Those Who Nurture:

Food, Gender, and the Performance of Family in Fantasy for Young Readers

A Dissertation

Presented to the

Graduate Faculty of the

University of Louisiana at Lafayette

In Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements of the Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Danielle R. Bienvenue Bray

Spring 2012
 UMI Number: 3516371

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 Those Who Nurture:
Food, Gender, and the Performance of Family in Fantasy for Young Readers

Danielle R. Bienvenue Bray

APPROVED:

__________________________________ __________________________________
Keith Dorwick, Chair Jennifer Geer
Associate Professor of English Associate Professor of English

__________________________________ __________________________________
Jonathan Goodwin David Breaux
Assistant Professor of English Dean of the Graduate School
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to a number of people and organizations who have fed me, my family,

and my dissertation these past months:

I am deeply grateful to my dissertation director, Dr. Keith Dorwick, and the other

members of my dissertation committee, Dr. Jennifer Geer and Dr. Jonathan Goodwin, for

their advice, support, confidence, and patience since I defended my doctoral exams in the

spring of 2008. I am further grateful to the Edith Garland Dupré Library at the University of

Louisiana at Lafayette, the Middleton Library at the Louisiana State University, the

Sojourner Truth Library at the State University of New York College at New Paltz, the Main

Library of the University of Georgia at Athens, and the Blodgett Memorial Library in

Fishkill, New York, all of which have served me with materials and/or quiet workspace as I

have undertaken this project.

I am more grateful than I would ever have thought possible to Maureen DelMonaco,

Christine Smith, Lynn Malone, Tracey Brocco, Tammy Fetterlin, and everyone at Just Kids

and Early Intervention of Suffolk County, New York; Diane Wahlers and everyone at Babies

Can’t Wait of Clarke County, Georgia; Eden Gillespie and everyone at Preschool Services in

Clark County; and especially Albert and Emma Laing, Meredith Siebert, and everyone at

Lifespan Montessori of Athens, all of whom have nurtured my son, Danny, when I could not

and in ways I could not.

Finally, I am forever grateful to my father- and mother-in-law, John Newton and

Carolyn Bray and my parents, Gordon and Katie Bienvenue for their physical and emotional

nourishment during this project and always; and to my husband, John Patrick Bray, and son,

Daniel Patrick Bray, who are the best treat of all!

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER 1: Training Family 18

Anderson’s May Bird Trilogy 19
Ende’s The Neverending Story 38
Conclusion 53

CHAPTER 2: Community as a Mother 55

Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book 56
Gaiman’s Stardust 62
Rowling’s Harry Potter Series 71
Conclusion 92

CHAPTER 3: Progressing Backward? 94

Rowling’s Harry Potter Series 95
Dashner’s 13th Reality Series 114
Conclusion 120

CHAPTER 4: Proliferation versus Normativity 121

Coville’s Jennifer Murdley’s Toad 123
Gaiman’s Coraline 127
L’Engle’s Murry-O’Keefe Family Stories 134
Conclusion 154

CHAPTER 5: Kick-ass Girls and Sissy Boys 155

Coville’s Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher 159
Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy 166
Conclusion 174

CONCLUSION 176

WORKS CITED 184

ABSTRACT 193

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 194

 INTRODUCTION

During the first year and a half of our son’s life, my husband was his primary stay-at-

home parent. If he remarked to a friend on the phone or updated his Facebook status to say

that he was feeding our son or taking him out in the stroller, he inevitably heard back, “Good

for you babysitting to give mama a break!” or “You’re like a manny!” It was completely

outside the experience even of our close friends, many of them academics and progressives,

that it would be part of the father-role to feed and stay at home with a child, and so rather

than conceptualizing my husband’s actions as fatherly, they instead equated them with the

actions of paid help; a man would only feed a child if he were earning money by doing so.

Another interesting dimension of the use of the word “manny” to describe a food-

sharing, stay-at-home father is that although it is a portmanteau of “male” and “nanny,” the

result is also similar to “Mammy,” linking the atypically-gendered male parent to the also

marginalizing Al Jolson depiction of the African-American mother, a figure often also

employed as a domestic servant, getting paid to take care of other people’s children. Both of

these groups have traditionally been excluded from second-wave feminism, in part because

unlike the upper- and middle-class white women who formed the core of the second-wave

feminist movement, they already found themselves in the public sphere, whether they liked it

or not. As bell hooks puts it in her article “Sisterhood: Political Solidarity Between Women”:

The vision of Sisterhood evoked by women's liberationists was based on the

idea of common oppression. Needless to say, it was primarily bourgeois white

women, both liberal and radical in perspective, who professed belief in the

notion of common oppression. The idea of “common oppression” was a false

and corrupt platform disguising and mystifying the true nature of women's
 varied and complex social reality. Women are divided by sexist attitudes,

racism, class privilege, and a host of other prejudices. Sustained woman

bonding can occur only when these divisions are confronted and the necessary

steps are taken to eliminate them. (127)

That is, the founders of the second-wave feminist movement assumed that those things they

hoped to gain from the movement were the things all women hoped to gain, without regard

for the differing backgrounds, and thus differing oppressions, of women of differing races,

classes, etc. In a later article, “From Scepticism to Feminism,” hooks further expands on the

divide between upper- and middle-class white feminists and nonwhite and working-class

feminists, saying that the feminist classroom “presents conflict, tension, sometimes ongoing

hostility” because of the differing expectations of students from differing backgrounds.

