The Influence of Children’s Portal Fantasies on Gender Behavior

Children’s literature has many functions. It provides a source of entertainment for young minds. Stories stimulate creativity and offer children a sense of escape from the boredom of childhood routines. Reading and being read to can provide children with access to imagined and undiscovered worlds, the most notable works of children’s literature being fantasies. While such fantasies are a means with which adults distract restless youngsters and help them settle down at bedtime, the adults who write children’s stories may bring to bear another purpose, whether conscious or unconscious. Given the significant role children’s literature plays in young lives, it is not surprising that stories should contain lessons on what society expects of boys and girls. Frank Taylor describes the way that children’s literature can influence a particular aspect of behavior: gender roles. In his book Teaching Sociology Taylor maintains, “By age seven, and perhaps as early as age four, children begin to understand gender as a basic component of self. The literature affirms that many masculine and feminine characteristics are not biological at all; they are acquired […] Children’s books may be an important source of gender stereotypes that children use to help organize gendered behavior” (Taylor, 301). The portal fantasies Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Peter and Wendy offer to young readers highly fanciful stories embedded with examples of female behavior that instruct in and reinforce rigid social norms.

One of the earliest and most noted pieces of children’s literature that provides an example of children’s literature as social didacticism is Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Carroll initially conceived the idea for the book as a story for ten-year-old Alice Liddell. The Alice in Carroll’s story is a proper upper class Victorian girl who finds herself chasing a white rabbit down its hole into a world of confusion and talking animals. Struggling from moment to moment to find her way through the chaos, Alice wants to behave properly in a world where the social etiquette she has been taught does not fit. To understand Alice fully, it is important to look at her from the context of the period in which she was created. Carroll, or Reverend Dodgson, wrote the story of Alice in 1850s England while working at the Christ Church College at Oxford. It was believed that he wrote the story for the daughter of Dean Henry Liddell, with whom he was very close. In the book, Alice is curious and follows her curiosity, but winds up in situations where her identity is questioned and she comes to question her own assumptions. In chapter five, for example, Alice’s neck has grown long as her head as she finds its way through the trees and comes upon a disgruntled pigeon that accuses her of being a serpent.

“But I’m not a serpent, I tell you!” said Alice. “I’m a – I’m a -”
“Well! What are you?” said the Pigeon. “I can see you’re trying to invent something.” (Carroll 90)

Alice as a serpent alludes to the biblical story of Adam and Eve. During Carroll’s time, there were few children’s stories, but it could be assumed that all children would attend Christian churches where they would have been exposed to the story of Adam and Eve. It is also to be expected that children would connect the symbol of a serpent with the symbolic reference to the serpent as the temptation of sin. Alice is helpless and unable to assert herself with the pigeon as she is in her extraordinary encounters with other creatures in Wonderland. Young female readers could be expected to take away from this literary work two concerns: girls must be concerned about the suffering that may follow from the impulsivity of women and girls are not clever enough to engage in abstract thinking, much less making sense of their own identity. Elsewhere in the story, Alice is bombarded by questions from a talking caterpillar and again later by the Cheshire Cat. None of her answers ever suffices and Alice finds herself becoming increasingly confused and unable to assert herself in any situation. Alice’s inability to speak for herself teaches young girls that they, too, are helpless when confronted by authority and that they should not expect to be able to stand up for themselves.

Nearly half a century later, the story of Dorothy in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz features a girl protagonist whose adventure in Oz is just as confronting as Alice’s stumble through Wonderland. The message for girls is the same: stay close to home. Dorothy journeys along the yellow brick road with one objective in mind; find Oz, the wizard who will be able to send her home to Kansas. On her journey, three guardians join Dorothy: the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Lion. Each of the male guardians has his own wish, which contrasts sharply with Dorothy’s. When the Scarecrow decides to join her, he exclaims, “Brains are the only things worth having in this world, no matter whether one is a crow or a man” (Baum 47). When these two rescue the Tin Woodman, and he chooses to join them, he explains “but no one can love who has not a heart, and so I am resolved to ask Oz to give me one” (Baum 61). Their last companion, the Lion, decides to join them because he finds that “life is simply unbearable without a bit of courage” (Baum 70). Dorothy’s three male companions are concerned with acquiring skills that they are lacking: intelligence, emotion and courage. Having survived being lifted up by a tornado and dropped into a strange land where she must survive flying monkeys and an evil witch, Dorothy’s only concern is with returning home. Her longing for home is rigidly didactic. Dorothy is the only young female character for young girl readers to identify with in the story, and girls can be expected, therefore, to share her plight. The message for young boys to find in the story is that they must strive to be smart, emotionally strong and brave. Girls, on the other hand, long to be home, the place they belong, the place where men want them to be. Middle America in 1900 shared these values. In the farming communities in Kansas, a woman’s place was in the home, and as such, Dorothy’s dream is to return to the domestic sphere.

