of chemical (and perhaps social?) stimuli,S do indicate that there are links between biology and gender, on the evidence available, it still seems that the current challenges to gender identity are more likely to be responses to changes in social attitudes and expectations rather than physiology. Accordingly, it is important to continue to distinguish between biology, sexual orientation, and gender. They are closely related but distinct aspects of identity and behavior. Despite the well-established understanding that like femininity, masculinity is largely a set of ideological and cultural practices rather than a bio-

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logical given, a large proportion of current studies into masculinity focus on sexual orientation, especially homosexuality, and the way different men choose to act out their social roles, which are all embraced as kinds of masculinities, rather than providing genuine critiques of gender. With very few exceptions, these studies are exclusively concerned with those who are male rather than with those who adopt masculine behavior. For instance, a recent essay by Philip Butterss begins by defining masculinity as "what it means to be a man," and goes on to discuss the range of ways in which men have used literature to give expression to their experiences (1999, 100). Masculinity is not what it means to be a man (if it were, it would, for instance, be unchanged through time as biological maleness has remained constant for centuries) but a set of assumptions about what men are like which are projected on to those with male bodies and which almost inevitably affect the experience of inhabiting a male body. These assumptions, though often talked about as if they were universal, are in fact subject to variation and reinflection in proportion to the extent to which the male body under consideration conforms to the prevailing model of hegemonic masculinity. In the West this has for long been associated with white, employed, heterosexual men, though challenges to this norm are being increasingly effective. Clearly it is important to understand that being biologically male does not define and should not limit self-identity any more than does being female, but many of those working in masculine studies today seem to be neglecting some of the important work done in the early days of feminism and gender studies. I'm thinking particularly of the way sex and gender were carefully separated, with gender being linked to the entry into language and the social world (including sexual and emotional orientations), so that masculine and feminine subjectivities, and all kinds and proportions of combinations of the two, were understood to be available to both sexes. For instance, significant aspects of gender orientation were identified as both formed by and expressed through language and intellectual approaches in ways which could be distinguished from performances of gender roles occasioned by the shifting contexts of daily life, including those involving erotic attraction. The simultaneously burdensome and liberating knowledge that the self is not given, permanent and fixed, but plastic and highly susceptible to regimes of various kinds, imposed both from within and without, and designed to promote such things as health and beauty, intellectual, spiritual, athletic, or aesthetic development, needs to continue to inform our understanding of gender, as it does in the work of theorist Judith Butler (1990). It is not just the case that there are multiple masculinities and femininities from which we choose, but that most people at different times and in different contexts change some parts of their gender identities as readily as they change their clothes (indeed, changing clothes may signal a change in identity). While certain features of gender-for instance, a masculine tendency to priv-

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ilege rationality and assertive rhetoric-may be relatively constant, others are far from being unalterable components of identity: both masculinity and femininity are affected by class, income, employment status, nationality, cultural tradition, education, and parenting. Accordingly, a man living in a traditional Asian home in Britain may simultaneously occupy a number of cont1icting positions. Perhaps he constructs himself as the epitome of a manly patriarch at home, while knowing that by some groups in Britain he will be considered as occupying an essentially feminine role: inferior, dependent, Other. 6 Although his intellectual gender orientation may be largely unaffected by this duality, changes in context may affect the way gender is expressed in his performance of self, and for the duration of anyone performance, his sense of gender identity. Irrespective of sex or sexuality, gender roles have expressive dimensions which are continually being revised, rehearsed, and represented--especially in adolescence. One forum for trying on and rehearsing different identities is fiction, which is why it is worth looking closely at the range of identities and the ideological stances provided by the literature directed at and/or consumed by (not always the same thing) young people. Age is an important feature of this audience, for if gender is ever to escape from the essentially polarized model by which it currently tends to be understood and discussed, the process needs to begin in infancy and to be sustained throughout childhood. A notable feature of the majority of works about masculinity, with the exception of those which are principally concerned with pedagogy, is their lack of attention to boys and boyhood. Not surprisingly, given that most are written by adults (usually men), explorations of masculinity tend to be concerned with the mature expression of masculinity, offering autobiographical, anthropological, sociological, and a variety of other kinds of explanations for and apologies/defenses of contemporary manhood (see, for instance, Seidler 1989, 1994; Edwards 1997; Messner 1997). However, given that masculinity is at least partially (I would say significantly) learned as part of socialization, having once identified the patterns and behaviors by which traditional forms of masculinity have been inculcated, surely the place to begin initiating change is in childhood. Of course this process is not straightforward, since it is impossible (and probably not desirable) to jettison centuries of conditioning and culture in one fell swoop, but more thought needs to be given to rethinking the relationship between gender and childhood. This may in fact be part of the appeal of best-selling writer Robert Bly's analysis of what he perceives as the current crisis in masculinity. In Iron John (1990) he argues that the problems with masculinity stem in part from the phenomenon of the absentee father and the related feminization of childhood. Boys, he maintains, lack male role models and so do not learn how to grow up to be manly men.

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In rethinking gender, there is much to be said for dispensing altogether with the terms "masculinity" and "femininity," for they are so closely bound up with the biological categories of male and female as to make it virtually impossible to free them from associations with sex. 7 Moreover, they also lend themselves so easily to dichotomous thinking as to make it difficult to dismantle traditional conceptions of what gender is and how it works. The terminology acts as a barrier to understanding and limits the positions from which gender can be approached and understood; especially with regard to masculinity, which tends to be vulnerable because it defines itself negatively, that is, by what it is not. Jeffrey Weeks (2000) puts it thus, "masculinity or the male identity is achieved by the constant process of warding off threats to it. It is precariously achieved by the rejection of femininity and homosexuality."g It is the fallacious insistence on difference in this approach that destabilizes masculinity. Current research on gender difference concludes that there are "virtually no differences between men and women on any psychological trait, mental ability, physical capacity, or attitude at all. The differences between individual men and individual women (within-group differences) are greater than any differences between the two groupS."9 This search for difference results in the exclusive categories represented by established definitions of masculinity and femininity that are required to define themselves against each other. Perhaps a better approach would be to think of gender as a range of ways of expressing behavior graded on a rather different basis and capable of being endlessly recombined. If, for example, the organizing principle were not biological sex but power-a more accurate measure since ultimately gender is a system based on unequal power relations associated with the relations between men and women but not exclusive to them (see Messner 1997, 5, 7-8), we might find it easier to explain changes in behavior and gender dynamics such as those currently taking place in Britain in tandem with female (but not necessarily feminine) success. It seems that it is not the fact of being male that provokes masculine behavior, but the condition of power. It is hard to separate the two since our social institutions, including language, were conceived and shaped through centuries of patriarchal rule, causing the vocabularies and semiotics of power to reflect traditionally masculine attributes and values. Indeed, the fact that men and masculinity have for long been used as the norms against which everything else is measured (not least by psychoanalysts and others concerned with setting psychological and physiological norms) has posed many problems for those seeking to understand masculinity, since its characteristics and operations are so firmly embedded in Western culture as to be largely invisible much of the time (Watson 2000, 32). There is a chicken and egg dimension to our understanding of the relationship between masculinity, being male, and the manifesting of power, however, since it would be equally legitimate to say that masculin-

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ity took on the forms it did because men rather than women were socially powerful. Connell makes a similar point when he observes that "gender is a system of power and not just a set of stereotypes or observable differences between men and women" (cited in Brod et al. 1994,4) and warns against the tendency to confuse the phenomenon of women being dominated by men with femininity being dominated by masculinity (p. 22). For the moment, however, the performance of power seems to be closely linked to the performance of masculinity, whatever the sex of the actor. 1O This connection underpins Elizabeth I's famous speech at Tilbury: "I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too." Despite the fact that she held the most powerful seat in the land, and her only close rival was another woman, Elizabeth had to claim not to be a man but to have the qualities associated with manliness. Similarly, despite her coiffures and handbags, Margaret Thatcher's approach to power was clearly on the masculine spectrum as the adjectives used to describe her and her approach to negotiations suggest: she was "unyielding," "firm," and the "Iron Maiden." Admittedly these are two isolated examples of women who succeeded in the public arena by successfully performing power and so shaping their intellectual and emotional aspects of personality along masculine lines as defined at different historical moments. A more widespread and pervasive example of this phenomenon is the "ladette," whose exploits are currently capturing tabloid headlines and the columns of popular magazines rather than the pages of children's literature, but whose impact on young people deserves some attention.

Let Loose the Ladettes Despite their holiday interlude of playing with power, the lasses in Cal decott's text are never anything but decorous and feminine. Today's exemplars of girl power take a very different stance, as evidenced in this extract from an article called "Dirty Girls: How a new species of fetid, freaky, football-loving chicks is changing the face of gender politics in the UK": There's a new breed of minx roaming the streets in Cool Britannia. She drinks beer by the ga11on, goes man-hunting with a tribe of like-minded girlfriends. sleeps half the day and reportedly changes her boyfriend four times as often as she changes her bedclothes. This is the new Ladette ... and she is taking the pubs and tabloids of Britain by storm . . . . these sex-crazed, ale-swilling maneaters ... all looked the same: tiny tank tops with spaghetti straps, tight pants, strappy sandals and aggressively pretty ... seemingly neither man nor woman, but some sort of gender in between, or of their own making. ll

Queen of the ladettes is radio DJ Zoe Ball, who infamously left home for her wedding clutching a bottle of Jack Daniels, with a cigarette in her mouth.

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According to The Express newspaper (10/9/99), "Zoe's fondness for drinking and smoking proved an inspiration for a generation of young ladettes." If masculinity is a way of behaving-"an active corralling of practices, events, desires, contingencies, a regulatory semiotic and maternal operation" (Ferguson cited in Gutterman 1994, 223)-then ladettes can be said to be taking on many of the most superficial, least admirable codes and values of masculinity. As well as being a degenerate form of masculinity in itself, such behavior can have an adverse effect on the way some males act out their manliness. As Messner observes, when men's institutional power is eroded, there is a tendency for men to exhibit increased displays of masculine bravado; female success, he suggests, is resulting in an ideology of "hardness" among young men (1997, 57). For the moment, however, the ladettes' behavior has the appeal of novelty, added to which is the fact that as with many tomboys (the more familiar and acceptable face of females who mimic the behavior of males), this crossing over into the territory of masculinity seems to be both temporary and to depend on a high degree of traditional feminine appeal. While lower down the social scale a worrying number of girls are brawling and spewing in the streets, their cover-girl counterparts, mostly well-educated and essentially middle-class young women who gave the ladette a label, an identity, and a kind of respectability, often find themselves in the too familiar female bind of having to be all things to all people. Thus leading ladettes don't just have to be able to hold their drink better than men, have a larger repertoire of dirty jokes, and smoke bigger cigars than men, they must also be beautiful and impeccably groomed. These pretenders to the male throne never gain an ounce, despite the quantity of alcohol they consume, and no matter how late it is or how long they've pmtied, their make up is perfect and their clothes immaculate. Significantly, most of the best-known ladettes are beginning to retire into conventional marriage and maternity (as soon as she married, for instance, Zoe Ball announced she was putting her career on the back burner because she planned to have a large family), thus they represent no long-term threat to masculinity, and no real way forward in thinking about gender. These factors must affect the way the young women's attempts to join in masculine culture is perceived; they are the acceptable, because limited and so discounted, face of changing sex and gender roles. However, behind the ladette furor other forms of female power have been more subtly and more successfully transforming women's positions, access to power and so their relation to traditional gender stereotypes. Since, in the conventional dichotomous model of gender that still prevails, a change in one group (women) associated with a set of gender-specitic behaviors (femininity) has to be balanced by a change in the other (men and masculinity), anxiety about relations between the sexes akin to that expressed at the end of the last century is being evidenced, as can be seen in the sales of and

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attention given to the theories of Robert B ly. However, there is beginning to be a sense that the old gender paradigms are becoming obsolete and can no longer satisfactorily describe men's and women's roles, behaviors, and interactions. But if these changes are to provide new ways forward, it is crucial that they do not just reverse the power dynamic in gender relations but validate all social groups. Opportunities for change, growth, and the creation of comfortable social identities must be available irrespective of sex, sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, and all the other categories that currently manipulate images and understanding of self and others. In the last quarter of the twentieth century more energy was put into creating opportunities for traditionally marginalized groups, while masculinity was largely construed as being able to take care of itself. Nevertheless, much is done in opposition to hegemonic masculinity, and until gender categories are either expanded or disbanded, this seesaw of privilege will continue to result in inequalities and divisions. An important part of this process involves representing masculinity to the next generation in ways that will encourage them to be less rigid in their thinking about how the world is classified. The following discussion of recent texts for young adults considers three books that take up this challenge. The Masculine Makeover: Holes In a thought-provoking article on "Constructions of Female Selves in Adolescent Fiction," John Stephens argues that what he calls the makeover narrative is a specialized form of feminine discourse used as an index for a character's ability to express self-recognition or agency (1999, 5). Stephens identifies elements common to most variants of the makeover narrative in which the makeover: is physical and visible may be a result of others acting on the focused body or an act of selfrefashioning metonymically expresses a character's unfolding interiority thereby operating as a metonym of growth does not impose a new personality but discloses what is already there (though this is capable of perversion, with the makeover functioning as a disguise, appropriation of someone else's identity, or other means of concealing the selffrom the self while projecting a false selfto others) Typically in adolescent fiction, the makeover narrative postulates the idea of an authentic or essential self, what Stephens, following Butler, terms a "substantial model of identity" which is expressed through the makeover, at the same time relying on the idea that identity is not just experienced, but performed for and so revealed to others. In this way, the adolescent makeover

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narrative yokes together two theories of self-identity which are normally at odds: a conventional bildungsroman understanding that identity is there to be discovered, tried and tested as part of growing up, and a postmodern recognition that identity is shifting, unstable, always under construction and conveyed through performances. 12 Stephens's analysis is excellent, but 1 disagree with the assumption that the makeover is intrinsically a female discourse or paradigm. While the term "makeover" undoubtedly relates to the world of make-up and fashion, which for most of the twentieth century was dominated by women (currently the situation is being revised, with sales of men's fashion, cosmetics, and fashion/lifestyle magazines increasing rapidly),13 the underlying structures of such narratives are drawn from and reflect male models. This is most clear in the need for the makeover to be public, visible, and acknowledged, all characteristics associated with manly success. Traditionally the feminine heroine wins private, internal battles, and her reward comes from the personal satisfaction of knowing that she has triumphed over her temper or desires or other kinds of weakness. Occasionally someone else (often another female) will know and quietly validate the triumph, but usually it is a secret shared only with the reader, and certainly there is no public celebration or acknowledgement of the victory. By contrast, the manly hero visibly and publicly celebrates his successes, be they on the battlefield, the playing field, or some other public forum (classroom, law court, newspaper). A makeover narrative would be incomplete without this public recognition of change. 14 Moreover, there are a number of male makeover narratives that conform exactly to the model Stephens identifies, though the emphasis is less on revealing "inner beauty" per se than strength of character and the realization of manly potential (I would argue that these amount to the same thing and structurally function in the same way). Often, as with the female makeover, change is expressed through a transformed body, and the transformation is more likely to be a product of the intervention of others than a willed selfrefashioning. A recent example of the male makeover narrative is Louis Sachar's highly successful novel Holes (1998). The protagonist, goodnatured Stanley Yelnats, is overweight, unfit, and unlucky. His family is poor, Stanley is bullied at school by a boy much smaller than he (which means the teachers don't take the bullying seriously and even find it amusing), and at the start of the novel he has been convicted for a crime he did not commit. Rather than railing against the injustice of his life, Stanley passively accepts his fate and is primarily concerned not to worry his mother. His makeover comes about when he is sentenced to attend Camp Green Lake, a juvenile correction center set in a remote, arid wasteland infested with poisonous snakes, scorpions, and lizards and run by a sadistic warden. There is no lake and nothing green at Camp Green Lake, just a desert. Every boy at the camp is required to dig a hole five feet deep and five feet across each day, and it is

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this routine which transforms Stanley from a portly figure of fun to a wellbuilt hero. Stanley notes the changes to his body with more detachment than satisfaction (the usual response in the female version of the makeover): "he guessed he'd lost at least five pounds. He figured that in a year and a half he'd be either in great physical condition, or else dead" (p. 59). Stanley's reduction is contrasted to the bodybuilding routine undergone by his "no-gooddirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather," a scrawny young man growing up in Latvia in the nineteenth century who, on the instructions of a wise old woman, develops his body by carrying the pig he is raising (as part of a competition to win the hand of the woman he loves) up a mountain every day. As the pig grows, so Stanley's great-great-grandfather's physique develops, until he is a strong and handsome young man; but when he finally goes to compete for his bride, he discovers she is brainless and doesn't care for him. In despair, he impulsively joins the crew of a ship sailing for America, in the process breaking his promise to the old woman who had advised him, and bringing a curse down on himself and his descendants. Central to Stanley's makeover is the manual labor which for generations was synonymous with men's work and deeply implicated in the position of men at the top of the social pecking order. At the start of Holes Stanley embodies the redundant male body, and his flabby ineffectuality acts as a metaphor for displaced ideals of masculinity. According to Gagnon and Simon (1973), by the late twentieth century, "[m]an's body as the primary tool in shaping the world is nearly obsolete and the distinctions between men that were created on the basis of it have lost their validity" (cited in Watson 2000, 40). Stanley's makeover involves reversing the demise of the manly physique, which means effectively leaving the comforts of the twentieth century for more primitive, more heroic, more manly contexts. This is signaled by Stanley's nickname, "Caveman," awarded on his first evening at the camp (one of the few acts of defiance available to the "campers" is to refuse to be called by their given names and to rename each other in ways which at first seem random or simply antisocial, but which are gradually shown to reveal something about the boys' characters). Stanley initially fails to recognize that it is he to whom the nickname refers, but when he does, he is surprised and not displeased. Significantly, though this is never recognized by Stanley, when he becomes Caveman he begins the makeover process; historically he has gone back to the beginnings of human existence, when the male body ascribed status, while personally he is being given a fresh start. Stanley's story is part of a narrative fugue, the various strains of which retell the events of three generations of his male forebears, including the encounter of his great-grandfather with the famous female bandit, "Kissin' Kate" Barlow. Unbeknownst to Stanley, Kissin' Kate robbed and stranded his grandfather on the very site where Camp Green Lake now stands, which is

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also where she buried her vast treasure, accounting for the Warden's (a descendant of the couple who bring about Kate's death while trying to force her to reveal the location of her treasure) obsession with excavating the site. Stanley finds himself recalling family legends at crucial moments in the story, and whereas in his original enfeebled condition he was incapable of taking control of his destiny or helping others, as he grows in physical strength, so Stanley becomes a more valid and effective person. He helps his unit-mate Zero learn how to read, in the process discovering that like his other friends, he has erroneously concluded that the nickname "Zero" signities the boy's position at the very bottom of the pecking order at Camp Green Lake. Zero has nothing and seems to be capable of nothing. In teaching him to read, Stanley discovers that Zero has been educationally deprived-he has been taught nothinglzilchlzero-but in fact he is not only a fast learner, but a highly developed though untaught mathematician. The name "Zero" is ultimately shown to "sum up" both his ability to deal with abstract mathematical concepts and the extent to which society has invested in him to date. Like a zero or naught in mathematics, Zero turns out to be one of the most potent signifiers in the book, for as is revealed in the final, he is the direct descendent of the wise old woman who cursed Stanley's great-great-grandfather. When Stanley/Caveman and Zero (whose real name turns out to be Hector) have the ultimate male-bonding experience of being stranded and exposed on a mountainside and, in true Outward Bound fashion, surviving, they put right the mistakes of the past, and change the course of the future. On their return to camp, they locate the treasure, defeat the authorities, and are returned to their families in triumph. Stanley's new body is equated with his new, more mature, and satisfactory "madeover" character, and the book closes with assurances that the conditions are now right for everyone to live happily ever after. To those familiar with Iron John, this summary of Holes might suggest that Sachar has written a fictional homage to its tenets. According to Robert Bly, if the stresses and strains of modern life are to be effectively addressed, an end must be found to the crisis in masculinity he claims is disempowering Western men. For this to happen, Bly insists, traditional masculinity as personified and enacted by the strong male body in combination with the restoration of all-male communities and connection with the natural world must be restored. In this reading of Holes, the Warden, the only female, takes the role of the ultimate bad mother who is blamed so relentlessly by Bly and his followers. But the novel is not a hymn in praise of mythopoetic man. It is far more subtle and satisfying than that, and, as can be seen in the concluding remarks on Stanley's physique, this male makeover narrative is closely allied to the value systems associated with the feminine heroine: While Mrs. Bell, Stanley's former math teacher, might want to know the percent change in Stanley'S weight, the reader probably cares more about

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the change in Stanley's character and self-confidence. But those changes are subtle and hard to measure. (p. 230) As in the female makeover narrative, Stanley's new body signifies both interior growth and the revelation of qualities which already existed but were not apparent to or valued by those around him before the change. Moreover, despite the changes in his physique and fortunes, it is not clear that Stanley is aware of how much he has changed during his time at the camp, and if he is, he does not signal it by dressing more becomingly, behaving more confidently in company, or becoming the object of someone else's desire-all actions associated with the female makeover. This lack of focus on self and increased alertness to the needs of those around him constructs Stanley as the subject of a makeover which is not dedicated to the cult of the manly man, but offers a more general, gender-neutral, prescription for coming to terms with self-identity. The fact that the narrator steps back from naming the changes in Stanley is also significant, since there is no gender-neutral vocabulary for this purpose. Since it is impossible to separate language and experience, until language is genuinely restructured, experiences relating to sex and gender cannot be adequately articulated or experienced. Those who argue that language privileges male subjectivity ignore the extent to which the process of forging identity is blind to sex. If Lacan is right, the entry into language and civilization causes an irreparable split between the Imaginary and Symbolic orders, irrespective of whether the child is male or female. Indeed, although men have largely shaped the formal attributes of language, females have traditionally found language acquisition easier at an earlier stage in development, and females are more associated with language use in almost every form, forum, and format than men. Evidently the feminine (not female) brain uses both hemispheres for language communication while the masculine separates space relations and language into separate halves of the brain (see Moir and Moir 1998, 115-8). Though advocates of ecriture feminine argue that language is structured along masculine lines, therefore effectively precluding the articulation of female experience, and specifically ways of expressing the female body, it is hard to see the male body as more satisfyingly expressed through language (unless you believe that men's bodies are limited to the modes of tumescence, detumescence, and ejaculation). As Gutterman points out, masculinity as it is expressed in patriarchy is based on a select and partial conception and experience of the male body (1994, 240). For this reason, it is precisely those areas outside language, notably the body and the domain of the unconscious (as evidenced by dreams, daydreams, fantasies, and so on), which feminists have claimed as crucial to the expression of female subjectivity, that are currently credited with giving the most satisfactory insights into masculinity. As Gutterman puts it, "Trapped

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within patriarchal logos, masculinity ultimately may be unknowable, but it can be broached or inferred from the symbolic secret code of the male body" (p. 242). Changing Contexts: The Sterkarm Handshake The "symbolic secret code of the male body" is unsatisfactory as a source of information about masculinity in general, and clearly for literary critics problematic unless the body is evoked through language. Of course, as in the case of the female body, such evocations may take the form of silencing and denial as well as description, point of view, and actions. But if we accept that men's experience of masculinity is different in different contexts and constructed differently in different discourses, it is worth asking what can be learned by looking at the representations of being male and masculinity in the contexts and discourses of children's literature. While for the most part babies and very young children are treated more as generic groups on the basis of age than on sex or gender, this situation changes rapidly by the time children are of school age. By adolescence, probably the most active period for trying on and discarding identities, reading is in many ways a gendered experience (see Noble and Bradford 2000) and many of the texts directed at boys offer very limited, almost invariably conventionally masculine models and vocabularies for their young male readers. This has been true for most of the past century, making it difficult for boy readers of children's literature to avoid the conclusion that the only natural, normal, and acceptable way of inhabiting a male body involves accepting the stereotypical attributes of masculinity. While writers such as Aidan Chambers, whose most recent novel is discussed below, have made an important contribution to the literary representation of gender by confronting the link between maleness and masculinity directly, as we saw with Holes, others approach the problem more obliquely. Susan Price's fascinating adventure novel, The Sterkarm Handshake (1998) in many ways exemplifies the kind of fiction that Robert Bly credits with retrieving what he calls the "authentic manly adventure"; certainly it holds up to scrutiny a society before female successes threatened to discredit the male body and the carefully crafted manly ideal. However, Price's novel does more than invoke the kind of exemplary old-fashioned masculinities Bly so admires. Indeed, in The Sterkarm Handshake those who act as colonizers and who possess the trappings and mental characteristics of manly power ultimately tum out to be both weak and treacherous. The plot device is simple: in the twenty-first century, scientists have invented a Time Tube, more or less analogous to the Channel Tunnel, but which enables journeys through time to different epochs rather than between countries. The project is funded by a multinational conglomerate which has

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chosen to locate the Tube in the sixteenth century, which they intend to strip of its plentiful natural resources and exploit for tourism. As part of the project they have an anthropologist/translator, Andrea, living full-time in the sixteenth century. In twenty-first century terms, Andrea is large-boned and overweight and so regarded (or disregarded) as unattractive: Back in the 21st she was "Big Fat Andy," and had learned to expect that men would look straight past her. But what the 21 st called "big and fat," the Sterkarms called "bonny." Tall as she was, full-fleshed, broad-beamed, bosomy, thunder-thighed-the eyes of the Sterkarm men lit up. They noticed her all the time, and it was disconcerting. (p. 22)

Instead of experiencing a physical makeover when she moves in with the Sterkarm family (the leaders of a local tribe), she finds herself effortlessly reconstructed as beautiful and desirable. Even most young readers will not be surprised by this change: after all, they will know from paintings and other art forms from previous centuries and different cultures that the cult of the extremely thin female form which dominates contemporary Western fashion (and is typified by the ladette) is a relatively recent phenomenon. However, The Sterkarm Handshake challenges other, perhaps more ingrained social practices too. Class prejudices and inequalities bound up in British social organization are shown to serve the rapacious needs of capitalism through a subplot based on a character who is, conveniently, a descendant of the Sterkarms. Once a successful businessman, Joe has been made redundant and has spiraled downwards into homelessness and all the problems that entails, including a profound anxiety about identity. Like Andrea, Joe is to all extents and purposes invisible, not seen because to see him would require some action. As Joe realizes, in many ways we are what we do; identity is bound up with work. In the sixteenth century as an able-bodied member of the clan and male to boot, he finds himself unquestioningly valued, able to contribute in a variety of ways, and thus his sense of himself is restored. As in Holes, there is a recognition that new forms of work have rendered traditional masculine attributes obsolete and, again, it is only by regaining a sense of worth through contact with earlier ways of being that Joe can reconstruct himself. The Joe plot line is not driven by a simplistic nostalgia for the past-the sixteenth century is shown as brutal, hard, smelly, and primitive. Rather, it works to make readers question the inevitability of current social practices. Moreover, although Joe has his sense of amour-propre restored by traveling to a time when simply being born into a group endowed a person with a sense of identity, The Sterkarm Handshake carefully and systematically challenges constructions of masculinity that limit men to aggressive, authoritarian, logical, unemotional behavior. This is seen most clearly in the depiction of the central male character, Per Sterkarm. Per's nickname is "the May," which means "the girl" in the book's version of sixteenth-century dialect. He is

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called this because he is exceptionally pretty; but this doesn't stop Per being a ruthless fighter, a virile lover, and an emerging leader of the clan. Nor do these qualities prevent him from experiencing and acknowledging a wide range of emotions, and behaviors-when Per "performs" manliness, it becomes clear just how restricted contemporary constructions of the masculine hero have become. Look, for instance, at the way he interacts with his fathe~ 1l00rkild: Toorkild sat nearest the fire, baking his aches and pains. Per was pressed so close against him that, to be comfortable, he'd slung one leg over his father's lap. His head rested on Toorkild's shoulder, his face turned up to watch Toorkild as he spoke. Toorkild looked down at him, and they gazed steadily into each other's eyes. They were holding hands. Of all the people crowding around them to share the fire's heat, only Andrea thought this at all odd.... Nobody had told the Sterkarms that, when a child was six, they were "too big" to be kissed and cuddled any more. The Sterkarms blithely went on kissing and cuddling their children even when they were fortysix-and older. Nobody had ever even hinted to Per that it was unmanly to hold his father's hand or to kiss him, because no one at the tower thought it was. So Per went on doing it, as unself-consciously as when he'd been three. Toorkild didn't have to struggle to show his affection for his son by coughing and shaking his hand at the full stretch of their arms. (p. 26)

By focalizing the scene through Andrea, Price gives readers a kind of double vision; they can see with modern eyes, yet are told how to understand this behavior in context. As Per becomes an increasingly familiar character, the reader, like Andrea, is drawn in to his lifestyle and worldview, which means revising stereotypical views of masculinity. Much of Per's charm-his warmth, his ability to connect, the nurturing side of the protection he offers-comes precisely from his feminine qualities. Reading The Sterkarm Handshake drives home the extent to which masculinity has been reshaped at different times, usually to suit the needs of the economy. llhat it is being debated and contested now is a consequence of the fact that society changes with increasing rapidity, and in many ways the dominant version of masculinity-and of gender in general-has fallen behind. As long as people are categorized using a crude and essentially binary system which sorts on the basis of sex and sexuality, the sense of the self as unknowable and unstable will continue to impede the formation and performance of identity. llhis is one of the central concerns in Aidan Chambers' most recent study of adolescent (male) development.

What You See Is What You Get: Postcards From No Man's Land Chambers' rejection of stereotypical constructions of masculinity pervades this novel (1999), starting with its characteristically punning and multilayered title: "no man's land" variously conjures up the masculine terrain of bat-

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tlefields, posits Holland as a place without men, or inhospitable to men, and problematizes identification with manhood. The protagonist, Jacob, is a type familiar from Chambers' previous four books in what will eventually be a sextet: male, late adolescent, introspective, bookish, fascinated by language, enthralled by his first sexual experiences, and alert to what society would regard as a susceptibility to perverse (homoerotic) desire. As the book develops, an alternative way of constructing sexual attraction and sexual politics emerges. Jacob's narrative is concerned with his first trip to Holland, where he is to attend the fiftieth anniversary ceremony of the Battle of Amheim, in which his grandfather, also named Jacob, fought. The narratives of the two Jacobs alternate and converge, and each contains an illicit love story. The grandfather died in his lover's arms in 1944, while his adoring wife waited for him to come home, and the grandson finds himself simultaneously attracted to a transsexual (male/female) and a female who, although her sexuality is not in question, behaves with a directness, experience, and power that challenge the conventional boyfriend/girlfriend role as constructed in Britain. Both Jacobs step out of their familiar worlds and revise, by broadening, their self-identities. Questioning norms, thinking/behaving independently, and moving beyond the binary sexual roles as definitions of identity are the goals of the text. Its philosophy is encapsulated in an explanation Jacob's cousin Daan, with whom he is staying in Amsterdam, provides of his relationship with his two partners, Ton, the transsexual, and Simone, his girlfriend. Ton never sleeps with women. That's the way he is. Simone only sleeps with me. That's the way she is. I sleep with them both. That's the way I am. They both want to sleep with me. That's how we are. That's how we want it. If we didn't, or if anyone of us didn't, then, okay, that's it. All the stuff about gender. Male, female, queer, bi, feminist, new man, whatever-it's meaningless. As out of date as marriage forever. I'm tired of hearing about it. We're beyond that now. (p. 299)

The effect on Jacob is powerful, not because what he hears is strange, but because it is familiar, though previously Jacob was incapable of understanding what he knew. Like Chambers' readers, Jacob can only conceive the world according to the language, images, and explanations he has at his command. Perhaps because they border a number of countries, speak many languages, their own being marginalized (unlike the monolingual British and our ubiquitous English), and through trade and colonial endeavors historically interacted with many cultures (like the British), the Dutch have more access to alternative ways of thinking about the self. Encountering this difference for the first time, Jacob undergoes an ontological shift of such magnitude that it is almost a physiological reorganization too:

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Kimberley Reynolds It was as if what he had heard had started the insides of his body shifting about, not his organs, not his heart and stomach and liver, not his offal, but the parts of his inner self that inhabited his body. It was as if his self were a sort of three-dimensional jigsaw made of pliable bits which could be combined in to a number of different beings, different Jacobs, rather than just one. Now the bits were moving around, shaping a self who startled him. Not just because this newly forming self was a stranger. Just the opposite. He had caught glimpses of him more and more often since he was about fifteen. A he that had been the leading actor, Jacob's other self, in daytime imaginings and nighttime dreams, playing out inside his head secret wishes and unspoken desires. What was startling was that now this other he was revealing himself completely, like someone stepping out of dark shadow in to bright light. (p. 301)

Much as I admire Chambers' work as a whole, and good as this book is, for me there are several problems with this revelation. First is the tendency to focus on sexuality rather than gender. The sense of change is so profound that this must be more than a "coming out" narrative, as the final scenes with Hille, culminating in a quick, uncomplicated bit of sex before Jacob catches the plane to return to England, confirm. Daan is doing more than posting a free love manifesto when he explains his way of life to Jacob, but the book does not follow through the logic of position. For instance, in this passage Chambers fails to evade the need to sex Jacob's other self. He remains "he," and the change is reduced to the need to act out forbidden sexual desires. (Interestingly, however, this sexing is simultaneously a gendering-the other self too appears to be masculine-which cleverly avoids the Jungian cliche of evoking the anima.) The effect of this is to reduce the impact of what is otherwise a brave and far-seeing book, for while Jacob's gender identification is uncontested, the logic of the change Chambers is positing is incomplete. For at least two decades, gender theorists and behavioral scientists have recognized that our binary systems of sex and gender are inadequate (Devor 1987, Grimm 1987). This is one of the principal reasons why the pendulum keeps swinging between periods of liberation/tolerance and repression. As long as hegemonic masculinity as invested in [affluent, white] men remains the indicator of and key to social power, then serious challenges to it are likely to result in a hardening of male codes of behavior and the renewed oppression of women-bad for both sexes as well as for those marginalized groups which then perforce become allied with women. If, however, the current crisis in masculinity can be constructed by those thinking about gender, and particularly in relation to men and masculinity, as an opportunity rather than a threat, like the final scenario in Groundhog Day (1993), the outcome could finally be different and better for all social groups. If this is to happen, biological sex, sexuality, gender, and power must be separated, and their work-

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ings clearly understood across society. Sex alone should not justify one group's power over others, and mechanisms are needed for people to achieve power without necessarily cutting themselves off from important aspects of self. As Devor argues, we need a new gender schema that recognizes "that all individuals ... are comprised on an infinitely varied, and constantly shifting blend of what we now call gender characteristics." She continues: In such a scheme, characteristics that are now associated with personality types called masculine and feminine would gradually become divorced from the male and female sexes. Human personalities would come to be recognized as being far more complex than the concepts of masculinity and femininity now allow, and the world would come to be seen as peopled by men, women, and many other types of persons who are neither women nor men. All persons would be thought of as possessing some characteristics that might be called masculine or feminine, while the mature state of humans would be seen as consisting of a blend of what we now call gender characteristics. (1987, 38)

Postcards from No Man's Land, like the other texts I have discussed, goes some way toward reconceiving the world by broadening the spectrum of normal behavior. It seems both timely and necessary to build on this beginning and to ensure that the texts (whatever their format) we create for young people and which play such a seminal role in their developing identities, continue to offer visions of society in which sex and gender are facts, and difference is enjoyed, but in which all groups are equally able to participate.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

K. Sayer's Women of the Fields: Representations of Rural Women in the Nineteenth Century (1995) provides a discussion of the myth of the ideal wife and mother and the nineteenth-century tendency to associate feminine womanhood with an idyllic pastoral world. It is also worth noting that it was during this period that anthropology emerged as a recognized discipline and began disseminating information about the different ways cultures organize sexuality and social power. An interesting example of the greater range of acceptable behavior in boys and young men is provided in E. Taketani's "Spectacular Child Bodies: The Sexual Politics of Cross-Dressing and Calisthenics in the Writings of Eliza Leslie and Catherine Beecher" (1999). Taketani discusses two books by American writer Eliza Leslie-Lucy Nelson: Or, the Boy-Girl (1831) and Billy Bedlow: Or, the Girl-Boy (1832). Both books are concerned with what happens when a child of one sex dresses as if he or she belongs to the other. Interestingly, though we are now accustomed to girls wearing trousers and other traditionally male forms of dress, as these texts show, in the first half of the 1800s this was seen as much more problematic than a boy sporting female apparel. Lucy is thoroughly punished for "indulging in a predilection ... for

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4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

Kimberley Reynolds the habits and manners of a boy" (p. 359). By contrast, Billy, who wears girls' clothing and accessories, copious quantities of cologne, keeps his hair in long ringlets, and is obsessed with showing off his tiny waist is indulged in his behavior until he finds it inconvenient and changes his way voluntarily. The Moirs' work is widely contested, including by Lesley Rogers who in Sexing the Brain (1999) argues that hormones alone cannot account for sex differences and that many scientists have underestimated the complexity of the human brain's responses to exposure to hormones, which includes social stimuli. See Amelia Hill, "One girl in six hits puberty by age of eight." Observer, June 18, 2000. Based on findings of Bristol University's Institute of Child Health study, "Children of the Nineties," also featured in Channel 4 's series Generation Sex. The set of assumptions on which such constructions are based has been clearly detailed by Edward Said, most notably in Orientalism (1978). A similar problem of terminology exists in children's literature, since the root word "child" has accrued so much cultural baggage that it is effectively impossible to use it empirically. Cited in D. Gutterman (1994). See also V. J. Seidler, (1989). According to Seidler, the problem is that identification with being male and manly is based on the total negation of "suspect" attributes: "If successful, this denial can mean that we [men] no longer have a sense of self which exists separately from our male identity. We are so anxious as boys to prove that we are not girls-that is, that we are not emotional, not weak, and not governed by feelings-that we come to identify our sense of self directly with our sense of male identity" (p. 18). From D. Edgar's "Men, Mateship, Marriage: Exploring Macho Myths and the Way Forward" (1997), cited in Philip Butterss (1999,101). Similarly, J. Watson, Male Bodies: Health. Culture. and Identity (2000) observes that "The psychological search for innate difference between the sexes continues unabated, even though the main finding of some 80 years research has been the massive psychological similarity between the sexes in terms of individual attributes" (p. 35). It is worth noting that feminists have for years identified male power as the root cause of sexual harassment and the tendency for some men's abuse of women in sexual relationships. So they have argued that if it were possible to sever the link between power and sex, it would be easier for women and men to become social equals. Messner, however, offers a corrective to this view, locating the inequality as the result of gendered behavior rather than sex. Structural positions of power, he argues, "generally demand masculine forms of behavior" (p. 22). Salon Unzipped, "Dirty Girls," available from http://www.salon.com/ coVweavl1998/07115weav.htrnl. Although I question Stephens's assertion that makeover narratives are essentially feminine, there is an interesting way in which the identification of the need for change does align these texts with earlier models for expressing female experience, since the drive behind the makeover originates with a

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sense that the current self is in some sense invalid. As S. Gilbert and S. Gubar argued many years ago in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979) this was the way many women experienced themselves during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. T. Edwards in Men in the Mirror: Men's Fashion, Masculinity, and Consumer Society (1997) calls attention to the increasing sexual objectification of men in the media, including male strippers and pornography for women, and asks whether this is evidence of a crisis in masculinity or an indication of changes in sexual politics (pp. 5-6). It is important to note that the makeover narrative has a subgenre in which the makeover it regarded as suspect-not as revealing an authentic self but as an attempt to deny the self and to pretend to belong to a superficially attractive but ultimately less worthy social group. A classic example of this kind of rebuttal of the makeover narrative can be found in Lenora Mattingly Weber's Meet the Malones (1999), in which the central character is made over by her glamorous grandmother and tries temporarily to move from the hardworking "mop squeezer" set and join the "prom queens." She looks the part, but the makeover brings only dissatisfaction and ultimately self-loathing.