Since a central theme of second-wave feminist thought is that women should have

equal opportunity with men to work outside the home, the movement had less to offer to

women already forced by their socioeconomic circumstances to work, often in abysmal

conditions. Annelise Orleck’s review, “Feminism Rewritten: Reclaiming the Activism of

Working Class Women,” of The Other Women’s Movement identifies the book’s author,

Dorothy Sue Cobble, as a “labor historian” rather than as a feminist historian, and sees the

book as an attempt to reconstruct the feminism of the 1960s and ‘70s by reincorporating the

activities of nonwhite, nonwealthy women, which had more to do with workers’ rights for

those who had no choice but to work than with the right of women to work when their

economic status did not require it of them. In “Revising the History of Twentieth-Century

Feminism,” Nancy Gabin reviews two other books, The Other Feminists by Susan M.

2
Hartman and Feminism and the Politics of Working Women by Gillian Scott, with a similar

eye.

Male stay-at-home parents, similarly excluded by a second-wave feminism that

assumes the most desirable adult life for anyone is a job in the public sphere, have also tried

to speak up for themselves. In an article entitled “Not All Men are Sly Foxes,” Armin A.

Brott, author of The Expectant Father and other popular fathering books, justifies his writing

specifically for fathers, and misses the mark somewhat in my estimation, by lamenting: “In

What to Expect the First Year [...] Men, and their feelings about parenting, are relegated to a

nine-page chapter just before the recipe section” (287). Brott’s concern that men are

underrepresented in the world of parenting advice is underscored by his clear disdain for the

positioning of fathering advice near recipes; feeding is a low-status occupation, unworthy of

masculine attention.

Is a father who feeds, then, not fatherly? And if a food-sharing adult who is

biologically male cannot be a father, then is the performance of certain acts more important

to the construction of the roles “mother” and “father” than biological sex? Is there a more

suitable term for the role of food-sharing care-giver – nurturer, perhaps? – that is inclusive of

all of the potential food-sharing figures in a child’s life? In the body of late-twentieth- and

twenty-first-century juvenile and young adult fantasy literature, a wide range of

performances of family configuration present themselves, often distinguished by the sharing

of food between parent-surrogates and child protagonists. While some of these surrogate

figures are adult women primarily depicted in the home, many are children, men, or even

non-human, and may be found in the private and public spheres. Thus, “mother” or

“nurturer” in these works is a role defined less by biological sex or the trappings of

3
traditional femininity than by the performative act of food-sharing, and “family” is a

performance, not a unit bound by biological similarity.

Much of the extant criticism looking at representations of food in children’s literature

focuses on the use of food images to educate children as both literal consumers of food and

market consumers. In her book Voracious Children, Carolyn Daniel focuses on food in

children’s literature for food’s sake, writing about depictions of eating in children’s literature

establishing a code of appropriate food and appropriate times to eat that educates children to

become good consumers both of food and of goods. Although Daniel does also look at non-

fairy tale children’s literature, much scholarship is focused on nonliterary works, such as

advertising and fairy tales passed down through oral tradition. Sandra L. Calvert has done

childhood studies work that looks at how foods with low nutritional value are marketed to

children. Susan Honeyman has examined the marketing of candy to children as part of

Halloween celebrations and at the role of sweets in cautionary tales. The child is, therefore,

both a consumer of food and of texts, able to use them up, probably extracting some

nourishment, but then being done with them. In the field of Theatre (and Performance)

Studies, Bertolt Brecht has criticized this trend of what he calls “culinary theatre,” which, in

Jill Dolan’s words, “fulfills a need as base and transient as consuming a meal” (106).

Children, like adult theatre audiences, are capable of more engagement than this with what

they read or view – and with what they eat; I prefer the notion of a child who dines on texts,

with the ability to savor them and detect the different flavors that make them work.

Certainly, many children’s authors write for child diners, not child consumers, producing

texts with literary merit for child readers to savor.

4
 In contrast to other critics, like Daniel, who have argued that the presence of food in

children’s literature exists for its own sake, to educate children about food and consumption,

my focus is on the symbolic value of food, investigating the instances of food-sharing by

different characters and the relationship between those food-sharings and the sharers’

relationships with their child protagonists. Ultimately, this function of food imagery does

educate the child reader because it teaches her/him to read critically by inviting her/him to

understand family relationships based on the nature of food-sharing among a group of

characters, but the food-family symbolism is also interesting for its own sake from a

literature studies and performance studies standpoint. Exploring representations of food as

symbolic also moves food itself into a secondary position, something that informs

relationships, here the primary concern, particularly because the performed families

identified through this food symbology are not always composed as one might expect. To put

it another way, I am concerned with the intersection of food-sharing and gender expression in

the performance of family, and will examine characters who share food as mother- or

nurturer-figures and members of kinship groups, regardless of age, biological sex, or

biological relationship.