By the end of the book, the reader learns that the silver shoes Dorothy has taken from the witch in the beginning of the story have the power to send her home. Dorothy spends the entire adventure trying to find the instrument to take her home, only to discover they were on her feet the whole time. While it could be argued that there is a lesson in her facing her fears and braving the dangers of Oz, the story teaches young readers something deeper: girls and women need men to help them. Ultimately, Dorothy, and every individual, has the capacity to help her, but she doesn’t see this and spends the entire book in a desperate search for Oz to help her. The young female reader learns that it is only through men that she can have her greatest wish fulfilled.

J.M. Barrie wrote the story of Peter and Wendy during a period that has come to be regarded as the golden age of children’s books, the Edwardian Period. Despite the sense of excitement of flying and the wonderment of Neverland, the book quickly remands Wendy to her role as a female. As soon as they land on the island, Wendy is immediately confronted with male expectations and demands.

“O Wendy lady, be our mother.”
“Ought I?” Wendy said, all shining. “Of course it’s frightfully fascinating, but you see I am only a little girl. I have no real experience.”
“That doesn’t matter,” said Peter […] “What we need is just a nice motherly person.”
“Oh dear!” Wendy said, “you see I feel that is exactly what I am.” (Barrie 65)

Wendy arrives in Neverland where she is expected to play the maternal role. She spends her entire stay there pretending to be cooking and cleaning the house, putting the lost boys to bed on time and making sure they have good manners. As Wendy is the only young female character in the story besides the savage native Tiger Lilly and Wendy clearly takes the role of the female protagonist. She is the character young girl readers are lead to identify with. While young boys are free to fly with Peter or wrestle with the lost boys, girls who choose to identify with Wendy are confined to maintaining order and preparing food.

In Sexism and the World of Children’s Books Marion Bauer states, “Literature does not shape society, its ideas, or its rules. It is merely a mirror held up to the world. It can, however, give back a reflection that challenges or one that merely reinforces the status quo” (Bauer 580). The reinforcement of stereotypical gender roles in these three works of children’s literature is clear. Alice teaches girls of the danger of impulsivity should they forget their simple natures. Dorothy teaches that women are helpless without men. Wendy embodies a belief that for females there is nothing more fulfilling than the role of being a mother. The unfortunate reality is that such rigidly drawn gender roles are not exclusive to these pieces of literature. However, when such strict gender roles are presented to children through literature as entertainment and escape, they contribute to one more subconscious prejudice that must be unlearned.

In all three portal stories, young girls are thrust into worlds where they are not supervised by parents or teachers, where they are free to explore and adventure only to find themselves back home. These girls depart from a world full of conventions but always find themselves back where they started. There is also the consistent theme that home is boring or bland and this is often the reason they discover these new worlds. The best they can hope for is to enjoy the comfort of home, like Dorothy. The worlds they discover are full of excitement and danger, much the same experience readers have when they seek the thrill of living vicariously through the characters in the stories. The young reader identifies with these heroes, and through observing, them in the text learn that what Alice or Dorothy do is what they, too, should do. How Wendy acts is how they should act. It is through the girls’ experience in these portal worlds that young readers learn what it means to be a girl.









Works Cited

Barrie, J.M. Peter Pan. New York: Penguin Classics, 2004. Print.
Bauer, Marion Dane. “Sexism and the world of children's books”. Horn Book Magazine 69.5 (1993): 577-580. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Web. 13 Dec. 2010.
Baum, Lyman Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1960. Print.
Carroll, Lewis and Richard Michael Kelly. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2000. Print.

Taylor, Frank. Teaching Sociology Vol. 31, No. 3 (Jul., 2003), pp. 300-311 Published by: American Sociological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3211327