Saturday, October 22, 2011

In the Night Garden

It is obvious that Valente tried specifically to go against what is considered normal in writing In the Night Garden. She makes the main characters and the heroes of the stories female, as opposed to the traditional male character hero. The male characters who have some sort of power tend to exist just to make blunders and to be antagonists to the plot. Prince Leander screws things over by breaking his half-sister's neck, King Raja walks in on the Snake Star and ends up killing her and all of his children. The women in these stories make up for these blunders and end up being the heroines. Knife teaches Prince Leander a lesson and also revives her daughter, and the Snake Star removes King Raja from power by killing his feared army. Valente's In the Night Garden goes against the traditional fairy tale formula of "the Prince saves the helpless Princess and they fall in love and live happily ever after." Valente purposely discards gender roles for the sake of breaking fairy tale norms.
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7 comments:

  1. LaurenOctober 23, 2011 at 12:06 AM

    I wouldn't agree that Valente discards gender roles. It seems more as if she swaps them. I wonder if the story could have been more interesting had it been presented genderless, or even less stereotypically "feminist," where the men do things wrong and women are the heroes.
    (I apologize if that offended anyone. I couldn't come up with a better way to phrase it. I don't think that all feminism is like that.)

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  2. jess.putlandOctober 24, 2011 at 8:14 PM

    I think that Valente does indeed re-write the typical patriarchal fairy tale. I found this very enjoyable because it was refreshing to have a female protagonist. However, the end of our readings gave way to more male-dominated story lines.

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  3. HumbertOctober 30, 2011 at 7:50 PM

    I agree with Lauren and am a proponent of feminism except when feminism leads to misandry.

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  4. LisaNovember 1, 2011 at 9:33 AM

    TATY SAID: I think that Lauren does have a point when it comes to the feminist views. Yet I think that Jessica also has a point that it ends up being about the men in the end of our reading.

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  5. ThedardenNovember 2, 2011 at 6:02 PM

    I personally liked how she tried to go against what's consider normal for gender roles

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  6. NickNovember 7, 2011 at 12:32 AM

    Like in all my other post it didn't bother me that she switched gender roles.

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  7. LisaNovember 8, 2011 at 9:10 AM

    Just a bit more info about the differing strands of feminist thought in the history of feminism. There were indeed feminist theories that believed that women were morally superior to men, for example during what's known as the first wave of feminism in the U.S., during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

    Other strands of feminism take the ending of all oppression and the fundamental equality of all humans as core. These strands go by the titles of Liberal, Socialist, Womanist, Third-wave, and Intersectional Feminisms. Environmental Feminists argue that we should extend our thinking beyond the oppression of humans to also include the oppression of animals and the more-than-human world.

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