Other critics have also studied the link between material objects and relationships in

children’s literature: Patricia E. Clark writes about recipes as a way for women to pass down

cultural knowledge in Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo; Elise L. Smith has

examined the use of garden objects to teach morality to children in late-eighteenth-century

children’s literature; and Holly Blackford has written about physical objects, including food,

and mother-daughter discourse in Little Women and other stories targeted at adolescent girls.

5
Thus, the link between representations of physical objects and relationship-construction or

value-sharing, especially among women, in children’s literature is well-established.

The relationship between food and gender in children’s literature is also a popular

topic for research. Wenying Xu looks at food and masculinity in “Asian-American culinary

fiction,” particularly that of Frank Chin, whom he says tries to combat the American

tendency to have emasculating prejudices about Asian men in his children’s fiction. Carina

Garland has analyzed the representations of consumption in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books as

Carroll’s attempt to work out his “anxieties ... surrounding female sexuality and agency”

(22).

There is, indeed, a wealth of feminist criticism of the role of food and consumption in

children’s and young adult fantasy literature. Much of this criticism, however, relies on a

very narrowly-defined feminism: what is commonly called “liberal” or “second-wave”

feminism, that feminist movement which seeks the equality of women and men primarily in

the public sphere. Roger Clark, Heidi Kulkin, and Liam Clancy identify this tendency of

scholars of children’s literature to be steeped in liberal feminism in their article “The Liberal

Bias in Feminist Social Science Research on Children’s Books,” published in Beverly Lyon

Clark and Margaret R. Higonnet’s 1999 book Girls Boys Books Toys: Gender in Children’s

Literature and Culture. Clark, Kulkin, and Clancy argue, “Changes in feminism over the last

quarter century, then, make it difficult to argue that its central moral tenet is still that women

should be equal with men” (73); nonetheless, with some exceptions, this continues to be a

primary focus of feminist children’s literature scholarship. For example, the 1972 study by

Lenore Weitzman, et al., which Clark, Kulkin, and Clancy highlight as having established the

liberal feminist paradigm that picture book analyses have followed ever since (72 -4), crops

6
up in name and as a model in some quite current studies of children’s literature and gender.

For example, Cordelia Fine references the now-almost-forty-year-old study in her 2010

Delusions of Gender, along with some more recent studies using the Weitzman model and

finding similar results (218-23).

Another study using the Weitzman model of analyzing picture books for depictions of

male and female characters, this one by Janice McCabe, et al., was published in April of

2011. The McCabe study purports to examine “[g]ender representation” in twentieth-century

picture books, but does so by noting the frequency with which the books present biologically

female characters in comparison to how often they present biologically male characters, so

that it deals with biological sex rather than the more complex and less easily quantifiable

representation of gender, a distinction of interest to me and to this project. As Claudia

Pearson questions in a discussion of the McCabe study on the Rutgers University-hosted

child_lit listserv, “what about confused gender representations? For example, there can be

little question that the Velveteen Rabbit is a mother figure, but the story uses the male

pronoun to identify it. Similarly, Horton is identified as male, but the illustrations tend to use

‘feminine’ qualities such as soft round edges and long eyelashes.” Much of the richness of

gender representation and performance is lost in a study that merely counts biologically male

and female characters without looking critically at how these male and female characters

actually perform gender.

Many feminist scholars of children’s literature would agree that the need is greater

than ever to look critically at portrayals of gender in children’s books, but are, as Clark,

Kulkin, and Clancy argued over a decade ago, still looking at gender in children’s literature

using the Weitzman framework (71-74). This framework is evident in a recent thread on the

7
Rutgers child_lit listserv started by Marah Jean Gubar of the University of Pittsburgh, who

requested “a really sexist picture book that I could use in my undergrad class, to juxtapose

with a book like WILLIAM'S DOLL or that BABY X one that tries to challenge gender

stereotypes.” Gubar’s query received more than twenty-five responses over the course of

several days, including several recommendations of Whitney Darrow’s I’m Glad I’m a Boy!

I’m Glad I’m a Girl!, which Dan Hade called “the most obnoxious, disgusting picture book I

know” and Deborah Overstreet called “so horrible that it's nearly hilarious!”