7

Masculinity as Social Semiotic Identity Politics and Gender in Disney Animated Films ROBYN McCALLUM

I have come across the ages out of the dim and distant past from the lair of the primeval man to claim you-for your sake I have become a civilized man-for your sake I have crossed oceans and continents-for your sake I will be whatever you will me to be. EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS, TARZAN OF THE APES

While the Disney culture industry is in general shaped by radically conservative metanarratives, resulting in frequently anachronistic representations of gender politics, it is not unresponsive to wider interest in the cultural production of gender. That response, however, is shaped ideologically in ways that implicitly critique collective fantasies about gender, and about masculinity in particular. As Willis (1993) has argued, "popular culture and its cinema ... responds to, reads, and maps collective demands or desires, however vaguely articulated"; it is "always reading us-reading our social configurations of power and desire, pleasure and violence" (p. 8). Critical interest in Disney animated films has tended to focus on the representation of femininity, but emergent interest in changing constructions of masculinity coincides with a shift of focus within both the Disney industry and the body of critical writing that responds to it. Susan Jeffords (1995) saw Beauty and the Beast (1991) as part of a 1990s trend toward the representation of the "new man" and a redefinition of the masculine heroic ideal. While subsequent films, such as Aladdin (1992), The Lion King (1994), and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), more or less revert to relatively conventional representations of hegemonic masculinity, this process of redefinition is continued in three films of the late 1990s, Hercules (1997), Mulan (1998), and Tarzan (1999). These most recent films explore the notion of masculinity as a social construction-a bundle of behaviors, a way of being in the world, which must be learned. The education program each protagonist follows in order to 116

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become a man is, however, inextricably linked with notions of "learning to be human" and the development of caring intersubjective processes. In Hercules, even learning to be a hero also involves learning to be other-regarding, that is, learning to be above all human. In Tarzan, the process of learning to be (hu)man is literal-as Tarzan, the feral child, must learn what it means to be both human and male. In Mulan, the process of learning to be a man is again literal, as Mulan switches gender and learns to impersonate a man, but while the motif of cross-dressing implicitly problematizes masculinity as performance, the film nevertheless reasserts hegemonic masculinity by defining masculinity in relational opposition to femininity. At the same time, humanist and feminist impulses in Hercules and Mulan sustain and elaborate the late twentieth century image of the "new man" which emerged in Beauty and the Beast. Tarzan, however, represents a shift in another direction, perhaps in response to the 1990s mythopoetic men's movement, with this "new man" being reconstructed in the model of the masculine "hard-bodied," "natural" ideal that reinstates a version of traditional masculinity. Beauty and the Beast, Hercules, Muian, and Tarzan span a decade of interest in and conflict over notions of masculinity, and collectively represent Disney's reading of and response to a changing social climate.) While each of the films explores new forms of masculinity, such forms are not necessarily indicative of more progressive social attitudes. Instead, they are shaped by and filtered through the patriarchal and conservative metanarratives that dominate the Disney culture industry. As Andrew Ross (1995) puts it, "patriarchy is constantly reforming masculinity.... Indeed, the reason why patriarchy remains so powerful is due less to its entrenched traditions than to its versatile capacity to shape-change and morph the contours of masculinity to fit with shifts in the social climate" (p. 172). As Jeffords has argued, Beauty and the Beast would seem to represent Disney's response to changing constructions of masculinity within popular culture. Films of the 1990s evince a trend toward the representation of a more sensitive masculine heroism that contrasts with the muscular and hardened "fresh aggressivity" of heroes of 1980s films (Hatty 2000, 140 and 172-3). Disney's response to this trend is the representation of the Beast as the "sensitive new man who can transform himself from the hardened, muscle-bound, domineering man of the' 80s into the considerate, loving and self-sacrificing man of the '90s" (Jeffords 1995, 170). There are three main strategies used in Disney's film to map this transition. First, the (muscular) masculine body is represented as a burden (p. 171). Thus, the curse placed upon the Prince, as punishment for his lack of regard for others, figures the failed masculine body that can only be recuperated through learning to love. The Beast is characterized as strong, protective, imposing, domineering, and overpowering, on the one hand, but on the other as childish, petulant, basically solipsistic, and needing to learn, via a female teacher, to be other-regarding-that is, sensitive. As

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Jeffords argues, the Beast's story suggests that "masculinity has been betrayed by its own cultural imagery: what men thought they were supposed to be-strong protective, powerful, commanding-has somehow backfired and become their own evil curse" (p. 171). Second, Disney introduces an education program whereby the Beast must learn to love someone else and, by implication, learn to be a sensitive loving (new) (hu)man being. The plot of the Beauty and the Beast story is modified accordingly, so that the curse is punishment for a character flaw over which the erstwhile prince apparently had no control (the opening of the film implies that his selfishness, which brings down the curse upon him, is the result of bad parenting and having been spoiled), and the curse can only be lifted once he learns to love someone else, thus casting Belle in the role of teacher and the Beast as student of human society. The educated, articulate, intelligent and sophisticated Beast of traditional versions of the story thereby becomes an illiterate, ignorant, selfish, and childish Beast who must undergo an education program which will tum him into a sensitive loving (new) man (pp. 167-9). Third, borrowing from Cocteau's La Belle et la Bete,2 Disney uses the love triangle (represented by Belle, the Beast, and Gaston) to schematize two versions of masculinity: the traditional, macho, muscular, hypermasculine (male chauvinist) man represented by Gaston, and the sensitive new man, represented by the Beast (p. 170). These motifs recur, with modifications, in Hercules, Mulan, and Tarzan. Each has a literary pretext, and as with so many Disney versions of literary texts, the stories are simplified and reshaped to fit what has become the Disney fairy tale formula: an adolescent protagonist, dissatisfied for some reason with his or her present lot, embarks on a quest or process of training in search of a true sense of self and a proper place in the world. After a climactic confrontation with an embodiment of evil, the hero is rewarded at the close of the film with marriage, or the prospect of heterosexual coupling (see Zipes 1995, 110-11). Tarzan, Hercules, and Mulan all repeat the education motif of Beauty and the Beast and each has a central lyric episode in which characters learn to be either a man or human or both: the "True Hero" sequence in Hercules, the "Be a Man" sequence in Mulan, and the "Son of Man" sequence in Tarzan. In each film, the sequence schematically maps out the character's development, from adolescent to adult male in Hercules, from child to adolescent in Tarzan, and from daughter to "man" in Mulan, and in so doing articulates notions of masculinity both as a construct (and hence a bundle of behaviors which are learned) and as an innate quality. The structure and editing of these sequences implicitly encodes the training program as "makeover"-it is a process that either reveals or conceals the character's inner self, and it is an overtly gendered process (Stephens 1999, 5). This aspect is conspicuous in Mulan, the least overtly conservative of the three films, where the makeover motif is used quite self-consciously and playfully

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at various points, but comparison of these sequences in each film highlights the extent to which it is also a motif in both Hercules and Tarzan, though much less self-conscious and parodic in effect. In Hercules, the educational program is combined with the idea of the masculine (muscular) body as burden. The motif of the failed masculine body emerges when Hercules, deprived of his superhuman strength, finally proves himself and attains true hero status by acting out of love for another human being rather than out of a desire to prove himself a hero. Nevertheless, this does not occur before the film has mapped out his physical and personal development according to a traditional masculine model with its emphasis on physical activity and the spectacle of the (muscular) male body. The film's plot is constructed from story elements associated with various legends surrounding the figure of Hercules, but it also omits some of the less savory elements of these stories, introduces motifs associated with fairy tales, especially Disney versions of those tales, and reshapes other elements to fit the Disney formula. Thus the film begins with a prelude that introduces Hercules, here the son of Hera and Zeus,3 as an immortal. In a scene reminiscent of Sleeping Beauty, Hades, typecast Disney fashion as the effeminate villain of the story, turns up at Hercules's christening party. Upon learning from the three Fates that it is Hercules's destiny to fight and defeat the Titans, and thus foil Hades' plan to make a "hostile takeover bid" for heaven, Hades arranges for Hercules to be stolen and fed a potion to make him mortal. Hercules drinks all but the last drop of the potion, and hence loses his immortality but retains his godlike strength. Now effectively orphaned, he is raised as a mortal. The story then passes over his childhood and resumes with his adolescence. As with so many adolescent Disney protagonists, his sense of being is defined in terms of a sense of lack of belonging and so, upon learning that he is a foster child and that his father is really Zeus, he finds himself a personal hero trainer, Philoctetes (familiarly, "Phil"), and embarks on a training program. Hercules is represented initially according to the stereotype of the overgrown gangly youth who doesn't know his own strength and goes about inadvertently destroying things. He is depicted as tall and thin, with broad, but stooped shoulders, extraordinarily long arms and legs, huge hands and (pigeon-toed) feet, a long skinny neck, and oversized ears. In short, he is the typical adolescent boy in the middle of a growth spurt, who hasn't quite grown into his body yet. His quest for selfhood and belonging is articulated as a desire for something which is inherent, as with so many Disney protagonists, but it is further couched in the language of sport and competition, as in, for example, "I will find my way, I can go the distance ... Beat the odds, I can go the distance." Visually the sequence depicting Hercules's training program emphasizes action and physical development: his progress is literally measured by the increasing size of his biceps, and his completion of the program and readiness to embark on becoming a hero is signaled by his sudden

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physical changes-the larger biceps and pectorals and thickened neck, as well as a stance that changes from stooped and pigeon-toed to upright, with the chest puffed out and his feet now nicely turned out. However, while Hercules's training is depicted visually as a process of physical growth and maturation, the accompanying dialogue and song lyrics emphasize a humanistic vision of personal and emotional maturation which must come from within, as in Zeus's admonition: "I can't [do a thing], but you can. Prove yourself a true hero on earth." Thus although Hercules's heroic deeds gain him fame and all the rewards of consumer culture (including, in a self-reflexive joke about the Disney industry, his own "Hercules" merchandise, such as sandals, drinks, and action figures), his status as a true hero is, as Zeus tells him, "something [he] has to discover for [him] self ... inside [his] heart." Thus his hero-hood is only realized once his superhuman strength has been taken away and he acts out of love and concern for another human being, rescuing Meg from the Pool of Death. Finally, having proved himself and gained immortality, Hercules chooses to stay with Meg on earth, where he finally realizes he belongs, and the film closes with the prospect of marriage. In this way, true hero status, and hence the male heroic ideal, is defined as something which is constructed and learned. It is a bundle of behaviors and skills like handling weapons and rescuing damsels, and a physical presence, a masculinity that is "spectacular and performative" (Hatty 2000, 131) but it also draws on something innate. And that something, as the climax of the film reveals, involves the development of an intersubjectivity that is altruistic, loving (and heterosexual), and that compensates for the failures of the masculine body. In Mulan, the education motif is repeated when, upon joining the army, Mulan and her comrades undergo a training program similar to Hercules' personal training program, but here the motif is complicated by the crossdressing theme and by the film's parallel constructions of masculinity and femininity. Whereas the pretexts for Disney's Tarzan and Hercules are extensive, The Ballad of Mulan, in which a young Chinese woman disguises herself as a man and takes her father's place in the Imperial army, provides the basic narrative frame, which the Disney film fleshes out through the introduction and imposition of the Disney fairy tale formula. 4 The film opens with an introduced episode in which Mulan visits the village matchmaker. As with Hercules, Mulan's sense of being is defined in terms of lack, here a sense of disjunction between the person her culture and community expect her to be and the person she is inside. The theme is foregrounded by the lyrics of her first solo, which focus on this conflict between individuality and social conformity. When her aged and crippled father is called up for military service, Mulan takes his place, stealing away at night to join the army without her family's knowledge or consent. Unlike the Mulan of the pre-text, her service in the army is relatively short and, her gender-switching having been discovered, she is expelled; she thus saves the Emperor and the Imperial city as a

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woman; and the film closes with her return home, followed by Shang, her commanding officer whose life she saved whilst in the army. A key change is the introduction of a romance plot: the film ends with Shang accepting Mulan's invitation to dinner in her family home and the implied prospect of marriage. The training regimen undergone by Mulan and her comrades has clear parallels with Hercules's personal training program. Each is structured as a series of physical tasks and behaviors to be mastered, showing the active male body as spectacle, and using visual gags to deconstruct this process. In Mulan, however, the implied construction of masculinity is not as straightforward as in Hercules, but is instead complicated by the cross-dressing theme, by the audience's knowledge that Mulan is a woman, and by the lyrics of Shang's song, "I'll Make a Man out of You," which accompany and give shape to the episode. The training begins when Shang challenges Ling to fetch an arrow from the top of a high pole, while carrying two weights; he fails, and this leads into Shang's song, which, beginning with a military-style drum, initially defines masculinity in opposition to femininity, through the accusation that his recruits are effeminate. His vow to tum "daughters" into men is directly addressed to Mulan, now Ping, who Shang holds by the front of her/his shirt. The references to gendering in the lyrics are of course ironic in relation to MulanlPing's hidden sexual identity, but they also echo a stereotyped sentiment familiar from sports and war films, which "relate collective training ... to rites of passage from boyhood to manhood" and depict the training program as aiming "to transform queers and women into 'real men,' "as in Platoon or Full Metal Jacket (Kirkham and Thumim 1993, 16). In Disney's version of this, Shang's song then goes on to construct an image of masculinity grounded in paradox and a play between surface and depth and between learned behaviors (one can become a man) and innate qualities (being in touch with one's innate center of being). Through a series of imperatives the song's chorus essentializes masculinity by asserting that it embodies the speed, strength and power of the natural world, and yet contains this within an aura of tranquility and mystery. The first three attributes suggest a fairly conventionalized image of a real man as having speed, force and strength, but the association of masculinity with mystery, by means of an analogy with the dark side of the moon, implies a more complex image, given both the conventional association of mystery and the moon with femininity and Mulan's secret identity. Furthermore, each time the line linking manhood and mystery is repeated it is accompanied by shots of Shang. The first refrain has him seated alone, shirtless, on the hillside at night in a pensive introspective pose. The second refrain coincides with Mulan climbing to the top of the pole with which the episode opened, and the last line is sung over a series of point-of-view shots indicating a renegotiation of the relationship between Mulan and Shang as Mulan throws

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down the arrow, having proved her right to a place in the army. An implication of the point-of-view shots used to depict Shang throughout the film is that he is frequently represented from Mulan's female viewpoint; thus his mysteriousness or otherness is represented as being constructed from a female point of view. This, of course, reinscribes traditional gender notions of natural gender differences, figuring an essential masculinity that is powerful, separate and unknowable: the appropriate object of feminine admiration and desire. When the education motif is repeated in Tarzan, the humanistic shaping of masculinity, which remains more or less implicit in Hercules, becomes much more explicit: a feral child, Tarzan must literally learn what it means to be human, as well as male. As Fiedler (cited by Kidd 1996, 93) suggests, feral child narratives appeal to the collective fantasy that "a single human being, cast away in the jungle, might recapitulate the evolutionary experience of the race" and thus provide scope for exploring that evolutionary experience and hence what it means to be human. Film versions of Tarzan, however, have tended to shift the focus away from the evolutionary paradigm. In a comparison of literary and film versions of Tarzan, Walt Morton (1993) argues that whereas the novel's appeal lies in the ideology of social mobility and transformation implicit in the "story of one man's climb up the evolutionary ladder to civilization" (p. 121), the film's popularity is "fixed to the primitive appeal of man in nature ... combined with the visual spectacle of male physicality" (p. 118). In Burroughs's novel, Tarzan's superiority is based on class (he is a displaced English lord) and innate qualities, namely the capacity for language and a sense of the value of property and propriety (hence his desire to clothe himself). Disney's version follows most Tarzan films made after MOM's highly influential 1932 production, Tarzan the Ape Man (starring Johnny Weissmuller), and omits references to Tarzan's aristocratic lineage, his self-education, and innate desire to clothe himself and claim ownership of property.5 Disney's Tarzan, like Weissmuller's, is taught language by Jane, and for the most part is portrayed semi-naked-though there is a logic implied by the illusion of continuity, which depicts Tarzan first in a nappy and then a loincloth. In this way, whereas the novel, with all its imperialistic assumptions, offers the promise of (European) "man conquering nature" (p. 118), the films offer "the wish-fulfillment of an idyllic return to nature and the chance to abandon civilization" (p. 121). Certainly, the influence of other film and television versions of Tarzan is apparent in Disney's emphasis on male physicality and notions of naturalness, as well as in plot and character details, especially the close of the film in which Jane chooses to stay with Tarzan in the (Edenic) jungle. On the other hand, the social Darwinism underlying Burroughs's characterization of Tarzan, which "attempts to justify imperialism by displaying Eurocentric society as biologically superior" (Iwerks 1995,72), is retained in

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Disney's Tarzan, albeit largely displaced into the anthropomorphic structure of animal society. Tarzan's program of education and growth from childhood to adulthood is manifestly mapped onto an evolutionary paradigm. The film opens with baby Tarzan and his parents shipwrecked off the coast of Africa, and when Tarzan's parents are killed by the leopard Sabor,6 a female gorilla, Kala, whose child has also been killed by Sabor, adopts baby Tarzan and rears him, against the wishes of the male gorilla leader, Kerchak. Disney charts Tarzan's growth through childhood and adolescence as a rite of passage elaborated by boyish pranks, and, once again, Tarzan's sense of being as he enters adolescence is defined in terms of lack, as he realizes his difference from Kala and the other apes and is driven by a desire to prove himself to Kerchak, his adoptive father figure. As in Hercules, Tarzan's physical maturation is portrayed visually as symbolic spectacle and performance in a lyric sequence; he matures in an apparently continuous shot during which he jumps up into the air as a boy and comes back down as a young man. As in Hercules, the song lyrics depict this growth as a physical challenge and as something which Tarzan pursues alone, uncovering his own inner resources. These aspects are emphasized by the use of hands as a constant visual motif throughout the film, symbolizing both Tarzan's emotional bond with his ape family and his difference from them. This difference is signaled by his ability to straighten his fingers and by the possession of an opposable thumb, that genetic difference which along with language apparently set prehistoric human beings along the evolutionary path toward civilization. Throughout the growing-up sequence, visual emphasis falls on the capacity for invention and construction that Tarzan's natural manual dexterity (and human intellect) enables: after watching a rhinoceros sharpen its hom, he makes a sharpened arrowhead; he makes a spear to help him pick fruit, ties branches for a shelter, and teaches elephants to blow termites out of their nests to make feeding easier for the apes. Similarly, his defeat of Sabor is only possible through his ability to make and use tools. However, while Tarzan's (human) superiority over the apes is implicit here, the film is at pains to stress that Tarzan's place is with the apes in the jungle, that he will "find [his] place beside the ones [he] love[s]," as teacher and their natural leader. A key way in which Hercules, Mulan, and Tarzan explore constructions of masculinity is through the manipulation of the spectatorial gaze. Since Laura Mulvey's seminal essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975), many film theorists writing about the representation of masculinity in film have noted the difficulties with which the "pleasures to be had in consuming the spectacle of the 'perfect' male body" are fraught (Kirkham and Thumim 1993, 12). As Mulvey argues, "[J]n a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female" (p. 11). The ways in which men and women look at each other are "a register of male-female power relations" (Dyer 1982, 63) and in visual

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representational systems the processes of looking and being looked at are heavily codified. Because the action of looking (especially staring) is used to assert dominance, men are usually the (active) bearers of the look, while women are usually the (passive) recipients of the look. The process is all the more rigidly codified when the object of the look is nude or semi-naked. Thus established codes of spectatorship are violated when images of men (especially semi-naked men) are offered as (potentially erotic) spectacle "because of the contradiction between the vulnerable passivity implicit in the state of being looked at, and the dominance and control which patriarchal order expects its male subjects to exhibit" (Kirkham and Thumim 1993, 12). As Kirkham and Thumim point out, such potentially erotic displays of the male body, however, are key features for certain film genres, such as the epic, adventure and sports film (p. 12). There are three main strategies for avoiding the feminizing and homoerotic implications of such bodily displays: by depicting the male body in action; by stressing evidence of action, suffering and endurance marked on the surface of the body by such visual signs as bulging muscles and sweat (p. 12); or by motivating such displays by means of point of view shots which "feminize" the spectatorial gaze (Walt Morton 1993, 118). The bulging muscles of the male body in action, as in the depictions of Hercules and Tarzan during the training and education sequences discussed above, metonymically figure conventional masculine attributes, such as "violence, competition, aggression, skill, and endurance" (Kirkham and Thumim 1993, 12). Likewise, as Mulan reaches the top of the pole at the close of her training program, a close-up reveals a bead of sweat running down the side of her face, a common visual signifier in masculine heroic film discourses (such as the male epic) of stoicism, sacrifice, and self-sufficiency (p. 23). Even when the male body is posed for a single shot, as in a male pin-up, tensed muscles imply the suggestion of action. The closing shot of Hercules at the completion of his training program positions the viewer at a low angle, and a vertical pan from feet to head accentuates his physical growth and heroic potential, as well as framing the male body as spectacle, as body-to-be-displayed, but with its muscles tensed, poised for action. Visual strategies which frame the male body as spectacle are also used at key points in Tarzan: for example, at the close of the episode in which Tarzan kills Sabor and holds her body above his head doing his "Tarzan yodel," again the viewer is positioned at a low angle and Tarzan's muscles are tensed, ready for more action. In Hercules, Tarzan, and Mulan, the spectacle of the male body is also motivated via the key female characters and the use of point of view shots. For example, the male body is quite clearly framed as object of the female gaze when at the beginning of the training session Shang removes his shirt. The camera angle is low, cutting off the top of Shang's head, and panning shots from feet to shoulders accentuate the extraordinary breadth of his

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naked chest. Reverse shots back to Mulan, and her expression of both pleasure and astonishment, indicate that Shang is being represented from her point of view; thus the male body as spectacle is framed and imaged via the female gaze. At the same time, however, Mulan takes a slightly mocking, and hence ironic, attitude toward conventional muscle-bound images of masculinity by drawing attention to the framing of the male body as spectacle, as in Ling's response to (the now bare-chested) Shang's challenge: "I'll get that arrow pretty good, and I'll do it with my shirt on." Mulan's initial attempts to impersonate a man are also parodic: at Mushu's instruction to do her "man walk ... shoulders back, chest out, head up, feet apart, and strut," she walks bowlegged and pigeon-toed with her arms swinging outwards at chest height in a parodic inversion of Shang's "man walk." Likewise, the emphasis on masculinity as physical strength and bodily display, at the expense of intellect and linguistic competence, is gently mocked in Hercules when Meg first meets Hercules and asks him, "Did they give you a name with all those rippling pectorals?" and "Are you always this articulate?" The exchange is echoed in Tarzan with Jane's comment to Tarzan at their first meeting: "You do speak, and all this time I thought you were just a big wild quiet silent person thing"-and isn't it always a surprise when a nice hunky body actually speaks too? Disney's Tarzan was released in 1999 and while there is a continuity of development in the representation of masculinity from Beauty and the Beast, to Hercules, and to Tarzan, the latter marks a clear shift for Disney's gender politics which corresponds with reactionary elements within popular culture. Tarzan's conservatism is perhaps also a product of the constraints constituted by its extensive intertexts and pretexts: Tarzan is an iconic figure within popular culture where he is the epitome of hard-bodied muscular masculinity, and hence perhaps does not offer much scope for experimentation with gender representation. The same could also be said for Hercules, whose depiction is constrained by the generic conventions of the epic. In Mulan, however, released in 1998, Disney finds the scope to playfully explore constructions of masculinity, and this film indicates a less conservative direction for Disney. Mulan is the most superbly crafted Disney animation since The Lion King. It makes extensive use of visual symbolism and exploits visual angles of view for emotive elfect; it is accompanied by a haunting and moving soundtrack; it is structured visually and thematically through repeated images and sequences; and it is highlighted by ironic, self-mocking humor. Visually, the film constantly plays on the relation between surface and "reality," using framing shots and reflective surfaces to foreground the idea of representation, which underlies its treatment of gender. A key way in which Mulan explores notions of masculinity is through cross-dressing and makeover motifs, but also through the manipulation of the spectatorial gaze in makeover episodes where constructions of masculinity

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are paralleled with constructions of femininity. This occurs most clearly in the four interlinked episodes in which central characters are made over in cultural and gender specific ways: Mulan's visit to the marriage matchmaker, in which she is made over as the "perfect bride"; Mulan dressing as a man in her father's armor; the training episode, discussed earlier; and the siege of the palace by soldiers dressed in drag, which visually repeats both Mulan's first makeover and the training episode. The film opens with Mulan preparing for her interview with the matchmaker by writing cheat-notes on her wrist; these comprise a list of desirable feminine qualities-quiet, demure, graceful, polite, delicate, refined, poised, punctual-qualities which, as the episodes which follow indicate, the tomboyish, forgetful, and outspoken Mulan is clearly lacking. This is followed by a sequence in which she is ritualistically made over for a visit to the marriage matchmaker, and symbolically made over as subject of her culture's construction of femininity. While she is not entirely passive, she is relatively compliant; throughout the process of being undressed, bathed, dressed, made-up and having her hair dressed, she resists only to pull a wisp of hair and curl it in the center of her forehead. Camera distance and hence audience detachment emphasizes Mulan's position as object of the gaze; close-ups are used only briefly for moments of resistance, and the song lyrics clearly articulate the relation between appearance, marriageability, passivity, and family honor-in other words, they assert that in appearance and demeanor "girls" should be what men want them to be. After her disastrous meeting with the matchmaker, Mulan's makeover is symbolically unmade, first, as she removes her jewelry and makeup and takes her hair down during the first solo, and then again when she cuts her hair and dresses in her father's armor. This second episode is carefully structured using music with a strong beat punctuated by the sound of falling rain and thunder, odd angles of view (alternating very high and very low angles, close-ups of Mulan in reflective surfaces), and visual symbolism (such as a close-up of her replacing the conscription papers with the comb which was earlier placed in her hair). Her father's sword also has a prominent role throughout the sequence: she is seated, kneeling, at the window with the curtain blowing in, and as she holds it up in front of her, her face is reflected and refracted in the blade-the angle of the blade splits her face in two, a light and dark side; further, in two clean strokes, she uses the sword to cut off her hair. The episode also repeats an earlier scene in which her father tried on his armor and practiced swinging his sword, but dropped it and fell. The contrast between his age and frailty and her youth and vigor figures not only the failed (paternal) body, but also the failure of (Eastern) patriarchy, implicit in the film's underlying critique of traditional social customs such as arranged marriages. As with Jasmine in Aladdin, Mulan is an "all-American gal" whose rebellious behavior legitimates Western social practices and structures. There is also an obvious contrast between Mulan's active construction

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of self (as a male), here, and the earlier makeover scene in which she is the passive subject of her culture's construction of femininity. A final makeover occurs toward the end of the film when Mulan, Shang, and three soldiers dressed in drag (Ling, Chien-Po, and Yao) storm the palace. The episode repeats and transforms earlier episodes: the three soldiers visually parody Mulan as she was made over for the interview with the matchmaker; and their actions parody the earlier training episode. When the soldiers' efforts at breaking down the door of the palace using brute force fail, Mulan suggests an idea, and, as the "Be a Man" song used earlier in the training episode cuts in, the boys begin undressing in a parodic striptease, their actions, in time with the music, visually repeating the earlier training exercises. The refrain ("Be a Man") coincides with a framed shot of three fans, which open to reveal the heavily made-up faces of the three soldiers dressed in kimonos. While, visually, they echo (and parody) Mulan and the young women in the earlier matchmaker episode, there is a strong contrast in the operation of the spectatorial gaze in each episode. In the earlier episode the women are positioned as passive objects of the spectator gaze. A middledistance tracking shot moves down the line of young women, each of whom walks with head held high and eyes closed, with the exception of Mulan who is watching and copying the other women ahead of her. In contrast, Ling, Chien-Po, and Yao not only make eye contact with the viewer, they also "make eyes" at the camera and deliberately flaunt their ambiguous sexuality. The camera tracks back as the three stand, tum, walk up the stairs, and remove their scarves in a further parody of a striptease, wrapping the scarves around the poles-again repeating the earlier training sequence, as well as the conventionalized striptease act. The camera pans across as each character turns his head, and as Mulan is about to start climbing, Shang places his hand on her shoulder, removes his cloak, and joins them; the sequence closes with a visual exchange between Shang and Mulan, accompanied again by the final line of the song, "Mysterious as the dark side of the moon." With the staircase functioning visually as a stage, the whole episode is highly structured visually and parodic of a drag act and a striptease, as the soldiers wiggle their hips, "make eyes" at the camera, and move as if dancing. The construction and spectacle of gender performances are foregrounded, especially through the deliberate frame-breaking strategy of making eye contact with the viewer and hence disrupting the objectifying spectatorial gaze. The episode is very funny, despite its predictability. It is ironic, of course, that the soldiers must perform as women in order to .fulfill their duties as men by rescuing the emperor. It implicitly suggests the duplicity in constructions of gender: traditional transgressive attributes of femininity, cunning, trickery, and disguise prove more effective strategies than battering down a door. Disney's playful treatment of gender in Mulan is in direct contrast with Tarzan. Burroughs's novel, with its humanistic celebration of intellect, civi-

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lization, physical strength, and the individual (male's) capacity for survival and transformation, appeared as panacea for a crisis in masculinity which occurred in the earlier part of the twentieth century: "at a time when men feared the feminization of their lives and natural forces no longer posed a threat to human survival, Tarzan of the Apes reinforced and celebrated men's preeminent position over women and nature" (Higgins 1995, 16-7). Disney's reworking of Tarzan is just as timely, given "the felt crisis of masculinity" (Hatty 2000, 179) in the 1990s and the sexually coded nature of the battle being waged over the category of the feral (Kidd 1996,91). As Kidd argues, "in most stories, the feral child is a boy whose savage virtue and virility prove him superior to both animals and civilized humans"; thus the feral child has become "fetishized by the male mythopoetic industry" for whom the motif is "masculine and violent." At the same time, however, the feral child has been appropriated by challenges to the contemporary masculinist movement, such as Estes' Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, in which the feral child motif is feminine and instinctively creative (1993, 90-1). Disney's Tarzan appeals to both sides of the debate through underlying contradictions in its opposition of "natural" and "civilized" masculinities. While not producing a love triangle, Tarzan repeats the schematic representation of masculinity produced by Gaston and the Beast in Beauty and the Beast, with Clayton, Tarzan, and Kerchak. Here, Clayton is not Jane's suitor (his role in the novel), but his hypermasculinity is played off against Tarzan's "natural" masculinity. However, whereas Beauty and the Beast used the Beast and Gaston to play the New Age sensitive man off against the macho man, Tarzan modifies and reconstructs these two categories in relation to nature rather than the feminine, as well as to each other. Thus, their characters are revealed as they relate to the gorilla community and, by extension, the natural world. Clayton, the macho ("civilized") man, is always linked visually with the gun and seeks to exploit the jungle, Tarzan, and the gorillas, and he is killed when he becomes entangled in jungle vines. Tarzan is the natural wild man who is part of gorilla society and "rides the twisting highways of tree boughs" (Corliss 1999,67). Tarzan's stance while riding the trees is like that of a surfer or skateboarder; hence the film implies a link between nature and images which typify Western male adolescence, thus naturalizing the latter. On the surface, then, the film seems to critique Clayton's exploitative ("civilized") masculinity as a product of capitalist consumer culture against Tarzan's sensitive ("natural") "wild man" masculinity. The contrast is foregrounded just before Clayton's death in an exchange between the two men parodically reminiscent of Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry films. Tarzan is holding a gun on Clayton, who goads him, "Go ahead, shoot me, be a man"; Tarzan imitates a gunshot and replies, "Not a man like you," smashing the gun. Further, while Tarzan does tie Clayton up, he is absolved from responsi-

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bility for Clayton's death when Clayton cuts the vines that prevent him from falling and thereby causes his own death. The contrast between Tarzan and Clayton, however, is really only one of degree; the film is playing off what are really two versions of muscular, hard-bodied masculinity. While Tarzan is clearly depicted as the sensitive caring man who gets the girl, the return-tonature motif only thinly disguises a return to traditional maSCUlinity. Tarzan's characterization represents an overt recuperation of a (re)version of traditional masculinity, redefined as "natural." Jane's account of having been saved by a "tlying wild man in a loincloth" may be a slightly tongue-in-cheek mockery of Tarzan's wild man masculinity, but the implied assumption still remains that the "big wild quiet silent man in a loincloth" is every modern woman's secret fantasy. In an interesting move, the sexual implications of Tarzan's wild man masculinity are articulated via Jane's gradual eroticization as object of the gaze: she makes her first appearance in a long dress, hat, gloves, umbrella, and high-heeled boots, and as the film progresses becomes more and more undressed and disheveled until finally, in the closing shots of the film, she is swinging from the trees with Tarzan, barefoot in a short skirt and crop-top. Tarzan further elaborates and complicates the heroic male ideal through the introduction of a third male character, Kerchak, Tarzan's adoptive father figure, who, in part, combines the character functions of three ape characters (Kerchak, Terkoz, and Tublat) in Burroughs's novel. In the novel, Tarzan's parents and Kala's baby are killed, not by Sabor, but by Kerchak, and Tarzan is raised by Terkoz, who Tarzan kills in a leadership struggle and "barely veiled scene of Oedipal desire" (Cheytitz 1989,348); Tublat is Terkoz's son, who kidnaps and, by implication, attempts to rape Jane. Burroughs's Tarzan is no less aggressive, competitive or violent than Kerchak, Terkoz or Tublat but, for Burroughs, his humanity (and hence innate intellect) and aristocratic breeding evince his natural leadership qualities, which are then proved through physical confrontations. While Burroughs clearly conceived "mother love" as crossing species boundaries, his Tarzan doesn't find (and apparently does not seem to need) a replacement father figure (Higgins 1995,23). Key changes in Disney's version of Tarzan, then, are the displacement of much of Kerchak, Terkoz, and Tublat's violence onto Sabor and the reshaping of Kerchakfferkoz into a father figure for Tarzan (as well as the introduction of Tarzan's need for a father figure). Underlying Kerchak's initial attitude toward Tarzan and the representation of their relationship are contemporary assumptions about the nature of fatherhood and father/son relationships. Kerchak is depicted as the traditional authoritarian patriarchal father figure, who must learn to be sensitive and understanding of his son's difference (a modern dad, in other words). Obviously, the imperialist and anthropocentric ideologies implicit in Burroughs's depiction of the gorillas (and the indigenous Africans) as lesser species are not palatable for a contemporary audience. Thus, in Disney's film, the xenophobia and classism implicit in Burroughs's references to

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Tarzan's innate intelligence and nobility by virtue of his aristocratic lineage which sets him apart from the apes (and Africans), is displaced onto Kerchak, whose objections to adopting Tarzan articulate a fear of otherness (as in "it's not our kind" and "he will never be one of us"). The film closes with Kerchak's realization that Tarzan had "always been one of us" and his handing on of the role of leader of the community, the moral implication being that he has learned to be a "father" and that he has overcome his xenophobia. As suggested, Disney displaces the classism and xenophobia of Burroughs's novel from humans to animals. At the same time, however, Disney's gorillas are humanized, obscuring the cultural differences between human and ape. The film opens with a sequence of alternating images of the human family and the gorilla family accompanied by the theme song, "One World, One Family." The two families are clearly linked by their shared two parent, one child structure; by Sabor, who kills the gorilla child and human parents; and by the editing of the sequence. For example, in one shot Kala is shown throwing the baby gorilla up into the air and out of screen; but it is baby Tarzan who reenters, falling down into the arms of his mother. The sequence is perhaps a quotation of the often-invoked image of evolution in the opening of Stanley Kubrick's 2001,' A Space Odyssey (1968). The illusion that it is one continuous shot places overt emphasis on the thematic and ideological implications of this image (that human beings and apes are part of one family by virtue of the "human" characteristics the film ascribes to the apes; that such commonalities are situated within evolutionary history). If the argument seems circular at this point it is because the "One World, One Family" theme which the film is at pains to advocate really only displaces Burroughs's classism, anthropocentrism, and cultural imperialism. Disney's humanized ape society is depicted as rigidly patriarchal, classist, and xenophobic. Thus, Kerchak's death and Tarzan's ascendance as leader of the gorilla family, along with his consort, Jane, articulates a series of shifting relationships. The implication that Tarzan's ascendance represents the ascendance of human beings over apes remains as the core power relationship, though the ideology underlying this relationship is modified via the gorillas' humanization and Tarzan's difference from Clayton (and other men like him). Differences, then, between these three male characters also represent different ways of exercising power in the world, and Tarzan's ascendance represents the ascendance of a form of "natural" (democratic individualistic, that is, American) leadership over both benevolent classist patriarchy represented by Kerchak and exploitative capitalist patriarchy represented by Clayton. At the same time, the construct of masculinity and humanness at the heart of the film's depiction of Tarzan as "natural" and "wild" reinstates a (rejuvenated) version of macho-masculinity. As "wild man," Tarzan is the new (reevaluated) hardbodied hero of the late 1990s, a model of masculinity, which is legitimated further through Jane's decision to remain with him in the jungle.

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The quotation from Burroughs's novel with which I began this chapter forms part of Tarzan's marriage proposal to Jane after he follows her to America, a proposal which, incidentally, Jane refuses. There are central contradictions between Tarzan's mission to claim Jane and his submission to her will on the one hand, and on the other between the cultural values implicit in the idea of a civilized man (that is, Western, capitalist, democratic, and patriarchal) and the process of (innate) self-fashioning by which Tarzan has become such a man. Such contradictions are perhaps indicative of a sense of crisis in masculinity early last century; alternatively, they perhaps point to the sense in which the "postmodern slide toward the plural and the provisional," whereby masculinity becomes masculinities, is not peculiar to the postmodem era, but symptomatic of the way in which patriarchy has, and still does, shape and reshape gender politics. Tarzan's expression of submission to Jane's will-"I will be whatever you will me to be"-is tantalizingly evocative of the much more recent "new man," but its articulation within a metanarrative which is rigidly patriarchal also points to that insidious complicity within contemporary (re)constructions of masculinity between patriarchy and the structuring of desire according to (Western) romance paradigms. As Kirkham and Thumim suggest, "despite this postmodern slide ... we are still left with 'masculinities' as organized by patriarchal power into certain structures with their signs, their images, and their imperatives" (1993, 26). As with the early 1900s, the 1990s were marked by interest in and conflict between (re)emerging ideals of masculinity, and Beauty and the Beast, Hercules, Mulan, and Tarzan seem to map Disney's versatile capacity to shapechange in response to a changing social climate. Despite the relationship between patriarchy and power, the plurality and provisionality produced by such shape-changing still induces anxiety and instability in the male subject (p. 26). I suggested that Disney's Mulan is the least conservative of the three films discussed. This is partly because of its use of carnivalesque humor and the potential for such humor to irrupt and break boundaries. At the same time, however, the imposition of a Western romantic love paradigm onto the story of Mulan appropriates and contains such potential carnivalesque irruptions in the same way that it appropriates, contains, and "Orientalizes" the story itself. Taken out of context, the "you" addressed by Tarzan, the selfmade civilized wild man, may also be read as referring to the female reader and viewer, and patriarchy itself-masculinity is "whatever [female readers/viewers, society, patriarchal institutions] will it to be." In a modem capitalistic commodity culture, "masculinities, along with other objects of desire, are being 'sold' via filmic representations in order to contain the unsettling experiences of anxiety and lack" (p. 25), and are as much in the service of female desire as male insecurity and patriarchal ideology, especially insofar as female desire is constructed via its submission to the (dominant) paradigm of romantic love.

