From Muse to Poet: The Liberation of the Female Protagonist from a Traditional Romantic Gender Role in Cornelia Funke’s Tintenherz
Introduction
Modern young adult fantasy fiction has commonly inscribed its females in their ancillary roles of due to its preference to a gendered, conventional hero. Cornelia Funke’s German fantastical fiction for young adults, Tintenherz (2003), subverts the prevalent patriarchal gender representations, specifically concerning the models in German Romantic fiction. The use of German Romanticism upon German young adult fantasy fiction was primarily augmented by Michael Ende in Die unendliche Geschichte, originally published in 1979 as children’s and young adult fantasy fiction. Ende developed a unique paradigm of an unconventional, passive protagonist’s growth into an independent poet, but retained the conventional Romantic …show more content…
When she observes her father’s power of reading when the villains force him to read treasures out of The Treasure Island, she is immediately fascinated with and desires the power. Even though it deprived Meggie of a mother, she examines if she also possesses the power, practices her reading, and masters it to help to defeat the evil within the story. The villains’ intentions and characteristics accordingly demonstrate the effective features to put Meggie in peril, by being illiterate, coarse men. It is certainly a deviation from the intelligent and domineering witch Xayíde.
Not all female characters achieve a status of being a Romantic hero; Resa’s aunt Elinor harbours an obsession with ancient literary texts. Her book-centred life isolates her from her society who labels her crazy. Upon the villains’ burning of her libraries, her identity as a book collector turns insubstantial as the ashes of the books. Her utter dependence upon books may demonstrate the dangers Meggie could have faced had she subjected herself to a perpetual passivity by being merely receptive to
Introduction
Modern young adult fantasy fiction has commonly inscribed its females in their ancillary roles of due to its preference to a gendered, conventional hero. Cornelia Funke’s German fantastical fiction for young adults, Tintenherz (2003), subverts the prevalent patriarchal gender representations, specifically concerning the models in German Romantic fiction. The use of German Romanticism upon German young adult fantasy fiction was primarily augmented by Michael Ende in Die unendliche Geschichte, originally published in 1979 as children’s and young adult fantasy fiction. Ende developed a unique paradigm of an unconventional, passive protagonist’s growth into an independent poet, but retained the conventional Romantic …show more content…
When she observes her father’s power of reading when the villains force him to read treasures out of The Treasure Island, she is immediately fascinated with and desires the power. Even though it deprived Meggie of a mother, she examines if she also possesses the power, practices her reading, and masters it to help to defeat the evil within the story. The villains’ intentions and characteristics accordingly demonstrate the effective features to put Meggie in peril, by being illiterate, coarse men. It is certainly a deviation from the intelligent and domineering witch Xayíde.
Not all female characters achieve a status of being a Romantic hero; Resa’s aunt Elinor harbours an obsession with ancient literary texts. Her book-centred life isolates her from her society who labels her crazy. Upon the villains’ burning of her libraries, her identity as a book collector turns insubstantial as the ashes of the books. Her utter dependence upon books may demonstrate the dangers Meggie could have faced had she subjected herself to a perpetual passivity by being merely receptive to