earticle

영어

This study analyzes two survival narratives from children’s literature with girl protagonists to examine the ways their gender is performed and constituted through each story. In the 21st century, the expression ‘girl power’ embodies girl gender agency and empowerment. Yet, recent post-feminist theories warn against the newly positioned neo-liberal consumerism which represents the mainstream patriarchal discourse as forcing the girls into self surveillance and a self-inflicted dependency on systemic control. The analysis of two narratives reveals diversely different gender constitution. The Hunger Games of a dystopian survival narrative portrays an intelligent and athletic girl, who has seemingly learned the lesson from Little Red Riding Hood. She is, thus, agreeable to the traditional gender role of a beautiful and submissive girl wanting to conform to patriarchal authority, and survives the deadly game as a result. On the other hand, the girl in Wolf in the Snow projected as another Little Red Riding Hood exhibits agency and empowerment and saves herself from harsh nature and a wolf of a sort, and consequently redeems her gender. She enacts self-sustaining girlhood with empathy for the human world with its cohabitants. Simultaneously she disintegrates the myth of Little Red Riding Hood as an instigator of self-destruction and sexual prohibition.