Charles Butler, who posted images of the book, now out of print and not commonly

collected in libraries, on his Flickr account, calls the book a “1970 primer in gender roles”;

one gender role so primed is that through several illustrations, though only once explicitly in

the text, only girls prepare and serve food, the sharing of which is apparently as marginalized

an occupation to the liberal feminist mind as it is to Brott’s. For example, in the illustrations

accompanying the text “Boys are Cub Scouts. Girls are Brownies,” the boy is hiking with a

walking stick, while the girl is cooking over a camp stove; and for the text, “Boys are pilots.

Girls are stewardesses,” the boy is standing resplendent in his pilot’s uniform while the girl

runs by with a tray of refreshments; and of course, “Boys can eat. Girls can cook.” Naturally,

the liberal feminist balks at such proscription of gender roles; however, the book is

interestingly progressive in that the text, “Boys are fathers. Girls are mothers” is

accompanied by an illustration of the boy pushing a stroller full of dolls – exactly the type of

gender-subversive image Gubar was hoping to present as a counterpoint to her “really sexist

picture book” – as well as the girl hugging one doll.

The discussion of I’m Glad I’m a Boy! I’m Glad I’m a Girl! on child_lit engages in a

kind of feminist criticism of children’s literature which Clark, Kulkin, and Clancy describe as

8
“‘looking for’ evidence to support one hypothesis or another” rather than “‘listening’ to

themes of oppression and resistance, and to nuances of expression” (81); that is, these posters

from child_lit turn to I’m Glad I’m a Boy! I’m Glad I’m a Girl! in hopes of finding

depictions they deem “sexist,” and of course find them, but because their hopes for the book

are so specific, these depictions are the only ones of which they take notice. Clark, Kulkin,

and Clancy call on scholarship of children’s literature to seek to receive from texts all of the

“nuances of expression” they present rather than focusing in on the expected; or, as Judith

Butler puts it in the conclusion of Gender Trouble, “The task here is [. . .] to redescribe those

possibilities that already exist, but which exist within cultural domains designated as

culturally unintelligible and impossible” (203). By focusing in on the nuances of gender

expression presented in the corpus of children’s literature with an eye to the performance of

gender outside a masculine-feminine binary, scholars can hope to bring to light the

complexity of the performance of family and of gender that transcends biological sex.

While the I’m Glad I’m a Boy! I’m Glad I’m a Girl discussion took place on a

listserve, and was thus not an example of polished scholarship, this trend of liberal feminist

“looking for” evidence that says food-sharing is less-than rather than “listening to” what

individual texts say about what Butler would call the “proliferation” (203) of gender

expressions informed by the act of food-sharing is also apparent in other feminist

examinations of the role of food in children’s literature, including chapters by Holly

Blackford, Lisa Rowe Fraustino, and Leona Fisher in Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard’s

book Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature, published in 2009 as part of

Routledge’s Children’s Literature and Culture series. In “Recipe for Reciprocity and

Repression: The Politics of Cooking and Consumption in Girls’ Coming-of-Age Literature,”

9
Blackford discusses the self-affirming nature of food consumption before arguing that “food

is not merely a means of pleasure and an expression of individual or sexual desire if you

identify most with those who have to cook it and clean it up” (41). She then goes on to frame

in negative terms iconic moments of mother-daughter food preparation from several young

adult girls’ books:

What if you’re little Laura Ingalls, watching Ma heavily churn the butter and,

laboriously by hand, mix sausages for the winter in Little House in the Big

Woods? What if you’re Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John, spending your early

childhood following around your mother while she gardens, shops, and cooks?

What if you’re Tita, in Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, sentenced

to endlessly make the tortillas? (41)

Ultimately, Blackford’s argument is that in these books, “Cooking is a form of self-control

and a way to prepare the female character for repressing inner needs,” drawing on the

wonderful/horrible mother archetypes “that Melanie Klein thought endemic to infantile

perspectives on mothers as part- rather than whole objects” (42-3). Blackford’s interest is in

trying “to view the mother as a whole object – as neither cook nor crocodile” (54), but she is

hampered by her implication that the mother-cook is by definition unwhole.

Fraustino looks at the food-mother link in a selection of picture books in “The Apple

of Her Eye: The Mothering Ideology Fed by Best-selling Trade Picture Books.” Like

Blackford, Fraustino presents a selection of books from the genre under consideration and

articulates, in concise and negative terms, the intersection of food and motherhood in each –

for example: “The Tale of Peter Rabbit’s Currant Buns: A Good Mother Does Nothing But”

(58), “Are You My Mother?’s Worm: A Good Mother Is Biological – And, She Stays Home”

10
(61), and “The Runaway Bunny’s Carrot: Mothers Can’t Exist Without Their Children” (64)

– building up to the argument that:

Not only do images of food and their significations reinforce outmoded

cultural myths of motherhood for the adults who read these books to their

children; they also serve as the earliest training manuals for a girl’s future

position of ever-present, all-providing, and inexhaustibly patient mother – for

by focusing on mother-son relationships, they place the girl in the gendered

subject position of mother rather than child. (70)

