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Cinderella, Marie Antoinette, And Sara: Roles And Role Models In A Little Princess, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

Role-model criticism, the easiest and often most logical form of criticism for children’s literature, has fallen out of favor in our more theoretically sophisticated times. Toril Moi, surveying the state of feminist criticism in 1985, devoted a chapter to “Images of Women” criticism, finding it overly prescriptive and frequently self-contradictory in its calls for a “realistic” or accurate depiction of women’s lives simultaneously with the desire for “strong, impressive female characters” (47). Since many real women (and men!) are neither strong nor impressive, the effort is doomed from the start. And the specific call for “role models” is problematic in …