{"title":"Little Girls, Big Dreams","authors":"Kiera Vaclavik","doi":"10.3167/ghs.2023.160202","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Published 70 years apart and adopting contrasting approaches to real-world detail, Lewis Carroll's Alice books and Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes bear a number of affinities. Both portray dynamic, creative, and skillful girls whose dreams and destinies they probe. In this article, I highlight Alice's inventiveness and the curtailment of her dreams, then examine Streatfeild's employment of a production of Alice in Wonderland to delineate two distinct modes of female creativity. While the endings of the two works seem distinct, offering far greater possibilities of self-fulfilment for Streatfeild's heroines, neither is unproblematic. If Streatfeild has no time for the interpersonal relationships and domesticity imposed upon Alice, she nevertheless insists upon a hierarchized value system that downgrades the very creativity it purportedly celebrates.","PeriodicalId":44250,"journal":{"name":"Girlhood Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4000,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Girlhood Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.3167/ghs.2023.160202","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"SOCIAL SCIENCES, INTERDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Published 70 years apart and adopting contrasting approaches to real-world detail, Lewis Carroll's Alice books and Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes bear a number of affinities. Both portray dynamic, creative, and skillful girls whose dreams and destinies they probe. In this article, I highlight Alice's inventiveness and the curtailment of her dreams, then examine Streatfeild's employment of a production of Alice in Wonderland to delineate two distinct modes of female creativity. While the endings of the two works seem distinct, offering far greater possibilities of self-fulfilment for Streatfeild's heroines, neither is unproblematic. If Streatfeild has no time for the interpersonal relationships and domesticity imposed upon Alice, she nevertheless insists upon a hierarchized value system that downgrades the very creativity it purportedly celebrates.
期刊介绍:
Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal is a peer-reviewed journal providing a forum for the critical discussion of girlhood from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and for the dissemination of current research and reflections on girls'' lives to a broad, cross-disciplinary audience of scholars, researchers, practitioners in the fields of education, social service and health care and policy makers. International and interdisciplinary in scope, it is committed to feminist, anti-discrimination, anti-oppression approaches and solicits manuscripts from a variety of disciplines. The mission of the journal is to bring together contributions from and initiate dialogue among perspectives ranging from medical and legal practice, ethnographic inquiry, philosophical reflection, historical investigations, literary, cultural and media research to curriculum design and policy-making. Topics addressed within the journal include girls and schooling, girls and feminism, girls and sexuality, girlhood in the context of Boyhood Studies, girls and new media and popular culture, representation of girls in different media, histories of girlhood, girls and development.