Fraustino, like other feminist scholars under consideration here, holds up mothering and

food-sharing as a marginalized potential future, but furthermore, she argues that this future is

offered specifically to girl readers because she assumes that girl readers will all automatically

identify with the mother characters in these books because they and the mother characters are

both biologically female, never addressing the possibility that girl readers might also identify

with the son characters because they and the son characters are both children. 1

Interestingly, the second-wave/liberal feminist position that food-sharing is

marginalized and to be frowned upon by women is roughly as old as I’m Glad I’m a Boy! I’m

Glad I’m a Girl! itself. In “Nancy Drew and the ‘F’ Word,” Fisher cites the reactions of

critics in 1973 to The Nancy Drew Cookbook:

The (Oregon) Daily News’ review of the book, by Georgia Smith, for

instance, showed disappointment that the book undercut Nancy’s appeal as a

strong role model: “Ironically, Nancy’s had a modest following among

1
There seem to be no studies which can help us determine if girl readers might as easily model their future
behaviors onto other children who just happen to be boys as onto the mothers with whom they share biological
sex. We do not know for certain if they primarily determine their gender behaviors with depictions of mothers
who are female rather than non-female characters who are agemates.

11
 feminists up ‘til now. . . .Now a girl like that doesn’t usually mess around with

pudding. Even ‘Mystery Corn Pudding’” (2 August 1973, Box 32, SSR-

NYPL). A bookseller in Charlotte, North Carolina also worried that “we may

be relegating the famous girl detective to the kitchen,” though he conceded

that the book is “a cute idea” [. . .]. (75-6)

Thus, the early 1970s, when I’m Glad I’m a Boy! I’m Glad I’m a Girl! was published, were

not a completely backward time when no one thought critically about gender; they were, in

fact a time when food-sharing was already considered a marginalized, traditionally-feminine

occupation. In the four decades since then, third-wave feminism has offered a variety of new

perspectives for feminist scholarship, perhaps most notably to a discussion of food-sharing

and the role of mother, cultural feminism.

Interesting in the child_lit discussion of I’m Glad I’m a Boy! I’m Glad I’m a Girl! is

the absence of any counterpoint discussion. It is not only that several posters discussed the

book within a second-wave/liberal feminist framework; it is also that no poster discussed it in

any other way. For example, there was no third-wave/cultural feminist backlash against the

idea that food-sharing is intrinsically a marginalized position. Cultural feminism, as defined

by Jill Dolan, “proposes [. . .] a fundamental change in the nature of universality by

suggesting that female gender values take the place of the generic male. It seeks to reverse

the gender hierarchy by theorizing female values as superior to male values” (6). Chief

among these “female values” is biological motherhood, particularly of a daughter (87-90).

Through this lens, a critic might see in I’m Glad I’m a Boy! I’m Glad I’m a Girl! a

celebration of the feminine values of motherhood and food-preparation that are superior to

the gendered roles in which the boy in the book is portrayed.

12
 Rather than calling a book “horrible” because it portrays girls performing

traditionally-feminine acts, a cultural feminist would question the assumption that these acts

are intrinsically inferior to those acts performed by boys in the book. Some feminist scholars

of children’s literature have called for such an approach, notably Lissa Paul, who discusses

the movement to “reread” the canon in search of “a feminine tradition of ‘other’ stories” in

her chapter “Feminism Revisited” from the second edition of Peter Hunt’s Understanding

Children’s Literature (116). Paul notes that third-wave feminist scholars of the 1990s have

seen “stories about women’s healing and successful communities of women” in books which

are traditionally viewed as depicting “struggles to conform to the social order” (117) – the

same books in which Holly Blackford sees a “Recipe for Reciprocity and Repression.” In her

conclusion, Paul argues that liberal feminism has done its job, and that “[t]astes have

developed for colloquial, domestic voices pitched in other registers and speaking in other

cadences” (124); readers want to hear about the food-sharers, the mothers, the nurturers.

In her genealogy of feminist theory, Paul also notes that, “In the 1990s another

change happened as feminist criticism evolved into gender studies” (123) – a field which

provides another interesting perspective with which to examine I’m Glad I’m a Boy! I’m

Glad I’m a Girl!, and one which could provide an opportunity for a broad and interesting

discussion of gender expression in the book. Whereas cultural feminism, as Dolan explains,

“bases its analysis in a reification of sexual difference based on absolute gender categories,”

seeking only to reverse the hierarchy to privilege feminine values, and thus leaving “[t]he

oppressions wrought by gender polarization [. . .] peculiarly unattacked” (5-6), gender theory

is open to the possibility of what Butler calls a “proliferation” of gender expressions through

performative acts, each of which carries its own gender expression (203). In I’m Glad I’m a

13
Boy!, I’m Glad I’m a Girl!, there is, for starters, the rare illustration of a boy playing with

dolls, not to mention the potential to discuss to what extent biological sex is important to the

roles of “boy” and “girl.” Does engaging in the activities described in the book make a child

a boy or girl regardless of anatomy? To simply dismiss the book as an “obnoxious,

disgusting” relic may be cathartic, but does not provide contemporary students of children’s

literature with the new lens through which to regard apparently-dated works that an

examination of what the book says about gender performativity would.

