From Jacqueline Wilson to Louisa May Alcott, for many of us, literature has been integral from a very young age in shaping our perception of girlhood and femininity. Tales of rebellious girls and badly behaved heroines, like those in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and Wilson’s infamous Tracy Beaker, have allowed generations of girls to redefine what they understand of their female identity against patriarchal standards.
The most classic models of girlhood stem from the rise of the novel form
by female authors in the 19th century, where writing transformed to become a way in which women could move from the private to the public domain – the eponymous figures of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Jane Austen’s Emma provide striking examples of young women defiant to the male-dominated world they inhabited.
‘Girlhood’ encompasses many different identities, which all interact with one another to replicate a unique experience for both reader and author. Literary translation and feminist scholarship have found a space for women across the globe to express nuanced and individual experiences of girlhood. From Toni Morrison’s exploration of racial oppression tainting the adolescent female desire to fit Western beauty standards in The Bluest Eye, to Elena Ferrante’s picture of female friendship set against the backdrop of class struggles in post-war Naples in My Brilliant Friend, each portrait of girlhood is different and tells a new story. Female authors have found power in literature to explore the fluidity of female identity, as with Virginia Woolf’s novel about the malleability of what it means to be a woman, Orlando.
But when female authorship is removed, this expression of girlhood becomes
clouded by a male gaze which has dominated much of the Western literary canon – the trope of the unreliable male narrator has permeated the genre of 20th century American literature; whether it’s Vladmir Nabokov’s 40-year-old narrator who preys on the young Dolores Haze in Lolita, or a collective adolescent male narration clouded by lust and overlooking the tragedy of the mass suicide of the Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides.
Young girls in these novels become passive to a literary voice of desire that has led to a corruption of the understanding of adolescent female identity both in the world of literature and wider cultural space (and yes, I’m talking about you, Tumblr 2014).
However, with an ever-changing perception of feminist scholarship in the modern day, there has been a greater exploration of the literary complexities of the gendered voice of narrative and allowed for the rise of the female gaze to redefine female identity. So, whatever girlhood means to you – from a reckoning with the body to the joys of female friendship– literature has the power to reconstruct, reinvent, and reconcile with it.
Illustration via Bethanie Agnes for The Student