The tomboy archetype in children’s fiction is an excellent example of abjection. Rather than accept their own femininity, heroines such as Jo march and Anne Shirley suppress it by manifesting nonfeminine behaviour. Both characters have to subdue their hot tempers, incompatible with feminine norms; Anne is also literally silenced as she abandons her imaginative, poetic language. Cross-dressing is another way of denying one’s body and gender. In contemporary novels, the grotesque archetype can be stretched quite far, since young women’s unwomanly manners are tolerated slightly more than in Jo March’s days.
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One of the strategies for successful individuation of female characters is androgyny, which we see clearly in a growing number of contemporary novels, especially if we treat this concept broadly, including social androgyny as opposed to biological.
… girls are double oppressed: as women and as children. This implies that in a children’s novel, a female character’s development is more universal than in the mainstream, where the femininity is overt and explicity. Not least, girls’ fiction is historically a relatively recent genre; therefore, masculine patterns are “default values” in children’s fiction, as in many other fields.
- The Rhetoric Of Character In Children’s Literature by Maria Nikolajeva
Lists of Tomboys In Fiction – a Wikipedia category
Problems with the word ‘tomboy’ as a thing: To be a tomboy does not challenge gender norms, it merely reinforces them – boys do this and girls do that. Therefore, it is time that tomboy falls away from our vocabulary just like other derogatory terms have.
from Why The Word Tomboy Has To Go
(I prefer hoyden.)