This project will explore representations of food-sharing in a selection of juvenile and

young adult fantasy novels, both canonical and non-canonical, published in the late twentieth

and early twenty-first centuries, attempting, as Clark, Kulkin, and Clancy would put it, to

“listen to” what performances of food-sharing tell us about performed family units in the

texts. As Kate Bornstein says, somewhat critically it must be noted, in Gender Outlaw,

“Adults are afraid to ask ‘What are you?’ so we ask ‘What do you do’ . . . in hopes of getting

a clue to someone’s identity [. . .] When it comes to work, we can ask. When it comes to sex

and gender, we’re supposed to observe discreetly and draw our own conclusions” (author’s

emphasis) (10). Although it is absurd, as Bornstein hints here, to attempt to discern a

person’s gender identity based on the gendered implications of what that person does for a

living, in another sense, the question “What do you do?” is a valuable one for examining how

the roles of mother and nurturer play out in a story outside the confines of biological sex. By

asking what characters “do” instead of asking what they “are,” I hope to establish what this

body of authors says about the role of food-sharing as a performative act defining a gender of

“mother” or “nurturer” that transcends biological sex. Each chapter will focus on a selection

of works with similar uses of food-sharing symbolism primarily employing a gender studies

14
approach to the texts as a tool to explore this richness, drawing from the work of Butler and

other performance studies theorists to examine the performative act of food-sharing.

Chapter one will begin with an exploration of how Jodi Lynn Anderson uses food-

sharing to indicate a character’s mother-role in the found family of May Ellen Bird in her

May Bird trilogy, and will further examine how such characters’ participation in the found

family in a magical world helps to strengthen May’s relationship with her biological mother

when she returns home. In these books, May, the central character, travels to the Ever After,

a land of the dead, and in that world, creates a new family of the people she meets. The

chapter will then build upon the discussion of May Bird’s found family in order to explore

how Michael Ende also uses found family in a magical world to heal a biological parent-

child relationship in The Neverending Story, with the notable difference that the parent and

child are both biologically male, though they participate in food-sharing activities as a

mother and child might.

Building upon the notion of performed family through food-sharing, chapter two will

focus on the role of a community as mother- or nurturer-figure, especially as part of a

coming-of-age experience for a protagonist. The chapter will explore two works by Neil

Gaiman, examining the role of the graveyard community as mother to Bod Owens in The

Graveyard Book and the role of the land of Faerie as a mother-figure during Tristran Thorn’s

coming-of-age in Stardust. The chapter will then begin to examine the massive Harry Potter

series, as Hogwarts and its faculty function in this way for Harry.

The exploration of the nature of food-sharing and nurturing in the Harry Potter books

will continue in chapter three, focusing on the discrepancy between the anti-heteronormative

nature of gender roles in the parent generation and Harry, Ron, and Hermione’s more

15
traditional performance of gender when they first assume adult roles in the last book of the

series. This chapter will also delve into James Dashner’s not-yet-complete 13th Reality

series, which similarly boasts several adult male food-sharers, but also the same traditional

delegation of food-sharing tasks to the girl in the group of child protagonists that develops

between Harry, Ron, and Hermione in Deathly Hallows.

Chapter four will continue to explore tension between anti-hegemonic and

heteronormiative gender expressions, focusing on the differing performances of positively-

portrayed adult figures and adult antagonists, using as examples Gaiman’s Coraline and

Bruce Coville’s Jennifer Murdley’s Toad. After briefer looks at these works, the chapter will

deal primarily with Madeleine L’Engle’s books about the Murry-O’Keefe family: the Time

Quintet and the additional three books about the adult Meg and Calvin O’Keefe and their

children. In these books, gender is fairly egalitarian, with many of the female characters

incorporating food preparation into their work lives (for example, the matriarch, Dr. Kate

Murry’s Bunsen burner stew, which her son-in-law, Calvin, adapts into Bunsen burner hot

chocolate in The Arm of the Starfish), and many of the male characters also sharing food and

providing nurturing. Another interesting facet of this gender-egalitarian landscape is that it

does not carry over to the villains of the stories, who tend to be more gender-normative than

protagonists.

Drawing on the examination of proliferative gender-expressions of female characters

in chapter four, chapter five will explore Bruce Coville’s Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher

and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which present a character type frequently

given short shrift in feminist criticism: what Fine and others call the “sissy boy” (221).

Coville’s book focuses on animal-loving sissy boy Jeremy Thatcher as he embarks on the

16
hatching of a dragon’s egg and then the care and feeding of the baby dragon inside, during

the process growing progressively less clearly identified with his male agemates and instead

preferring the company and support of a female classmate. While the central character in The

Golden Compass is Lyra Belacqua, a masculine-type girl fantasy hero, in The Subtle Knife

and The Amber Spyglass, Lyra shares the stage with Will Parry, the son of a mentally ill

single mother, who is accustomed to mothering his own mother and so easily transitions to

mothering Lyra, whom he teaches nurturing behaviors she is then able to reciprocate to him.

