A brief interlude (real information to follow when the deadline has been met)

I'm sitting at my (mostly clean) desk at the moment drinking hot toddies and wrangling with the same critical chapter that I've been working on since July. Fortunately, this time there are no elf footprints involved, though I do have the 1973 edition of a fiction textbook open next to me for reference. A fiction textbook, may I say, that manages to consist entirely of extracts from popular children's and young adult fiction (of the time) and yet only contains four female protagonists in nearly six hundred pages and approximately 35 pieces of fiction; they are a whale (of indeterminate type), a dragon, a little girl of the everyday sort, and a princess.

I have read this book at least a dozen times so far; the extracts that I've picked specifically to support my arguments I've been over more frequently. But it's been mostly fun, because quite a few of the pieces in the book are extracted from novels I read as a kid.

Which made me realize something.

Most of the fiction that was available to me as a child and young adult was about boys becoming men and girls becoming their doorprizes; all of the books that stuck with me were about boys struggling to find their places in the world so that they could be recognized as Men. And since there weren't any other fully fleshed out characters around, I identified with those boys; and when I was a confused adolescent I identified with their struggle towards an elusive but noble Manhood. And then after all of that vicarious living, my parents were mystified at my hostility to their insistence that I act like a lady. I knew, by then, exactly what happened to ladies: even if they didn't get killed so that the boy-man could have some personal growth or emotional epiphany, nothing worthwhile really happened to them.

I'm still waiting to be called on my quest, to be given the sword that proves that I am the long-lost son of whomever, and to fight my way to take my place as rightful king of nowhere and rule with a firm but kind ethos. And I still wonder why, when I've been give the option to see myself as the lost prince, the once and future king, the assistant pig keeper, I'm expected to choose instead to be the baby-minder who never gets to go anywhere.