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Notes Throughout this chapter, "Disney" is used to refer to the production company, not to any individual person. 2. In Cocteau's highly influential version, the love triangle is produced via the introduction of Avenant who, while he has much the same role and character as Gaston, is the object of Belle's love. When Avenant is killed, he is transformed into the Beast, who, in turn, is transformed into the Prince (Ardent) who is played by the same actor playing Avenant. As the Beast, now transformed back to Ardent, explains, Belle loved both Avenant and the Beast, and gets them both, fused. "Love may turn a man into a beast. It can also make an ugly man handsome." 3. Hercules is usually the son of Zeus and Alcmene, hence his mortal but heroic status (see Graves 1960). 4. The ballad begins with Mulan at her weaving loom, grieving that her father has no elder son to take his place in the Emperor's army. Having decided to join the army in his place, she buys a horse, a saddle, a whip, and a bridle and, dressed as a man, bids her family farewell. After ten years of fighting, she is rewarded by the Emperor with honor and permission to return home. Upon her return, she removes her warrior's clothes and, dressed once again as a woman, greets her army comrades with whom she has fought for the last ten years. Disney's adaptation fleshes out this basic frame through the introduction of formulaic Disney fairy tale motifs. 5. Intertexts for Tarzan are extensive, but the main pretexts are Edgar Rice Burroughs's novel Tarzan, King of the Apes and the 1932 MGM production Tarzan, the Ape Man, and the series, which it spawned. Again, significant changes and omissions have been made to Burroughs's story to fit the Disney ninety-minute formula, many of these changes following on from Weissmuller's highly influential portrayal of Tarzan. 6. Burroughs is now notorious for his fantastic constructions of the African continent, and some of Disney's changes, especially to the gorilla family, reflect an increased knowledge of the social behaviors of apes. In Burroughs's novel, Sabor is a lioness, not a leopard, and while she figures as a key protagonist whom Tarzan must defeat-he claims his title "King of the Apes" after killing Sabor-she does not kill his parents. Disney's changes clearly seek to redetine the moral boundaries represented by various characters more clearly, with a leopard-usually associated with cunning and stealth-replacing the lionfrequently portrayed as a "noble beast" as in The Lion King-and further, with the leopard now performing the apes's murderous acts, thereby shifting any moral culpability away from Disney's now very humanized apes. 1.

8 Making the Invisible Visible Stereotypes of Masculinity in Canonized High School Literature INGRID JOHNSTON AND JYOTI MANGAT

[Beowulf] is a man and that for him and many is sufficient tragedy. J. R. R.

TOLKIEN

Although there have been continuing debates about the Western literary canon, teachers know that the corpus of the texts being taught in Canadian high school English classes have remained unchanged for many years (Altmann et aI., 1998). Students are still being introduced to traditional literary works written predominantly by male authors and featuring mainly male protagonists. Despite this male dominance, issues of masculinity are rarely foregrounded in literary study and students are given few opportunities to interrogate conventional assumptions about male gender constructions. Given the invisibility of this gender issue in the educational context, we decided to investigate how students read masculinity in the literature they encounter in school and attempt an evaluation of the extent to which contemporary social views of masculinity are reflected in these texts. Our understanding of the term "masculinity" in the context of this study is based on notions of gender as binary categories constructed through language and hierarchically placed in relation to each other. Davies (1997) explains how the construction of masculinity plays out in this binary: This construction operates in a variety of intersecting ways, most of which are neither conscious nor intended. They are more like an effect of what we might call "speaking-as-usual"; they are inherent in the structures of the language and the story lines through which our culture is constructed and maintained. The structure of the language and the dominant story lines combine, with powerful effect, to operate on our conscious and unconscious minds and to shape our desire. The male-female binary is held in

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to

Through a survey of students' responses to the representation of male characters in their school literature, we hoped to learn how high school boys and girls in a western Canadian high school read and respond to these "dominant story lines." The study was conducted in a mid-sized suburban high school where most of the students and teachers are white and middle class. Before we administered the survey, teachers were interviewed about the texts that students were being introduced to in the regular academic-stream literature classes. Grade 10 students were reading William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit; in Grade 11, they were introduced to William Shakespeare's Macbeth and John Knowles's A Separate Peace or William Golding's Lord of the Flies; in Grade 12, students were studying William Shakespeare's Hamlet, J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, and Arthur Miller's The Crucible or Death of a Salesman. The fact that eight of these ten texts appear on Applebee's (1993) list of book-length works required in public schools in the United States suggests that there is an entrenched school canon that transcends national borders. All of these texts were published more than forty years ago, all are written by British or American writers, and most feature male protagonists. Even Romeo and Juliet, with its double protagonists, and To Kill a Mockingbird, which is focalized through a young girl's eyes, are texts overdetermined by the actions of male characters. In addition, much of the literature being studied as "modem" in contemporary classrooms represents social conventions that are at least half a century old, especially those by the white, Western males. Primarily written in the post-World War II era (with the obvious exception of Shakespeare), these texts reflect a time when assumptions about race, gender, and power relations in the Western world were more homogeneous than in our present moment of "post-Vietnam, post-Watergate blues" (Tomashoff 1999). Over the past thirty years, many changes in North American culture have been a result of the larger social reconfigurations set in motion by the American civil rights movements and the mainstream acceptance of feminist ideals, which overturned traditional understandings of race, culture, and gender. We felt that high-school English classes would be effective locations for exploring how the legacy of this literary past impinges upon a cultural present and what this means for students' constructions of gendered identities. As Martino (1995) suggests, "The English classroom is clearly a site where a number of discourses are brought into play to define multiple and fragmentary positions for both teachers and students" (p. 205). Toni Morrison (1992), in her critique of the invisibility of race in canonized American literature, addresses the question of how readers often fail to

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pay attention to embedded assumptions about race in the books they read. Morrison's uncovering of many underlying assumptions about race in literary texts had the potential to offer insights into the invisibility of masculinity in the canonized school literature. While Morrison eloquently critiques the "absent presence" of African Americans in white-dominated texts, our study raises questions about the unexamined and very present presence of masculinities in male-dominated texts. Morrison's claim that "[u]ntil very recently, and regardless of the race of the author, the readers of virtually all of American fiction have been positioned as white" (1992, xii) might be extended to include the notion that these readers have also been positioned as male. While critics such as Gilbert and Gubar (1979), Eagleton (1986), Schlender (1995), and Goodman (1996) have focused attention on feminist readings of canonical texts, our study intended to gauge how contemporary readers respond when they are asked to make masculinities visible. We wanted to follow Goodman's suggestion that reading with "gender on the agenda" offers one way of focusing on literary texts. It encourages us to see aspects of the texts and the contexts of their creation and reception that we might not otherwise notice. (1996, viii)

The survey for the study, then, was designed to gain insight into some of the following questions: How do today's high school students, brought up with ambiguity about gender roles in contemporary society, respond to reading literature that privileges hegemonic notions of masculinity? Might the reading of canonically entrenched literature be different for adolescent boys and for girls? How are stereotypes of masculinity perpetuated in these texts? Does privileging males as central in texts extend or limit boys' constructions of masculine identities in the contemporary world? How might young female readers respond to the constructions of masculine identities in these texts? We asked students in the Grade 11 and Grade 12 regular academicstream English classes to complete our survey. Seventy students, thirty-five boys and thirty-five girls, taught by four English teachers, volunteered to answer questions about their perspectives on male characters in the literature they had studied during their high school years. Thirty-four of the student participants were in Grade 12 and thirty-six in Grade 11. The students were given the questions in figure 1, together with a list of titles of the full-length texts read at each grade level, and the names of the main male characters (see table 1), and they were given class time to complete the survey. In order to contextualize the study we also interviewed the four English teachers (two male and two female) of these students about their text selection, teaching strategies, and approaches to gender issues in the literature they teach. The theoretical positions espoused by the teachers were expected

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Figure 2. Survey of Student Responses to the Depiction of Male Characters in High School Literary Texts. Please answer the following questions with specific reference to each of the texts that you have read in your grade 10, grade II and/or grade 12 English classes (see attached list): Are you: male _ _ _ _ _ _ female _ _ _ _ _ _ ? Are you: in grade II _ _ _ _ _ _ in grade 12 _ _ _ _ _ _ ? What kinds of character traits do these male characters generally exhibit? Would you describe them as strong or weak males? Why? Please provide specific details. What is the relationship of these characters to their society, environment, and/or social group? How much control do these characters appear to have over their lives in the context of the novels/plays studied? How much control do these characters appear to have over their worlds as presented in the works? How do these male characters interact with other male and female characters in the works you have studied? How would you describe the role of males in today's society? How are these roles ret1ected or not ret1ected in the literature you've read in your English classes? Do you have any other comments about the depiction of male characters in these works?

to impact upon their teaching of literature. Appleyard (1990), in a discussion of approaches to literature teaching, cites a 1981 study by Purves in which two different approaches predominated. The "personalist" and "academic" approaches described in the study relate to the kinds of responses to literature teachers regard as important. Appleyard elaborates the differences between these two positions as follows: The personalist approach values questions that relate to the life of the reader such as "whether the reader finds a connection to the work, whether the work resembles the reader's perception of the world, the lesson of the work, the emotions aroused by the work and its success in involving the reader, and whether the work is serious and significant." The other group took an academic, text-centered approach to literature, focusing on "literary

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Table 1. Full-Length Literary Texts (and Male Characters). Grade 10

Grade 11

Grade 12

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Romeo Mercutio Tybalt Paris

Macbeth Macduff Duncan Ross

Hamlet Claudius Laertes Fortinbras Polonius

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

A Separate Peace by John Knowles

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Atticus Finch Jem Tom Robinson Ewell Boo Radley

Gene Finny (Phineus)

Holden Stradlater Ackley Mr. Antolini

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

Bilbo Baggins Gollum

Piggy Ralph Jack Simon Roger Percival Sam'neric

John Proctor Rev. Hale Rev. Parris Giles Corey

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller Willie Loman Biff Happy Ben Howard devices, language, the relation of technique to content, structure, evaluation of craft, symbols, genre, and tone." (p. 115)

The four teacher participants, three with more than twenty years teaching experience, discussed both these approaches but saw their own teaching as characterized more by a text-centered approach. They all acknowledged the value of the personalist approach for students and paid attention to how literature related to students' lives and experiences, but felt more at ease with the formalist approach in which they had been educated. Three of the four teachers reinforced this view, explaining that they placed more emphasis on textual analysis of literature than on readers' responses to the text. However, all

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suggested that they are incorporating more reader-response approach than in the past. The fourth teacher, a young woman who has been teaching English for just seven years, indicated that she places slightly more emphasis on reader response than on textual analysis. Implied in the teachers' discussions was a concern with the requirements of the provincial examination in Grade 12 which is worth 50 percent of a student's final graduation mark. The multiple-choice section of the test requires close reading and attention to style, tone and meaning. The two written sections of the examination attempt to provide a critical balance that acknowledges both New Critical and reader-response approaches to literature. Despite this, many teachers, including the ones interviewed as part of this study, continue to teach secondary English with more emphasis on New Critical than on reader-response, believing that the more traditional approach will help their students succeed in the examination. Text selection in high school English classes also reinforces the tendency for the predominantly male, predominantly white canon to be selfperpetuating. Although the English teachers in this school explained that they have autonomy in text selection for their students, they nevertheless tend to choose the same texts that appear on school reading lists throughout North America. Eaglestone (2000) suggests one reason for this lack of variety: In English at all levels, the same canonical texts come up again and again, year after year. A person who studied English and has become a teacher often teaches the texts she or he was taught, in part because she or he was taught that these texts were the most important. (p. 56)

In addition, text selection in schools is often based on budgetary restrictions and on what is available in the school bookroom. Both of these factors perpetuate the existing canon. External assessment factors, such as high-stakes testing, also influence teachers' text choices. Teachers in our study made reference to these factors in their comments that they base decisions "on what's in the bookroom" and "on what others in the school are teaching and what else is being taught in the province." The provincial diploma examination again was mentioned as a factor in teachers' text choices; one teacher explained that she chose particular literature so that her students are "not out of line with everyone else." Despite the external issues of examinations and budgets, all four teachers seemed to want to teach texts that would engage students and hold their interest. Interestingly, all of the teachers spoke about their desire to teach books that they themselves enjoyed. One teacher explained, "I choose what I like because then at least I'm not faking it with the kids. I can't teach what I don't like." Often, the texts teachers "like" are the ones they were introduced to in high school, again perpetuating the traditional reading lists. For example, one teacher commented that she chose to

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teach Arthur Miller's The Crucible in her Grade 12 classes because she had read and enjoyed the play when she was a high school student. Teachers in the study usually introduce texts by placing them in both social and political contexts. For example, two teachers described how they introduce The Crucible with discussions about the McCarthyism of 1950s America and the Salem witch-hunts of the seventeenth century, and To Kill a Mockingbird with race relations in the Depression-era South. Provided with this kind of context for their reading, students were typically asked to move between two reading stances. One requires close reading of a text in order to analyze themes, style, and characterization, and the other a more personal approach that encourages them to make explicit links between the literature, their own lives, and the world outside the text. This dual focus of reading attention reflects Appleyard's comments that when teenagers are asked about their responses to books they have read (both inside and outside the classroom), they tend to give three kinds of responses. First, they explicitly mention the experience of involvement with the book and identification with the character. Second, they talk about the realism of the story, and lastly, they say that a good story makes them think" (p. 100). Appleyard comments that these three interrelated responses represent a sequence of deepening penetrations into the relationship between previously unquestioned experiences and the newly discovered need to understand and judge them ... The adolescent has become what the juvenile was not, an observer and evaluator of self and others. (pp. 100-1)

Implicitly, the questions in our survey encourage students to consider their own identifications with the male characters in the books they had read. At the same time they were also being asked to step back and reflect upon their own observations and to offer a critique of the social codes constructed in the texts. All four teachers were asked whether they use any texts in which issues of gender are particularly significant. One of the teachers responded that she "[doesn't] take a gendered approach to literature" but also recognized that "everything I'm teaching with my Grade 12s is pretty male-oriented: Death of a Salesman, Hamlet, The Catcher in the Rye." The other three teachers responded that they sometimes focused on feminist issues in full-length texts such as To Kill a Mockingbird and Macbeth and in some short stories, such as Katherine Mansfield's "Brill" and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper." Even though our question asked about both genders, these teachers saw gender as relating specifically to women's issues. In the interview, one of the two male teachers, when questioned further about issues of masculinity in literature said, "I hadn't really thought of [masculinity]; 1 guess I'm more conscious of feminist issues. Maybe I've unconsciously accepted

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traditional notions of masculinity and don't even see them as issues." It was evident from our teachers interviews that questions of masculinity and the representation of male characters were not being addressed in these literature classes and that our study was the first time that students and teachers alike were considering such issues. The seventy students responded to the survey with enthusiasm and interest. Most students answered all the questions, although in a few cases, a number of questions were left blank. In the quotation of students' responses that follows, we have edited students' spelling but otherwise have remained faithful to their language choices. Asked about the character traits exhibited by the male protagonists in their school literature, students responded broadly along gendered lines. In table 2 we outline the most common responses to this question. The number in parentheses indicates the number of times each characteristic was mentioned in the survey. We have included only those descriptors generated by students that appeared more than once.

Table 2. Male Character Traits. Number of Boys' Responses

Number of Girls' Responses

Strong (9) Dominant (5) Heroic (4) Father figure (3) Not impulsive (3) Powerful (3) Stubborn (3) Ambitious (2) Brave (2) Controlled (2) Courageous (2) Confused (2) Independent (2) Weak, become strong (2)

Strong (8) Dominant (6) Powerful (5) Aggressive (4) Heroic (3) Arrogant (3) Not compassionate (3) Ambitious (2) Macho (2) Self-centered (2) Protectors (2) Confused (2) Innocent (2) Vulnerable (2)

While the top two characteristics in both the male and the female responses are the same ("strong" and "dominant"), the character traits that are mentioned with less frequency provide insight into the nuances of gendered readings of the same texts. Where the boys in our study described male protagonists as "father figures," "not impulsive," and "brave," the girls used such terms as "aggressive," "arrogant," and "not compassionate." The girls appeared to have a less positive view of the male protagonists in the literature than the boys, although the criticisms implied in the girls' descriptions are mitigated by their acknowledgement of many of these protagonists as "innocent" and "vulnerable."

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The thirty-five boys in our study tended to focus on characteristics of independence, stubbornness, and authority. Boys suggested that male characters generally exhibit "strong, dominant tendencies" and have "control over their surroundings." They chose adjectives such as "noble and strong" to describe characters who "face an internal struggle." The boys believed that the males held important roles in the social worlds of the literature. For example, they commented: Generally, with a few exceptions, the male characters are attempting to dominate others in their lives. Most often the males are in a position to influence the events of the story because of the stature given to them as members of society in the novels.

Several boys related these characteristics to specific protagonists they had read about: The male characters so far have been generally strong. They exhibit traits of wanting something and are willing to do anything to get it; for example, both Macbeth and Romeo are like this. The males are usually strong, independent characters-for example Romeo from Romeo and Juliet was a strong character with independence who fought through the whole book. I would describe the characters as strong in either body or mind. In Macbeth he has a strong body, that of a warrior, however his mind is weakened. In To Kill a Mockingbird Atticus Finch's mind is strong and his body is not. Most of the males exhibit strong features that show masculinity. For example, when Atticus shoots the dog with the sheriff's rifle, when Boo Radley protects Jem and his sister from Ewell. Most male characters are strong and seem to have a sense of themselves. They are confident (Finny in A Separate Peace), have their own set of personal morals (Romeo), and in the end, they triumph over the conflict (Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird).

The thirty-five girls commented more frequently on traits of aggression and arrogance, considering that male characters had "power" and were usually "quite arrogant and self-centered." Girls emphasized that protagonists exhibit a need to "prove machismo." They described these characters as "dominating" and "craving a lot of attention," rarely showing any traits that were "sentimental or compassionate." One girl explained:

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Men are dominating over females in the literature. For example, in "The Yellow Wallpaper" the husband over his wife, and in Hamlet, Polonius over Ophelia. And another commented: They [male characters] may be strong physically but in stories such as Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, A Separate Peace, we see characters who are mentally weak and highly susceptible to the characters around them. And one girl thought that there was a shift in the characteristics of male characters between the literature read in Grade 10 and the literature read in Grade 12: In Grade 10 I found the male figures to seem strong and knowledgeable. For example, Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird was patient and wise, while perhaps Romeo was none of these things but at least emotionally strong and full of character. As were the characters often in Grade II. In Grade 12 however, the males seem to be dull individuals lacking emotional intuition and compassion beyond a closed-minded idea of what the problem should be. There are some subtle contrasts in the language choices of boys and girls to describe characteristics of male characters. Boys tend to focus more on qualities of reason and strength, with descriptors such as "controlled," "brave," "knowledgeable," and "lots of thinking." They comment predominantly on qualities characters do possess. Girls included more emotional qualities, using terms such as "power-hungry," "jealous," "obsessed with honor," and they also include qualities or attributes that characters do not possess, for example "not sensitive," "not sentimental," "not compassionate," and "not very intelligent." These responses support the arguments of researchers such as Davies (1997, 1993) and Francis (2000), who contend that gender plays out in particular oppositional ways in Western society. In this construction of gender, often considered integral to a successful social identity, masculine attributes include qualities of rationality, strength, aggression, and independence, and feminine attributes include qualities of emotion, care, cooperation, and dependence (Francis 2000, IS). Although both Davies and Francis stress the blurring of these boundaries in contemporary society, they make the point that children still go to extraordinary lengths to maintain the perceived core values behind constructions of masculinity and femininity. These gender boundaries appear to play out in students' responses in our study, with boys and girls maintaining notable differences in their attitudes towards the male characters portrayed in their school literature. In response

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to the second question (table 3) about whether male characters were strong or weak, almost twice as many boys as girls agreed that they were strong. A larger proportion of girls commented on the appearance rather than the reality of strength in the characters portrayed. Table 3. Are the Male Characters Strong or Weak? Boys' Responses

Girls' Responses

20 students said "strong" 4 students said "weak" 5 students said "move from strong to weak" 4 students said "appear strong but are weak"

11 students said "strong" 5 students said "weak" 5 students said "move from strong to weak" 9 students said "appear strong but are weak"

Similarly, girls and boys in the study differed in their opinions about the degree of control that male characters appear to exert over their lives and the decisions they make. Boys were more inclined to see the male characters in a positive light, commenting that protagonists have a measure of control over their lives even if they have little control over their worlds as represented in the texts. They attempted to rationalize the level of control these characters were really able to exert, commenting that: The characters all seem to shape their lives by decisions they make. Often these decisions are not influenced by others, so it shows a lot of control over their lives. Basically, the male characters have some status in their respective societies, so it is possible to somewhat control their lives. Atticus seems to have most of the control of his life. Macbeth not so much, as his fate is already decided by the witches. Most characters have a guiding force that leads them throughout their lives (Macbeth-the witches' prophecy; Atticus Finch-the events in the town; Romeo-love).

Girls, in contrast, generally consider that male protagonists have little control over the worlds they inhabit in the texts. In addition, they disagree with the boys about the degree of control these characters have over their lives. Girls' comments focus on the appearance, rather than the reality of control that male characters exert over their destinies. One girl suggested that protagonists "appear in the beginning to have control over their lives" and another explained that "they believe that they are in control when really they're not." Several others elaborated:

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1ngrid Johnston and Jyoti Mangat They "appear" to have control over their lives at the beginning of the books but somehow everything goes spiraling out of control. They do not seem to have much control over their lives. They aren't often strong enough to stop their misfortunes from occurring. Macbeth relies far too much on fate and witchcraft to make intelligent, decisive decisions. One more example is Romeo and Juliet where Romeo seems unstable and emotionally compulsive. They [male characters] don't seem to be incredibly stable. Usually one incident triggers a point where they freak (i.e. death of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet when Romeo goes crazy).

Girls and boys in the study demonstrate more agreement about the question of how male characters interact with other male and female characters in the literature. Both tend to characterize male-male relationships as "equal" but often "marred by conflict" because the males are "competing" with one another. Students of both sexes also overwhelmingly agree that male characters tend to "dominate" and "control" female characters. Some boys, however, consider this control as a form of protection of women. For example, one boy wrote: "In many cases, the male heroes are trying to protect the females from harm." Another boy commented that the male characters "act as protectors or authority figures," and a third explained that "these male characters generally tend to take the role of a protector to women." Girls were more scathing in their comments about male-female relationships in the literature. They include comments such as "males treat females as if they're not very important," "they are patronizing to women," and "they think they're superior and treat women as objects." One girl explained that "males tend to want to control the relationship and regard females condescendingly." Another elaborated, "Often the men treat them as if they are just amusing creatures and that they must humor them." These attitudinal differences between boys and girls in the study are even more pronounced in their responses to questions regarding their perceptions of the roles of males in today's society. The boys' comments on their own changing roles in society suggest that they feel ambivalent and uncertain about their place in the world. Many boys also believe that traditional notions of masculinity have changed as a result of feminism and not as a result of a reevaluation of male roles per se. Representative boys' comments in table 4 suggest a perception of themselves as "other" in society and as acted upon rather than being in control of social direction. In their comments about changing roles of men, boys spoke in terms of the diminution of their place in the world and a sense of nostalgia for the past. They saw themselves as having come down in the world and as searching for new ways of being in a

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Table 4. Role of Males in Today's Society. Boys' Responses

Girls' Responses

They are not really predominant because women are becoming equal.

Today males and females are more equal with their roles in society.

Hierarchy of male/female is still evident in real life (in wages and success).

The role of males in today's society is to command society and still, in some cases, women are treated as second class citizens.

Men have come down in their roles as providers.

The roles of males in the real world are totally opposite from what we read.

They are trying to hold much of society together without knowing how to do it.

They are not as big a deal or as powerful as they used to be. This is because women are stronger and have a larger role in society.

They have become somewhat obsolete, as women can do similar things now, making them universal roles.

In Western society men are many things: they are loving fathers, violent criminals, avid capitalists, athletes and other things. But in the literature we studied they were stereotyped and all similar, very unlike society.

Males are quickly becoming society's underdog sex as more and more attention is turned towards women's rights.

Men and women are equalized more and more every day. Sometimes [men are] humbled more than they deserve, sometimes not.

Males have changed in today's society, not due to the evolution of the male persona, but rather due to the evolution of the position of women changing the structure of the society in which we live.

Males are still dominant and powerful figures in today's society. Politics is completely dominated by males, as well as professional sports and top end jobs.

The role of the male in society is generally basically equal to the women; there are still some stereotypes involved that are hard to get rid of.

Males are still more powerful in politics and government. In other high-level occupations there is still a male majority. But there is less inequality than in previous times.

Men today are just living out their lives.

In Western society I'd certainly say that men have lost some of their traditional power. This is reflected somewhat in the search for control that many of them (male characters) seem to go through in literature, but they are often still the dominant presence.

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Table 5. How Are the Roles of Males in Today's Society Reflected or Not Reflected in Your School Literature? Boys' Responses

Girls' Responses

Male characters don't reflect the world we live in.

In the Ii terature we read the males are usually (in theory) dominant.

Male characters arc generally not reflective of males in real life.

Males' emotional instability is reflected in the literature we study. In the literature, males start in roles of power, but are worn down, and lose their power disgracefully in the end. (Macbeth)

The Ii terature we read still depicts males as they used to be; the literature should be updated.

Of the books we read, most of the males are portrayed as weak and not what the stereotypical male in society is ... that's funny in a sorry way.

Literature does not reflect the changing roles-literature is set in the past and depiction of characters seems outdated.

Male characters seem to be split between wimpy and whiny (Romeo, Hamlet, Macbeth) and violent and commanding (Claudius).

Our novels do not reflect that men and women are equal in the classroom and that men are dominant in society because the situations and age groups are not representative of us.

Today's males are not reflected in the novels we read. In the literature, the majority of the men are superior and treat women badly.

Most of the novels we read don't reflect the males in society today. Most of the men in novels deal with mainly patriarchal societies, which is not what ours is. In the novels, it seldom seems equal opportunity. Most male characters are domineering; they are portrayed as leaders that must be strong at all times. They strive to reach goals that, though pushed on them, they accept.

Males in today's society are less domineering and overbearing than they are portrayed in the novels we read. Males are depicted as macho and on the top of society's class system, which in today's world is not completely true. The males in our novels also seem to be air-headed and often stupid. Men are depicted as the unintelligent people of society instead of women.

Roles in literature are not reflective of today's society.

Male characters always seem to be extreme. There is no just regular Joe.

Males' roles as equal to females are not reflected in literature, as in school we do not study modem stories, usually older stories.

Men appear less powerful today than in the novels we've read. Most novels are from earlier times.

Male characters are depicted from noncurrent eras where they usually fill conventional roles.

I'd have to say that it has been the female's role which has changed in literature and society drastically. Male roles in literature don't seem to have changed all that much.

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more equal society. While boys spoke wistfully about losing what they believe men had in the past, the girls spoke more about males still having positions of power, and still acting "better, stronger, tougher, cooler ... compared to everyone else." They felt that "while men don't have all the power, they still have the majority." They comment that while men are "not as big a deal or as powerful as they used to be," they "are still dominant and powerful figures in today's society." A number of the girls concede that these changing roles might create a disconcerting place for men. One girl, for example, comments that gender roles are "equalized more and more every day. Sometimes, [men] are humbled more than they deserve. Sometimes not." Another acknowledges that "females today seem to be the same little girls that want to be taken care of, but they also want the power to take care of themselves." The tone of the boys' responses, as shown through representative samples in table 4, is generally one of nostalgia for a more certain past, while the girls' responses suggest that men still had a long way to go in accepting their changing present and future roles. Boys in the study overwhelming support the notion that perspectives on masculinities in the literature they read in school is outdated. Girls are more divided in their views, with only half agreeing with this view. Many girls consider that the male dominance portrayed in the literature, though mitigated, is often still in evidence in society today. The vast majority of the boys consider that their in-school literature is not reflective of the roles of males in contemporary society and that the "literature does not reflect the changing roles-[itj is set in the past and the depiction of characters seems outdated." Students seemed to acknowledge that the male characters in their school literary texts are often stereotypes of traditional masculinity. As the sample comments in table 5 show, there is consensus among boys and girls that the literature they are reading in school is dated. Girls, although less convinced than boys that the role of men portrayed in their texts was outdated, comment on some of the stereotypes at work in the texts that aim to "make us think that all men are dominant," that they are "superior and treat women badly." Our study suggests that today's young men and women differ in their perceptions of the role of male characters in the literature they read in school and in their understandings of the positioning of men in contemporary society. Boys, as insiders to the issue of masculinity, appear to have internalized many of the stereotypes of masculinity that appear in the books they read. Even when boys see these expectations as unrealistic and stereotypical, they are still drawn towards them and they find it difficult to relinquish the illusion of control. As Faludi (l999a) explains: Today it is men who cling more tightly to their illusions. They would rather see themselves as battered by feminism than shaped by the larger culture. Feminism can be demonized as just a "natural" force, trying to wrest men's

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Ingrid Johnston and Jyoti Mangat natural power and control from their grasp. Culture, by contrast, is the whole environment we live in; to acknowledge its sway is to admit that men never had the power they imagined. To say that men are embedded in the culture, is to say, by the current standards of masculinity, that they are not men. (p. 14)

Girls, as outsiders, seem more skeptical and dismissive of the ideological stance of received notions of masculinity. We infer from their comments that they believe their positioning allows them to see through the facrade of masculine control and the mirage of power. Coexisting with this disdain is girls' apparent acknowledgment of their own marginalized positions within this structure. As a result, they seem aware of the very real consequences of men's historically advantaged positions and see these as operating to varying degrees in contemporary society. Girls' perspectives are revealed in part through the tone adopted in their written responses to questions of masculinities in their school literature, evident in such comments as "male characters seem to be split between wimpy and whiny and violent and commanding" and "males' emotional instability is reflected in the literature we study. In the literature, men start in roles of power but are worn down and lose their power disgracefully in the end." The girls' sense of being outsiders to the issue under discussion appears to relate to their ironic and somewhat superior stance towards the male characters. It seems that girls actively resist "the capacity of men and boys to play the victim and thereby to mobilize women's sympathy and support" (Skelton 1998). Although aware that social equality has not yet been fully achieved, the young women in our study exhibit a confidence about their gendered identity formations that is in sharp contrast to the sense of male disempowerment evident in the responses of the young men. Implicit in the tone of the boys' comments is a recognition that the status of males in today's society is being eroded and that boys find it difficult to come to terms with how to position themselves in this shifting landscape. Faludi (I 999b ) attributes this angst to a lack of context for how contemporary males are expected to behave: Modem debates about how men are exercising or abusing their control and power neglect to raise whether a lack of mooring, a lack of context, is causing men's anguish. If men are the masters of their fate, what do they do about the unspoken sense that they are being mastered in the marketplace and at home, by forces that seem to be sweeping away the soil beneath their feet? If men are mythologized as the ones who make things happen, then how can they begin to analyze what is happening to them? (p. 51)

Students in our study clearly showed that they did have perspectives on the construction of masculinity in their school texts and in society at large and

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were insightful in their identifications of stereotypes in the canonized texts they studied. Our survey may have brought these issues temporarily to the surface, but it was fairly clear from the tone of the responses that issues of masculinity are more invisible to the boys than to the girls. The girls' slightly mocking tones indicate that while they rarely had opportunities to examine perspectives on masculinity within the contexts of their English classes they were certainly aware of them. The boys, in contrast, appear far more earnest in their comments and were more inclined to buy into the mythology of male control presented in the texts. Their responses suggest that they had not paid much critical attention to issues of masculinity. This may be because social constructions of Western masculinity are so deeply embedded within the literary canon so as to be invisible to those who are supposedly represented in these texts. This study supports Martino's (1995) assertion that the literature teachers choose to study in the English classroom is an important consideration "in promoting a particular ideological perspective in the classroom and that this is a step in opening up possibilities for students to consider the effects and workings of dominant discourses in their own lives" (p. 205). Martino further argues that this approach of encouraging students to develop an understanding of how texts work to promote particular readings and to position them to respond in particular ways "can form the basis of a strategic attempt on behalf of the teacher to get students to question, challenge and reflect upon their own positioning within such discourses" (p. 205). The study suggests that contemporary high school students are aware of the ambiguities about gender roles in the literature they read and in the society in which they live but we found that the girls were generally far more comfortable with the ambiguities surrounding masculinity than the boys. Teachers in Canadian classrooms may continue to ask students to read canonical school texts with male protagonists that position males as the implied reader, but perhaps by questioning this centrality, both boys and girls can expand their perceptions of masculine identities in the contemporary world. The feminist movement has created opportunities for girls to question the invisibility of gender in a previously male-dominated world. An increasing focus on issues of masculinity may create the same opportunities for boys.

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Challenging the Phallic Fantasy in Young Adult Fiction KERRY MALLAN

A significant appeal of some traditional literary genres is their ability to play with desire, to promise oneiric fantasies of success, romance, and adventure. Through the power of their words to convey images, these stOlies interweave the linguistic and the visual and thereby seduce readers by offering tantalizing dreams of an objective reality which shows the "truth." However, as Langbauer (1990, 188) points out, recent poststructuralist literary theory and criticism have opened out the ways for investigating "this privileging of sight and the way language attempts to lay claim to it." There are historical links between cinematic and literary realism in that both are bound to the relation between the spectator/reader and the visual. Both forms have the capacity to evoke identificatory desires as well as to convey disturbing realities. In order to "see" the discourses which shape the imaginary relation between text and reader, and to disentangle the web of accompanying associations and assumptions implied in texts, representations of gender and sexuality need to be foregrounded and deconstructed. In their critiquing of the phallocentric order, with its similar claims to realism of authority, truth, and objectivity, feminists have interrogated visual/textual representation and the way it supports the valorization of phallocentrism (see Mulvey 1975; Irigaray 1985). However, more recent feminist theories contest this valorization by reconsidering the woman as an active, desiring subject rather than a passive object of the male look or gaze (see Doane 1991). Mulvey's influential paper on phallocentrism and visual representation contends that "vision" itself is male: to look is a male prerogative while "to-belooked-at-ness" is the fate of the female. This deterministic and totalizing view of sexual difference and hierarchy is based on the argument that phallocentrism ultimately depends on the image of the castrated woman. This idea of the mark of castration as a "lack" which designates the feminine arises from psychoanalytic theories which contend that the absence of the penis ensures woman's vis-

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ibility while at the same time reassures the male order of its exclusive possession of the symbolic phallus (Lacan 1990; Butler 1993). Yet such privileging of the phallus and its relations of dominance and submission closes off other possibilities for male and female ways of being. In order to consider these other possibilities, we need to challenge rather than naturalize this image; to see it for what it is: a phallic fantasy. This runs counter to Lacan's (1990) theory of the phallus which contends that "the phallus is not a fantasy" (p. 79), but "a privileged signifier" (p. 82): a signifier of difference. The notion of phallic fantasy derives from Western culture's privileging of a particular form of "phallic" masculinity. Such privileging means that the male body is understood as phallic: hard and impenetrable. The female body is its opposite: soft and penetrable. The focus on a specific part of the male/female anatomy (penis/vagina) is a synecdoche for the whole masculine/feminine body. Such bodily imagos of masculinity and femininity not only articulate and confirm a hierarchical power relationship between men and women, but also offer a fixed and limited view of gender relations and inter/intra gender subjectivity. As Waldby (1995, 273) contends: "Phallic fantasy can only be maintained when it has penetrable bodies to feed on, and if women systematically refuse to bear the weight of these kinds of projection then it falters." Whilst the phallic fantasy privileges a hegemonic masculinity and denies female agency, there are, nevertheless, both benefits and losses for men. As this chapter will later suggest, these losses (in relation to identity/ subjectivity, gender relations, and sexuality) while apparently alienating and harmful for men, may eventually be an added impetus for challenging dominating modes of patriarchal masculinity. This chapter looks at four Young Adult (YA) novels and the various representations of masculinity they offer: The Secret of Sarah Byrnes (Crutcher 1996); Heroes (Cormier 1998); Tyro (McRobbie 1999); and Postcards from No Man's Land (Chambers 1999). These novels, written by male writers from the United States, Australia, and Britain present masculinity in its various guises over different and, at times, shifting time periods. From a literary perspective, there are common themes such as "heroic" masculine subjectivity, male sexuality, homosociality, and violence, which link the books. These themes serve as convenient entry points for critiquing masculinities and their associated gender relations, oppressions, and opportunities. Rather than approach the texts through a plot-by-plot description, I want to focus on their specular effects in order to unravel the complexities of representation. In questioning the authority of surface appearances and by attending to detail, I hope to discover what Irigaray (1985) considered as those blind spots and peripheries outside male speculation. By refusing to accept realism's claim to transparency, we might well resist its illusory charm and consider its nightmarish effects.

