Don't Tell Boys They Can't Read Books, begs Griselda Heppel
Recently, a headline in The Times caught my eye:
At the Hay Festival, Harris announced: ‘We’ve got to stop giving them the message that it’s wrong for a boy to read books about girls, because even schools are giving them this message.’
As a children’s author, this is an attitude I wrestle with. I don’t consciously create characters to suit a supposed readership; they spring to life according to the needs of the story.
With The Fall of a Sparrow, I was back to a female protagonist, Eleanor, and arguably taking an even greater risk of limiting my readership by setting the story in a girls’ boarding school, as this meant the supporting cast, too, was mostly made up of girls.
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| The Tragickall History of Henry Fowst by Griselda Heppel |
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| Ante's Inferno by Griselda Heppel |
My first book, Ante’s Inferno, had a 12 year-old heroine, Ante, while in The Tragickall History of Henry Fowst, the main character is a boy.
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| The Fall of a Sparrow by Griselda Heppel |
A risk, that is, if you buy into the idea that boys can only cope with reading about themselves.
Which I don’t. Boys are just as capable of identifying with a hero of the opposite sex as girls are; the key is the story itself. Plunge your main character into a hair-raising situation, like, oh I don’t know, having to fight off monsters on a dark journey through hell (Ante’s Inferno);
pile problems on them until they can see no way out but by making a dangerous pact with a demon (The Tragickall History of Henry Fowst); or draw them into a chilling mystery in which trivial, seemingly innocent details build up until strange ‘accidents’ start to happen (The Fall of a Sparrow); and whether it’s a boy or a girl driving the story won’t matter. Boys will enjoy a gripping plot as much as girls as long as you let them.
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| Send your main character on a dark journey through hell, as Dante does in his Inferno (inspiration for Ante's Inferno). Illustration by Gustav Doré). |
As long as no disapproving adult – parent, teacher, family friend – tells them they shouldn’t.
I have to admit I thought we’d got beyond this. I’ve done school visits in all kinds of schools: mixed, boys only, girls only, and have been delighted to find boys as eager as girls to hear about my stories and queue up for signed copies. These places clearly all valued reading as a wonderful gift for all children, not to be limited by long outdated stereotypes.
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| Boys are just as eager readers as girls, if you let them. |
But from what Joanne Harris said, many boys are still having their fun destroyed and opportunities for wide reading curtailed in this way; even more so, when you think how many children’s books in the last couple of decades centre on a girl as main character (to redress the balance of the last 150 years or so).
While this is bad news for boys and authors alike, Harris takes it further than that. Missing out on empathising with female characters, she reckons, leads boys, once grown up, to value women less. ‘A boy who is afraid to read a book with a girl protagonist will grow up into a man who feels that it’s inappropriate for him to listen to a woman’s voice.’
Yikes. I hope it’s not as bad as that. Surely reading children’s books with exclusively male heroes when young doesn’t turn all men into misogynists. Nevertheless, I fear Harris may be on to something. It’s not the limited reading in itself, it’s being told at an impressionable age by a respected adult that books with heroines are beneath them.
That’s where the damage is done. And it's got to stop.
Comments
Some boys, as they grow, will see this attitude for what it is and overcome it. My own father did. But not all will, and that 'women are foolish, soppy, silly' attitude is fertile ground for misogyny.
In response to my recent psyche.co article on that subject, I had a female teacher emailing me about what I could recommend as reading for her Yr6 and Yr7 girls, whom she feared were being driven away from books by social media pressures. Luckily I was able to recommend a good dose of Jacqueline Wilson. I suspect that Tracey Beaker would keep both girls and boys on their toes...
I hadn't heard of The Children by James Vance Marshall, Peter, and have looked it up. I see it's also called Walkabout, which I had heard of, mainly re the film. A great book to choose for schools. And The Secret Garden is timeless. Wilson, good suggestion, also anything by Eve Ibbotson. The main thing is to keep boys AND girls reading as long as we can!