The conclusion will attempt to find common ground among all of these differing uses

of food symbolism to indicate a mother- or nurturer-role or family-relationship, and will

identify avenues for future scholarship along this vein. My hope in embarking upon this

study is that by examining motherhood and family relationship beginning with what

characters “do,” such as food-sharing, that is part of the performance of the gender-role of

mother or nurturer instead of beginning with what characters “are,” the biological sex or

relationship most commonly associated with the role, it is possible to uncover a wealth of

food-sharers who are not relegated, othered, or mythologized/idealized; in short, I hope to

answer Bornstein’s call “that people begin to question gender” (14), by beginning to unearth

the proliferation of gender expressions already present in children’s fantasy literature. This

more inclusive view of motherhood/nurturing and family allows food-sharers to be evaluated

as individuals, not as part of a mass role that is either the prison of the un-liberated woman or

the pedestal of the idealized cultural feminist relationship. Instead, each family member,

woman or man, adult or child, human or non-human, performs the role of food-sharer in

her/his own way, and succeeds or fails on her/his own.

17
 CHAPTER 1: Training Family

In his article, “Performing Family: Ritual Kissing and the Construction of Early

Christian Kinship,” Michael Penn uses the vocabulary of performance studies theory to

explore how early Christians were able to construct their church as a performed family by

focusing on a particular performative gesture: the kiss. Penn argues “that the adoption and

modification of a typical familial gesture into a decidedly Christian ritual helped early

Christians redefine the concept of family” (154). In “Vital Signs at Play: Objects as Vessels

of Mother-Daughter Discourse in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women,” Holly Blackford

makes a similar argument regarding the ritual use of domestic objects: “In Little Women,

female relics take on meaning from their connection with childhood, home, and mother—the

life sources for each daughter as both child and ‘little’ woman. They also take on meaning

from the way that they symbolize female enterprise” (2); that is, the girls’ childhood

treasures take on the significance of sacred “relics” as they represent the lessons the girls’

mother has taught them about growing up into womanhood.

Both Penn’s and Blackford’s arguments regarding ritual acts and objects constructing

notions of family and gender lean toward Judith Butler’s notion of gender performativity:

“that what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained

set of acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the body” (xv-xvi). The bestowal of a

certain type of kiss to indicate that a person is part of one’s constructed religious family, or

the preservation of a set of hair ribbons as a memento of one’s mother helping her to

transition from girlhood into womanhood, is a performance of family. This chapter will

examine how child protagonists and the characters they meet in magical lands use the

physical act of food-sharing to construct performed families in those lands that help the
protagonists to find the healing and education they need to more fully participate in

relationship with their mother-figures in the mundane worlds from which they come. The

chapter will first explore how this performance of family in the magical land of the Ever

After works in Jodi Lynn Anderson’s May Bird trilogy to heal the relationship between May

Bird and her mother, and will then move on to explore the way in which the performance of

family in Fantastica helps a male protagonist, Bastian Balthasar Bux, to mend his mundane-

world relationship with his father following the death of his mother in Michael Ende’s The

Neverending Story.

Anderson’s May Bird Trilogy

One fantasy series in which the act of food-sharing helps to construct a performed

family in a magical land is Jodi Lynn Anderson’s May Bird trilogy, in which the child

protagonist, May’s, experience of found family in the magical world of the dead, the Ever

After, enables her to heal a broken relationship with her biological mother in the mundane

world. In the opening of May Bird and the Ever After, the first book in the series, May has

trouble fitting in with her peers and also has trouble relating to her mother, called Mrs. Bird

throughout the trilogy, but apparently a single mother as there is no mention of May’s father

or of another partner for Mrs. Bird in the series. May’s difficulty building relationships with

agemates and her mother is presented through food symbolism.

Anderson first introduces May’s perception that she doesn’t fit in through her body

type. In the first chapter of the book, suggestively titled “A Sack of Beans,” May prepares to

see her schoolmates at the Hog Wallow Day Extravaganza and Picnic by having “gained two

pounds, eating sesame-and-peanut-butter balls two at a time, so she wasn’t quite so skinny”

19
(Ever After 10-11). Anderson then ties May’s relationship with food, and her difference from

her classmates, to her failure to participate in other gender-normative activities by describing

a process analysis report she presented to her class the previous school year: “Everyone else

had done their reports on things like ‘How to Make a Bologna Sandwich’ and ‘How to Sew a

Pillow.’ May had done hers on ‘How to Teach Your Cat to Dance.’ It was one of the few

times May’s classmates had actually noticed she was alive in a good way. (They’d noticed

her in a bad way many times.)” (Ever After 15). Even May’s triumphs at socialization are

bookended by her failures to get positive attention from her classmates and to show interest

in the gender-appropriate domestic activities of girls her age. The dancing cat story is

furthermore only a brief reprieve from what happens when May arrives at the picnic and

instead of being impressed by her attempts to be more like them by having gained weight,

her classmates take turns remembering their favorite embarrassing stories about her (14-6).