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Subverting "Heroic" Masculine Subjectivity Whilst the hero tale has been, as Hourihan (1997) suggests, central to Western storytelling and cultural consciousness since the earliest times, it is, nevertheless, undergoing a transformation. This transformation is apparent in both film and literature targeting child and adult audiences/readers. Action women and girls, the comic buddy partnerships, the parodic, camp avenger, and the more-brains-Iess-brawn masculine protagonist are the visible characterizations which signal and form part of the generic shift. Such transformations have not erased the outmoded heroic ideal; portrayals of the traditional "hero" continue to offer a nostalgic and celebratory adherence to a conventional form of heroic masculine subjectivity with its emphasis on individuality and, at times, alienation from the social (Lucas 1998). In some cases, these conventional heroic types are paradoxes as they appear to celebrate (white) male dominance, superiority, and power while at the same time convey the "unsustainable cost of such a masculine figure" (p. 143). Such contradictions, reversals, and erasures, which are often inscribed in literary texts, offer possibilities for writing and reading stereotypes against the grain, and for seeing the play between (rather than the veracity of) surface images. By attending to the literary tricks and illusions of the realist tradition (such as: the omniscient narrator; the persuasiveness of first person; its visual metaphors; the attention to detail; its supposedly objective picture of reality; ideological embeddedness) we can see other visions which may not necessarily be those of the narrator. Heroes (1998) foregrounds its subject from the outset, but it is only after reading the novel that the ironic note of the title can be realized. This is not a book about cultural icons, idealized manhood, or courage under fire. Rather, it shows the "unsustainable cost" of such masculine myths. It concerns itself with illusory surfaces: what appears as real, true, and brave is often a facrade masking untruth, danger, and vulnerability. In creating illusions, the eyes are tricked into seeing something which doesn't exist. Cormier employs the motif of detail to create this trompe-l'oeil. In setting up his male protagonists, Cormier invites the reader to see how the authority of the visual comes to represent empirical evidence of accepted or universal truths. Unlike Campbell's hero with a thousand faces, Francis has his face blown off as a result of falling on a grenade, a deed which is hailed by the military, the press, and the townsfolk as an act of bravery: "You're a goddam hero ... Little Francis Cas savant. Falls on a grenade and saves-how many men did you save, Francis? How many men were you willing to die for?" (p. 37). This is the official story of wartime heroics. The true story, according to Francis, is that he wanted to die and saw the grenade as the way to achieve this end. Francis disguises his disfigured, grotesque appearance by covering it in bandages, scarves, and a Red Sox cap. The grotesque is vividly described:

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I have no face ... no ears to speak of, just bits of dangling flesh .... My nostrils are like two small caves ... my teeth are gone ... my gums began to shrink, however, and the dentures have become loose and they click when I talk and slip around inside my mouth. I have no eyebrows. (p. 1)

The wartime "hero" is forced to go undercover literally. His appearance is disturbing and frightens children, and adults tum away to avoid looking at him. Without his familiar face he is assured anonymity; he becomes a nonentity and his former identity has been erased along with his face. The public cannot celebrate a hero without a face, as this works against the culturally constructed image of the returned (intact) soldier: without a full body, the reality and violence of war become unpalatable truths which destroy the appeal of the heroic myth. Furthermore, the emasculating effect of the violated body destroys the phallic fantasy, as a doctor unsympathetically advises Francis, a blind girl is his only chance for finding a sexual partner. As phallocentrism relies on the valorization of the visual as a way of ensuring its authority and dominance, by removing sight, the phallic presence cannot depend on the visual to support it. By way of contrasting images, Larry LaSalle is the embodiment of the conventional masculine hero. Larry's return to his home town is celebrated by a parade, a glowing newspaper report heralds the arrival of the returned local hero, and the award of the Silver Star for bravery confers and confirms his heroism. Again, detail supplies the visual authority. The phallic imagery of Larry's material body signifies its impenetrability, hardness, and weaponlike capacity: "His slenderness was knifelike now, lethal, his features sharper, nose and cheekbones" (p. 62); "a lean hard body" (p. 62). His image is constructed in terms of an amalgam of Hollywood hunk and classical Greek iconography: "A tall slim man stepped into view, a lock of blond hair tumbling over his forehead, a smile that revealed dazzling moviestar teeth" (p. 29). Such stereotypical imaging underscores the cultural constructedness of a hegemonic bodily imago and leaves no doubt about the visual authority of the courageous, heroic marine. However, there is a subtle shift in the heterosexual phallic fantasy, as Larry is also described as having: "the broad shoulders of an athlete and the narrow hips of a dancer" (p. 29). This seemingly incompatible, yet classical coupling of the athlete and the dancer blurs the boundaries between masculine and feminine bodily ideals (broad shoulders/narrow hips) and schemata of masculinity and femininity. (The stereotype that all male dancers are gay, for example.) As if to dispense totally with any misreading of his true heterosexual identity, Larry rapes young Natalie, a girl he can only describe in terms of her sameness to other females and her desirability as a treat to be savored and devoured, a bitch in heat-"The sweet young things, Francis. Even their heat is sweet ... " (p. 81). The fact that this violation occurs while the two are dancing adds a particularly potent

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visual sexual metaphor for the choreography of war and sexuality as a series of physical maneuvers, bodily contact, and penetration into unknown ten-itory. The phallic materiality of Larry's body is further strengthened by the costume and masquerade of the male hero. Lan-y's marine uniform acts as a signifier of his heroic subjectivity and insulates the vulnerable and penetrable (feminine) body within. Like the knights and wan-iors of the past, Larry stands triumphant before the adoring crowd, resplendent in his military guise: "Lany LaSalle stood on the platform, resplendent in the green uniform with the lieutenant's bars on his shoulders and the ribbons and medals on his chest" (p. 62). Before the rape, Larry removes his medals and ribbons (which he mockingly refers to as "scrambled eggs") and rolls up the sleeves of his shirt. The body is thus transformed from hero to everyman with the implication of change from godlike status to mere mortal. In the end, this novel cannot help but become what it seeks to destroy: the myth of heroic masculinity is perpetuated and sustained. Violence remains the ultimate solution. Francis, determined to avenge Natalie's rape by killing Lan-y, becomes the embodiment of the traditional Westem gunfighter: with a gun at his thigh and an avenging heart, Francis walks through the streets in the early moming towards Lan-y's home. However, Francis is denied retribution as Lany offers to kill himself and save Francis the trouble. Lan-y's decision can be read as a final heroic gesture in that by killing himself Francis is free of any criminal act. It can also be seen as a moral reminder and confirmation of the novel's adherence to a traditional heroic nan-ative structure where the forces of darkness are ultimately defeated. Larry's body is now broken, his dancer's legs are all but useless, and killing himself seems a logical solution to a lifetime of physical pain. Francis, too, is given a possible solution to his cun-ent disfigurement and estrangement-plastic surgery, another violence to the body. Thus, the body as an illusory surface can be refashioned, reimaged, and reinvented. While Heroes may ultimately be read as a revisionist heroic nan-ative, with its consistent questioning of the hero as the epitome of masculine proving and individualism, there is a significant departure from conventional heroic masculinity which is evidenced in Francis's complicity in raping Natalie. The night this assault occurs, Francis is told to go home by Lan-y, but instead he hides in the shadows and witnesses the sounds, if not the sights, of the act. Thus through his silence and inaction he betrays his friend. Such actions can also be read as Francis's desire to participate in the mythos of masculine collectivity through his absent presence. By stepping out of the shadows and attempting to intervene on behalf of Natalie, Francis threatens the homosocial bonds between Larry (as the older male and patriarchal figure) and himself (as the boy wanting to become the man). Rather than risk being alienated from the group, Francis decides to lie about his age and enlist

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in the army as a way of escape (and a way of joining the company of other men). After the grenade incident, he becomes a faceless vigilante who would rather commit murder than publicly debunk the myth of the local hero. It is this aspect of desire, in terms of the characters' identifications with hegemonic masculinity, that is central to understanding the phallic fantasy and how it attempts to naturalize social practices of being a man as well as the erotic potential required by such an identification with the phallus.

Desire, Masculinity, and Sexuality The rape of Natalie seems a useful starting point for seeing how the phallic fantasy, with its vertical power relations, is enacted in its most literal sense. By accepting the argument posed earlier that the bodily imagos of masculinity and femininity assume the impenetrability of the male and the penetrability of the female, we accord too much power to the phallic fantasy and limit the ways male and female sexuality can be conceived and experienced. When the male body is also viewed as penetrable, such a violation or threat of penetration causes fissures in the absolute boundaries created by the phallic imagination. Certainty is never assured with any identification as there is always a price to pay. As Butler observes: This "being a man" and this "being a woman" are internally unstable affairs. They are always beset by ambivalence precisely because there is a cost in every identification, the loss of some other set of identifications, the forcible approximation of a norm one never chooses, a norm that chooses us, but which we occupy, reverse, resignify to the extent that the norm fails to determine us completely. (1993, 126-7)

The desire to be one of the boys is a significant part of the identification with masculine collectivity even when the costs of such identification are high. This point was realized in Heroes with Francis's decision to keep silent and invisible while Natalie was being raped. As Buchbinder (1998) notes, patriarchal power operates through exclusion and marginalization. Whilst women are part of this exclusion/marginalization so too are individual men or groups of men who do not conform to the ideological or sexual norms of the dominant group. In Tyro the ways enclaves of "them" and "us" are enforced and the effects of marginalization supply the dominant theme for exploring homosocial desire and masculinity as it is experienced through the body. McRobbie also invokes the visual as a means for enabling the reader to see through the (third-person) narrator's eyes and those of the male protagonists. The male gaze is a means of both surveillance and voyeurism. Male and female bodies are scrutinized, male genitals are observed and handled, and eyes track movements and gestures. The play of shadows, obstructing or obscuring

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direct vision, serves to conceal the identity of the transgressors, allowing them to elude detection and naming, and to secure the margins as a site of transgression and disruption. Tyro highlights the ways that social class intersects with gender in constructing masculine subjectivity. The setting of a Scottish shipyard in 1953 provides the ideal mise-en-scene for playing out class and masculine differences and hierarchies. Andrew is singled out from the beginning as "a member 0' the upper crust" (p. 14), "a member of the nobility" (p. 22) because of his high school education at an elite school and his middle-class patterns of speech and behavior. Andrew soon learns the costs of becoming one of the workers. Part of the initiation rites is to strip a new apprentice and grease his genitals. This act of violation is carried out by the lowly and unpopular Jack Coultree and The Tigers (two third-year apprentices). The perpetrators see this transgressive act as a leveller, a way of erasing class and workplace hierarchies and ensuring that the new kid on the dock becomes one of the boys. After Andrew is subjected to this humiliating act, Coultree throws him a rag and tells him to "clean yerself up" (p. 47). This gesture with its connotation of disgust strips away the phallic fantasy by equating the male genitals and their greasing with the female vagina and menstruation and the culturally construed associations of uncleanliness and shame. Furthermore, the grease stain on Andrew's overalls serves as a visual symbol of his rite of passage and heroic masculine subjectivity; it is seen and regarded as a "badge of honor" and "a war wound" (p. 52). This disrupts any male-female comparison, as a period stain, while initially regarded as a rite of passage into womanhood, forever becomes a mark of embarrassment and further evidence of women's leaking, open, bodily spaces. The unclean female body and its cleansing before sexual intercourse is taken up in Postcards from No Man's Land (Chambers 1999). This novel utilizes an alternating dual-voiced narration by teenage Jacob and Geertrui, a dying Dutch woman. Geertrui recalls her life as a young, nineteen-year-old girl in Holland during World War II and her love for young Jacob's grandfather, also called Jacob. On the night of her first sexual experience, Geertrui prepares her body for Jacob. Ashamed of her body sweat and surface dirt, Geertrui castigates herself for having such an unclean, and therefore sexually uninviting, body: "I felt unfit for him" (p. 214). Smelling of the evening's cooking, house dust, the odors of the hen coop, the cheesy smell of the dairy, and her own "body sweat and sex odor" (p. 214), Geertrui begins the cleansing ritual-inspecting, bathing, scrubbing, scenting, oiling, cutting, drying, and dressing-before she walks to Jacob's hideout in the barn. The fact that Jacob receives her unshaven, dishevelled, unwashed, dressed in stale and dirty clothes, and with dirty, bloodstained bandages covering leg wounds does not matter. She is the sexual object to be received, smelt, tasted, and touched. As if to cast Geertrui's preparations in sharp contrast to male bodily

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presentation, young Jacob, after a nighttime kissing encounter with the enticing Hille in a park, wakes in the morning, goes to the bathroom to pee, recalls the evening's pleasures, and decides to masturbate, which produces "more satisfaction than any for a long time" (p. 252). After the "make-do deed" (p. 252), Jacob gazed at his "sleep-rustled frig-sweated self in the mirror, smiled, winked, and said out loud, 'Skin, skin, I do loooove skin' " (p. 252). This narcissistic display of self-satisfaction and self-appreciation negates the female: a nice fantasy, but an unnecessary presence. There is an interesting parallel that can be drawn between this interpretation of the scene and Lacan's "mirror stage": in the act of seeing itself in the mirror the child (Jacob) erases the maternal (feminine) body as the site of primary identification and replaces it by the misrecognition of the imago as himself. What Jacob sees is not the real subject, but an imaginary projection-a shifting signifer. While Tyro and Postcards from No Man's Land explore male heterosexuality, they also consider more transgressive sexualities and the alienating effects and negative sexual injunctions that the phallic fantasy attempts to enforce. When Andrew tries to report the greasing incident to the police, his complaint falls on deaf ears; he realizes that any whistle-blowing will be quickly quashed and so he has to be seen to be going along with it in order to access the power and privilege associated with shipyard masculine solidarity. The costs of his decision tum out to be catastrophic when another apprentice, Oliver, is initiated but does not return to the shipyard, too humiliated and shamed that his "small penis" was seen by Coultree and The Tigers. As Waldby says: Not only must the penis be invested with an exclusive erotic potential, but full identification with this imago also requires a suppression of that in his body which confounds a phallic image. This suppression can be seen in the shame for men associated with "impotence," having a soft penis or a penis which is "too small." (1995, 271)

Only Jimmy Edgar is prepared to separate himself from the group and to name the greasing ritual for what it is: an act of "bastardry" (p. 51). However, Jimmy too pays the price for his decision to stand apart from the others, as he is subjected to taunts and name-calling about his perceived sexuality. The homophobic language and actions directed at Jimmy are a way of securing the solidarity of the homosocial group while at the same time attempting to distance any homosexual desire which could disrupt the sexual taboos of patriarchal masculinity and the phallic fantasy. Ironically, the stripping, touching, and viewing of male genitals during the greasing apparently are not seen as any sexual violation or erotic dis/play by these men. In Postcards from No Man's Land, young Jacob encounters a transvestite, Ton, on his first day in Holland. He is simultaneously aroused and

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stunned when Ton kisses him while "pressing his [Jacob's] hand deep in to her crotch, where he felt the swell of a compact set of penis and bans" (p. 11). This book is about desire and, in Lacanian terms, is also about absence. In this sense, Chambers teases his readers as much as the characters tease one another. By teasing, evading, suggesting, Chambers elicits the desire of the reader. Like a romance novel, the reader is given tantalizing glimpses of erotic possibilities, but these remain veiled or removed from sight. As if watching the passing parade of erotic sex workers in a red light district, the reader encounters through Jacob's eyes a range of male sexualities: straight, gay, and bisexual. Jacob's own sexuality is fluid. He is attracted to Hille, a girl he meets on his pilgrimage to his grandfather's grave, and is also attracted to Ton, and Ton's bisexual lover, Daan. It is not until the last page of the novel, when Hille takes him in hand, that his sexual awakening is realized (again this is left to the reader to imagine). Despite the novel's tentative exploration of ways of being male, it still relies on the binary and hierarchical relations of dominance and submission which support the masculine ownership of the phallus. Geertrui's dangerous liaison with Jacob in wartime Holland is eventually ended with his sudden death from a heart attack and her pregnancy carries the legacy and stigma of their illicit romance. The protocols of her duty as a nurse and her own innate shyness prevent her from participating fully in the pleasures of scopophilia as she tends to the naked bodies of the male soldiers. This is despite her longing to look: "I wanted to look and look" (p. 55). As a nurse she is seen by the male patients as an "Angel of Mercy" and Jacob refuses to call her by her first name, preferring her second name, Maria, with its associations with the virginal Madonna. Geertrui remains subservient to the men, and especially to Jacob by tending to his body and his sexual needs. Her own pleasures are subsumed under his desires. She is his "bride" (p. 216). Both Geertrui and Jacob illustrate the ambivalence of gender identification and the failure of historical and cultural norms "to determine us completely" (Butler 1993, 127). While both characters want to break from the constraints which limit accepted ways of "being a woman" and "being a man:' they are not able to fully resignify and reverse their cultural positionings. In contrast to Geertrui and Jacob, Daan's bisexuality appears to allow him the freedom to please himself by participating in alternating, transgressive sexual relations and to break away from the norms of heterosexuality and homosexuality. However, his seemingly free and unencumbered traversing of sexual boundaries continues to enforce hierarchical power relations. He refuses to commit to one partner and eschews emotional involvement; his partners must bide their time and wait their tum as the game is played on Daan's terms. . Though Jacob likes Hille, he is attracted to both Daan and Ton. However, it is his obsession with Anne Frank and her diary that provides him with his

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phantom lover. As he admits, he has fallen for a girl "who's only words in a book" (p. 50). By allowing himself to indulge his sexual desires and emotions through the words in a book and the visions they evoke, Jacob ensures that he does not surrender the phallic fantasy in favor of other transgressive real-life lovers, but simply uses it to fuel his own erotic imaginings. Nightmarish Effects of the Phallic Masculine Fantasy

Jacob's desire for his phantom lover is just one of his many "daytime imaginings and nighttime dreams" (p. 301). It is through his fantasies that he is able to construct a different Jacob: a Jacob who can play out "inside his head secret wishes and unspoken desires" (p. 301). Again the metaphor of shadows is used to illustrate the way the other Jacob, his mysterious doppelganger, emerges and reveals himself: "What was startling was that now this other he was revealing himself completely, like someone stepping out of dark shadow in to bright light" (p. 301). The imaginary Jacob's "stepping out" from behind the shadows is symbolic of the "real" Jacob's realization of his own fluid sexuality, and is preparatory to his inevitable "coming out." Ton prepares Jacob for the costs of transgressive sexuality and disruption of the phallocentric order when he relates his own exiling from his home by his homophobic father who has "never forgiven himself for breeding a queer" (p. 265), and who can only survive as long as he does not see his son. "Seeing" Ton gives a presence and therefore a truth to, and empirical evidence of, homosexuality and transvestism and their threat to the impenetrable nature of the phallic masculine body. Throughout this discussion, the importance of the visual in both sustaining and disrupting the phallocentric order has been the continuous thread which pulls together the various strands of masculine identity and ways of being. Up to this point, Postcards from No Man's Land is the text which moves the most convincingly towards dephallicizing the male body by allowing the reader visions of other masculine bodily imagos which go beyond that of the phallic. The Secrets of Sarah Byrnes offers a different approach to the specular by refusing its pleasures, thus unsettling it "by an excess of its own logic" (Langbauer 1990, 193). By refusing to hide behind shadows, and openly exposing the visual, the secretive pleasures of voyeurism are denied and so too is the phallocentrism of the visual. Sarah Byrnes, like her counterpart Francis (Heroes), is a grotesque. Her face bears disfiguring scars as a result of her violent and cruel father throwing her against a hot stove when she was three years old. Unlike Cormier, Crutcher avoids using detail to describe Sarah's appearance. Instead, the reader learns about her monstrous appearance through the first-person narrator (and best friend of Sarah) Eric Calhoune (nicknamed Moby because of his size). Rather than hide behind bandages, scarves, and a cap, like Francis, Sarah exposes her face to the

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world. Thus, by forcing the "to-be-Iooked-at-ness" condition of the male gaze, which Mulvey posits as the phallocentrism of visual representation, Sarah ensures that the gaze is deflected. She also insists on being addressed as "Sarah Byrnes," as Moby explains: Sarah Byrnes got sick of every new Einstein at school thinking he was the only genius in the world to figure out this great pun about her last name and her condition. She hated waiting for them to get it, so she made everyone call her Sarah Byrnes. If you just call her Sarah, she won't answer. (p. 8)

Sarah's toughness, intelligence, resilience, and refusal to hide her face not only run counter to bodily imagos of femininity as passive, penetrable, and soft, but also wrest the ownership of the symbolic phallus from the masculine. Though Sarah can be read in phallic terms, she is not quite the phallic woman: a notion which would perpetuate another fantasy to be dec onstructed. In one sense, Sarah subverts the conventional heroic masculine tale as she refuses to be cast as the victim waiting to be saved by another; even the idea that a plastic surgeon could restore her natural beauty is not an option. However, Sarah is unable to escape the violence and domination of her father until he is imprisoned and even then there is the lingering spectre of his menacing presence. Sarah's presence throws into sharp contrast the alienating and harmful effects that identification with the phallus can have for individual men. By disrupting the phallic fantasy as powerful and privileging for all men, this text reveals the nightmarish realities this fantasy has for the male characters. While these textual representations of masculinity do not "transparently" reflect social realities, their constructions are, nevertheless, informed by cultural, historical and corporeal narratives of ways of being male that are available in Western societies. While this novel looks at exposure through Sarah, it also looks at concealment in its attempt to expose the fragility of the boundaries which delineate the inner from the outer, the center from the margins. The outer bodies of the male characters mask their inner turmoil and insecurity. The status of being in the center or at the margins is shown to be shifting. Moby uses selfdeprecating humor and quick intelligence to hide his discomfort and embarrassment about his overweight body. Like Sarah, who insists on being called by her full name to ward off jibes about her appearance, Moby assumes the persona of the wisecracking fat guy as a form of self-protection. In a selfreflective moment, Moby reveals that "there is a scared little fat boy inside me who is terrified of being seen" (p. 149). The vulnerable inner self is protected by the outer body and thus avoids the high cost that comes with being exposed. Dale Thornton, the school bully and lunch-money extortionist, was forced by his cruel, insensitive father to keep on repeating the eighth grade "until he got it right and the only way he'd finally learn was to do it over and over and over" (p. 21). Consequently, Dale becomes the father by employing

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the same tactics of bullying and violence on other kids that his father uses on him. Dale hides behind his violent, abusive exterior to avoid revealing the scared and abused child within. His passion for working on old cars in the space of his meticulously organized "makeshift shop" is his way of finding an avenue for his positive emotions and a means for restoring a calmness and order to his unloving and chaotic family life. When Moby visits Dale in his workshop, he is surprized at Dale's small stature: "But he's so small. Dale Thornton hasn't grown one inch since junior high school. His tight, sleeveless t-shirt displays the same muscle definition, outlining his washboard stomach, but he's little" (p. 86). The illusion of the phallic body is that it is large, looming, and tough. In the space of the womblike enclosure of the workshop the body appears smaller, childlike, despite its manlike build and masculine costuming. Mark Brittain is the final part of the male triumvirate. Mark hides behind his pseudo-Christian declarations and unwavering morality to cover his fear of never being able to live up to the expectations of his father, their church, and the school. When Mark's girlfriend, Jody, has an abortion, his staunch condemnation of promiscuity and abortion is exposed for all its hypocrisy. Unable to cope with his fall from grace, Mark attempts suicide. Throughout the four novels, violence underpins both male-female relations and the illusory homosocial bonds of phallocentrism. The staging of the violence-the battlefield, the schoolyard, the dockside, the domestic setting-is not as significant as the specular and spectacular effects it has on the characters who are its victims and perpetrators. In this sense, violence exceeds its narrative function in the brutality or shock value of the violated image. The grossly disfigured faces of Francis and Sarah force the spectator to look away; the boys who are subjected to the greasing of their genitals are compelled to bear the mark of this violation-in the case of Oliver, his shame at having his small penis exposed to ridicule and disgust, forces his retreat from the male-dominated workplace back to the safety of his maternally protected domestic environment; Andrew's revenge on Coultree and The Tigers relies on further violence, even murder, in order to balance the scales of justice; the wounded soldiers Geertrui nurses are visible evidence of the effects of wartime-sanctioned masculinist violence and highlight the futility and fatality of the rhetorical insistence on a masculine heroics. The nightmares arising from these acts of violence far outweigh any sweeter dreams a phallic fantasy could offer. Dreams, Nightmares, and Awakenings: Remaking Masculinities in a Contemporary World

In its challenging of the phallic fantasy, what can literature hope to offer its readers, particularly when they are young people who are stillieaming about themselves as gendered, sexual beings? My feminist reading of these four

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novels does not necessarily constitute an authentic or correct interpretation of the texts. It does, however, offer a perspective on gender relations, sexual difference, and the ways masculinity (and to a lesser extent femininity) are represented. In offering this perspective I want to open up for discussion the ways these and other texts for young adults invite their readers to consider, challenge, and reflect on what it means to be a man (or a woman) living in a contemporary Western world. I also want to show the ways textual representations reflect and reimage notions of masculinity and femininity through literary optical illusions. This essay has drawn heavily on the metaphorics of vision and the play of shadows and light in concealing and revealing characters' hidden secrets and in showing the folly of falling for seductive farrades. Adrienne Rich, in a passage from "When We Dead Awake" (1980, 35), says that women have a need "of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, from entering an old text from a new critical direction." The same advice can be given to men, as they too can be encouraged to see the illuminating possibilities that can come with "seeing" from a fresh perspective. As these four novels demonstrate, there is a questioning of traditional patriarchal structures and archetypes and an attempt to demonstrate the "unsustainable cost" that comes with adherence to old ways. While glimpses of the "new man" are observed in the character of Moby, other more hybrid-sexual characters, in the form of Jacob, Daan, and Ton, open up the possibility for reconsidering hybridity as an indication of the refusal or failure of identity with the phallus. These transgressive sexualities splinter the supposedly fixed categories of male and female, heterosexual and homosexual. However, in their subversion of the dominant norms of a phallic masculinity, these hybrid characters become themselves "disciplinary productions" with their own sets of "cultural sanctions and taboos" (Butler 1990, 334). As Butler's earlier comment warns, any identification comes at a cost. In rebelling against the law of the father, whose "law" is there now to imitate? Do these breakaway men now need to align themselves more with the feminine as they too have become a marginalized other? Identification with other ways of being male and with a rejection of the phallic order may mean moving out of shadows and into the glare of public scrutiny and censure. Male melancholia, which is not new to literary texts, may be one expression or cost of this challenge to the phallic fantasy. In refusing the benefits offered by the phallic bodily imago, the male characters hide behind their exterior surfaces, doubt replaces certainty, and selfdestruction or some other violent action becomes a viable resort. Without their center they need to recenter themselves in order to remake a sense of identity and self-worth. While the image of the melancholic male attempting to recenter himself is a classic one, it is also one common to revisionist Westerns and action mms of the 1990s (see Tasker 1998, 72-81); herein lies the trap of simply refashioning a familiar masculine heroic subjectivity and

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parading it as something new. Are these fictional characters, in their search for a new form of nonphallic masculinity, becoming yet another Indiana Jones in search of the Holy Grail? Or, are they, like their psychoanalytical forefathers, attempting to uncover the mystery of masculinity which lies (like its feminine precedent) in another "dark continent" (Irigaray 1985)? These questions imply that the answer lies in some definitive outcome: a point at which true identification is reached. As my reading of the four novels has suggested, any identification is marked by prohibition and punishment as well as resistance and failure. In its insistence on a compulsory (hetero )sexuality and maintenance of fixed and hierarchical gender divisions, the phallic fantasy operates through demands, threats and fear (Butler 1993). Ironically, it is through these very repressive functions that other identities "are forged from and through a state of siege" (1993, 118). The young adult books discussed in this chapter reflect the trend evident in other areas of literary and cultural production of offering masculinities which are conventional or oppressive as well as those which are transgressive or unconventional. While these texts undoubtedly challenge the phallic fantasy, they nevertheless "reveal the inherent tensions between the need and desire to remake masculinities in a contemporary world and the relative 'security' for men of dominant gender ideologies" (Murrie 1998, 178). However, as the discussion of represented masculinities has shown, not all men desire or benefit from a patriarchal culture based on dominance and submission. If young adult fiction can continue to offer textual constructions of diverse masculinities (and femininities) that unsettle the norms of traditional gender representations, then there is a greater opportunity for young men and women to consider other ways of being male and female-ways that do not rely on, or submit to, a monolithic and repressive phallic imaginary.

10 Queering Heterotopic Spaces Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy and Peter Wells's Boy Overboard BEVERLEY PENNELL AND JOHN STEPHENS

The patriarchal order prohibits fonns of emotion, attachment, and pleasure that patriarchal society itself produces. Tensions develop around sexual inequality and men's rights in marriage, around the prohibition on homosexual affection (given that patriarchy constantly produces homo social institutions) and around the threat to social order symbolized by sexual freedoms. R. W.

CONNELL, MASCULINITIES

Children's literature is an area of cultural fonnation that is implicated not only in the perpetuation of gender dualism and its social hierarchies but also in the promotion of the mythologies of heterononnativity and identity politics (Norton 1999,415). Heterosexual ideology thus has far-reaching implications for pedagogy, as Michael Warner points out in Fear ofa Queer Planet (1993): in combination with a potent ideology about gender and identity in maturation, [heterosexual ideology] bears down in the heaviest and often deadliest way on those with the least resources to combat it: queer children and teens. In a culture dominated by talk of "family values," the outlook is grim for any hope that the child-rearing institutions of home and state can become less oppressive. (p. 9)

Fiction written for young adult readers has included gay male characters since the late 1960s, but representations of a gay subjectivity, and particularly representations which thematize subjective agency, have been extremely rare. In her study of YA novels which deal with homosexual experiences, Roberta Trites concluded that while novels written since 1969 situate their characters in relation to particular social discourses of homosexuality and demonstrate a shift from negative discourses within "problem novels" to

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more positive discourses, nevertheless "homosexuality seems at once enunciated and repressed" (1998, 143). Focusing on the relationship between power, knowledge, and pleasure, and especially on representations of pleasure and pain, Trites identifies a largely negative rhetoric that blocks the possibility of subjective agency for gay/lesbian identifying characters (pp. 149-50). In the last decade attention has been increasingly paid to the regulatory nature of all kinds of identity politics, including that of gay/lesbian. This has seen the emergence of the term queer to signify a position from which to contest such normative identity categories. An important part of this contestation involves an analysis of the discursive practices that interpellate and police the categories of sex, gender and sexuality. Queer discursive practices allow those masculinities and sexuality/sexualities that have been traditionally subordinated or silenced-in literary texts, for instance-to be articulated in agential counterhegemonic narratives. Countries outside the Anglo-American hegemony, and specifically postcolonial countries, have been particularly successful in producing a number of fictions evincing a queer sensibility and in this chapter we will discuss two in particular, Sri Lankan-Canadian writer Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy (1994) and New Zealand writer Peter Wells's Boy Overboard (1997).1 Both fictions use heterotopic spaces as central to queering childhood subjectivity, although they do this in very different ways.2 Boy Overboard celebrates the pleasures children derive from establishing covert heterotopic spaces away from adult scrutiny. Funny Boy employs heterotopic spaces very differently as it represents the high emotional and intellectual cost to children and adults when such spaces are rare because, in households where extended families and household retainers all serve a regulatory function, the society's surveillance seems absolute; in such contexts heterotopic spaces are only ever wrested temporarily from public scrutiny. There is another dimension to the use of the heterotopic space in Funny Boy: the novel's dialogism is achieved discursively by the interaction of the text's "real world" narratives and the intertextual space it constructs with the genres and texts of canonical children's literature. This strategy successfully enables a queer critique of heteronormative literary metanarratives. Annamarie Jagose suggests that "queer is less an identity than a critique of identity" so that subjectivity is "always an identity under construction, a site of permanent becoming ... " (1996, 131). The matrix of interpellations by which a society labels its members means that any identity or subjectivity is not so much fragmented, as many postmodernist writers describe it, but rather multifaceted (Mercer 1993,239-40). Hegemonic masculinity, through its many permutations, has continued the tactic of establishing hierarchies of stable identity categories especially to do with sex, gender and sexual desire, so that these terms become a focus of queering activity:

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Queer theorists argue that to foreground a single aspect of an individual's identity and then denigrate or valorize the subject by such reductive categorizing leads inevitably to the fragmentation of societies rather than to fragmented subjectivities (Mercer 1993, 240). Central to the queer project, then, is exposing regulatory social hierarchies and dismantling the cultural and scientific narratives that underpin these normative socializing practices. H. L Minton argues that, with its interest in "the non-essentializing nature of sexual identities," queerness is premised on the notion of resistance to the "pervasiveness of social regulation" and so directs our attention "towards issues of subjective agency" (1997, 349). Narratives constructing a queer aesthetic may then address the problems that Trites identifies in YA narratives which purport to represent subjective agency for nonheterosexual participants. In her analysis of a queer aesthetic or sensibility, Marla Morris suggests that it has three important markers (1998, 275-86). First, it rejects the traditionally rigid normalized subject-positions that adhere to the sex-gender paradigm as the primary markers of identity. It surpasses the liberal humanist project that pretends that straightllesbian and gay/transgendered people are all somehow essentially alike. Second, queerness as a politics challenges the status quo by rejecting assimilation. The politics of queer is, Morris argues, "digressive," requiring examination of those cultural codes and discursive strategies located in the dominant culture. Unlike resistance, a digressive politics is not utopian. She says that we must entertain a certain cynicism about what, realistically, is possible. Third, a queer aesthetic reads and interprets texts as potentially politically radical. In specifically describing the productions of a queer literary aesthetic, Abou-Rihan states that much of this work stems from a performative understanding of identity and is characterized by its adventurous, playful, ironic and sometimes even deliberately shocking explorations of the politics of representation and the uses of carnival and masquerade. (1994, 261) As the discussion of the fictions develops it will be seen that carnival and masquerade feature in interesting ways as the protagonists seek subjective agency. We argue here that Boy Overboard and Funny Boy are part of the queer digressive enterprise. The narrative processes in both texts direct readers' attention to the incoherencies in the dual gender regime and the oppressive regulation of sexual desire and practice in a social order dominated by the metanarratives of hegemonic masculinity.

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Postcolonial sites, even very diverse ones, have great potential for producing queer narratives, as we think is illustrated by Funny Boy and Boy Overboard, because postcolonial theory and queer theory intersect in their explorations of hybridity and states of becoming. It is arguable that postcolonial apprehensions of imperialist social and institutional power and the concomitant strategies of resistance to marginalization make writers from postcolonial cultures more aware of the matrices of identity politics that determine our cultural positioning and (de)limit our understandings of personal agency. Shaobo Xie suggests that postcolonialism "celebrates and theorizes the experience of otherness as a matrix of counterhegemonic agency" (1999, I). He distinguishes two aspects in this. On the one hand, the emergence of the postcolonial narrative "testifies to a changed world characterized by increased tolerance and understanding of racial and cultural difference; on the other, it mirrors a world saturated with imperialist ideas, stereotypes and narratives." In other words, the process of integrating colonialist pasts has scarcely begun, and the emergence of the kind of culture most likely to dismantle the hierarchical forms inherited from imperialismthat is, the emergence of truly hybrid cultures-is still in a state of becoming. While it is not our intention here to examine why representations of a queer subjectivity have only very recently become the concern ofYA fiction,3 there are three factors that should be mentioned because they have a bearing on how Funny Boy and Boy Overboard represent a shift away from other gay/lesbian young adult novels, and thereby enter queer space. First, although YA fiction has long been dominated by first-person narration, it has not been the rule for a gay character to have that narratorial function. Notable exceptions are John Donovan's I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip (1969), usually identified as the first YA novel to deal with gay themes; Aidan Chambers's Dance on My Grave (1982); and the novels of David Rees, such as The Milkman's on His Way (1982). The same restriction applies in third-person narratives dominated by the focalization of one main character. In short, a gay subjectivity can only be suggested in a limited way in any fiction unless a gay character narrates or focalizes, because characters which are only narrated lack interiority. This is clear if we compare Jamie, the main character in Boy Overboard, with that of his slightly older brother Matthew. Represented behaviors indicate that both these characters occupy a queer space, but because Jamie is the sole narrator of events readers can only infer judgments about Matthew's sensibility from Jamie's depiction of his highly talented and peer-abused brother. Arjie, the main protagonist in Funny Boy, is also a first-person narrator whose sexual desire moves steadily beyond normative heterosexuality. A further aspect of Wells's handling of first-person narration is his refusal to adhere to the ingenuous notion, which characterizes realist fiction for young audiences, that the language of a first-person narrator should be

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consistent with the supposed linguistic capabilities of a child of the narrator's age group. This perhaps explains why David Rees's YA novels, for example, seem to be restricted to the surface. Jamie is eleven, and although he is "meant to be a genius" (p. 4), an eleven year old would not be capable of the full range of this novel's discourse. The represented direct speech of Jamie's peers is flat, truncated, ungrammatical, a style consciously adopted by Jamie as a means of survival in a world which responds violently to difference: "I learn to slur my words and slouch my language" (p. 64). By endowing Jamie's narration with a full, adult, linguistic range, Wells accesses language resources of a kind that facilitate his representation of Jamie's difference and isolation as a queer space. In Funny Boy, Arjie is also a linguistically sophisticated first-person narrator justified by his discovering that, as a homeless victim of ethnic persecution, "The only thing for me to do is write" (p. 280). This permits an elegant literariness in the discourse that is instrumental to the fiction's self-reflexiveness. The narration in Funny Boy is overtly polyphonic as there are times when the adolescent Arjie comments on the experiences and perceptions of his younger self while at other times readers are left to interpret events for themselves. Funny Boy also overcomes the conventional linguistic limitations imposed on the adolescent/child first-person narrator by positioning the implied reader beside the narrator while Arjie, as auditor/voyeur, eavesdrops on the conversations of the adults in his world: the child's scrutiny of the adult world dismantles the potential for subjective agency offered by patriarchy's hierarchical arrangement of stable identity categories. The second impediment to the representation of gay subjective agency, and a consequence of the first point, is that many of the gay/lesbian identity novels are primarily about a main character coming to terms with a friend's homosexuality, as, for example, in Diana Wieler's Bad Boy (1989) or Nette Hilton's Square Pegs (1991). Thus in Square Pegs the strategy of employing a narrator himself constructed within homophobic discourses does not permit an unequivocal resolution of the question of whether Denny's responses reinforce or undermine conventional assumptions about homosexuality and its performance, since it remains indeterminable whether his friend Stephen affects old-fashioned "camp" or whether this impression is rather a consequence of Denny's focalization of him. This was always already an anachronistic approach, focused as it is on assimilationist tactics requiring a transformation from homophobia to acceptance. Third, unlike most YA fiction, neither of these novels is driven by an overarching story mapped onto a narrative of personal development and social integration, except in so far as such a narrative is invoked in order to be queered. The basic narrative strategy of Boy Overboard broadly accords with a common YA structure,4 and the novel draws on genres and motifs generally

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familiar in children's literature: the parents of the principal character(s) are removed at the outset, leaving the children to make their own way in a heterotopic space, and there are further links, via Golding's Lord of the Flies, with Robinsonade narratives. s This is only a pretext, however, since Boy Overboard is not event-focused but concerned with the narrator's responses to people, incidents, social formations, and spaces. It maps a subjectivity in a fluid state of becoming as narrative constructs and dismantles space, time and interpersonal relationships. It deploys its intertwined narratives to lay bare how the power of heteronormativity derives from surveillance of sociocultural boundaries. Funny Boy on the one hand neatly fits the description of "a corning of age story" but on the other, as metafiction, it is primarily concerned to undermine the narrative expectations of traditional children's literature genres. For instance, the conventional function of the bildungsroman protagonist is subverted because Arjie's story does not advocate the successful integration of the young adult into society but rather problematizes the desirability of subscribing to normative social regimes, especially those structuring gender and sexuality. The hybridity of the text is another crucial element here. The fiction is designed in six parts, five as realism and one as nonfiction in the form of diary entries. The first five sections have been variously categorized as short stories or novellas or chapters and the important fact is that none of these labels is quite right, so we here follow the lead of critic and novelist Rajiva Wijesinha and refer to them as episodes (1997,347). The effect of the linked but independent six episodes is to critique the traditional structuring of such narratives and in particular, to dismantle reader expectations about the linear development of the story lines that encourage reader expectations about climax and closure. Thus traditional reader expectations about the "happily ever after" romance genre are dismissed in the fiction's first two episodes. Subjectivity is incomplete and unstable and the becoming continues in the final episode as Arjie's family prepares to emigrate to Canada. Arjie anticipates life for his family as "penniless refugees" (p. 302) and expects unwelcome new experiences of social, economic, and ethnic marginalization. The closure is far from utopian and suggests that subjectivity is, of necessity, fluid and perpetually in a state of becoming. While Boy Overboard and Funny Boy both emerge from postcolonial cultures they are positing queerness from very different sociocultural contexts. Boy Overboard takes the theme of childhood development, the traditional Eurocentric "quest for subjectivity" narrative, and refashions it as an account of the emergence of a queer sensibility in a social world heavily gendered by North American macho and feminine images, especially those that are circulated by its mainstream film industry. In his continually bewildered attempts to negotiate the ways of being asserted by his social context, Jamie

