| This dissertation will focus on construction and expressions of gender, particularly masculinity, in selected English canonical children's works in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Using the performative gender theory, this dissertation examines the performances of "masculinity" in The Jungle Book, The Wind in the Willows, selected tales of Beatrix Potter, and Winnie-the-Pooh. This dissertation proposes categories of masculinity that range from Violence to Collaborative Unions. While a heterosexual norm underlines many of these tales, the actual processes of development, from child to adolescent, demonstrate that engendering is an inconsistent and unstable process. These authors' use of animals complicates the process because of the freedoms that animals are allowed and because of the paradoxes, ironies, and ambiguities inherent in conceptions of masculinity as expressed in fin-de-siecle English literature through the literature following World War One. Masculinity in the fin-de-siecle was in flux, and the performance of masculinity as evidenced in children's literature demonstrates a range of possibilities for gender identities. While many of the stories I examine use a resolving mechanism to re-inscribe traditional conceptions of masculinity upon male characters at the end of these stories, the chaotic processes, the gender blurring episodes, and the reconfigurations of power demonstrate that masculinity is an unstable categorization especially in children's literature when animals are employed in the anthropomorphic way. Contradiction and confirmation, imperialism and irony, paradox and didactic representations: masculinity as a concept of gender will be read as it is performed by the various animals in these stories.; I will trace the development of male animal characters, focusing on performances and their static, transformational, conservative, liberal, imprisoning, or liberating representations. Each of these chapters examines performances by both male and female animals to see what roles the characters enact have in relation to actions we traditionally think of as "male" activities. This dissertation examines where historical context intersects with literary creation to reflect anxieties in masculinity from the fin-de-siecle aestheticism, through Edwardian sentimentality, the horrors of World War One, and the reconfigured identity of masculinity after the war. |