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effectively delineates a queer masculinity-a sUbject-position apart from the rigid identities asserted within the mainstream, heteronormative cultural discourses in which he and his peers are embedded. Wells achieves this by problematizing all conjunctions of identity, gender, and subjectivity. As will be seen in our later discussion, he does this by means of two central strategies: the construction of settings and the deconstruction of the notion that social meaning depends on the symbolic phallus. Funny Boy's maturational episodes from childhood to adolescence elaborate the pluralized interpellations involved in subject formation for a Sri Lankan child growing up in the ethnopolitical turmoil of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Arjie is the second son in a Tamil family and therefore part of an ethnic minority; he lives in a postcolonial society where his family ar~ adherents of the Catholic Church; his sexual desire moves outside the heterosexual norm; having been socioeconomically privileged he is faced with homelessness and poverty by the time of the family's emigration to Canada. These matrices of interpellation impinge upon the subjectivity of the boy-child whose family expects him to become an exemplar of hegemonic masculinity, with a father who sends him to a school that will "force" him to become a man (p. 205). The struggle to resist normative pressures is shown to be a constant factor in intersubjective relationships not only for Aljie but also for older relatives, like his father and his mother, in earlier historical contexts. In the first four episodes we observe through Arjie's often uncomprehending eyes how adults fail to be agential in dealing with regulatory social structures, inevitably capitulating to the patriachallaw, lore, and heteronormativity. Such capitulation often involves disloyalty to relations of desire which the text valorizes above family, ethnicity, religion, and politics. Concepts like romantic love and the patriarchal nuclear family are queered in this process. Western readers accustomed to textual constructions of gay/lesbian identities and gay/lesbian relationships and communities are positioned differently from South Asian readers. Gupta, drawing comparisons with Indian experience, points out that in Hindi, for example, there is no equivalent term for "gay" (1993, 341). Wijesinha's (1997) analysis of the reception of Funny Boy has enabled those outside Sri Lanka to be informed about the cultural struggles over the meanings of the text within that society. Thus many Sri Lankans see the plea in Funny Boy for the deregulation of sexual desire as "an embarrassing issue" (Wijesinha 1997, 355) rather than as an issue of social justice. Clare Seneviratne in an October 1995 editorial in Lanka Woman (cited in Wijesinha 1997, 353) labeled the book as "filth." Wijesinha states that "in literature in English it (homosexuality) has barely figured" (1997, 355). 6 Concerns arise from an episode in the fourth part of the fiction, for instance, where pedophile activity is jokingly described by Arjie's hotelier father as an aspect of the Sri Lankan tourist industry and the boys

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involved are laughingly passed off as another of Sri Lanka's "natural resources" (pp. 166-7). As this is discursively constructed as an overheard conversation, one that Arjie does not understand at the time, interpretations are left to the reader. A queer critique invites protest at the reification of children within hegemonic masculinity's power structure where hierarchical social relations condone the exploitation of subordinated masculinities. The hostile reaction of the young man, Jegan, a trainee hotelier who does not want to believe what he sees happening on the beach as an implicit adjunct to the hotel's business, makes it very clear that such activities are not condoned by the text. The conflation of homosexual desire and pedophilia may seem unjustified to many readers, but in a society where the problem of tourist prostitution exists, strong resistance to any potential sites of enunciation is understandable. The arrival of versions of the "gay lifestyle" is constructed discursively as another form of Western imperialism and cultural contamination. Wijesinha's paper is also important because it acknowledges the multifaceted matrix of themes investigated by Funny Boy. While his paper is only concerned with two of these-ethnic division and homosexuality-it is most important that the complexity of the novel has been acknowledged. Earlier reviewers and commentators focus on only one of these issues: socially progressive writers embrace the fiction as a bildungsroman of homosexual sexual awakening, while conservative readers focus on the (mis)representation of the Sri Lankan political situation in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Understandings of the fiction that derive from these latter readings are often informed by ethnic bias without regard for the fiction's carefully balanced statements about the ethnic conflict that dismantle the possibility of any notion of there being "right" in such conflict. In fact, the fiction radically undermines the regulatory power of ethnicity in matters of intersubjective and sexual relationships (Rao 1997), showing that ethnic identities are factitious (p. 117). Arjie's assumption at the close of Funny Boy that he is irredeemably separated from his family seems unnecessary from the perspective of a contemporary Western cultural context, but this is the experience of boys in Sri Lanka and widely throughout the Indian subcontinent. Structures of inclusion and exclusion, conjunction and disjunction, likewise inform the setting for Boy Overboard. The (fictional) small New Zealand town of Hungry Creek is represented through Jamie's experiences and perceptions as a multiplicity of heterotopias: the "looney bin"; the zoo; the Transit Camp for immigrants, inevitably suspected to be communists; the swamp; the garbage dump; the school-and within the school, Jamie's class, Form One Accelerate, the "special class for underprivileged hyperintelligent children" (p. 4); Priscilla's bedroom, which Jamie has to share; and the garden shed where Jamie and three other boys explore one another's bodies and

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experiment with bondage. This also incorporates an imagined heterotopia constructed from films and known generically as "Hollywood," a (re)constructed mental space which regulates meanings, behaviors, and bodily inscriptions. What these diverse spaces seem to have in common is that they are thematically nuanced as places of incarceration, surveillance, or regulation, even as they are also part of a structure of conjunction and disjunction. Hence those that are separate from the community leak into it. The cries of lions and elephants punctuate the text, and a fearsome form of regulation is the name "Horton," a mass murderer detained in the mental hospital: "we know a mass murderer cannot be held in the bin up the road. It is as natural as the tides going in and out that he will escape. And come for us" (p. 21). In his representation of what might otherwise be everyday, innocuous spaces, Jamie's narration renders them strange, sites of disruption and resistance. For exam" pie, Jamie describes children of his age as "stateless persons, caught in an inbetween world, hostages as much as emissaries" (p. 72), and so the Transit Camp is the setting for a confrontation between the girls and boys from Form One Accelerate. A confrontation which pivots on a desire for sexual experimentation is here played out as if a standoff in a B-grade film, and ends in mutual humiliation. 7 This conjunction of spaces-school and Transit Camp-and of desires-to get behind the signifiers, which fascinate the children, "Frenchie, feel, pantie[s], root" (p. 136), and the desire attributed to the internees to "enter our land of freedom" (p. 138)--connotes a deeply embedded, solipsistic failure to comprehend difference and otherness, and bespeaks the need for some other way of being. What emerges as a queer subjectivity in becoming is evolved in relation to the novel's heterotopic spaces, and especially in the resistance to their explicit and implicit significations. Wells does not seek to define such a subjectivity, but implies its being as a state of mind and an emerging sensibility. Hence these spaces, and the way the narrator orients himself toward them, foreground the social forces which construct boyhood, and discerns hegemonic masculinity as implicitly underlying all, but processes of resistance and resignification eventually queer them. In other words, Hungry Creek is a heterotopic space where queerness can express itself and redefine relationships amongst identity, gender, and subjectivity. The novel enacts how childhood culture is subject to the regulatory practices of adult society, but in its imitations and interpretations of adult culture (especially its popular culture representations, here notably Hollywood film) can be both formative and deconstructive. To illustrate this we analyze four episodes that are linked in a large structural pattern spanning two hundred pages of the novel. The first episode recounts the screening of a sex education film at school, during which Jamie discovers the symbolic power of the phallus in

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society. For pubescent boys obsessed with penises, this is an affirming message. It expresses, however, a crucial doubleness. Jamie's perception is not simply an affirmation of patriarchy, but a simultaneous deconstruction of it, an ambivalence evident in the language he uses to describe what appears on the screen: This body has no head, this is what is so disturbingly fascinating. It is as if so long as you have this thick hose thing, nestled in a strange black whirl of hair, a posy of springstreak, you no longer need a head, a body without a head, but possessing this thing-a penis, as the voice devoids it-you are complete.

On the one hand, the absence of the head and the selection of descriptive terms which defamiliarize the penis in a somewhat pejorative way-"this thick hose thing," "strange," "this thing," "devoids"-effect a critical attitude towards what the body signifies; on the other hand, the description of pubic hair by means of the lyrical "posy of spring streak" is an assertion of naturalness which perhaps reinforces the ideological fiction of the phallus. The display of the naked male body certainly and instantly interpellates Jamie into patriarchy, into a particular understanding of "the power and energy of malehood." This knowledge enables Jamie in tum to resignify the school hall as a "dark temple of malehood," and gazing at the nearest male authority figure, the teacher working the projector, Jamie sees in him a metonymy of phallic power-a way of looking clearly articulated in his response to Mr. Pollen as he absentmindedly rolls up a shirtsleeve: This act, brazenly nonsexual in his view, is for me so rhapsodically drenched in everything I have seen that I understand immediately that those muscles which wrap round his arms, and bulge, so satisfyingly rigid as he casually flexes his forearm, are simply poetic equivalents, hints and mere shadows, of that other miraculous secret, the one which is so extraordinary that nowhere in the world can it be seen. (p. 58)

The orientation of readers towards this rhapsody is, perhaps, uncertain, but we would expect it to be at least skeptical. There are several points at which its overstatement could be unraveled deconstructively: "brazenly nonsexual," "rhapsodically drenched," "simply ... mere" as against "miraculous ... extraordinary," and the final irony that the place of the phallus in sustaining heteronormativity can be seen "everywhere in the world." But however the moment is read at the time, the ideology it implicitly embraces is evoked in order to be subsequently dismantled. The sex education scene is reinvoked in the second episode within an ekphrasis as part of a radical resignification of a Hollywood-produced image,

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when Jamie gazes at a still from de Mille's The Ten Commandments, and his gaze becomes a process of queering: my eye became fastened, even shocked, by the sheer drama of the man who occupied the central vortex of the photo: the explosion of a beautiful man. I glimpsed in that instant the body of Mr. Pollen and his shadow up on the screen in the school hall (the body without a head), but here, in this photo, the man had not only a head but a savagely beautiful face. He was powerful and masculine. I looked silently at his hard midriff, his columnar forearms, the perfect circlet of his thick neck. I saw they were encircled with gold, studded with jewels, and given such a heightened curvaceous form that you became aware as much of his nakedness as you did of his costume. His head was shaved-in itself strangely disturbing-and he was wearing a weird kind of crown, formed smooth like a hood of what even I could read, and felt, as if it was forming inside me, as the flange of a hard penis. I gazed down at Yul Brynner, marveling. He looked so fierce, so proud. He was the epitome of ail that was manly. Yet I could see he was wearing a short skirt, what appeared to be a metal brassiere, jewelry, and makeup. (p. 168)

The key elements here are the evocation of heterotopia in the contrast between "the out-of-focus backdrop" and "the perfect Hollywood sky"; the disruption of conventional gender epithets in "a beautiful man" as a physical description; Wells's predilection for the epithet "strange(ly)," that becomes emblematic of the process of queering; the description of the figure as metonym of a penis, rendered explicit in the description of the crown, but more implicit in the sequence "hard ... columnar ... thick," which the text elsewhere applies directly to penises; the allusion to anal pleasure as Jamie "reads" the crown as a penis and feels it "forming inside me"; and of course this is all framed by the shock realization that the "powerful and masculine" and "the epitome of all that was manly" can cross-dress and be feminine. The ekphrasis then sets the scene for Jamie's own cross-dressing triumph at the close of the novel when he appears at the school fancy-dress ball crossdressed by his brother Matthew as "Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile," an effect achieved by approximating a physical and mental amalgam of Elizabeth Taylor, Yul Brynner, and Kim Novak. The paired scenes powerfully exemplify the queer discursive position which destabilizes the terms "man" and "woman." The third episode in the sequence revolves around the men's changing shed at the beach, a homosocial space which foregrounds how, through appearances and behaviors, cultural constructions of masculinity inform a community about what is entailed in being a man. Men can here be naked in one another's presence, but the narrative subjects them to satirical ridicule as

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"naked giants" with "idiotic protuberances" (p. 237) they usc casual conversation about football as a regulatory practice: "so knowledgeable are they about the arcane laws of this game--of men not touching men." This already fissured heterotopia is queered, however, by an episode which it inevitably generates, whereby a mysterious naked man walks out of the shed and parades on the beach in front of Jamie and his friend Geoff. Jamie grasps that in crossing the boundary that defines licit and illicit nakedness, this man prompts a shift in perspective which, for Jamie, is a kind of epiphany: "a head attached to the body, a penis attached to the flesh, feet attached to the soil of the world" (p. 246). The moment of insight, however, is returned to private knowledge when, Geoff having recounted the incident to his parents, the boys are placed under surveillance and experience instead the regulatory function of adult men in their lives. The thematic strand we are following here climaxes in Jamie's triumphant cross-dressing scene, which is queered, we think, because it in part exemplifies how drag functions as a performative deconstruction of femininity or "woman": I become aware that for the fIrst time in my life I am truly naked, that in fact I am not even wearing a costume but that I am parading, perhaps like that man of so long ago, amongst them. Miss Jaye stares at me, suddenly struck by something which has only just occurred to her. I wave, regally. (pp. 257-8)

In retrospect, Jamie is overcome by a sense of having experienced an ideal state of being: Is this what I have been waiting for? For this movement, this motion towards being? Is this the climb which has been silently happening inside my blood? Flood? For one second I comprehend something: the M is joining to E, this is what is soundlessly happening during this dance, as the white light bounces round over our heads: yes, part is joined to part and a form of wholeness, hidden behind the choreography of costume, is happening. Is this not how the whole of life should be? Ideally. In this revolving softly, lost dream, this slow awakening? (p. 259)

The recognition of the state of becoming queers the understanding of what has happened. This is reinforced by the understanding that the sense of elation and completion is found not in the performance of regulatory gender identities but "hidden behind the choreography of costume." That is, the text posits a state of "wholeness" lying outside and beyond the heteronormative narratives of gendered subjectivity, arousing desire and the knowledge of

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being desired. In the introduction to Tendencies (1993), Eve Sedgwick characterizes "queer" as "the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality are not made (or cannot be made) to signify monolithically." And it is into this queer space that Wells leads his narrator: Jamie is in a state of becoming, evolving a subjectivity neither completely one thing nor another, always in transition, always indeterminate. The novel plays out the cultural and sexual possibilities that impact upon his sensibility, and his interpretations of them. The strong sense of subjective agency Jamie feels as he experiences a state of wholeness, the M joined to the E, functions as an expressive form of cultural critique. While little critical attention has yet been paid to Boy Overboard, Funny Boy's subversive themes have received international attention. Raj Rao's (1997) discussion admits to having difficulty placing it comfortably withiQ existing theoretical frames, arguing that feminist and postcolonial theory are somewhat useful with their discussion of race, class, and gender. 8 Queer theory has the advantage of allowing discussion beyond the stable identity categories that Rao lists. He also states that "Homosexuality can never assume allegorical proportions" (p. 124), but this is arguably Funny Boy's achievement: same-sex desire is the means by which it offers its queer critique of the constant injustices that are sustained by the regulations of patriarchal societies. In a review in Nation (30/9/96) Somini Sengupta accurately identifies the novel's strategic thrust when she says that Funny Boy is "really a story about the power of stories-the bitter truths, the mythologies, the fantasies that make and maintain families and nations." What becomes emblematic of the process of queering in Funny Boy is the disjunction between the metanarratives that form children's expectations about the social world and their actual experiences of it. The queer aesthetic is enabled by the fiction's complex self-reflexiveness. By the overt construction of intertextual spaces, the novel successfully dismantles the ideological burdens of canonical and popular fictions read and viewed by children, thereby undermining genre, story line and closures. The hallmark of entering queer space in Funny Boy is the valorization of pleasure, desire, and sexual freedom as the means for critiquing heteronormativity. An important strategy for constructing the text's self-reflexiveness is the frequent use of overheard dialogues to subvert the realist mode: I would often sit on the verandah listening to their conversations, usually out of sight behind one of the reed mats we hung from the eaves of the verandah to keep out the sun. I always had a book with me in case somebody caught me listening. (p. 160)

The ironic self-reflexiveness of using the book as a mechanism for disruption and dissimulation is fairly clear. Realism is subverted as readers are

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reminded of their role as audience for the literary scenes where intersubjective dramas are enacted. These are scenes where protagonists are likely to be at their most unguarded and so honest, or most reticent and dishonest, depending upon whether or not they believe they are safely beyond public scrutiny or alternatively, open to incredulity and hence shame. The dialogues and interactions of the participants often require interpretation by an active reader. In the first two episodes where Arjie is still a child, readers may either find his reactions naive or comprehend episodes which seem meaningless to him, thus filling the gaps as they engage with the narrative's serious ideological implications. This happens, for instance, in the aforementioned incident in "Small Choices" (pp. 166-7). The idiom to which the title alludes, "It's small choices of rotten apples" (p. 173), undermines any suggestions that there can be "right" in the social relations imposed by hegemonic masculinity, whether to do with sexual regimes, business and political affairs or issues of ethnicity. Funny Boy's multiple heterotopias are based on the traditional spaces of social realist novels that overlap with those of the family story genre of children's literature: the home and neighbourhood, the sites of family celebrations, holidays, and leisure activities. The potential for pleasure offered by each of these heterotopic spaces is fraught because adult scrutiny is never far away and fear of public shame is a potent regulatory and repressive force. The novel constructs heterotopic spaces that participants lay claim to in order to pursue agential intersubjective relations and relations of desire only to have them normalized and reappropriated into the heteronormative practices of the dominant culture. Part of the carnivaJizing in Funny Boy occurs with the inversion of the traditional narrative structuring of the fairy tale and romance. The first two episodes deconstruct the romance genre and the romantic love paradigm that it sustains. The intertextual space in the first episode shows the disjunction between the pleasures of femininity as constructed in fairy tales and Sinhala-Tamil cinema and the real experience of rigid dual gendering that regulates access to gender performances. Episode 2 dismantles the imagined heterotopic space of weddings and subverts the "love and marriage" expectations about the closure of romance narratives. For Arjie, his brother, and sister and cousins, their grandparent's home constitutes a heterotopic space one Sunday a month, when "spend-the-days" usually mean no parental supervision and few servants. Here most of the boys, and one tomboy cousin, play endless games of cricket in the wide open field opposite the house while the girls, plus Arjie, play games of makebelieve in the house yard. The reflective narrator tells us that "Two things formed the framework of this system: territoriality and leadership" (p. 3). This geographical trope becomes symbolic on many levels as it functions to critique dualities, but here comments upon the dual gender regime that Arjie's family attempt to impose upon him. In the heterotopia of the girls'

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space and the potential it offers him for "free play and fantasy" Arjie finds a temporary moment of artistic and imaginative agency: Because of the force of my imagination, I was selected as leader. Whatever the game, be it the imitation of adult domestic functions or the enactment of some well loved fairy story, it was I who discovered some new way to enliven it, some new twist to the plot of a familiar tale. (p. 4)

The metafictive possibilities with regard to the writer are clear here with the ironic comment about the "new twist to the plot of a familiar tale." Arjie's interest in "voyages of the imagination" (p. 4) as a seven year old made him the center of the games he played, especially "bride-bride" in which he, as storyteller, always had the right to play the part of the bride. In his "transfiguration" into the bride, adorned with sari, veil, rouge, lipstick, and kohl, he becomes able "to leave the constraints of my self and ascend into another; more brilliant, more beautiful self ... an icon, a graceful, benevolent, perfect being upon whom the adoring eyes of the world rested" (p. 5). The solipsistic subjectivity is clear as is the sense of passivity and the lack of agency involved in the masquerade of the female "icon," subjected to the design and desires of others. Arjie is agential only because he writes the script, but as a child does not realize that he is writing his own disempowerment. Like Jamie in Boy Overboard, Arjie's artistic sensibility desires transcendence and longs for the transformation that the performance of femininity seems to offer in films and the "well-loved fairy story" (p. 4). Implicitly, in Arjie's script, "the more brilliant, more beautiful self' becomes the object of masculine heterosexual desire. Ironically, in the girls' and Arjie's queering of the heteronormative order of the romance narrative, the "person with the least importance, less even than the priest and the page boys, was the groom" (p. 6). To his family, AIjie's "transfiguration" (p. 5) is abject. Kanthi Aunt raises the alarm about his cross-dressing, exposing his transgression of the gender boundary that leads to him being labelled "funny" (p. 14) for the first time. Women are thus complicit in the maintenance of the gendered social structure that sustains the power of hegemonic masculinity. Arjie's mother, equally complicit, is represented as causing him pain as she lets the patriarchal will override her sense of what is in Arjie's best interests. She increases the regulation of Arjie's life in response to his father's accusation that she has not properly supervised his dressing up games with his girl cousins. His mother wryly states that, "If the child turns out wrong, it's the mother they always blame, never the father" (p.19). The much-loved heterotopic space must be monitored so that the transgressive can be placed under surveillance, and the gender order restored: "Why can't I play with the girls?" I replied.

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"You can't, that's all." "But why?" She shifted uneasily. "You're a big boy now. And big boys must play with other boys." "That's stupid." "It doesn't matter," she said. "Life is full of stupid things and sometimes we just have to do them." "I won't," I said defiantly. "I won't play with the boys." Her face reddened with anger. She reached down, caught me by the shoulders, and shook me hard. (p. 20) A comprehensive queering of heteronormativity is achieved as Arjie's mother describes its social structures as "full of stupid things." Its regulatory power is perpetuated, of course, by acquiescence but it is also discursively dismantled here with the ironizing of submission to "stupid things." The narrative becomes ideologically explicit as the implications of the situation are explained to the reader-the text goes on to disclose that Arjie's mother cannot believe that her behavior is just. Such moments lead scholars such as Wijesinha to describe the work as "didactic," but the advantage of this narrative strategy is that it suggests children are very young when they develop an awareness that heteronormative expectations are being enforced. Submission often seems the only possible response because adult-child power relations are only painfully contested. Further, the child narrator often explains incidents in a simplistic manner. This has a dual effect. It shows that the moral implications are clear even to a child or adolescent, and it implies that the rationalizations masking venal adult behaviors are transparent to the eyes of children. The reader is thereby effectively positioned to problematize the values espoused by all the participants (p. 274). In dismantling the feminine interpellations constructed in the romance genre, Episode 1 denies any real possibility of empathetic, let alone democratic, relationships across the gender divide in heteronormative culture. Rather than offering freedom to become, romance is represented as a method of perpetuating a dual gender system. At the close of the first episode Arjie says, I glanced at the sari lying on the rock where I had thrown it, and I knew that

r would never enter the girls' world again. Never stand in front of Janaki's

mirror, watching a transformation take place before my eyes. No more would r step out of that room and make my way down the porch steps to the altar, a creature beautiful and adored, the personification of all that was good and perfect in the world. The future spend-the-days were no longer to be enjoyed, no longer to be looked forward to. I would be caught between the girls' and the boys' worlds, not belonging or wanted in either. (p. 39) Here then, in the realist mode, is a representation of a subjectivity exemplifying the pain, loss, and marginalization that have been the usual attributions of

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the gay subject (Trites 1998, 149). By the novel's close, however, this is reversed by the pleasures of reciprocated homosexual desire and lovemaking that are represented in Episode 5 (pp. 250, 253, 259-260). In Episode 2, "Radha Aunty," heteronormativity is posited as the opposite of the fulfillment of intersubjective relations and sexual desire, acting instead as a regulatory social practice which supports patriarchal socioeconomic and ethnic power structures and limits subjective agency. SinhalaTamil love comics and rehearsals for the musical The King and 1 construct the intertextual space here. Arjie's "idea of romance and marriage was inseparable from Sinhala films and Janaki's love comics" (p. 42). As he reads his favorite love story, he ironically "turned the pages rapidly. The part about asking the parents and their refusing didn't interest me. 1 wanted to read the inevitable end, about the wedding" (p. 43). Arjie also resists the outcome of The King and 1 at first because he "couldn't see the point of a play where the. hero and heroine didn't get married in the end" (p. 53). When Radha Aunty's forthcoming marriage is announced (p. 43) he "could hardly believe that all I had read in those comics was going to come true" and he imagines himself in the heterotopic space "of a real-life love story" (p. 44). Inevitably the naive perspective of the child is queered by the complex social imperatives that impinge on decisions about marriage in his social context. As Arjie chaperones Radha Aunty to and from musical rehearsals he finds himself in the midst of what his grandmother terms "illicit relations" as Radha's friendship with Ani! crosses the Tamil-Sinhala ethnic divide (p. 74). Like the play areas at the grandparent's home, the environs of the rehearsal hall and the Green Cabin restaurant provide heterotopic spaces where Radha Aunty has the opportunity to develop a reciprocated relationship with Ani!. Community surveillance means that the matter is soon brought to the family's attention. Family pressure, in conjunction with an incident of ethnic violence, push Radha Aunty back to the Tamil marriage that her family has chosen for her. Arjie's mother tells him, "most people marry their own kind" (p. 53) andArjie observes Radha's gradual conformity to this regulation. The complexity of the issue is narrativised in many ways, one of these being the inclusion of Aunty Doris's story. She is the director of the musical and a widowed older person, a Burgher woman who married a Tamil man. Her views about the "sacrifices" involved in marrying against her family's wishes (p. 78), pursuing relations of desire and reciprocity complicate matters for Radha: "Whether you married the person you loved or not seems to become less important as time passes" (p. 79). The disjunction between love stories and real life is disclosed by the episode's outcome. The public triumph of heteronormativity with Radha Aunty's traditional marriage is queered by the narrative's representation of her loss and pain as she relinquishes agency. Her general withdrawal and a new "harshness" in her manner (p. 90) are evident, and "her eyes had lost

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their warmth" (p. 95). The imagined heterotopic space, the "magical occasion" (p. 96), of a wedding is further dismantled by Arjie "because I felt no pleasure, for I knew that although everything would happen in the way that I had dreamed, there would be something important missing" (p. 97) in the ceremony and Radha Aunty's relationship with her betrothed. Heteronormativity then is queered as abjection and lack, a negation of the self. To critique the gendered regulatory interventions in Arjie's life beyond the family, the fifth episode is set in an elite boys' school, the Queen Victoria Academy. Two nineteenth-century British school poems by Sir Henry Newbolt. are brought into intertextual play here, "The Best School of All" and "Vitae Lampada." The latter poem has the famous refrain, "Play up! play up! and play the game!" while the lines "It's good to see the School we knew, the land of youth and dream," open the former. Arjie comments that "I found it puzzling that one would be nostalgic for something one had longed to escape" (p. 228). As with Boy Overboard, here too, the social imperatives that construct boyhood and manhood in Arjie's school are sustained by hegemonic masculinity, but processes of resistance and resignification eventually allow Arjie to dismantle these as he observes the adult relationships and behaviors at the school. As a bastion of patriarchy, this colonial vestige of the British public school system has its social class tensions heightened by the ethnic divisions among the staff and students, and Arjie is able to exploit these. Here in this homosocial institution Arjie meets Shehan, the boy with whom he forms a deep friendship and a desiring relationship. The school experience is anathema to Arjie, who is appalled at the psychological violence of the dominant sexual and gender regimes inflicted on children by the sadistic and authoritarian "Black Tie," the school principal. The ostracism that Arjie and Shehan suffer at the principal's hands alerts Arjie to the operations of power and its inequitable distribution. As he grasps the "idea of power" (p. 270), Arjie also perceives that power is available in ways that can potentially repudiate its illegitimate use. How was it that some people got to decide what was correct or not, just or unjust. It had to do with who was in charge; everything had to do with who held power and who didn't. If you were powerful like Black Tie or my father you got to decide what was right or wrong. If you were like Shehan or me you had no choice but to follow what they said. But did we always have to obey? Was it not possible for people like Shehan and me to be powerful too? (p. 267)

Again, as with Boy Overboard, attention is drawn to the seemingly unbridgeable gulf between children and adults. Pleasure is also real and valorized as promoting subjective agency. While conventionally many narratives frame resistance to regulatory regimes as requiring personal sacrifice, there is usually at least symbolic

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reward in becoming a hero. The significance of Funny Boy's representation of Arjie's assumption of subjective agency is that his resistance involves choosing public failure. Arjie humiliates himself on Speech Day because the act will rebound on the sadistic principal and undermine his political objective of retaining control of the school. The narrative strategies of Funny Boy queer heroism allowing a radical act of political subversion by embracing abjection. Intellectual activity and imagination combine to devise a plan that undermines the discursive deployment of sociopolitical power that the principal intends to achieve by combining his annual speech to parents with the recitation of the two nostalgic poems (pp. 215-6). When chosen to recite Newbolt's two poems Arjie knows that "the power had moved into my hands" (p. 270). As he undertakes to do "what the bravest boy in my class would not dare" (p. 267), "my ears attuned to my voice as I mangled those poems, reducing them to nonsense" (p. 274). He avenges the injustices that he and Shehan have suffered and more importantly thwarts Black Tie's power play. Rather than perpetuating the mythology of honor being due to the best school of all, Arjie queers the idealization of such masculinist fictions/institutions and resists their insistence on hierarchy and regulation. But the reader is not left with individualism triumphing and justice prevailing. It certainly has not prevailed for most of the friends and relatives that Arjie calls to mind as he plans his strategic action. In Episode 6, "Riot Journal: An Epilogue," notions of power are queered in their tum as Arjie's queer heroism is followed by the family's disempowerment as they face the need to seek asylum outside Sri Lanka: I thought about how, when we were young, Diggy, Sonali, and I would sometimes imagine what foreign countries were like. All those Famous Five books, and then Little Women and the Hardy Boys. We would often discuss what fun it would be to go abroad, make snowmen, have snowball fights, and eat scones and blueberry jam. I don't think that we ever imagined we would go abroad under these circumstances. (p. 302)

This anti-utopian closure overrides the moment of personal empowerment, repudiating any notion of "progress" or suggestion that it is symptomatic of movement towards democratic social relations or social justice. The intertextual space again alludes to the need to dismantle canonical literary representations of subjectivity and actuality. We have here Morris's "digressive" politics demonstrated rather than any utopian prediction. It is important in literature for children that the gendering processes be made visible if they are to be redressed and subjectivities represented which are not unthinkingly gendered in traditional ways. Funny Boy and Boy Overboard seem to us to have effected a paradigm shift in the representation and problematizing of masculine minds and bodies and narratives of gay subjec-

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tivity in particular. Both fictions enunciate powerful counterhegemonic narratives that privilege sexualities as a key dimension of lived experience and intersubjective relationships where there is mutuality and reciprocity of desire regardless of age and gender. Readers are alerted to the ways children and adults constantly negotiate the regulatory mechanisms that are in place for the containment of sexuality and sexual desire. The pleasure dimension of sexuality is foregrounded and experiences outside the heterosexual regime are advocated. Funny Boy offers a queer critique of traditional values because its narrative processes resignify aspects of heteronormativity as "unnatural acts": the denial of emotion to men; the masquerade of strength that legitimizes the operation of power through violence; the pursuit of economic power and social status at the expense of intersubjective relationships. Both Funny Boy and Boy Overboard, in very different ways, offer critiques of identity which foreground subjectivity as multifaceted and shifting and, as queer sensibility argues, more to do with difference than homogeneity-a matrix of acquiescent or resistant responses to sociocultural interpellations and subjective desires.

Notes Examples of other fictions from postcolonial societies that attempt to queer heteronormative assumptions include, also from New Zealand, Graeme Aitken's Fifty Ways of Saying Fabulous (1995) and William Taylor's The Blue Lawn (1994). The Australian collection of short stories, Hide and Seek: Stories about being Young and Gay/Lesbian (Pausacker 1996) has several pertinent examples, particularly Robert Dessaix's story "The Invitation," Dean Kiley's "Staying In," John Lonie's "It's a Long Way from Oxford Street," and Lucy Sussex's "Silence." 2. As a marker of their entering queer space neither Boy Overboard nor Funny Boy is explicitly a YA novel. Each clearly has a crossover audience appeal, in accord with the concept of the amorphous audience (that is, the dismissal of the traditional white, male, heterosexual implied reader of Westem literature). 3. See Roberta Trites' article "Queer Discourse and the Young Adult Novel: Repression and Power in Gay Male Adolescent Fiction" (1998). Our understanding of the term "queer" differs from Trites' use of it, however, which seems not to distinguish it from a more general sense of gay discourse. 4. It achieves an effect similar to novels which employ classic, retrospective, first-person narration. The fetishization of verisimilitude in children's literature marks this as a minority discourse, however. 5. See especially p.151, where Jamie is hunted through the swamp by his classmates and is only saved when the school bell summons them back from savagery to civilization, in a calculated reminiscence of the close of Lord of the Flies. 6. Raj Rao (1997) comments that an emerging trend of gay South Asian literature should be acknowledged. 1.

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The role of one of the marginal characters, Fainell, is telling here: he is different, other (not one of the class), and is subjected to mock homosexual rape and general roughing up. As a tough male, he is the only boy who can respond to the challenge thrown out by the girls: "If yous wanna root I'll rootcha" (p. 140). 8. Here Rao's ideas are in line with the notion of "hegemonic masculinity": it is what he is calling the "male fanatical self-that is, an empowered self-that sees difference of whatever kind as a legitimization of domination and of recourse to violence as the means of maintaining control" (Connell 1995, 77-83,231-2).

11 Trigger Pals A Case History RODERICK McGILLIS

for John Wayne and the gang Preludium

I am a fifty-something male, white, heterosexual, married with children. I guess I am about as straight as they come. How did I get this way? I cannot answer this question with the authority of scientific data or a knowledge of genetics, and frankly I doubt that anyone else could provide data of this kind that would definitively answer the question. We deal in mystery here. Yet most of us will concur in the belief that our childhood years are formative, if not definitive. Mine were spent doing what boys growing up in North America during the 1950s did, and what they did, among other things, was live imaginative lives as cowboys. We went to the movies to see cowboys; we watched cowboys on television; we read cowboy comics and even books; we asked for cowboy paraphernalia for Christmas and birthdays; we made guns, knives, bows, and arrows out of sticks or pieces of cardboard or anything we could find to shape, however crudely, into those magic objects we associated with the cowboy and his adversary; and we played cowboys in our backyards and in our houses. It is not an exaggeration to say that boys of my generation across North America acquired much of what they know of being masculine from the cowboy heroes they assiduously followed and emulated in their cowboy games. Playing cowboy was, to a great extent, participating in a male homosocial world in which boys learned to be older boys. Today we have such advocates of the fierce inner man as Robert Bly (1990) and Sam Keen (1991) who urge men to "leave woman behind" (cited in Bordo 1999, 46) in order to become real men, true men. The homo social world of the cowboy, or at least the cowboy who interests me here, is to a great extent a world in which

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women are unnecessary (Hatty 2000, 169). Something of this masculine world of the ranch cowboy in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America is offered by B. A. Payton when he writes that Most cowboys were barely past boyhood, typically in their late teens or early twenties, and when cooped up together, they were prone to boredom and mischief. One favorite. way to kill time was to haul a fellow cowboy into a hastily convened kangaroo court on a trumped-up charge such as stuttering or bragging. The defendant was always found gUilty after his comrades' damning testimony and was summarily sentenced to a humiliating penalty such as getting whacked on the backside with a quirt. (2000, 83)

Cowboys looked after themselves while living independently and freely in the great outdoors. They often cooked for themselves and sewed their own clothes. They rode together, worked together, and played together in what Leslie Fiedler has aptly called "the holy marriage of males" (1960/1966, 350). Fiedler also points out that this vision of the American male is "makebelieve," "paradisal": the "tie between male and male is not only considered innocent, it is taken for the very symbol of innocence itself' (1966, 350). In this sense, the male world is pastoral. It evokes the values we associate with childhood. To study the cowboy is, to some degree, to study what used to be called "boyology," a term coined near the beginning of this century to denote the intense study of boys then in fashion (Kidd 2000). A quick scan of recent publications in men's studies sections of large bookstores will show titles that indicate boyology is back in fashion with texts such as Myriam Miedzian's Boys Will Be Boys: Breaking the Link between Masculinity and Violence (1991), William Pollack's Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood (1998), and Christina Hoff Sommers's The War against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men (2000). So a study of the cowboys I am referring to ought to help us-both men of my generation and the male culture we continue to inhabit-understand how we got here. First, I ought to clarify what I mean by "cowboy." The cowboy I have in mind is that rare breed who took life in the Western films most often associated with small, even fly-by-night, production studios in Hollywood, often referred to as Poverty Row or Gower Gulch. l The so-called B Western was a staple of Saturday afternoon cinema from the 1930s to the later 1950s, and many of these films turned up on television in the 1950s, just as many of the stars of these Westerns found a place in regular series on television. Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy,2 and Gene Autry are perhaps the most famous, although the list of names is extensive. A study of these cowboys should prove instructive in terms of the construction of masculinity for males belonging to the baby boomer generation 3

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but we should not assume that the masculinity we might find in these cowboys has drifted into history along with the cowboys. What we find here is a vision of masculinity, conflicted and compelling, that is still with us. From styles of dress to a love of the gun, much of what I examine below continues to fill young men's heads with visions of male privilege. The ideal that the cowboy presented young boys is difficult to shake. "Don't let your sons grow up to be cowboys," drones a popular song, but we know the singer does not really mean this. That he urges mothers to encourage sons to be doctors and lawyers and such when the cowboy beckons with romantic intensity testifies to just how conflicted he is. Notions of masculinity have always been conflicted, but the cowboy pretends to be beyond (or prior to) inner conflict. Testimony My heroes have always been cowboys. (Sorry, I cannot avoid echoing another popular song.) When I reflect on this, I can only conclude that something strange4 looks back at me. I cannot ride horses; I cannot abide guns; I know nothing of cows or of riding fence; I am not an advocate of violence in any form; but I do love cowboys. As a boy, I ran home from school to watch Cowboy Corner on television, a program we received from Watertown, New York, in which a fellow called "Danny B" daily introduced a "B" Western film from the previous two decades, films with such stars as "Lash" LaRue, Johnny Mack Brown, Eddie Dean, and Bob Steele. I went to the movies on Saturday afternoons where we could see the Durango Kid and Roy Rogers. I read Western comics. Once we owned a television, I watched Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy in their weekly series. In 1954, my parents took me to see Roy Rogers and Dale Evans at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto. Growing up, I ached to own the latest Western paraphernalia: sixguns, stetsons, ropes, boots, badges-all that I saw the Western heroes wear in those wonderful Western films that filled my days and nights with fantasies of power and self-confidence. I can still feel my desire for the Red Ryder BB gun advertised so effectively in the many comics I read. Johnny Code actually had a BB gun, and I lusted after it. In short, when I was a boy much of what formed my image of manhood derived from those "B" Western films and their spin-offs which thrived from the 1930s until the mid 1950s when television sent them into the sunset where all good cowboys ride at adventure's end. What intrigues me now is the apparent paradox: raised on the violence of cowboy movies, I have emerged a pacifist who continues to feel attraction to those violent cowboy movies. Why? I shall argue that these films, like much popular culture, are ambiguous in their message in that they contain deeply conservative values edged with transgressive desire. In short, I argue that these films present a homosocial world that is less certain in its vision of

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masculinity than it pretends to be: that is, they construct a masculinity that is distinctly "other" to the one-dimensional image we might have of the cowboy as the type of male who is aggressive, unemotional, laconic, actionoriented, and violent. Just as the films blend genres, they also blend gender. They produce a male figure who is communal, parental, sensitive, selfassured, and independent. The rub here is "communal" and "other." These cowboys function as preservers, even nurturers, of community and at the same time they remain outside community, uninterested in economic gain or political power. Often they interact with children (at least one, Red Ryder, travels with a child; his young companion is a Native American, Little Beaver), and when they do they are clearly role models for these children. Yet they do not marry, they do not hold jobs, they appear not to work. They exist on horseback, forever riding from one endangered community to another to set things right. These films construct a male figure whom we might refer to as "queer" and by this I mean what Susan Bordo explains here: "Homosexual or heterosexual, some people are 'queer' -they do not fit easily into those pigeonholes" (1999, 165).5 These cowboys do not fit comfortably into our binary categories heterosexuallhomosexual, insider/outsider, masculine/ feminine.

The Trigger Trio I take my title here from the 1937 film of this name starring Ray "Crash" Corrigan, Max Terhune, and Ralph Byrd as the Three Mesquiteers. This is one of a batch of Three Mesquiteers films made by Republic Studios in the 1930s and 1940s. The films starring these cowboy heroes constitute only a small fraction of the many hundreds of such films made by Poverty Row Studios such as Monogram, Mascot, Tiffany, Grand National, and PRe. The films were quickly and cheaply made, formulaic, and immensely popular. The films delight in breaking down distinctions in genre: blended with the Western are such film genres as the detective mystery, science fiction, war stories, gangster films, comedy, the musical, the circus story, and even the jungle adventure tale. Sometimes this play with genre has strange results, as in many of the Mesquiteer films which feature as their D' Artagnon the ventriloquist's dummy, Elmer. Elmer often appears to speak and even to act independently of his ventriloquist, giving the films something of the surreal quality of the mid-1970s television situation comedy, Soap. In one film, Riders of the Whistling Skull (1937), Elmer briefly comes under suspicion of murder. Elmer fulfills several roles in the films: companion, comic relief, diversion, child, and even ironic adult-commentator on the Mesquiteers' adolescent behavior. Lullaby carries Elmer in a large womb like sack across the saddle of his horse, and he "births" him whenever an occasion arises where Elmer can be useful. This D' ArtagnonlElmer doubles as a baby for the three

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men who are his bearers. In these films genre blending is also gender blending; something queer wanders the West in these films. I do not, however, mean to say that these films are either covertly or overtly homosexual in theme, although for all I know they may be. But they do take an interest in such things as courting rituals, male bonding, single-sex families, and what we might call revisionary notions of masculinity. My interest here has to do with the manner in which these films present masculinity. The man is inextricably a part of his landscape, as Emerson Hough (1935) noted long ago. In these films the same landscape reappears again and again, because the studios repeatedly used certain locations. For example, Ray Corrigan, who played Tuscon in the Mesquiteer films, owned a ranch called Corriganville which served as the location for many Western productions from the 1940s right through the 1950s. The closed space of the locations, paradoxically, stands for the wide-open spaces of the cowboy's world. In other words, the cowboy's world is both extensive and limited. A man needs room to roam, but he is also circumscribed by the job he must do. We might, I think, also understand the cultural moment of these films as part of their landscape; the films construct their male heroes against the backdrop of the Depression and the emerging importance of America as a world power just prior to tbe Second World War. The space of these films is both empty and full, barren and fertile, large and small, fixed and ever changing. In short, these films construct a world that presents the male as a fantasy figure of power and self-confidence, a man capable of defeating all sorts of forces, even those twin villains of Depression-era America: the corporate boss and nature. The sheer volume of the Mesquiteer films indicates both their popularity and their pervasive influence on the filmgoing public. Between 1935 and 1943, fifty-three films appeared starring the Three Mesquiteers. What we see in the Three Mesquiteers films and those of Gene Autry (and I use these only as representative of a whole range of films with group heroes such as the Range Busters, the Trail Blazers, the Rough Riders or the Hopalong Cassidy films, and those with single heroic figures such as Monte Hale, Bob Steele or Buster Crabbe) is a strangely mixed configuration of the male. Even in those films which have a single cowboy hero, the man rarely rides alone. We all know about the cowboy and his sidekick, and it is true that cowboys seem to travel in twos and threes. Something odd is going on in these films, and it is their homosocial vision that I wish to interrogate. The films' emphasis on the male group is perhaps their most striking aspect, and with the Mesquiteers (at least in many of their films) the male group even has a child. The three characters, as the title of the series indicates, derive from Alexander Dumas's novel, The Three Musketeers, and just as the three musketeers are in fact four, so too are the cowboy version of this trio four (at least in the films with Max Terhune as Lullaby). The characters in the films

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are saddled with unlikely names: Stony Brook, Tuscon Smith, Lullaby Joslin, and in those films in which Max Terhune appeared, Elmer, the wooden dummy mentioned above. During the eight year life of this series, several actors played the parts of the Mesquiteers: the most prominent of the actors include Al St. John, Hoot Gibson, John Wayne, Robert Livingstone, and Tom Tyler as Stony; Guinn "Big Boy" Williams, Harry Carey, Ray "Crash" Corrigan, and Bob Steele as Tuscon; Guinn Williams, Syd Saylor, Max Terhune, Rufe Davis, and Jimmy Dodd as Lullaby. Others who made appearances in major roles include Raymond Hatton, Duncan Renaldo, and Ralph Byrd. My focus here is mostly on the films that include Elmer, the dummy. Why a dummy? Well it is true that Western films marketed to a mixed audience of adults and children in the 1930s and 1940s had no truck with reality. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the twelve-episode Western-science fiction film, Phantom Empire (1935) starring Gene Autry and Smiley Burnett. Here is a mishmash that no one, young or old, could mistake for reality in the West-old or new. Westerns during this period clearly looked to provide satisfying fantasy for Depression-ridden audiences whose desire was for some sense of beauty, song, excitement, and comic relief amid the dreary wastes of failed markets and lost topsoil. Many of these films deal with dispossessed landowners, scarcity of water, failed crops, foreclosures by banks, uprooted peoples looking for places to settle and work. But they also deal with what it means to be a male. I ask the question again, why a dummy? To answer this, we need to examine the masculinity constructed for the three Mesquiteers themselves. Loosely, what these three represent are the hot-headed young man, the levelheaded mature man, and the comical slightly older man. Here is a bizarre version of the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion. Together they represent everything the male ought to be: quick to take action, thoughtful, loyal, adaptable, brave, and capable of humor. These fellows don't take life completely seriously, although they do take such things as justice, honor, and protection of the innocent seriously. Often the objects of their protective actions are children, sometimes children in orphanages, as in, Roarin' Lead (1936) and Heroes of the Saddle (1940); at other times they protect women, once, in Three Texas Steers, (1939), even pretending that their ranch belongs to a woman who mistakenly thinks it is hers. Yes, the three men own a ranch, but they appear never to work it. Nor do they appear to have help keeping the place going. Most often we find them itinerant cowboys who just happen to find trouble wherever they go. I mentioned orphanages and when the plot requires, as it does in Roarin ' Lead, the three are on the board of directors of an orphanage. They are ranchers, horse dealers, businessmen, officers of the law, undercover agents, archaeologists, engineers, government stock inspec-

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tors, just about anything you can imagine. They are "footloose and fancy free" and they can tum their hands or their horses to just about anything. Two of the Mesquiteers have eyes for women: Stony and Tuscon. More often than not, Stony is the one most taken with a woman, although at times Stony and Tuscon are rivals for the woman's attention. Dining out, dancing, serenading, and of course riding (often with the man saving the woman from disaster on a runaway horse or in a runaway buggy) are some of the courting rituals the films show. Perhaps the most persistent sign of a man's worth, besides his saving the woman from runaway animals, is his willingness to fistfight. But it hardly matters. The viewer learns the importance of gallantry, even as he learns the more important lesson about freedom; freedom is only possible away from the domesticating ways of a woman. In one film, Hit the Saddle (1937), Stony is about to be married. Lullaby laments, ''There must be some good way to bust up a marriage." A crestfallen Tuscon can only rationalize, "He brought this on himself." Always resourceful, Lullaby convinces the would-be bride that if she marries Stony, she will have to look forward to a life of sewing, washing, cooking, and assorted other domestic chores. She quickly cuts out for New York where she plans to be an actress. Stony's only response to her departure is, "I'm cured," indicating that to have thoughts of marriage is tantamount to suffering from a debilitating disease. A return to health means a return to the boys. At the end of many of these films, most of which do not bring the hero to the brink of marriage, the young man taken with a woman always chooses to leave the woman and ride off with his pals. Boys' loyalty is crucial, as Anthony Rotundo explains in his comments on nineteenth-century boy culture in America: "Boys demanded loyalty between friends and loyalty of the individual to the group. Their concept of the faithful friend closely resembled the code of fidelity that links comrades at arms" (1993, 43). For boys, allegiance to the group comes before all else. We can see this kind of boy loyalty at work in Mark Twain's boys' fictions, and we see it in the Mesquiteers who are, in fact, comrades at arms. Male companionship is what these films are all about. But not simply male companionship; rather the companionship of boys. Something of Peter Pan sweeps through these films; this sagebrush trio (dubbed "Trigger Trio," remember) exemplifies what Leslie Fiedler calls the "good bad boy" (1966, 259-67; 1963,254-87) that young fellow with the sly grin and cocky tilt to the head whom we forgive for his excesses of exuberance because we know that when the chips are down, ma'am, he'll come through in spades, riding over the crest of a hill to rescue whatever needs rescuing and setting to right whatever has nearly toppled under the pressure of some bad man's greed. When you get right down to it, boys will be boys, and that is just the way we want it. These mature men can play at being boys because the "boy" is our

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ideal of masculinity. The opening sequence of Range Defenders (1937) makes the point. Here Tuscon and Lullaby find Stony in a barber's chair, and like two schoolboys they playa trick on him and run away giggling. Practical jokes are part of the fun of being boys. So too is kibitzing and even quarreling. Stony and Tuscon often quarrel and even pout, but their quarrels reflect their intimacy. No matter what the reason for their tiffs, they always rally when one or the other is in trouble or when they can fight together against a gang of baddies. Inseparable from the notion of manhood in these films is what I can only call the friendly gun. Guns these days are not so friendly, despite the stridcnt call on the part of some men for permission to own them. Charlton Heston may be elderly, but his virility continues to impress those who insist on their right to carry arms. Still and all, if sex is preferable to violence nowadays (as Fiedler pointed out forty years ago), we continue to defend the gun. In the films I am discussing, sex is attractive, but what Fiedler calls "good clean violence" (1966, 259-67; 1963, 273) is preferable to just about anything. In the first of Republic Studio's Mesquiteer films, The Three Mesquiteers (1936), Stony turns quickly to Tuscon as the two of them fire their pistols at a gang of bad guys, and asks, "Isn't this better than ranching?" He and everyone watching the film know the answer. Not much has really changed, only nowadays the bullets fly toward the innocent as well as the guilty. And they fly out here-in the land before the screen. They fly in schools and day cares. The opening of the Mesquiteers films changes little over the years, but it does change. The first films in the series, mostly with Livingstone, Corrigan, and Terhune, begin by introducing each of the Mesquiteers. First Stony, then Tuscon, and finally Lullaby; each of them smiles in tum at the camera in a gesture of welcome to the audience. It's the Happy Gang, so come on in. Then we have the rest of the credits. The films with John Wayne as Stony alter this beginning in a manner that intensifies the myth of the fliendly gun. We see each Mesquiteer in tum: Stony, then Tuscon, and finally Lullaby. All three shots are medium close-up, the actors facing directly into the camera. Each smiles at the camera and draws his six-shooters, Stony with a twirl and Tuscon with both guns, and Lullaby with a gesture pointing his gun directly at the audience. Clearly, these fellows are friendly, and they use their guns here as toys; part of their appeal comes in the direct way in which they draw, twirl, and point their weapons at us. The actions mimic the quick draw and remind us that these cowboys are proficient with their guns, fast on the draw and accurate in their aim. It was precisely actions such as this that encouraged me as a child to desire a set of toy guns that looked as much like the real thing as possible. Plastic guns or any other obviously fake replicas would not do. My friends and I wanted Colt 45s, preferably with ivory handles, and we wanted them in real leather holsters cut low just the way the gunfighters on the screen had them, slung low on the hip and tied to the thigh.

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Slung low on the hip so that we could be hipsters. I doubt that the connection is direct, but it is nevertheless nice. The rebel male of the 1950s, as articulated by Norman Mailer in The White Negro (1957), is the new "frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life" (cited in Savran 1998,49). The hipster who developed at least obliquely out of the infantile heroics of the "B" Western cowboys differed from that cowboy in that he no longer had a cause against which to rebel. When asked what he is rebelling against, the hipster (Johnny in The Wild One) can only reply, "Whaddya got?" As Savran points out, Mailer's "white negro" has something akin to the psychopathic in his makeup; he is masochistic, undirected, and concerned with self-gratification. Savran notes that such a subject is "infantilized and potentially violent" (p. 49). The childish behavior and the capacity for violence are evident in the many films of the 1950s that present young men in gangs: for example, The Wild One (1954), Blackboard Jungle (1955), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), High School Confidential (1958), and even Bucket of Blood (1959). This was the time of the birth of cool. We have not come as far from that time as we sometimes like to think we have. Let me go back to the sly grin. This usually goes along with a swagger that accentuates the cowboy body. The Mesquiteers are nothing if not cocky in their masculinity (especially Stony as played by Robert Livingstone). Boys learn the importance of self-assurance by watching these films. Not only is the manner of projecting the body in movement important, but so too are clothes that set off the body. Trousers tend to be close fitting and various paraphernalia will accentuate the hips and crotch: belts, holsters, buckles, and sometimes even chaps. Now and again, the trousers have fancy stitched patterns to emphasize the length of the leg and the curve of the buttocks. Boots are often worn outside the trousers so we can see the fine tool work. Shirts are clean and some have embroidered designs, stitched pockets or other fancy stitching on cuffs or shoulders. All this fashionable dress serves both to draw attention to the male body and also to display attractive items of merchandise for the young viewer who hopes to emulate his screen hero. The cowboy is, from one perspective, a fashion model. Even guns and holsters are part of the fashion, exhibiting eye-catching shiny stud-work and fancy patterns. No matter how long these fellows have been on the trail, no matter how frenetic the fistfight, they manage to remain clean, well groomed, and sartorially splendid. So Stony, Tuscon, and Lullaby are inseparable. But why a dummy? The addition of Elmer to the group reinforces its paternal function. These men not only fight and ride and shoot and stop runaway horses, but they also look after children. Children, either in ones, twos, or gaggles, frequently appear in these films, and when they do not, Elmer serves as a good substitute. Bizarre as it may seem, when children are absent Elmer reminds us that these three cowboys are caregivers. Many of these films involve the trio defending

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family values, and they often serve as surrogate fathers to children whose parents have either died or are for some reason ineffective. Realizing the distance between the vision of a John Ford and the directors (men such as Joe Kane, Mack Wright, and George Sherman) of the Mesquiteers series, we might nevertheless think of Stony, Tuscon, and Lullaby as the three Godfathers. Ford's film of the same name carries much of the masculine burden of the "B" Westerns; the three men of the title care for and save a baby by carrying him for days across the desert. They are, in effect, the "Three Wise Men" who deliver the child to safety and community on Christmas day. Two sacrifice their lives to save the child. Ford's film carries a weight of allegory rare in "B" Westerns, but its vision of men outside social norms and civil law who nevertheless are willing to sacrifice themselves for those social norms and its vision of men resourceful enough to nurture a baby, quite bluntly to replace the mother, remind us of "B" Western masculinity. As I noted earlier, Elmer rides in a large rounded bag that hangs from Lullaby's saddle hom. He goes wherever the other three go, and Lullaby takes him from his sack-births him-whenever the film requires a bit of comic relief or some nifty plot tum. For example, in one film, Three Texas Steers (1939), Elmer hangs on a bam wall and comments on a roustabout between Lullaby and a friendly circus gorilla. But mostly Elmer is a constant reminder that these three range riders are at heart defenders of domestic harmony, champions of the small and defenseless, and father figures who remain deeply attached to boyhood. When Elmer talks, he takes charge; he is a wiseacre, brash, quick, and ironic. The dummy speaks with authority and flips the three men around him into adolescence. Why a dummy? The question is akin to asking, why a duck? Upon quick reflection, I take this back: the question is not akin to asking why a duck because the whiff of Marx is hardly strong in the "B" Western. The evocation of fantasy is undeniable in the presence of Elmer. And the fantasy perpetrated by the films has to do with a masculinity that is decidedly powerful. These boys whose home is on the range seldom voice a discouraging word. They represent a male who is complete and autonomous. The male here does not need a woman-for anything. Male companionship and a good horse provide all that is necessary for fulfillment. Furthermore, these men can not only ride, fight, shoot, break broncs, herd cows, fix fences; they can also run orphanages and make decisions regarding the building of dams or telegraph lines or the resettling of communities. But most importantly, they can care for children; they can cook, keep house, change diapers, and prepare milk for feeding an infant. And with Elmer, they can even give birth to a living, talking, though not breathing, person. No fantasy of male independence could be more complete. We approach parthenogenesis here. We might recall Freud's conversation with Little Hans. The child asserts that he is going to have a little girl next year, but Freud tells him that "Only women, only Mum-

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mies have children." Hans replies, "But why shouldn't I?" (1909, 247). Why not indeed?-the Mesquiteers can have Elmer. I have made much of Elmer here, but note the comment of a school principal interviewed by Raphaela Best: "If I encourage boys to play in the dollhouse, the community will run me out" (cited in Miedzian 1991, 110). The space occupied by the Mesquiteers may not be a dollhouse, but Elmer is surely a doll. Three men and a male doll, then, represent a family unit in these films. This is a world in which women have no permanent place. They can provide a bit of fun-some dancing or a flirtatious walk through townbut they are not even a necessary aspect of family life. What kind of man do we have in these films? And why did the community not run him out before sundown? Capable Manhood

The answer is fairly simple, I think. A culture that believes both that "boys will be boys" and that "father knows best" cannot but delight in these cowboy heroes. Stony, Tuscon, Lullaby, and the many other cowboy stars represent a vision of masculinity that manages to remain distinctly masculine while it also manages to convey a feminine side. They wear guns, but they also wear embroidered clothing and finely tooled boots; they fight and even kill their enemies, but they also care for the young and helpless; they represent the freedom of wide open spaces, but they can cook and do other domestic chores; they are staunch members of the community, but they are also very much independent and free of societal restrictions; they neither smoke nor drink, but they nevertheless represent a certain audacity, a refusal to live by conformist codes; they are not tainted with the clash of desire, but at the same time they do not have to sleep alone. In short, these guys are father figures in the guise of a big brother. Not "Big Brother," but the kind of friendly, reassuring role model that our older siblings are supposed to be. This is manhood capable of standing alone together. This is the Trigger Trio. What I have been describing should be familiar to readers of books for children or viewers of popular tilms marketed at a young audience. Take for example, James Cameron's Tenninator 2: Judgement Day (1991) or Harold Becker's Mercury Rising (1998), films in which action heroes show their softer sides as they struggle to protect young boys. Clearly our culture has not lost its love affair with the hero we might think of as hopelessly outdated and naive in the Western films I am discussing. In those films, young viewers learn to be team players, to accept the need to work competitively within a group, but to work with that group in competition with other groups (see Rotundo 1993,286). We might use our film, Trigger Trio (1937), as a final example. The film opens with a panoramic shot of a Western landscape with requisite plains and rocks and

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background hills. Nestled in the middle of a valley is a ranch. Cut to a medium close-up of a sign which informs us that this is the "3M Ranch," home of the Mesquiteers. Cut again to a corral in which a rider sits astride a wildly bucking bronco. On the corral fence are a number of interested spectators, two of whom are Tuscon Smith and Lullaby Joslin. Shortly, the rider succeeds in taming his wild bronco and he dismounts and ambles over to Tuscon and Lullaby where he offers a cocky grin and asks for the money he has won. The young man with the grin is Larry, Tuscon's younger brother, and he has just won a bet with his older sibling. We can see right away the theme of competition. Later in the film, Larry will initiate another bet, this time with the villain. This time he bets to save a dog that the villain mistreats, but the bet entails offering his horse if he loses. He does not, although he wins because of a trick perpetrated by his comrade Lullaby. Winning is a collaborative achievement even if Larry does not know that he received Lullaby's help. Larry's self assurance is both engaging and rash. Obviously his kibitzing with his older brother is good fun, and his winning of the dog, Buck, reminds us of the importance of kindness to animals. But we also know that this behavior just might get him into trouble. He could well have lost his horse to the villain. The plot of the film concerns the sudden appearance of hoof and mouth disease in the local ranching community. When the local government stock inspector is murdered, Tuscon must oversee both the quarantining of animals and the investigation of the crime. Brother Larry chafes at what he perceives to be unnecessary bureaucratic interference in local lives, especially when blame for the hoof-and-mouth disease falls on the surviving daughter and young son of the murdered inspector. Allowing his passion to get the better of him, Larry is easily duped by the villain, a local rancher named Brand, to tie in with him. Here we see the result of Larry's immaturity. The film will now resolve to bring him through to maturity, something he will only attain after suffering. His suffering takes physical form when he falls from a cliff injuring a leg. Of course Larry learns in the nick of time that Tuscon was right all along. Saved both by the dog and by Tuscon from the accident that results in him caught beneath a tree, Larry apologizes for his hotheadedness, and he requests that Tuscon let him go after Brand. He also asks for a gun so he can give Brand what he deserves. With something of a reluctant shrug, Tuscon hands over a pistol and away rides Larry on his white steed, seemingly none the worse for his injured leg. He catches up with Brand and shots ring out. The villain falls to his death, and Larry redeems himself through the taking of this life. He uses the friendly gun accurately and justifiably-it seems. The film ends with community restored, although we are reminded that Larry's leg requires mending.

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This film, like so many others, has a young boy among the cast. This boy serves both as a catalyst for the Mesquiteers' actions (the boy first shows kindness to the dog that Larry eventually wins in his bet with Brand), and as a surrogate for the audience. Here is a boy who looks up to the Mesquiteers, and who will grow up to ride and shoot and protect the small and meek just like they do. In one shot early in the film, we see this boy with the dummy Elmer in his hand. The shot is a throwaway since it is brief and our attention is not directed to Elmer in this scene and he never appears again. It would, without doubt, be easy to miss Elmer hanging from the boy's hand. I suspect viewers unfamiliar with the Mesquiteers series of films would either miss this or find what they see mystifying. The boy with the doll is an understated visual reminder of the relationships between males in this film (and in the genre generally). I began by suggesting that the Trigger Trio presents us with a version of the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion. I might, however, change the names. How about McCoy, Spock, and Kirk? The trio of males constitutes an ideal homo social community. The viewer might wish to emulate any of the three, but two are somewhat less than completely satisfactory. Take our trio, for example. Lullaby, like Mr. Spock, is sensible and logical (at least in this film; it is worth pointing out that the characteristics I list here can move from one character to another in different films in the series), so much so that he lacks the attraction of spontaneity. Larry, as we have seen, is overly emotional: he allows his heart to hold sway over his head. Tuscon, however, appears to balance logic and spontaneity. This is why he is the leader. The young boy can look up to all three because they form a unit, but a unit that has an implicit hierarchy. These are comrades in arms, and they need someone with shoulder stripes, someone to give the orders and to maintain discipline. This is Tuscon. Yet Tuscon needs the other two. Together the three men are efficient and sufficient. So when I speak of "capable manhood" I am referring to men who bond. The vision of these films is not far removed from that in one of our most enduring children's books, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908). In this book, as in The Mesquiteer films, we have a homo social world, comfortable and sustaining. Women, when they appear, invariably appear alongside children or alongside domestics who are usually from racial minorities; in Trigger Trio this minority character is the Chinese cook who suddenly appears at the end. The appearance of the Chinese cook reminds us just how closed the world of the men is. Stony, Tuscon, and Lullaby represent strong and self-sufficient manhood that comes to the aid of weaker characters who are women, children, minorities, or elderly men. The viewer of these films sees masculinity as a supreme value. The masculine virtues of the cowboy heroes successfully communicate the impossible: men hold society

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together and men remain beyond the confines of social convention. These cowboys represent both social values and the values of independence and freedom. In this sense, they remain forever young. They are both grown up responsible citizens and boys who mess around with guns and horses. Not long ago a feature appeared in my local paper, the Calgary Herald, with the title: "There's Something about a Well-Seasoned Cowboy That Makes Women Wild about the West." In this piece of reporting, the writer, Dina O'Meara, quotes a woman from Edmonton named Kim Shanks who says, "I think cowboys are sexy because they're men, not wimps .... They're not going to whine or whimper if they get a scratch." Cowboys such as Clint Eastwood and John Wayne, O'Meara asserts, "squinted, sauntered, and shot their way into our hearts." Strong and silent, the cowboy does his job and gets on with things. Squinting and sauntering may result from life under the sun in boots made more for riding than walking, but shooting into our hearts is a deft reminder of how dangerous this image of manhood is; O'Meara and many others accept the shooting along with the sauntering as signs of attractive manhood. Such attractiveness is what our culture has valorized for much of the twentieth century. For me, and many men of my generation, the attractions of the cowboy were as natural as going to the cinema on Saturday afternoon. In the dark of the Ritz, the Savoy, or the Soper theatre, the cowboy shot himself into our hearts. This knight of the sage and mesas may have ridden into the sunset, but it was just "So long" for a while. He keeps coming back, and each time he does he carries a heavier load of hardware. Notes For an account of the Gower Gulch cowboys, see Diana Serra Cary's The Hollywood Posse: The Story of a Gallant Band of Horsemen Who Made Movie History (1975). 2. Viewers who sit through the credits at the end of the recent film L.A. Confidential (1997) will be rewarded with footage of a parade shot in Los Angeles in the 1950s. This footage concentrates on one figure on horseback: William Boyd as "Hopalong Cassidy." The man in black on a white stallion is a reminder of those supposedly simpler values of that supposedly simpler time when men were men and they set about eradicating evil and saving community, just as the two detective heroes in L.A. Confidential do. 3. Masculinity, as these "B" films construct it, obviously has similarities with masculinity as presented in the bigger budget "A" Westerns of the same period. Both "A" and "8" Westerns show the making of a man, and both "can be reduced to oppositions between those who stand and those who fall down" (Mitchell 1996, 168). The "B" film, however, exhibits less instability in its vision of manhood. This is why an "A" film such as Shane (1953) is closer to the conventions of the "8" Western than films such as Red River (1948) or Pursued (1947). In the latter two films the psychological dimension is strong 1.

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and characters come close to dementia or mental collapse. This is never the case with the "B" Western hero. These films, after all, have something in common with thc didactic tradition of works for the young. By "strange" I mean something akin to "queer" in the sense of "whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant" (Halperin 1995, 62). This definition may seem to conflict with the traditional manhood of the cowboy, but my point is that while seemingly safe and sustaining of the patriarchal (and heterosexual) order, these cowboys also offer a counter vision of men together outside the institutions of the patriarchal order, men together in a homosocial community. No matter how much we want to see them attached to some institutional position (government agent, engineer, orphanage director, even ranch owner or ramrod), they always ride away at the end apparently free of the trappings of institutional control. They live with their sidekicks in a world that is homosocial in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's sense of a male world that exists within "the orbit of 'desire,' of the potentially erotic" (1985, I). Perhaps the best example of this homo social desire is the series of films starring Hopalong Cassidy, beginning with Hopalong Cassidy in 1935 and ending with Borrowed Trouble in 1948. The threesome in these films, especially those with Hoppy, California, and Lucky, have a deeply "desiring" relationship; they flirt, grow jealous, make demands, sleep in the same bed, pout, threaten separation only to reconcile, and generally behave as an odd menage a trois. I am aware that my use of "queer" threatens to "dematerialize any possibility of queerness itself." This threat arises, Sedgwick argues in Tendencies, when one uses the word in a way that disavows "same-sex sexual statement" (1993, 8). Halperin also notes that "queer" becomes normalized by academic use and this very normalization renders the word respectable and unproblematic. Its force as a challenge to the mainstream is lost (see Halperin 1995, 112-3). I do not wish to suggest that "queer" does not refer to same-sex sexual statement, and I do not wish to diminish the word's political force. Quite the reverse. I wish to verbalize "queer," to queer the "B" Western; that is, to see masculinity in these films not as a "given condition but as a horizon of possibilities ... " (Halperin 1995,79). The sense of popular culture I offer is of its radical potential, while I remain aware of its conservative surface.

12 Masks and Masculinity in James Barrie's Peter Pan MONIQUE CHASSAGNOL

I don't want ever to be a man ... I want to be always a little boy and to have fun. J. M. BARRIE, PETER PAN

J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan ran away the day he was born because he overheard his parents "talking about what I was to be when I became a man" (1986, 41), and this moment of fear points to a problem which pervades Barrie's novel: what does it mean to be gendered as a man? When Barrie imagined Peter Pan for the Llewelyn-Davies boys, he was already a respected playwright in his forties, but a lonely man and a failed husband lingering in childhood. In his relationship to the various transformations of the text, he showed a recurrent desire to efface his own creative achievement by concealing the identity of the adult author and man behind that of a child. The origins of the story were in a game invented for the three elder Llewelyn-Davies boys, and two copies of the text-consisting merely of photographs taken by Barrie and a preface supposedly written by Peter Llewellyn-Davies-were made by Barrie in 1901 under the title The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island. At the first staging of the play, the program attributed authorship to the youngest female cast member (Jack 1990, 101). When the play was published over twenty years later, Barrie perpetuated the myth that there was no written text by claiming to have no recollection of writing it (Barrie 1995, 75).1 Barrie's first allusion to Peter Pan appears in The Little White Bird (1902), a novel meant for adults, from which the chapters telling the story of Peter Pan were reprinted separately in 1906 under the title Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, with illustrations by Arthur Rackham. Peter Pan, the play, was first performed in London on December 27, 1904, and appeared in novel form in 1911, first entitled Peter and Wendy, then Peter Pan and Wendy, and eventually Peter Pan, the hero gradually eliminating the heroine. 200

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The eponymous hero, then, is presented both as self-fashioning and in many forms, appearing with the features of a baby in an art book, played by a girl on the stage (in the tradition of pantomime), then as a boy in a novel. The image of the boy who refuses to become a man, constantly masked and unmasked in Barrie's lifetime and by other artists after his death, poses questions about masculinity at the tum of the twentieth century. In the novel, which is the focus of this paper, the ego instabilities of Peter, along with those of Hook and Mr. Darling, suggest a masculinity in crisis, a crisis highlighted by the inability of male characters to form mature relationships with females. By contrast, female characters display more firmly grounded egos.

Contrasted Images of Masculinity: Little Peter and the Great God Pan versus Hook, the Gentleman-Pirate In Peter Pan, male characters are far more numerous than female: Mr. Darling, the middle-class English father and his sons, a group of lost boys and a crew of pirates, a whole tribe of "redskins," and the hero, Peter, and his arch enemy Captain Hook boisterously occupying the foreground. Peter himself appears from the start as a puzzling lanus-faced character, his very name revealing his inborn ambiguity. Just as the Victorians loved well-behaved, innocent, idealized little girls, the Edwardians adored impertinent boys and eager, adventurous, ever-young men, thus following the example given by the new sovereign, Edward VI. In an attempt to make life a boundless playground, the Edwardians celebrated hedonism and youth and Barrie's hero takes his place among many other characters of a similar kind. The Greek god Pan, a favorite among the writers of the time, is to be found not only in literature but also in sculpture and painting (see Merivale 1969). To mention only a few authors famous for their children's books among other works, R. L. Stevenson writes in 1881 an essay entitled "Pan's Pipes" in Virginibus Puerisque, and in 1906, two years after the first performance of Barrie's play, Pan appears again in Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill (1906). The spiritual core of The Wind in the Willows published by Kenneth Grahame in 1908, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn," also stages Pan who, holding his pipes, comes as a vision to the timid and solitary Mole and to the wayfaring Sea Rat, the dreamer and writer. In The Secret Garden by F. H. Burnett (1911), the god is also present in the character of young Dickon, the country boy who plays the flute and can talk to animals. Pan, half-man, half-god, is an in-between character like Peter Pan, who is half-boy, half-fairy. Neither of them knew the love of a mother. Whereas Peter flew away from home the day he was born and came back later to find his cot occupied by another little boy, Pan's mother abandoned him at birth, horrified to have given life to such a monster. Both the Greek god and Barrie's hero--short-tempered, irritable and arrogant, eager for adventure, and

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always on the move-possess boundless energy. Pan, the god of animal instincts, frightening, lascivious, and debauched, pursues the nymphs if not the young shepherds, making the countryside resound with their cries of terror-or pleasure. But unlike Pan, Peter, although he loves to be feared and delights in killing, remains a little boy terrified by mature relationships with the opposite sex. He obstinately refuses to be touched, which he clearly announces to Wendy at their first meeting. Although he thoroughly enjoys and even demands to be taken care of and admired by females, he never considers them for themselves or realizes that they may wish to playa part other than that of devoted, overworked mother or mute worshipper; neither is he aware of the tender feelings Wendy and Tinker Bell have for him, much to Wendy's disappointment and Tinker Bell's anger. Unlike Pan's, Peter's sexual appetites do not bring panic in the woods: the sirens' charms and singing are no danger to him. His solitary adventures on the island, although shrouded in mystery, seem mostly to consist of pursuing and fighting male enemies, maybe imaginary ones. Yet, a spirit of nature with supernatural powers and oozing with vital juices, Peter Pan, on his unexpected arrival in the London nursery, startles Mrs. Darling. She quickly recognizes him as the creature she used to believe in and immediately falls under his charm. This surprising meeting certainly creates panic for the lady and for Nana, the female dog playing the part of the children's nanny. It inspires their ambiguous feelings for the intruder: fear of the animalistic Pan, and tenderness for Peter, the boy. His "little teeth," mentioned in several scenes, those of a baby as several illustrators represent him, nevertheless add a touch of the animal to his image: He was a lovely boy, clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that ooze out of trees; but the most entrancing thing about him was that he had all his first teeth. When he saw she was a grown-up he gnashed the little pearls at her ... Mrs. Darling screamed, ... Nana entered ... She growled and sprang at the boy, ... Again Mrs. Darling screamed, this time in distress for him. (pp.20-1)

Impertinent, violent, self-centered, yet on many occasions daring and chivalrous, Peter Pan intends to be respected and to have his absolute power unchallenged. Yet, throughout the text, his image constantly changes: a god and a baby, a son, a father, a tyrant, a warrior, a little bird. Although enemies to death, Peter and Hook are complementary and eventually alike. Both are captains, Peter of the Lost Boys, Hook of his crew of "dogs" as he calls and treats them. They have already been at war for some time when the Darling children arrive on the island. Hook has lost his right hand which Peter has given to the-female-crocodile to devour. Throughout the text, Barrie draws several portraits of Hook by means of successive

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contradictory touches: either dark or luminous, repulsive or enticing. A devilish figure in black, white, and red, Hook has also something of a flower, with a tinge of tender blue: In person he was cadaverous and blackavised, and his hair was dressed in long curls, which at a distance looked like black candles, and gave a singularly threatening expression to his handsome countenance. His eyes were the blue of the forget-me-not, and of a profound melancholy, save when he was plunging his hook into you, at which time two red spots appeared in them and lit them up horribly.2 (p. 76)

Barrie alternately mentions Hook's-very male-sexually aggressive appearance and his fascinating feminine charm. The reader appreciates the strong sexual connotations of the passage that adds to the numerous allusions to the captain's big cigar and to his iron claw, a precious instrument that twitches alone during the night and of which he is immensely proud. Unlike Peter, "the only boy on the island who could never write nor spell; not the smallest word" (p. 109), Hook, with deft irony, is represented as a refined and educated gentleman, who in the past mingled with the elite. He once attended the best public schools3 in the country where the flowers of English manhood were educated according to the strict rule of military discipline. Harsh competitiveness and bullying that verged on cruelty were meant to tum British little boys into true males: dominant, insensitive, tough in body and heart. 4 As bloodthirsty pirate and the terror of the seas, Hook is a literary stereotype found in many adventure stories, the literary genre Barrie liked best. He is one of the numerous mutilated captains or seafarers, like Melville's Captain Ahab in Moby Dick (1851) or R .L Stevenson's Long John Silver in Treasure Island (1883). Also, like all of these male characters, Hook suffers from a lack of love and tenderness, "No little children love me" (p. 187) he complains dejectedly but the narrator has already warned against empathizing with him, "Ah, envy not Hook" (p. 186). Unlike Peter Pan, who represents uncivilized nature and plays only the Pan pipes, Hook is the man of culture who plays the harpsichord, sister to Apollo's lyre. In his demeanor "something of the grand seigneur still clung to him" and he is "a raconteur of repute" (p. 76). The narrator further ironizes Hook as a character whose reputation has reached beyond his own fiction: The elegance of his diction, even when he was swearing, no less than the distinction of his demeanor, showed him of a different caste from his crew. A man of indomitable courage ... In dress he somewhat aped the attire associated with the name of Charles II, having heard it said in some earlier period of his career that he bore a strange resemblance to the ill-fated Stuarts. (p. 76)

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He is also a good storyteller and talented actor. Just as Mr. Darling makes a show of himself crouching in a kennel, like a hero of the theatre of the absurd, both despairing and exhilarated, Hook, a literary type, seems to the modem reader out of place and utterly anachronistic on the deck of The Jolly Roger in the dress of Charles II. The father and the pirate, characters in the same play, thus choose to wear unexpected masks: that of a dog and that of a king. In the eyes of the modem reader, they also play on a different stage and in a different play: one, a postmodern character, is in advance of his time, the other, in a Restoration play, is an anachronism. The incongruity cannot but be humorous. Captain Hook remains partly a mystery till the end which adds considerable magnificence to the character, to the point where Barrie pretends he dares not take off the mask so as to preserve order in the nation: "Hook was not his true name. To reveal who he really was would even at this date set the country in a blaze" (p. 185). The reader is left to imagine the true identity of this enigmatic hero who must have borne some other namemaybe a most prestigious, royal one-before the loss of his hand that gives even more grandeur to his flamboyant character. Hook, an intelligent man, soon recognizes Peter for what he is: the divine boy, the eternal youth he cannot compete with, since time pursues him as it does any man. Seeing the god more than the lost child in his rival, he calls him by Pan's name. To Hook's vital question: "Pan, who and what art thou?" the boy cockily answers: "I am youth, I am joy ... I am a little bird that has broken out of the nest" (p. 206). Hook then knows he has lost the game for good. While Peter is "tingling with life and also top-heavy with conceit" (p. 121), Hook, dejected, strikes the pose of a romantic hero, sitting "with his head on his hook in a position of profound melancholy" and heaving three sighs: Then at last he spoke passionately. "The game's up," he cried, "those boys have found a mother." Affrighted though she was, Wendy swelled with pride. (p. 122) He too would willingly have taken Wendy as a mother, like Smee who openly offers the girl freedom in exchange for adoption. But, although he plays the game of courteousness to the fair sex, Hook is far from indifferent to Wendy as a woman-to-be. Neither is she indifferent to his aristocratic manners and fine speech. When the pirates savagely attack the children, the boys, unlike Wendy, are treated "in a ruthless manner": several of them were in the air at a time, like bales of goods flung from hand to hand. A different treatment was accorded to Wendy, who came last. With ironical politeness Hook raised his hat to her, and, offering his arm, escorted her to the spot where the others were being gagged. He did it with

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such an air, he was so frightfully distingue, that she was too fascinated to cry out. She was only a little girl. (p. 169) Such exciting meetings quickly awake the desiring young woman in the little girl and the novel of adventure could then have turned into a romance. This scene of seduction and Wendy's "slip" have drastic consequences on the outcome of the narrative. The author, interfering in the story, personally condemns the lady's misbehavior, as if her so-called feminine nature had inevitably escaped his own moral principles as male and writer. It is as if female characters were capable of escaping the bounds set by the author, thus threatening to upset the balance of the story and make it fall into a different literary genre: Perhaps it is telltale to divulge that for a moment Hook entranced her, and we tell on her only because her slip led to strange results. Had she haughtily unhanded him (and we should have loved to write it of her), she would have been hurled through the air like the others, and then Hook would probably not have been present at the tying of the children; and had he not been at the tying he would not have discovered Slightly's secret, and without the secret he could not presently have made his foul attempt on Peter's life. (pp. 170-1)

But another female then steps onto the stage and saves the situation: Tinker Bell otTers her life to save Peter's, endangered by Wendy's passing lightheartedness; the male hero, saved, can continue the fight and the adventure story can continue. Hook's politeness is not only ironic: it is perhaps both the spontaneous reaction of the gentleman and that of the adult man still in search of the mother he sees in any little girl. Even as such, Wendy is fascinated by his genteel manners and eyes of such tender blue. Decades later, when Peter Pan comes back to her and finds her a married woman, he remembers nothing about Hook, whereas Wendy·has not forgotten the blue-eyed captain of the pirates (p. 232).

Sons and Mothers Males, even though they are sexually neutral or immature and take no notice of the physical qualities of female characters, are yet conscious that there is indeed a difference between sexes. Even Peter, who understands so little about females, explains to Tinker Bell, who had obviously noticed it before: "I am a gentleman, and you are a lady" (p. 44). He knows how to please and even flatter Wendy on their first meeting. While sitting on the bed, she has taken refuge in covering her face with the blanket "in the most dignified

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way" (p. 40). He kindly insists on the value of women- that is, the convenient use they can be to men: "Wendy," he continued in a voice that no woman has ever yet been able to resist, "Wendy, one girl is more use than twenty boys." Now Wendy was every inch a woman, though there were not many inches, and she peeped out of the bedclothes. "Do you really think so, Peter?" "Yes, I do." "I think it is perfectly sweet of you," she declared, "and I'll get up again," and she sat with him on the side of the bed. She also said she would give him a kiss if he liked, but Peter did not know what she meant, and he held out his hand expectantly. (p. 40)

Wendy, a woman born-not made as Simone de Beauvoir was later to claim-shows very early what the author seems to consider as innate female qualities. Peter, explaining to Wendy that the lost boys are children who fell from their prams in Kensington Gardens while the nurse was looking the other way, adds: " ... girls, you know, are much too clever to fall out of their prams." This flattered Wendy immensely. "I think," she said, "it is perfectly lovely the way you talk about girls; John there just despises us." (pp. 44-6)

Touched by such an unexpected mark of male esteem for the feminine image, Wendy immediately offers to give Peter a kiss. This he abruptly refuses, fearing she might want it back. Then, calling a kiss a thimble-an item commonly used by women at work as a cap protecting them from the phallic needle-in order not to frighten him away, she kisses him and, easily reassured, he kisses her too. The female figures conform to the role they consider natural to them. The narcissistic mermaids are content with singing, as any true mermaid should, with looking after themselves, basking in the sun and "combing out their hair in a lazy way" (p. 114) that deeply irritates busy, submissive Wendy. Tiger Lily, "the belle of the Piccaninnies," the haughty daughter of the Indian chief, is above all a true redskin, brave and unrefined by civilization: Coquettish, cold and amorous by turns; there is not a brave who would not have the wayward thing to wife, but she staves off the altar with a hatchet. (pp.77-8)

And when Peter asks Wendy why Tiger Lily refuses to be his mother, little Wendy, vividly jealous of the Indian girl yet reserved and discreet on love

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matters as she believes every self-respecting English female should be, timidly answers, "It isn't for a lady to tell" (p. 146). Tinker Bell, of good fairy stock in the line of Shakespeare's Titania, sensuous, seductive, passionate, violent when rejected, does not hesitate to attempt murder on a rival. Recognizing that Peter will never understand what part she wishes him to play, that of a lover, she loses no occasion to shout at him, "You silly ass" (pp. 44, 146, 179). Yet she offers her life to save him. Barrie's females, considering it their duty to comply with patriarchy's requirements of femininity, do so to comic excess. When good little Wendy, tidy and house-proud, sets foot on the pirate ship, ready for death because the infuriated pirates are bellowing abominable threats, the only thing that shocks her is that the ship had not been scrubbed for years. In the Neverland, she is content with Peter's fabulous tales about himself and never has any adventure of her own except escaping death on several occasions. The male world and the female one stand apart. Male and female characters live separate lives in separate places and meet only when the former come to the latter for help or comfort. Wendy nurtures the image of the indispensable housewife humorously illustrating the received idea that "a woman's work is never done" and that "there is no place like home" for her. After the boys have built a tiny, sweet, little house just for her, she spends whole weeks in their home under the ground, bent over her work, cleaning, sewing, darning for them only, anxious to put them to bed early, dry their feet and give them their medicine. In the chapter entitled "The Happy Home"-not without much irony on the part of the author-the latter represents Wendy, relegated to subordinate work-as the angel of the house whereas Peter speaks of himself in the third person "in a very lordly manner" and is worshipped by the redskins who prostrate themselves before him, calling him "the Great White Father," which he likes "tremendously" (p. 139). While he roams the island all day having fun and undertaking all kinds of heroic and mysterious adventures, Wendy wholly dedicates herself to a variety of never-ending chores, "Her face beamed" as she declares: "Oh dear, I am sure I sometimes think spinsters are to be envied" (p. 107). Later again she says: "Oh dear, oh dear, ... I am sure I sometimes think that children are more trouble than they are worth" (p. 142). She is comically overeager to play the part she believes falls to her, that of the indispensable female, and she delights in the fantasy that the males in her charge could not cope on their own. Unlike unhappy males who die while still immature or remain eternal little boys, very young females are capable of happily assuming adult roles. Wendy insists on treating Michael as a baby although he is well past that stage. First she hangs him up in a basket and later forces him to sleep in a cradle. Although he protests vehemently, he becomes the reluctant victim of a possessive mother: "I must have somebody in a cradle," she said almost tartly, "and you are the littlest. A cradle is such a nice homely thing to have about a house." (p. 143)

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And the narrator comments, "Wendy would have a baby. You know what women are" (p. 104), as if they all were, by nature, in constant need of babies or-worse---of males liable to be treated as such. Male babies, stupid enough to fall from their prams, like the lost boys, or to leave home the very day they are born, like Peter, too soon separated from their real mothers, deprive themselves of the pre-oedipal bond vital to establish well-balanced relationships with females in adulthood. They are then reduced to spending the rest of their lives beseeching any young female they come across to play the role of surrogate mother and letting themselves be caught in the trap of overprotective females. Peter, who strictly forbids Wendy to tell the boys stories about her past family life and her real mother, angrily declares, "we don't want any silly mothers" (p. 222), but he chases little girls from generation to generation without noticing that they are not the same character, but their mothers' daughters and granddaughters, all of whom he confuses as a dreamlike maternal figure. Barrie no doubt pays tribute to devoted mothers 5 by acknowledging their constant readiness to dedicate themselves to the comfort and happiness of males. Yet, there is a strong note of reproach in his tone. Like a spoilt, capricious child, Peter refuses to take his medicine "so as to grieve Wendy" (p. 173) but Sometimes, though not often, he had dreams, and they were more painful than the dreams of other boys. For hours he could not be separated from these dreams, though he wailed piteously in them ... At such times it had been Wendy's custom to take him out of bed and sit with him on her lap, soothing him in other ways of her own invention, and when he grew calmer to put him back to bed before he woke up, so that he should not know ofthe indignity to which she had subjected him. (p. 174)

The author knew from personal experience that by taking for granted men's superiority, by hiding their weaknesses and protecting their dignity, women smother males and contribute to their own oppression: "So long as mothers are like this the children will take advantage of them; and they may lay to that" (p. 213). Depicting Mrs. Darling as constantly ready for self-sacrifice, the narrator adopts a dismissive stance: "You see, the woman had no proper spirit. I had meant to say extraordinarily nice things about her, but I despise her, and not one of them will I say now" (p. 216). However he softens this stance because maternal love is an inborn female quality which Mrs. Darling cannot escape: "I won't be able to say nasty things about her-Mrs. Darling-after all. If she was too fond of her rubbishy children she couldn't help it" (p. 219). What the males want is not their real mothers and ordinary family life, but another female, preferably a little girl playing-not without some kind of ambiguous love-the part of a mother for them, in a mock family in which they, as males, distribute the roles.

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Yet, the reason Peter invites Wendy to the Neverland, the magic island of stock characters of adventure and fairy tales, is that he and the boys need a storyteller, a privileged role. Having heard Mrs. Darling tell a story to her children, he supposes her daughter will naturally and happily repeat her mother's part. He therefore asks Wendy to tell him and the boys the tale of a young man, "the prince who couldn't find the lady who wore the glass slipper" (p. 47) thus ignoring the fact that, as the title clearly indicates, the heroine is a female, and that the prince does find the lady in question and marries her in the end, which Wendy immediately reminds him about. She stresses the sentimental note of the happy ending: "Peter," said Wendy excitedly, "that was Cinderella, and he found her, and they lived happily ever after" (p. 47). Barrie starts the story of Peter Pan when the latter comes to the Darling's nursery for the shadow he has lost. Bitterly disappointed and irritated not to get what he wants, he bursts into sobs. Little Wendy addresses him straight away as an individual of the other sex to be respected and comforted: His sobs woke Wendy, and she sat up in bed. She was not alarmed to see a stranger erying on the nursery floor; she was only pleasantly interested. "Boy," she said courteously, "why are you crying?" (pp. 36-7)

Decades later, Peter, unchanged, comes back not for Wendy as an individual, but for the little girl he needs as a surrogate mother. Again, unable to get what he wants since Wendy is now Jane's mother, he starts crying: Peter continued to cry, and soon his sobs woke Jane. She sat up in bed and was interested at once. "Boy," she said, "why are you crying?" (p. 240)

The same sentence is used, a set phrase as it were, opening the story of the usual, fatal male-female relationship according to Barrie, just like "Once upon a time" are the opening words of the traditional fairy tale. And the same story starts again, in the very same way, as if the eternal little boy is eternally to awake young females from peaceful dreams just to stop his tears and mother him. Of Masks and Men

Unlike female characters, male ones, forever immature, find it difficult to perform a satisfying, coherent part. Each of them in his own manner painfully oscillates between various identities, constantly changing masks. In the Neverland, Peter Pan, always in search of adventures, remains the master of the game who carefully chooses the best roles for himself. He intends the other players to accept those roles assigned to them and they do "otherwise he would have treated them severely" (p. 110). When Wendy is discovered

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wounded by Tootles's arrow, Peter, using the poetic style he thinks appropriate to the scene, chooses Slightly for the role of the doctor: "Please, Sir," Peter explained, "a lady lies very ill." She was lying at their feet, but Slightly had the sense not to see her. "Tut, tut, tut," he said, "where does she lie?" "In yonder glade." "I will put a glass thing in her mouth," said Slightly; and he made-believe to do it, while Peter waited." (pp. 96-7) Unlike the Darlings, who know that in the Neverland they are, only for a limited period of time, having a break from their ordinary life in London, Peter does not distinguish between the real and the imaginary, to such an extent that the whole game becomes at times nonsensical. Anyone, according to Peter Pan's whims, may tum suddenly at the most unexpected time into anyone else, including his enemy: one of Peter's peculiarities which was that in the middle of a fight he would suddenly change sides. At the Gulch, when victory was still in the balance, sometimes leaning this way and sometimes that, he called out, "I'm redskin today; what are you, Tootles?" And Tootles answered: "Redskin; what are you, Nibs?" and Nibs said, "Redskin; what are you, Twin?" and so on; and they were all redskin; and of course this would have ended the fight had not the real redskins, fascinated by Peter's methods, agreed to be lost boys for that once, and so at it they all went again, more fiercely than ever." (p. Ill) On several occasions, Peter plays Hook's part. He imitates the captain's voice, thus saving Tiger Lily's life by tricking the pirates into freeing her, and sustains the impersonation so well that Hook himself "felt his ego slipping from him" (p. 125). After Hook's death, caught in his own game, he actually replaces him on deck: he looks like him, behaves like him, and changes into his archenemy. And the lost boys, too, fully enjoy playing a new role in a different dress, on another stage, the deck of The Jolly Roger: They all donned pirate clothes cut off at the knee, shaved smartly, and tumbled up, with the true nautical roll and hitching their trousers. It need not be said who was the captain.... Some of them wanted it to be an honest ship and others were in favor of keeping it a pirate; but the captain treated them as dogs, and they dared not express their wishes to him even in a round robin. Instant obedience was the only safe thing .... The general feeling was that Peter was honest just now to lull Wendy's suspicions, but that there might be a change when the new suit was ready, which, against her will, she was making for him out of some of Hook's wickedest garments. It was afterwards whispered among them that on the first night he wore this suit he sat long in the cabin with Hook's

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cigar-holder in his mouth and one hand clenched, all but the forefinger, which he bent and held threateningly aloft as a hook. (p. 213)

But there is another role that Peter Pan loves above all others: that of the respected and tyrannical father. He likes to end his sentences with "Peter Pan has spoken" (p. 140), and, convinced that, as a male, he is unquestionably always right, is satisfied to hear Wendy declare "Father knows best" (p. 140). In the "happy home," family links although played convincingly, are most uncertain and changing since when John rebels and declares he is not indeed Peter's son, Tootles asks-in vain-to be father in his tum, or, in case it is not possible, the baby, or even a twin. And Peter, just back from exotic adventures on the magic island, enjoys playing at forming an old couple with Wendy, who enthusiastically accepts the role of the elderly exhausted housewife and mother of eight: " ... there is nothing more pleasant of an evening for you and me when the day's toil is over than to rest by the fire with the little ones near by." "It is sweet, Peter, isn't it?" Wendy said, frightfully gratified. (p. 144)

But when the female starts to play the family game too seriously and considers Peter as a real father, the latter is terrified and, taking off the mask abruptly, shows like all the other male characters his true face, although often hidden, which is that of a distressed child: "But they are yours, Peter, yours and mine." "But not really, Wendy?" he asked anxiously. "Not if you don't wish it," she replied; and she distinctly heard his sigh of relief. "Peter," she asked, trying to speak firmly, "what are your exact feelings for me?" "Those of a devoted son, Wendy." "I thought so," she said, and went and sat by herself at the extreme end of the room. (p. 145)

And, as usual, Peter cannot comprehend Wendy's dissatisfaction at his response. As a dream-child, Peter is the one who makes imaginary things and beings come true by bringing three London children to the Neverland, a place already living in their imagination and teeming with literary reminiscences and characters from children's books and boys' adventure stories in particular. The Neverland is a jumble of odds and ends, images, stereotypes and cliches: twinkling fairies and villainous-looking pirates and redskins on the warpaths brandishing tomahawks and knives, and wild beasts of all kinds and singing mermaids and bits from Queen Mab and Puss-in-Boots. This "fearsome island" (p. 63) where "growing up ... is against the rules" (p. 72), where each individual finds his or her own dreams-and fears--corne true, is

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also the image of the maternal body, a placc once entirely one's own but forbidden after one has left it at birth, or rather allowed only in imagination and approached physically with terror: "Nothing horrid was visible in the air, yet their progress had become slow and labored, exactly as if they were pushing their way through hostile forces" (p. 63). In his introduction to R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1857) Barrie wrote: "To be born is to be wrecked on an island" (cited in Wullschliiger 1995, 131). In this magic realm, the Darling children find the waters, the grotto, and above all the secret, warm, "Home Under the Ground" (chapter 7), a cocoon where the boys are offered tenderness and protection and which the author describes at length several times (see p. 81, for example). Peter, the dream boy, fashions the children to enter his dream world: unless your tree fitled you it was difficult to go up and down, and no two of the boys were quite the same size. Once you fitted, you drew in your breath at the top, and down you went at exactly the right speed, while to ascend you drew in and let out alternately, and so wriggled up ... But you simply must fit, and Peter measures you for your tree as carefully as for a suit of clothes. (p. 103)

Peter makes each young male individually fit to leave and reenter the maternal body at will. Here the surrogate mother figure, Wendy, tenderly waits for him and all the boys. Once back in London, only Wendy remembers the Neverland and Peter Pan. The Lost Boys-adopted with great joy by Mrs. Darling and greater reluctance by her husband-soon become very ordinary unimaginative adults. At the end of the play, Peter's cry, says Barrie, might become "To live would be an awfully big adventure!"6 (p. 153) but the boy does not eventually choose to make ordinary life an adventure. On the contrary "with a rapturous face" (p. 154) taking on Pan's mask, he produces his pipes and, going back to the Neverland, with admiring fairies gathering around him, plays on. In the novel version, when Wendy falteringly suggests he might wish to tell her parents "about a very sweet subject" (p. 229) concerning them both, he as usual does not understand her, although the girl-passionately this timeexclaims she would love him just as much as an adult man with a beard. When Mrs. Darling stretches out her arms to him he repulses her: "Keep back, lady, no one is going to catch me and make me a man" (p. 230). Finally, in a plaintive tone, Wendy submits meekly and beseeches him to remember her: he promises unhesitatingly and offers to bring her back to the Neverland every year to do his spring cleaning. Wendy is overwhelmed with joy at this news but Peter flies away and quickly forgets. After his departure, Wendy makes great-but vain-efforts to keep Peter Pan alive in the boys' memories and years later permits her daughter to replace her as Peter's mother and go to the Neverland in her tum. Thus she allows the story to continue.

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Male characters, on the other hand, cannot enter worlds other than those of their fantasies. They demand to be given, but cannot give and transmit: they forget everything but themselves and therefore can play no part in the continuation of the tale. It is through mothers passing on their roles as storytellers to their daughters that the story of, and the belief in, Peter Pan can perdure. Peter forgets Hook, as well as coquettish, amorous and proud females like the mermaids, Tinker Bell, and Tiger Lily. Only Wendy remains, episodically, in his uncertain memory, and many other little Wendies, a series of female descendants, will succeed her: "When Margaret grows up she will have a daughter, who is to be Peter's mother in tum; and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent? and heartless." (p. 242). If not for its comic tum the world of Peter Pan would no doubt seem a heartless one in which male and female characters decide to conform to the stereotyped gender roles they consider assigned to them, with men supposed to be naturally daring adventurers and authoritative leaders and Mrs. Darling and her female descendants, deeply rooted in the middle-class English values of their time, accepting their part as subordinates, offering themselves as efficient housewives and caring mothers. Only in the world of imagination, the Neverland, are the females freed from the housework and childcare that the London-born females are dedicated to, but, as literary types, they, in a similar manner, strictly adhere to the characteristics of the genre they belong to. Never do female and male characters communicate, cooperate on equal terms or actually share any experience, not even sexual attraction. Males playa game of make-believe and females pretend to believe. In such circumstances, the Darling females tum their frustrating secondary role into the leading one by reversing the situation to their advantage. Taking for granted the male arrogance, domination, and lust for power, they pretend to submit meekly in order to maintain the social and cultural status quo. By exploiting the eternal male desire to be respected, but also tenderly cared for and comforted, they aggravate male weakness and sense of failure and become possessive mothers keeping their adopted sons in everlasting childhood, forever begging for maternal love, humiliated and misused in their tum. Life, no longer a joyful, childlike game to be played into adult age according to the Edwardian dream, becomes a tragic one in which both sides lose, but the male side-supposed to be born a winner in all fields-suffers for the loss far more cruelly than the female does. Men fail in their desperate attempts at keeping on the stereotyped masks they believe their own by nature, but which society imposes on them. They take refuge in other roles, at times burlesque or grotesque. Unlike women, born mature, they may be born males, but they never become men. Thus, Barrie's male and female characters never succeed in looking at one another's bare faces; the distressed males in need of mothers become mere puppets in the hands of unsatisfied females in need of lovers.

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After many generations of telling and retelling several versions of the fascinating story of BatTie's Peter Pan, Wendy's female descendants, feeling less and less enthusiastic about getting out of bed to coddle little Peter and to dry his tears, may one day bluntly refuse. They may even convince him that remaining for ever a self-centered immature male having fun on his own, a little lost boy in quest of female love, is perhaps not as satisfying a perspective for him and for the others as it may seem. Perhaps they will see that hegemonic masculinity may not be a fully satisfactory atTangement of gender roles, and find that there are better ways of asserting oneself as a male. Peter Pan, drying his tears, may then understand that to live together as equal grown-ups of the opposite sex may be, after all, "an awfully big adventure" and then a different story will start. Notes 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

As R. D. S. Jack points out, in communications with Charles Scribner after the missing manuscript of the play was discovered in 1964 in the Lilly Library of the University of Indiana, Barrie acknowledges that he "not only knew of the manuscript but suspected that he had given it to Maude Adams" ('The Manuscript of Peter Pan," Children's Literature 18 (1990): 103.) Jack further suggests that, "The conceit of the 'unwritten play' was thus a device designed to strengthen (and perhaps add a sense of mystery to) the myth of Pan." See other contradictory references such as "in the dark nature there was a touch of the feminine, as in all the great pirates, and it sometimes gave him intuitions" (p. 125); "Dark as were his thoughts, his blue eyes were as soft as the periwinkle" (p. 173); "The unhappy Hook was as impotent as he was damp, and he fell forward like a cut flower" (p. 188). In the play, Hook's last words are "Floreat Etona" (p. 106), an homage to Eton, the most famous of British public schools. These words were added to the novel version in 1911, when the Llewellyn-Davies boys themselves attended the school. Several writers, like Kipling and Orwell, wrote bitter reports of the agony they suffered for years in such places, and about the sad consequences this type of education left on their adult life as males. Barrie had a very passionate relationship with his own mother, Margaret Ogilvy, who herself, motherless at a very early age, had been in charge of her siblings. He wrote the autobiography of his early life with her in a book entitled Margaret Ogilvy (1896). When he was six, his elder brother, David, his mother's favorite child, died in a skating accident. The mother, in shock and despair, shut herself up in her room, refusing to take care of the rest of the family. Little James then thought that, in order to gain his mother's interest, he had to become a substitute for David in his mother's affection. He started to dress like him, to talk like him, and eventually looked like him and became as brilliant as David had been. And the link between Barrie and his mother became very close. They wrote to each other every day until she died, when the writer

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7.

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was thirty-five. He never grew taller than his brother David when the latter died and he kept a child's face and a child's voice until his own death at the age of seventy-seven. Peter's very famous statement when he thinks he is about to be drowned, "To die will be an awfully big adventure" (p. 132), was considered out of place during wartime, so was omitted in the 1915 production. Barrie (1860--1937), who wrote in the years when Freud (1856-1939) also lived in London and published his main works-in particular The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)-probably had his doubts about children's innocence, which he reveals in Peter Pan, hence the ironical, rather bitter tone, of the last words of the novel version. "An afterthought," an appendix to the play, performed in 1908, ends with a woman addressing a female dog, "WENDY: rlliet Jane flyaway with him to the Darling Never-never Land, and when she grows up I hope she will have a little daughter, who will flyaway with him in tum-and in this way may I go on for ever and ever, dear Nana, so long as children are young and innocent" (p. 163).

13 Representing Masculinities in Norwegian and Australian Young Adult Fiction A Comparative Study ROLF ROM0REN AND JOHN STEPHENS

Du har en tapper spnn, herr Simonsen. Mons nikket. la, han slekter pa sin mor. ("You have a courageous son, Mr Simonsen." Mons nodded. "Yes, he takes after his mother.") KLAUS HAGERUP, MARKUS AND DIANA

One of the newer areas of research into masculinities, as Bob Connell points out in The Men and the Boys, is a focus on "how masculinities are constructed by global forces and how men, in all their diversity, are positioned in global society" (2000, 33). Connell, among other researchers, has argued that international relations, international trade, and global markets are inherently arenas of gender formation, and that "we can recognize the existence of a world gender order," which he goes on to define as "the structure of relationships that connect the gender regimes of institutions, and the gender orders of local society, on a world scale" (pp. 40-1). The effects of a world gender order on how masculinities are (re)shaped are most evident in comparisons between the metropolitan structures of Europe and North America, on the one hand, and comparatively more recent players on the global scene in other parts of the world. Comparisons of a less overt kind are also possible, however, and in this chapter we otter a comparison of how agendas of masculinity formation emerge in some examples of young adult (YA) fiction from Norway and Australia. 1 These are essentially "European" cultures which are arguably at different stages in processes of gender revolution: Norway is widely recognized as one of the world's most advanced countries in its reorganization of gender regimes, whereas in Australia there is still considerable tension between types of masculinity, such as

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Representing Masculinities in Norwegian and Australian Young Adult Fiction 217 the traditional frontier masculinity of the first century and a half of European settlement and that of the more modem, urban "new sensitive man." The young adult literatures of Norway and Australia evolve quite independently of one another, at opposite ends of the world. 2 Very few books have crossed the language boundary through translation, and none of those which are the corpus for this project. 3 Both societies, however, are in dialogue with global popular culture (young people see the same Hollywood films, TV soaps and comedies, for example, all of which are media fraught with gender imagery), and hence each local gender regime implicitly, at least, engages in a pushpull dialogue with more global images of masculinity. Both literatures therefore include a substantial number of YA novels which engage, to varying degrees, in agendas of masculinity formation and thereby with forms of that masculinity grounded in domination, physical assertiveness, and egocentric individualism which still predominate in media images. This version of masculinity, under the influence of Connell's evolving terminology, is commonly referred to by the shorthand term "hegemonic masculinity."4 In order to compare the two literatures, we compiled separate working lists for the two countries, and then each of us sampled the "other" literature as much as was possible in the period available to us. Gendering can be analyzed in all behavior represented in fiction, but we were looking particularly for books in which there was little doubt that masculinity was, in some way, an explicit theme. Hence we looked at novels, rather than at authors. To enhance the effects of sameness and difference, we sought to promote our dialogue by each focusing initial attention on texts from the other literature. Jonathan Culler has pointed out that narrative is "the principal kind of sense-making at our disposal" (Culler 1997, 94). Our concern here is with particular forms of narrative, those of YA fiction, but our specific interest in its representations of masculinity, and especially its concern with possibilities of change or affirmation, necessitates that it be placed in the context of other kinds of narrative, more specifically, the metanarratives which shape the performance of gender in the world as well as in fiction. Of particular relevance were Connell's discussions of masculinity from a sociological perspective and Judith Butler's concept of gender as performative, especially the suggestion that gender is reproduced by the reiteration of behaviors and structures. (For other recent applications of this work to children's fiction, see Boethius 1999; Pennell 1999; Stephens 1999.) Connell, in response to "the burst of pUblicity ... [that] ... has brought back obsolete ideas about natural difference and true masculinity" and has implied "a false unity in men's lives," sets out to make "a fresh appraisal of research and theory about masculinity, and a fresh attempt to connect knowledge with strategies for change" (1995, ix). He surveys three main projects for a science of masculinity in the twentieth century, Freudian theory, sociological studies of "sex roles," and recent developments in anthropology, his-

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tory, and sociology. He concludes that gender must be conceptualized as relational. He notes that the modem era has witnessed the emergence of an historical consciousness about gender, a "knowledge that gender was a structure of social relations, open to social reform" (p. 227): Rather than attempting to define masculinity as an object (a natural character type, a behavioral average, a norm), we need to focus on the processes and relationships through which men and women conduct gendered lives. "Masculinity," to the extent the term can be briefly defined at all, is simultaneously a place in gender relations, the practices through which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects of these practices in bodily experience, personality, and culture. (p. 71)

Gender is thus relational both in the sense that masculinity and femininity are inherently relational (and constantly changing) concepts ("Masculinity as an object of knowledge is always masculinity-in-relation"), and that masculinity involves the likewise dynamic interplay of both personality and social relationship. Connell's focus on "the processes and relationships through which men and women conduct gendered lives" is substantially illustrated by a selection of life histories. What Connell infers from these life stories is very pertinent to our interest in the representation of gendered practices in fictional and narrative forms. He points out that the stories on the one hand give rich documentation of personal experience, ideology, and subjectivity, and on the other hand document social structures, social movements, and institutions (p. 89). In other words, "They give rich evidence about impersonal and collective processes as well as about subjectivity"-which is, of course, also a way to think about the relationship of fiction to the social world. The concepts of history and story are further linked through the processes which shape subjectivity and the narrative "forks" at which a subject is faced with divergent possibilities: A life-history is a project ... [and that project] is itself the relation between the social conditions that determine practice and the future social world that practice brings into being. That is to say, life-history method always concerns the making of social life through time. It is literally history. (p. 89)

The project thus defined is a project which seeks to identify the metanarratives and teleologies which shape a life-history and the significances drawn from it. A sociologist's views on how to interpret histories and stories, especially in relation to the dynamics of social change, are inevitably different from a literary scholar's readings of the constructed texts of fiction. That being so, there are nevertheless striking resemblances to our literary project, not only in the reliance on stories as our object of study, but also in the par-

Representing Masculinities in Norwegian and Australian Young Adult Fiction 219 ticular representations of subjectivity around which those stories can be said to pivot. The life-histories Connell collected pertained to men "for whom the construction or integration of masculinity was under pressure" (p. 90). It is our assumption that modem YA literature also discloses a very relevant "staging" of the same "masculinity under pressure." Fiction has the potential to represent subjectivities in dialogue with formative collective processes and with pressures for change. YA fiction, in particular, is apt to engage with what Connell describes as "the classic goals of education-to broaden experience, to pursue justice, to participate fully in culture" (1995, 240). Arguing that "education is the formation of the capacities for practice" (p. 239) and that changes in gender relations only come about within the context of a wider concern for social justice, Connell concludes that "A social justice agenda in education must concern the full range of capacities for practice, the justice of the way those capacities are developed and distributed and the ways they are put into effect" (p. 239). The nexus between such an argument and concerns characteristic of YA fiction seems very close. Fiction, however, cannot be conflated with life-history, and novelists are not sociologists, though on the other hand it would be unlikely that educated, culturally aware authors could fail to be cognizant of contemporary gender debates. But fiction lays out a constructed view of experience, and requires as much attention to the processes of construction as to the represented content. As argued elsewhere, gendering is an aspect both of narrative discourse and of story: important aspects of discourse will include the framing situation, particularly the operation of cause-and-effect and the movement towards closure; the representation of relations between characters, actions, and outcomes, with particular attention to point of view and focalization; the subject positions constructed for implied readers; aspects of register chosen; and the effects of intertextuality. (Stephens 1996c, 20) For example, constructions of hegemonic masculinity drawn upon in the configuration of a novel's set of principal characters are as much an aspect of intertextuality as of sociology. Hegemonic masculinity tends to be evoked as a schema, shaping what a character is like, how he behaves, and how he interacts with other characters. Only a couple of elements of the schema need be adduced for readers to instantiate the whole schema, because audiences recognize it from other texts-other novels, magazines, TV soaps, Hollywood films, and the like (see Stephens 1996, 17-18). This principle explains much of the process by which hegemonic masculinity is pervasively evoked. Its operation is also apt to be very complex in fiction, however, especially when the focused character also happens to be the story's narrator or its principal

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focalizer, and authors are striving for ironic effects in representation. It is here that Butler's concept of "constructed identity," that is, identity as the performance of attributes which are "a constituted social temporality" (1990, 141), is of particular significance. Butler argues that identity is generated within time and place and subjects produce an imitation of a gendered identity by repeatedly performing those acts which a specific society at a specific time assumes are the attributes of masculinity or femininity (Butler 1990, 134-41). The capacity of a novel to disclose a character's ideological assumptions through behavior, focalization, and dialogue also includes a capacity to foreground the element of performativeness within gendering and gendered practices. Many of the novels we considered for this study interrogate the performance of gendered practices by what we term "metonymic configuration." Patterns of gendered behaviors are built up through the simple fictive practice of developing conflict and/or thematic implication through interactions amongst diverse and contrasting characters (often character stereotypes). Thus a male character's behavior may be marked by attributes which prompt readers to instantiate a schema for hegemonic masculinity. Three or four of the following will evoke the rest: to be self-regarding, a physical or verbal bully, overbearing in relation to women and children, (over)fond of alcohol, violent, short-tempered, neglectful of personal appearance, hostile to difference/otherness, actually or implicitly misogynistic, sexually exploitative, insistent upon differentiated gender roles and prone to impose these on others, classist, racist, generally xenophobic, sport-focused, insensitive, inattentive when others are speaking, aimless, possessive. In addition to his story functions, that character is also apt to function as a metonym for hegemonic masculinity. Other characters, now performing different kinds of masculinity, may then enter into the novel's configuration of gendered behaviors. There may be both masculine and feminine metonymic configurations, as well as patterns of other kinds: fathers and sons; mothers and sons; school situations; sports practices; and so on. Patternings of this kind emphasize that our study is framed within and by fictional forms and concerned particularly with how issues of masculinity are represented within both novelistic structures and framing discourses, especially discourses of masculinity and discourses of femininity. We have chosen to focus attention on some points of convergence between the literatures, though some points of divergence would also offer insights into literature and culture. In delimiting our focus of attention we have thus set aside some otherwise very significant and informative areas because we thought that at this particular moment in time a comparative study would be either un symptomatic or unbalanced. Other researchers may conclude differently. There are thus three notable areas we have not included. First, the fictive strategy of redefining masculinity by the depiction of

Representing Masculinities in Norwegian andAustralian Young Adult Fiction 221

androgynous characters who present as male but tum out to be disguised females (or vice versa) seems at present to be predominantly Scandinavian. Eugenie Winther's Fr¢ken Tankel¢s (1934) is a classic Norwegian example; Borgny Dam-Nielsen's Den lange reisen (1988) is more contemporary. Westin (1999) offers a useful discussion of some modem Swedish examples. We are not aware of any Australian examples, and have not pursued the theme. Second, although representations of gay masculinity are now quite common in Scandinavian and English language literatures, gay themes in Australia are predominantly found in short fiction and mostly concerned with female experience, so we felt unable to make a meaningfully symptomatic comparison. This area would be more effectively handled from a different comparative base. Third, both countries are at various stages in the process of transition to a multicultural society, wherein people of different ethnic origins are dispersed in substantial numbers throughout society at all levels in all regions. Australia is perhaps further along in the process, with the consequence that Australian YA literature includes a larger number of novels in which the performance of masculinity is nuanced by diverse cultural traditions. 5 We have included one such text, Philip Gwynne's Deadly, Unna?,6 in our group of focus texts, but not specifically for that reason. The examples of this text type are still too few and too diverse to enable confident comparison. On the other side, there are some very useful areas of convergence between the two literatures, and these have governed our determination of a corpus. A more general trend which also appears in both is that whereas traditional boys' books almost completely rested on the exclusion of female characters (sisters, mothers, girlfriends), in modem YA novels about boys, females very often playa crucial part. Thus female characters may, for example, be instrumental in mapping or modeling social change, may be catalysts in the processes which put masculinity under pressure, or may constitute focalizing or implicit perspectives from which boys' masculinities are appraised (and perhaps ironized). An important function of female characters situated within a narrator's or focalizer's peer group is the challenge posed by their otherness. From the perspective of these young male characters, "girls" (jenter) are both objects of fascination and desire and objects of terror. Strategically, novelists can use this challenge from otherness to dramatize the relational construction of gender, initially by representing masculinity contrastively as not feminine within a system of symbolic difference, and then showing how masculinity only evolves within a system of gender relations. The "fear of girls" motif, which is perhaps more explicitly identified in Norwegian texts, appears quintessentially in the opening paragraph of Hagerup's Markus and Diana (1994), where the long list of everything Markus fears (heights, the dark, lightning, elevators, spiders, dogs) culminates with, "But most of all he was afraid of girls. They scared him out of his wits and made him blush just by looking at

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him." Parry's Sad Boys (1998), which has a complex patterning of three male and three female characters, with alternating male and female focalization, distributes fascination and fear between two of the characters (Jacko and Danny). Of particular interest is how male characters conceptualize and respond to otherness. In an ideal world where the condition of otherness would presuppose the kind of intersubjective communication which would enable gender redefinition, objectification itself would dissolve. This tends to be the case with the "fear of girls" motif (as for Markus and Danny), but it is, perhaps realistically, a less common outcome for the "fascination with girls" motif, which is commonly an induction into hegemonic masculinity. A tentative conclusion we have drawn is that in both literatures male and female authors seem to thematize masculinity differently, with the different perspective reproduced in basically the same way in each literature. That is, male authors seem more concerned to explore the angst generated by the pressures on masculinity during adolescence, and while they may at times privilege alternative versions (for example, that metonymic ally represented by the boy who reads, often figured in Scandinavian literatures as the "pale boy" who is uninterested in sports), they tend to show sympathy for boys performing a masculinity which is culturally determined and thus not of their own formation or choosing. Among Australian writers, however, only Glyn Parry (Sad Boys) and Alan Sillitoe (joy ride) can be said to embrace the notion of "meeting boys where they're at" (Parry 1998, 58) as opposed to seeking intervention into their masculine behaviors. In Norway, both Arne Berggren and Rune Belsvik seem willing to depict a desire in young males to be supermacho, though each does so in a very ambivalent manner, using humor, irony, the fallibility of first-person narrators, and eventual outcomes to maintain a distance from the attitudes and behaviors of male characters. Female authors tend rather to privilege a concern with changing the social performance of masculinity, and hence seem more apt to insist on the cultivation of awareness and choice as a responsibility, and to make strategic use of a development in male characters of an awareness and acceptance of female SUbjectivity and agency. This perspective may be ironically incorporated into male writing as a significant absence, as when in Berggren's The Fish (1997) or Belsvik's Love is a Cinematic Illusion (1992) the first-person narrators implicitly refuse the possibility of female agency. This is especially apparent in the ways they conceptualize the lives of their mothers. A different problem of otherness is pervasively associated with fathers. Novels by all authors (both Norwegian and Australian) in which masculinity is an explicit theme consistently attribute much of the responsibility for interpellative hegemonic masculinity to fathers, either because they are absent or have been rendered humanly inept by their own interiorization of masculine ideologies (whether by performing hegemonic masculinity or measuring themselves unfavorably against it). Erna Osland's The Sixth Hold (1997), for

Representing Masculinities in Norwegian and Australian Young Adult Fiction 223

example, depicts fathers who are absent and useless. When the mother fmds her two sons bloody and bruised in the bathroom, one of her first reactions is to feel guilt, and to conclude that they have got into trouble because they lacked male role models, but this is raised as an option to be refused. The book does incorporate a positive model, but neither of the boys' fathers has anything to offer. In some novels this process is developed in such a way that for the son to perform his own masculinity the father must be overthrown and symbolically killed. 7 This is not a new theme in YA literature, of course, and there has been a long literary tradition of oedipal stories. Not all novels which handle this motif do so under the shadow of the Freudian Oedipus myth, however, and novels such as The Fish or Deadly, Unna? seem more susceptible to a Butlerian analysis of social formations which implicitly reinforce the performance of particular behaviors. This argument is advanced, for instance, in Harald Bache-Wiig's "The Vanished Father?" (1996), where he suggests that Scandinavian children's fiction has outgrown the Oedipal myth in its representations of gender. Although Aldo Monrad, narrator of The Fish, is evolving a masculinity in contrast to his father, a rather desperate man oppressed by hierarchical patriarchy and depressed by his own failure to replicate hegemonic masculinity, his models are drawn from media which promote hegemonic masculinity-Hollywood films, advertising, and pornographic magazines (see Connell 1995, 214-6)-an irony readers will find hard to miss. Thus the narrative "overthrow" of the father, who suffers humiliation and then a minor heart attack during the fishing trip which is his attempt at father-son male bonding, paves the way for Aldo to embrace hegemonic masculinity. In contrast, when the close of Deadly, Unna? pivots on a violent defeat of the abusive father by means of unpremeditated cooperation amongst his children (male and female), the novel rearranges the masculine metonymic configuration so that the worst aspects of hegemonic masculinity are symbolically overthrown. For a character represented at a stage of life which is especially formative in gender production, "masculinity under pressure" is as much a state of potentiality as of crisis. Characters who narrate or focalize novels which thematize masculinity are not usually represented at the outset as already interpellated within a particular masculine schema, but their actions and attitudes tend to instantiate a particular schema by the text's point of closure. A group of texts such as Sad Boys,S The Fish, and Judith Clarke's Nighttrain (1998) spans a wide range of possible schemata, putting into crisis both the sensitive new man schema (SNMS) and the hegemonic masculinity schema (HMS). In these novels relational performances of gender are seen to produce ambiguity or outright lack. Sad Boys, focalized in alternating scenes by a male focalizer (Danny, nicknamed "Rabbit") and a female focalizer (Sharron), offers perhaps the most schematic representation of gendering. Indeed, the configuration of both male and female types is so heavily patterned and paired as to

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constitute a weakness in the novel. The parallel male and female groupsthree of each, of different but equivalent types-constitute a dialogue amongst different social constructions of gender, though one pair, Aboriginal cousins Andrew and Wendy,9 are largely pushed to the margin of events. This enables more emphasis on the contrast between Jacko, who is on an HMS trajectory, and Danny, on an SNMS trajectory. Jacko and his female equivalent, the affluent, materialistic bimbo Donna, perform heavily gendered roles unquestioningly, and their lack of introspection is not just because they are focalized by Danny and Sharron 10 but also because they share a tendency towards exhibitionism and verbaUphysical assaults on what is perceived as other. Danny and Sharron, in contrast, experience a sense of radical alienation and lack of agency, but then their tentative relationship enables them incipiently to explore and experiment with sociosexual behaviors. Their perception that Jacko and Donna are ontologically limited by the lack of any inner life and lack the potential to become unified or centered subjects contrasts with their own shared desire for an ethically based being and the creative impulses they have in common. Their common trajectory is toward other-regardingness. Perhaps the main function of Andrew and Wendy, the third pair, is that they too have diminished subjectivities: dominated by causes (history, ecology), both are actually quite self-regarding. In diametrical opposition to Jacko and Donna, they only have inner lives, and this is metonymically figured in the frailty of their bodies-Andrew suffers debilitating asthma and Wendy anorexia. The characters meet because all have gone to an island for a holiday, and Parry is using the "time out" motif to place the characters in unfamiliar crisis situations. Each of the boys had imagined the island as some kind of personal Eden, but Jacko's masculine arrogance made the hoped for idyll impossible. Banished from the island at the end of the novel, however, the boys emerge into a quasifantasy outcome when they are met outside the ferry station by the three girls in a pink chevy convertible, and all drive off together in a celebration of youth and simply being: Donna jumped on the air hom again"That's where the BP truck got the grannie!"and sped them past a white painted cross. "Yeah, well we're not old," said Sharron. "And we're not dead," said Ozone [Andrew]. "We're alive," buzzed Rabbit [Danny] with outstretched arms . . . . this was what he'd needed to feel all his life. This feeling you get when you're no longer an alien. Sun on your skin, wind in your hair, best mates all around. And the sky. That big Kahuna sky that lets you run and lets you hide and lets you be who you want to be. (Sad Boys, 216-7)

Representing Masculinities in Norwegian and Australian Young Adult Fiction 225 This close appears to imply that the proper state of youth is carefree abandon, contemptuous of the hard facts of old age and death. Even the introspective characters, the characters who, while on the island, followed a familiar YA pattern of personal development, are now freed from social responsibility into the untrammeled state of being "who you want to be." It seems likely that Parry's strategy here is a calculated response to the wider context of overtly thematized gender representations in Australian YA novels. These have principally been the domain of female authors deploying female focalizers, and within this process a major strategy has been to use the female spectator role to alter preadult females' consciousness about themselves and their orientation towards males. Elements of this strategy seem evident in the sections of Sad Boys focalized by Sharron. In the absence of social consensus about desirable masculinities, however, those texts often overtly or implicitly present ambivalent or shifting points of view, or their implied audience is female and the textual objective is to influence girls to contribute to changing images of masculinity by showing preference for males who instantiate an SNM schema. This includes such attributes as being: other-regarding in interpersonal relations; affectionate; well kempt, but unselfconscious about appearance; calm; self-possessed, but approachable; serious; polite; careful; attentive; supportive; considerate and respectful of the space and feelings of the (female) other; playful (as among equals); takes pleasure in female companionship; respects tum-taking in male-female conversations; artistic/ creative (but also practical); idealistic. The intensity of this advocacy may reflect that the SNM schema has as yet attained only limited currency in Australian society, and that it is most likely to be found within the social groups who write books, make films, and so on. Even here, gender correctness seems fragile when the desired masculine schema is being defined too restrictively, and characters are not enabled to engage in the kind of codeswitching between schemata which many males in actual world social interaction may commonly practise, and which Parry sets out to constellate in Sad Boys in his narrative argument for a more pluralistic or eclectic conception of masculinity. A rather different angle on this argument is afforded by Judith Clarke's Nighttrain, a novel which begins with the funeral of its main character and then plots the circumstances which led to his death. This story of the last few days in the life of eighteen-year-old Luke portrays masculinity as a state of ontological lack brought about because the particular configuration of relations in which the focused character is enmeshed not only fails to nurture him in a time of crisis but is the cause of that crisis. The novel thus situates its constructions of masculinity in the context of how society fails some boys, and why they die violently, whether by pointless accident, risk-taking or suicide. The novel flirts with the possibility that the main character, Luke, is

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schizophrenic, and by opening with his funeral hints at the possibility of suicide-but finally, the question is, How did he become so dysfunctional? What happens in the life of a boy that makes adults think he might be schizophrenic? The novel invites readers to infer some of the major concerns about the lives of young Australian males. It explores how society--especially family and school structures-fails to make space for male unease and nonconformism, for the intelligent young man who copes poorly with behavioral codes and the interrelated processes of formal education. Luke's father is part of the problem, but is himself a "victim" of patriarchy in his assumptions about how males should progress in the world (to avoid "the scrap heap") and his inability to communicate. Male teachers are also a big part of the problem-those teachers who wield power for the sake of power itself, but wield it in the name of social order, discipline, the reputation of the school, and in doing so enforce hegemonic masculinity within a rigid patriarchal structure. An especially penetrating exposition of adolescent masculinity is Berggren's The Fish. Aldo Monrad, the fifteen-year-old narrator, is prey to his hormones, oscillating between fantasy images of himself as a sexual prodigy and a recognition that he is alienated, lonely, and marginalized within his peer group, and may well be on the way to replicating his father's dreary, downtrodden life: I wasn't destined to be Agent 007 or sit in parliament and have lavish lunches and expensive cars with women in the back seat. I was destined for a job as an accountant, and a sexual debut when I was around thirty. (p. 52)

Berggren's first-person narrated, stream-of-consciousness technique has a subtle and complex effect. It implies and enables introspection, and at the same time discloses the limited means for self-understanding or cultural analysis that are at Aldo's disposal. Thus the second chapter drifts on Aldo's mindstream during a classroom time dedicated to reflection, focused on the task of writing about some book which has had a significant impact on his life or has links with a personal experience. Aldo meditates instead principally about girls and sex, and the chapter begins to unfold the kind of tools available to Aldo for such thinking. First, there are the codes of hegemonic masculinity. These are embodied in Toffen and Beinet, minor characters who are the dominant males in the peer group, and evoked as a critical absence by putative authority figures-the school principal, a soft man ll with a photo of Ghandi in his office, unmarried, and "probably gay" (p. 14), and Aldo's father. Second, there is the pervasive cultural effect whereby that masculinity is evoked through spectatorship of the constructions of females as objects of gaze, whether in the advertisements in weekly magazines, or in the pornographic magazines Aldo hides in his bottom draw. Third is the enlightened

Representing Masculinities in Norwegian and Australian Young Adult Fiction 227 wisdom of his culture, in the form of a sex information pamphlet which has been distributed through the school. Aldo's attitude toward this pamphlet is very dismissive, treating it as more "soft man" business, and he particularly scorns two pieces of advice: that one's "sexual debut" should be delayed until maturity, and that one should listen to what girls really want (p. 12). Aldo wants sex now, and female subjectivity is completely irrelevant to the possible performance of that desire. Aldo's entry at this point into HMS thinking is through a performance of the male gaze. He may dismiss Pia, the girl sitting in front of him, as "Swotsnout," but he finds her naked back sexually attractive as she bends and her tee shirt slides up. The things which constitute Pia's femininity, however-she collects pictures of ponies and plays the recorder, for example-are excluded by Aldo from any notion of her as a sexual object. She later invites him to go with her to a party and a large part of the novel is devoted to his reaction: Does he want to seduce Pia? Will he settle for "second-best"? In one ironically framed episode Aldo reconstructs Pia as a fitting object of lust within a masculinist code: I opened the window, lay on the bed, and closed my eyes. Pia sat on a motorbike outside the school gate. When she saw me, she got off and came sauntering over. "Are you coming in?" I asked. "Piss on school," Pia said. Something was different about her face. Her eyes had become larger. She looked as if she'd spent a long time in the sun. I glanced at her tits beneath the leather jacket. They were pretty big. "What do you reckon?" Pia asked and opened the zipper a bit just as a shriek split the sky and a foul smell entered my room. At the door stood the rumplestumble with damp knees and mother's milk in his hair. Fantastic. He had a nappy in his hand. (p. 44)

The demolition of Aldo's masturbatory fantasy is a symptomatic, deconstructive tum in the novel, repeated several times. Here it helps foreground (if any help is needed) the conventional and constructed nature of the sexual image (the motorbike, leather, tough demeanor, specific physical features). The intrusion of mundane everydayness comments on the image: how equivalent is Aldo's mental state to the baby's act in emptying his dirty nappy onto Aldo's floor? The floor may now be in need of "three liters of Ajax," as Aldo goes on to complain, but so, of course, is his mind. Aldo is placed under pressure by the messages of a sexualized culture, by his mother's concern about his lack of friends of either sex, and by his father's fears that he will tum out to be a replica of his own "failed" masculinity. The latter appears to invoke a crisis in conceptions of masculinity, in that Aldo's father seems hopelessly confused by irreconcilable tensions amongst the modem Norwegian gender order, hegemonic masculinity, and a contemporary hierarchy in masculinities which privileges the expertise and rank of the business executive. Aldo's strategy for attempting to resolve the pressures he is under is to define two life goals for himself: to have his first sexual experience, and with Pia (after

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all, Beinet has taught him a basic masculinist cliche-"All girls feel the same in the dark" [slar du av lyset, sa er det ikke noen jorskjell] , p. 44), and to make a male friend with whom he can ride the bus, go to the cinema, and so on. The kind of masculinity he aspires to perform in terms of his own interpretation of cultural imperatives precludes the possibility that one person could fulfill both functions. In fact, this division between friends and girls is deeply scored in both Norwegian and Australian YA representations of masculinity and appears as a thematic concern in all six novels we are discussing here. The anxieties of Aldo's father threaten Aldo's sexual project, because they lead to the bizarre and ultimately disastrous fishing trip, to a retreat into a zone (somewhere other than Norway) where masculinity defines itself against nature and wilderness, and where the only female presences admitted are the stripper and the whore. This strand of the novel, and especially the symbolic death of the father we pointed to earlier, is its frame. The opening chapter is set in the ambulance helicopter which flies them back to Oslo after the father's heart attack, and the close reiterates that moment. Aldo's father never does catch a fish, and never recuperates that failed masculinity he so misconceives, but in the third last chapter collapses beneath the water of the river immediately following Aldo's quasi-mystic encounter with the fish he has caught. The father's fantasy about a masculine, philosophical encounter with the primitive thus passes to the son. Back in Oslo, with the danger passed, he sends Aldo to the party, where Pia awaits with her own sexual agenda. The novel closes with Aldo and Pia sitting side-by-side on a bed behind a door Pia has locked. The irony which Aldo entirely misses is that Pia is doing the seducing. This moment, however, is not quite Aldo's first sexual encounter. His early moment of excitement prompted by Pia's sliding t-shirt reached its apogee as masculine performance at the river, where the site of their hut is shared by an old circus tent used for staging strip shows. Peeking through a hole tom in the wall of the tent, Aldo becomes fully incorporated into that version of masculinity uttered as vocal spectatorship of a pornographic scene. The episode with the tent is a very astute move by Berggren. Aldo witnesses and partakes in a ritual performance of masculinity, and the drawing in through the rent in the wall physically enacts the process of interpellation he is undergoing: an explicit contrast with the long-gone original occupants of the tent oppositionally declares that what is being displayed is another kind of performance, and thus a subject (that is, Aldo) who is trying to approximate gender norms is being interpellated into a process which itself reiterates past interpellations. While it is clear to readers how sharply the episode is judged, Aldo merely stumbles on into a tawdry first sexual encounter: masturbated by a prostitute working as an adjunct to the show, he deludes himself that this is evidence of his maturity.

Representing Masculinities in Norwegian andAustralian Young Adult Fiction 229

The representations of masculinity under pressure in the three novels discussed suggest a pessimistic view, though the problem is delineated in different ways. The Fish and Nighttrain both suggest that the impact of hegemonic masculinity within each of the cultures depicted tends to perpetuate ontological lack in male subjects. An alternative mode of being is present in each only as a perceptible absence. Sad Boys attempts to engage polemically with contemporary constructions of masculinity, but in setting aside "feminine" reconstructions appears to reaffirm what Connell describes as an "essentialist" definition of masculinity (1995, 68-9), characterized by Jacko's risk-taking, irresponsibility, and constant aggression. Danny's instantiation of an SNM schema is deferred by the ending, though the personality depicted does conform with a figure familiar in YA literature from both Norway and Australia, the young male with a propensity to develop an alternative masculinity. This potentiality is explored in the main characters of, for example, Deadly, Unna?, Love is a Cinematic Illusion, and The Sixth Hold. The pivot point of a complex male metonymic configuration in Deadly, Unna? is its narrator and principal character, Gary. He is depicted as gangling, awkward, not very at home with his body, intelligent but shy-that is, he typifies the young male character conventionally depicted as having good potential to develop towards a more desirable type of masculinity because the HMS is already disrupted. By the conclusion of the novel he has progressed far in this direction. Such progression is not inevitable, of course, and the narrator of Belsvik's Love is a Cinematic Illusion illustrates how a sensitive and intelligent youth may still function within the shadow of an HMS because of a propensity to be excessively self-regarding. In contrast, Gary's capacity to be other-regarding is cultivated almost programmatically in parallel with Connell's argument that changes in gender relations must occur within a wider concern for social justice. Surrounded by adult males exhibiting various aspects of an HMS-especially his father, who is brutal, irresponsible, drunken, violent and aggressive-Gary must call on resources of great courage to choose to be different. His choice is consistently affirmed textually by a pervasive suggestion that hegemonic masculinity is already entropic. This tendency is evident in the irony that football, a ready metonym for Australian HMS behavior, raises Gary's consciousness of other forms of subjectivity when he makes friends with an Aboriginal teammate, Dumby, and, more tentatively, with Dumby's sister Clarence. But Dumby-confident in his youthful masculinity, at home with his body, naturally talented at sports-is killed in an incident which deeply divides the white and black communities. Gary's masculinity is then defined by the choice he must make between three actions: to obey his father's demand that he work on his fishing boat; to go to a barbecue held by the poised, privileged, and middle-class girl he is in an incipient relationship with; or to walk for three hot hours to attend Dumby's funeral, with the possibility of a hostile or even violent

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reception. Such a range of choices seems rather factitious, and points to the self-conscious, thematic constructedness of Gwynne's story here in the depiction of an alternative masculine schema. Gary's (inevitable) choice of the most difficult option then commits him to resist his father, not for any self-regarding motive (that is, to become a "man" himself) but to make a symbolic gesture in solidarity with the Aboriginal people of the district. A further aspect of regendering in Deadly, Unna? which is pertinent to this last group of texts is male-female relation through cooperation, in that Gary receives valuable support from his sister Sharon and from Clarence. The obverse occurs when he is hiding from his father and decides the local library is the best place of concealment. Reading or "book-knowledge" is a common trope for differing male possibilities, and using a library as a place of concealment, because the macho male will never go there, is a motif that appears in many books. Gary uses the opportunity to try to finish a Mills & Boon romance his mother had been reading, but is prevented by the female librarian, who deems it "unsuitable," so he reads Biggles instead (p. 248). In a very obvious kind of way, Gwynne has juxtaposed genres commonly evoked as examples of social determination of gender at work, marking how endemically Gary's culture has naturalized the HMS. A contrasting situation is presented in Belsvik's Love is a Cinematic Illusion, a poetic discourse narrated by Arne, a young man obsessed with the girlfriend he threw over. Arne is talented and imaginative, but he is also a type of alienated masculinity. His narrative self-revelation constitutes a study of male solipsism, focused through the "human" problem of desire, the confusion that one desires what one cannot have, and does not want what one can (a paradox also explored by Berggren in The Fish). When Arne and the object of his obsession, Grete Eik, were a couple he didn't want her: "I tried to think back. To the times she always waited for me. The times we were together so much that I grew bored with her, so bored that I left. I drew comfort from that for a while" (p. 101). Now that she has a new boyfriend he works to split them, writing a school project on "love" in order to demonstrate to Grete that it doesn't exist, but is only an illusion perpetrated in films (eit Jilmtriks). The project has a self-reflexive function, as one of the novel's various metafictive elements, simultaneously drawing attention to the constructedness of the narrative and its theme. It is mainly this element which signals the novel's thematic concern with unrealized potential. What Arne seeks is a denial of the possibility of intersubjective relationships. He has no grasp of female otherness, but imagines girls as projections of his own desires, so that his potential for sensitivity is always already contained by HMS thinking. His trajectory is implicitly toward the masculinity suggested by his father's physical, inarticulate presence, his hand always grasping a hammer or a glass of ale. Arne's lack of any other-regardingness is narratively underlined through the function of a secondary female character, Guro,

Representing Masculinities in Norwegian and Austmlian Young Adult Fiction 231

who trades sex for attention, but in a defining moment holds back waiting for Arne to put reciprocity into language (pp. 94-5). For all his fluency, this he cannot do, even though he has enough intelligence and self-awareness to see that his inability diminishes him. This particular episode functions as a mise en abyme, encapsulating the whole of Arne's performance: insofar as subjectivity is enabled by intersubjective relations, he is afflicted with acute ontological lack. The scene ends with a dialogue rich in metonymic implication: [Guro:) '{ think I have to go home now.' 'Why?' 'I'm freezing.'

Like the significant absence of his own unspoken words, and like Guro's unanswered desire, Arne's potential for subjective regendering stands frozen. A clear contrast between the outcomes for masculinity in Love is a Cinematic Illusion and Osland's The Sixth Hold can be summed up in a remark of Connell's: "In the context of the broad delegitimation of patriarchy, men's relational interests in the welfare of women and girls can displace the same men's gender-specific interests in supremacy" (1995, 242). The Sixth Hold confirms the suggestion that, if male authors are concerned to explore male psyches and the cultural constitution of them, female authors are concerned with reconstructions of masculinity in its orientation towards femininity. It has been noted that a recurrent theme in Osland's fiction is mutual support and assistance between boys and girls in times of crisis (Birkeland et al. 1997,371), and that is again the case here. In what is predominantly a story about boys-an urban adventure involving the (unnamed) narrator and his older half-brother, Helge-Osland foregrounds the significance of the female for the relational construction of masculinity. The narrator, Helge, their absent fathers, and the shadowy, violent criminal element Helge has become involved with, configure possibilities of masculinity, though the focus is on the narrator's development. The defining moment in this novel, as its title suggests, occurs in chapters 4 and 5 and their consequence, an episode in which the narrator, apprehensive about attending his first school dance, approaches his revered older brother for advice. Helge's discourse on the five ways to hold a girl, delivered spasmodically while he goes on with his narcissistic bodybuilding exercises, lays the ground for a metonymic transition of the female from object to (agential) subject. Helge's lesson is about how to handle female objects, presented in comic mode because the narrator cannot see he is being set up for embarrassment. The narrator's experiences with Reidun, the girl he most admires, function as a marker of the transition: first he uses the wrong holdtoo close and too tight-and then reaches the conclusion, in the book's closing sentence, that it is up to Reidun to determine "which hold will be put into

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practice with her" (p. 102). Hence a "grip" on otherness (the Norwegian grep has this double sense), on the concept of other subjectivities, on intersubjectivity, is advanced as an aspect of acceptable or desirable masculinity. The narrator's own rite of passage from muscular solipsism to intersubjective awareness is signaled when, while being helped by Reidun after being beaten by Helge's associates, he tries to evade her questions by describing himself as "new" (p. 66), in the sense that he is new in the area and the school. But it also in effect signifies that he is in a process of transition and renewal, just as, strategically, the move from his father's house to his mother's at the beginning of the novel marks the beginning of a transition to enhanced awareness of female otherness. The Sixth Hold is narratively and thematically simpler than Deadly, Unna? or Love is a Cinematic Illusion, and to some extent that can explain why it envisions the process of regendering most straightforwardly. It is a fitting example to conclude with, however, because it does encapsulate the version of relational, male-female intersubjective masculinity imagined as desirable outcome or unfortunate absence in most of the fiction, Australian and Norwegian, we have examined. But the process is ongoing and never straightforward, and, as these novels well illustrate, change in gender regimes tends to produce conflict between various aspects of new role patterns, and there may be possibilities for both more fully realized and diminished subjectivities. Moreover, any particular version of masculinity is not simply identifiable in the content of a fictive text as a reflection of a cultural formation, but is present more relationally and dialogically through several possible constructions of and attitudes towards masculinity. The various masculinities we have discerned within the fiction's metonymic configurations vie for hegemony within some kind of hierarchy, and a significant aspect of the two literatures we have compared is not just that they seek to privilege quite similar versions of a sensitive new man schema, but that they also recognize the rival pull of forms of hegemonic masculinity, whether from traditionallocal forms or from the dominant masculine images of global media.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

This study evolved out of a dialogue, spread over several weeks, between the authors. We are very grateful to Agder University College, Kristiansand, for making this exchange possible and for extending its facilities to John Stephens for seven weeks. While book production in Norway, a small language society, is heavily subsidized by the government, Australian literature is more directly dependent on the market. This does not automatically result in quality differences, but may perhaps enable a more experimental children's literature in Norway. All translations from Norwegian here are therefore our own.

Representing Masculinities in NOIwegian and Australian Young Adult Fiction 233 4.

Throughout Masculinities, for example, "hegemonic masculinity" is used to refer to the version of masculinity which is considered normative within a particular society's expressions of masculinity. In most cases this does coincide with masculinities based in domination and/or violence, and in The Men and the Boys this has become the meaning of "hegemonic masculinity" (see, for example, p. 11). 5. Other pertinent Australian examples are: Archimede Fusillo, Sparring with Shadows (1997); Jonathan Harlen, Fracture Zone (1996); Matt Zurbo, Idiot Pride (1997). Two Norwegian female authors, Mette Newth and Unni Nielsen, have written YA novels, historical and contemporary, focusing on confrontations grounded in ethnic diversity. 6. Deadly, Unna?, drawing on Aboriginal English, means (roughly) "Wonderful, isn't it?" 7. Examples in addition to those discussed below are: Tor Fretheim, Langsam trio (1994); Archimede Fusillo, Sparring with Shadows (1997); Sonya Hartnett, Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf(1999). 8. The epithet "sad" in the novel's title plays across a semantic range which includes "depressed, depressing, hopeless, unrecuperable," as when one of the female characters remarks that "Boys are sad" (Parry 1998,24). 9. The author seems to be trying to pack in too many issues. Aboriginality is incorporated but quarantined off from the rest of the story by the strategy of making the pair cousins and concerned more with local Aboriginal history than adolescent coupling rituals. Wendy is also anorexic and gay-really! 10. We are for instance, told by Sharron that Jacko "likes guns and hates Asians and has no respect for the dead. No respect, period." (p. 105); Danny says that Donna is "the horny one" (p.llS). 11. Aldo's comment, Rektor er myk man ("The principal is a soft man"), directly cites the Norwegian equivalent of the sensitive new male.

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Subject Index

abjection, 62, 65, 77, 178, 181, 182, 213 agency, x, 38-39, 103, 143, 151, 178, 224. See also subjectivity. female agency, 222 myth of heroic, 48-50 audiences, 135, 139 fonnalist approach, 136-38 reader response approach, 136-48

femininity, 1,22,58,59,62,63,75,87, 96,97,99,103, 113n, 116, 126-127,179 feminine failure, 90, 92, 97 feminine schemata, 56, 67-68, 77n, 96,106,142,206,226 girl power, 101-102 as otherness, 221 patriarchal constructions of, 203 feminism, x, xi, 1, 17,57,59-60,64, 67,68,71,74,78,80,83,98, 107, 134, 139, 147, 150, 176 focalization, 167, 222

bildungsroman, 75, 104 boyology, 186 camp, 32 canon, 85 in schools, 134 carnival,96, 131, 166, 177 closure, 60, 63, 74 cross-dressing, 78-95, 120, 125, 174, 178. See also drag.

gaze, male, 7, 27, 29, 31, 33, 69, 123-129,150,155,160,226, 227,228 gender, x binarism, 66, 76, 85, 87, 110-112 gender blending, 189 as hierarchy, 227 identity, 41, 94, 97, 99, 107 and narrative discourse, 219 performativity, xii, 8, 28, 82-95, 98-99, 108, 120, 125, 127 power relationships, 61, 64, 66,68, 70,74-76,100-103,113,114n, 123

dialogism, 165 Disney animated tilms, 116-132 drag, 127 fairy-tale, 67, 86, 132n fathers and sons, 12-13, 129 female body, 108

255

256 reading as gendered experience, 108 relational, 218, 231 and sex, 97, 98, 112-113, 114n and social justice, 219, 229 stereotyped, 213 genre, 188 hero tale, 152, 195 subverted, 160 heteronormativity, 164, 169, 170, 176, 178,179,180 heterotopia, 165, 171, 177, 180 homophobia, 8, 12,47, 168 homosexuality. See masculinity, gay. homosociality, 151, 174, 185, 189, 197 homosocial space, 22 homosocial relationships, 27 hybridity, 167, 169, 188 ideology, 14,57-63,65,67,102 implied reader, 63, 73 intertextuality as bricolage, 211 makeover, 103-109, 118, 125-127 male body, 104-108, 117-127 failed masculine body, 117-l20, 126 genitalia, 25-27 as spectacle, 17,31-35, 115, 119, 123 visual representation of, 25-26 masculinity: adolescent, 128 attributes of, 124, 142 atypical, 86-87 civilized, 128, 131 code switching, 209, 225 commodification of, 32, 33 conventional, II crisis in, 15-16,21,24,25,34,35, 57,99,106,112, 114n, 128,131 defined negatively, 100 diminished, 24-31 dismantling hegemonic, 9, 11, 16, 49, 165, 183 diversity of, ix, 16,35. See also schemata.

Subject Index dominance in canonical literature, 147 essential, 122 within families, 207-209 fathers, portrayal of, 222-223 feminized, 24, 25 gay, ix, 8,12,14,26-27,73,82,98, 164,221 and first-person narration, 167-168 global formations of, 216, 217 hegemonic, ix, 17,46-47,56,57,61, 66-68,70-71,73,75,76,78,81, 98,103,112,116,135,151,153, 165,217,219, 223,226,233n under pressure, 162, 181,219, 223,229 heroic, 18-23, 24,49, 116, 124, 129 idealized, 23, 24 infantilized. See diminished. inherent in male bodies, 203 male-female binary, 133, 158 male characters in fiction, 140 as opposite to femininity, 3, 12, 14,64,121,151,191,213 in opposition to the law, 11 marginalized, 69-70, 72, 73, 92 normative, 1, 9, 45, 69 performative aspects, 210 phallic, 20, 28 queer, ix representation in film, 123-124 revisionary constructions of, 144, 159, 189 rural,71 schemata, 44-53, 58, 64, 65, 67-68, 72,77n, 190,219,220,225 sensitive new man, ix, 24, 44, 46-49,52-54,116,118,128, 162,223,225,229 as sexuality, 20, 21, 91 as social construction, 116, 125, 156 as state oflack, 225 stereotypes, 147 successful, 5 traditional, 57, 61, 63, 65, 76, 78, 90, 99,106,108-109,118-119,129

257

Subject Index and violence, 66, 72-73, 128, 187, 192-193 working class, 71, 74 metafiction, 56-57, 67-68, 71, 73, 75-77,169,178,230 metanarrative, 55, 57, 64, 71, 76,116, 131 metonymy, 65, 75 multiculturalism, 221 narrative and metonymic configurations, 220, 229 strategies, 61 Oedipal narrative, 13,27,129,223 Pan (demi-god), 201-202 patriarchy, 30, 56-63, 65-74, 83, 100, 107,108,124,126,129-131 perforrnativity, 166, 175,217,220,228 phallus, symbolic power of, 172 phallocentrism, 81,150 picture books, 16-36 polysemic nature of, 16 point of view, 41 postcolonial criticism, 167, 176 Post-Structuralism, 39 queer theory, 165, 176, 183, 188, 199n realism, 152 role-play. See subjectivity. romance, 177, 179 Romance, tradition of, 23

self-reflexiveness, 77, 120, 176 See also metafiction. sexuality, 112 subjectivity, 103-104, 110, 114n, 119, 151,156,165, 169,218,219, 224 female, 56, 98, 107 gay subjectivity, 164, 168 gendered, 175 identity, 41, 98,103-104, 107-111 intentionality, 49-52 interpellations of, 41, 43, 57, 62, 66, 68,69,74 intersubjectivity, xi, xiv, 55, 71, 73, 75,116,120,170,180,230,231, 232 loss of, 43 male, 21, 39,40,56,61,81,98,107 and other-regardingness, 224 queer, 170, 172 role-play, function of, 40-46, 50, 52,82 social-constructionist view of, 40 subjective agency, xi, xii, xiii, 38-54, 164-166, 168, 176, 180, 181,231 See also agency. transsexualism, 80, 82, III transvestites, 69 xenophobia, 130

Narne and Title Index

Abou-Rihan, E, 166 Ahlberg, Allen, Ten in a Bed, 67 Aladdin, 116, 126 Alien, 48-49 Althusser, Louis, 14n Altieri, Charles, 39-40, 41, 49, 51 Andersen, Hans Christian, The Emperor's New Clothes, 32 Applegate, K. A, Animorphs, 11 Appleyard, J. A., 136, 139

Berggren, Arne, The Fish, 222, 223, 226-229 Berger, John, 7 BI~Robert,99, 103, 106, 108 Bordo, Susan, xiii, 188 Bourdieu, Pierre, 50 Boys Don't Cry, 79 Bradford, Clare, 30 Briggs, Raymond, The Tin Pot Foreign General and The Old Iron Woman, 19-21 The Afan, 26-28,29 Browne, A., The Big Baby, 26, 29-31 Willy the Wimp, 26, 2&-29 Buchbinder, D, Afasculinities and Identities, xi Performance anxieties: re-producing masculinity, 25, 36n, 155 Burnett, E H., The Secret Garden, 201 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 122-123, 127-130, 132n Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble (1990), 41,9&-99,103,162,217,220, 223 Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of "Sex" (1993), 72, 155 Butterss, Philip, 98

Bache-Wiig, Harald, 223 Baillie, Alan, Last Shot, 77n Baillie, Alan and Wayne Harris, Dragon Quest, 21-23 Bakhtin, M., 31 Barrett, Angela, The Emperor's New Clothes, 32-35 Barrie, J. M.: The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island,2oo The Little White Bird, 200 Peter Pan, 200-214 Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, 200 Beauty and the Beast, 116-132 Belsvik, Rune, Love is a Cinematic Illusion, 222, 229, 230

258

259

Inder: ofNames and Titles Caldecott, Randolph, 96 Carey, Peter, The Big Bazoohley, 45-46 Cervantes, Don Quixote, 21, 23 Chambers, Aidan, Postcards from No Man's Land, 1l0-113, 156-159 Clarke, Judith, Nighttrain, 223, 225, 229 Cocteau, Jean, La Belle et la Bete, 118, 132n Connell, R.W., Masculinities, ix, x, xiii-xiv, 12, 16,22,55-59, 67-71,77,101, 184n, 216, 217, 218,229,231 The Men and The Boys, 8 Cormier, Robert, Heroes, 152-155 Culler, Jonathan, 217 Crutcher, Chris, ironman, xii-xiii The Secrets of Sarah Byrnes,

159-161 Davies, Bronwyn, 133 De Mille, Cecil B., The Ten Commandments,174

Doyle, Brian, Covered Bridge, 57, 68, 71,73-77 Easy Avenue, 73 Dubosarsky, Ursula, Bruno and the Crumhorn, 57, 68-77 Eaglestone, Robert, 138 Edgar, D., 114n Edwards, T., 115n Estes, Clarissa Pinko la, 128

Gagnon, John H. and William Simon, 105 Garber, Marjorie, 81 Garland, S. and T. Ross, Seeing Red, 19 Gilbert, R. and P. Gilbert, 15 Gilbert, S. M. and S. Gubar, 115n Gladiator, 18 Goodman, L., 135 Grahame, Kenneth, The Wind in the Willows, 81-82,197,201 Groundhog Day, 112 Gupta, Senil, 170 Gurian, Michael, 2, 10 Gutterman, David, S., 107-108 Gwynne, Philip, Deadly, Unna?, 223, 229-230 Hagerup, Klaus, Markus and Diana, 221 Halperin, David, 199 Hatty, Suzanne E., 186 Henkes, Kevin, Lily's Purple Plastic Purse, 3 Hercules, 116-132 Hill, Amelia, 114n Hilton, Nette, Square Pegs, 168 Hirsch, Odo, Antonio S and the Mystery of Theodore Guzman, 42-43

Hoban, Russell, The Mouse and His Child, 59 Hollindale, Peter, "Ideology and the Children's Book," 56-62, 64, 74 Hourihan, Margery, 152 Hunchback of Notre Dame, The, 116

Faludi, Susan, 147-148 Fiedler, Leslie, 122, 186 Fienberg, Anna, Dead Sailors Don 'f Bite, 44, 52-54 Finding Forrester, xii Fine, Anne, Bill's New Frock, 56, 60--64, 69,95n Fabric Crafts, 56, 64--67 Fletcher, Richard, ix Ford, John, 194 Francis, B., 142 Freud, Sigmund, 94 Full Mont); The, 32

Husain, Shahrukh, "What Will Be Will Be," 79, 85-94 "Secure at Last," 85, 91-94 lrigaray, Luce, 151 Jack, R. D. S., 214n Jagose, Annamarie, 165-166 Jauss, H. R., 16 Jeffords, Susan, 116, 117-118 Kemp, Gene, The Wacky World afWesley Baker, 40, 46-48

260 The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler, 58-59 Kimmel, Michael, 8 Kirkham, Pat and Janet Thumim, 124, 131 Kubrick, Stanley, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 130 wdybugs,81-82 Lacan,Jacques, 17,21,24,25,29, 30-31, 107, 151, 157 Langbauer, L., 150, 159 Lee, Harper, To Kill a Mockingbird, 139, 142 Lion King, The, 116 Lowry, Lois, Stay! Keeper's Story, 7-8 Lucas, R., 152 Mackintosh, David, The Emperor's New Clothes, 32-35 Mailer, Norman, 193 Martino, VVayne, 134, 149 Ma VIe En Rose, 79 McCallum, Robyn, 71 McKinley, Robin, Rose Daughter, 80, 89-94 McMahon, A., 24 McRobbie, David, Tyro, 155-156, 157 See How They Run, 77n McNay, Lois, xi-xii Mercer, Kobena, 165, 166 Meri vale, Patricia, 201 Metz, Christian, 33 Miller, Arthur, The Crucible, 139 Minton, H. L., 166 Modleski, Tania, 25 Moir, Anne and Bill Moir, 97,107, 114n Moloney, James, Swashbuckler, 40, 49, 51-52 Morris, Marla, 166 Morrison, Tony, 134-135 Morton, VValt, 122 Mulvey, Laura, 17, 31-32, 123-124, 150, 160 Mulan, 82-84, 87, 90-93,116-132 Norton, Jody, 84

1ndex of Names and Titles Oslund, Ema, The Sixth Hold, 222-223,229,231 Parry, Glyn, Sad Boys, 222, 229 Paterson, Katherine, Parzival: The Quest of the Grail Knight, 49-51 Paulsen, Gary, Hatchet, 3, 10, 12-13 Payton, B. A., 186 Pierce, Tamora,Alanna, 82-84, 87, 89-91,93 Pollack, VVilliam, 10, 12 Potter, Beatrix, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, 3-7 Pratchett, Terry, Only You Can Save Mankind, 48-49 Truckers, 59-60, 62, 65 Price, Susan, The Sterkarm Handshake, 108-110 Rao, Raj, 176 Rees, David, 168 Rich, Adrienne, 162 Robinson, Sally, 55 Rogers, Lesley, 114n Ross, Andrew, 117 Rotundo, Anthony, 191 Rowling, J. K., Harry Potter, 12, 14n Russo, M., 31 Sachar, Louis, Holes, 104-107, 108 Said, Edward, 114n Savran, David, 193 Sayer, K., IBn Sedgwick, Eve, 176, 199 Seidler, V. J., 114n Selvadurai, Shy am, Funny Boy, 79, 164-184 Sendak, Maurice, Where the Wild Things Are, 3-5, 7, 9-10 Seneviratne, Clare, 170 Sengupta, Somini, 176 Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, 85 Merchant of Venice, 85 Sillitoe, Alan, joy ride, 222 Silverman, Kaja, 21, 24 Simpsons, The, 81-82 Sleeping Beauty, 119

261

Index ofNames and Titles Solomon-Godeau, A., 16, 18 Spinelli, Jerry, Wringer, 8-9 Stephens, John, Gender, Genre and Children's Literature (1996), 56-77,219 Language and Ideology in Children's Fiction (1992), 60-62 "Construction of Female Selves in Adolescent Fiction: Makeovers as Metonym," 103-110, 118 Stoller, R., 81 Taketani, E., 113n Tarzan, 116-132 Tarzan the Ape Man, 122, 132n Terminator, The, 18 Terminator 2,18 Three Mesquiteers, The, 188 Trigger Trio, The, 195-197

Trites, Roberta S., 164-165, 183n Twain, Mark, "Hellfire Hotchkiss," 84 Waldby, c., 157 Warner, Michael, 164 Watson, J., 114n Weber, Lenora Mattingly, Meet the Malones, U5n Wells, Peter, Boy Overboard, 164-184 Weeks, Jeffrey, 100 Westin, Boel, 221 Wie1er, Diana, Bad Boy, 12 Wijesinha, Rajiva, 169, 170, 179 Willis, Sharon, 116 Xie, Shaobo, 167 Zipes, Jack, 92