On the heels of this disappointment, May again thinks in terms of food: “She felt as heavy as

a sack of beans. But then, a sack of beans never got embarrassed or did stupid balloon tricks

in front of other sacks of beans or forgot to lock the bathroom door. Come to think of it, life

was probably easy for all the beans of the world. Being a sack of them wouldn’t be so bad”

(Ever After 17).

Further suggesting a connection between her overly-thin body-type and her emotional

state, May also experiences feelings in her stomach or in food metaphors. When she is

nervous about following the instructions in a mysterious letter addressed to her, May feels

“like a casserole dish full of Jell-O” (Ever After 23). Toward the end of Ever After, the “sack

of beans” comparison returns, now in relation to friends May has succeeded in making in the

magical world, rather than to her difficulty making friends in the mundane world: when she

20
realizes how much danger her Ever After friends are in for trying to help her get home,

May’s “heart bec[omes] as heavy as a sack of beans” (Ever After 248).

Despite having made friends in the Ever After who would risk their unlives for her,

May’s trouble socializing comfortably with her peers in the mundane world is not resolved

after her first trip to the Ever After. At the beginning of the trilogy’s final book, May Bird

Warrior Princess, May brings her birthday party feast to an early and unceremonious end

when her mother answers the kitchen telephone and May announces that it’s the ghosts trying

to call from the Ever After (Warrior Princess 29). After all of May’s guests have fled the

house “screaming for their parents” and abandoning their “half-eaten lasagna” and “uneaten

cookies,” Mrs. Bird reveals the practical explanation for the spooky telephone call:

“Apparently our line’s been spliced for a week with someone’s in Hog Wallow. A pizza

delivery place” (Warrior Princess 29-31). While the epilogue to Warrior Princess reveals, in

brief, that May overcomes her shyness during her high school years, she is still presented as

something of an oddity and the emphasis is on May’s relationships with Mrs. Bird and

Somber Kitty (Warrior Princess 242-4).

The focus of the trilogy’s conclusion on May’s improved relationship with her family

rather than on her overcoming her shyness and suddenly becoming popular serves to

demonstrate that although May remains, to some extent, a misfit, this is an acceptable fate if

her relationship with her mother is healed. Indeed, one important narrative function of May’s

not getting along with her peers is to provide the first source of disagreement between her

and her mother. In the first chapter of Ever After, Mrs. Bird is contemplating sending May to

an elite boarding school out of state (7-10), explaining to May, “I think the structure would

be good for you,” and “You don’t want people to think you’re eccentric,” before ending the

21
conversation by asking, “You ready for the picnic?” (9-10). Mrs. Bird ends the conversation

about May’s difficulty socializing with her classmates by introducing the subject of

community food-sharing. We learn from the following exposition that this is not the only

time Mrs. Bird has broached the subject of May’s difficulty making friends in the context of

a group food-sharing: “Girls with nice smiles made friends. Mrs. Bird liked to remind May of

this when she came to volunteer on hot-dog days and saw how May sat at the end of the fifth-

grade table, curled over her carrots” (11). Mrs. Bird attempts to use occasions on which May

eats with her peers to open a dialogue about her social sharings with them, but these attempts

fail, possibly in part because Mrs. Bird’s own relationship and ability to share food with May

are also broken.

From the start of the trilogy, a series of food metaphors and incomplete food-sharings

demonstrate the damaged state of May’s relationship with her mother. Even in the above

description of Mrs. Bird’s concern for May when she volunteers at the school’s “hot-dog

days,” Mrs. Bird’s and May’s roles are polarized: Mrs. Bird is depicted in connection to hot

dogs, for many the epitome of non-nutritious food, while May is connected to carrots, which

might rather be expected to be the parent’s healthy food choice than the child’s. Although in

many ways they have very positive interactions with one another, it is often hard for May to

appreciate what her mother is trying to do for her, and it is likewise difficult for Mrs. Bird to

recognize when something she is trying to do for May is unsuccessful or misguided. When

May’s first cat – named “Legume, which, by the way, is another word for peanut” (author’s

emphasis) (Ever After 8) – dies, her mother replaces Legume with a hairless Rex whom May

names Somber Kitty. May’s mother has selected for May, without her input, a cat that lacks

fur, arguably a cat’s most desirable and comforting feature; and May highlights the cat’s lack

22
of ability to provide this comfort by selecting for it a name that is neither as affectionate nor

as food-focused as the name she gave her previous, furry cat, though it could be argued that

even the name “Legume” is a more clinical name choice than “Peanut,” the word with which

May considers it a synonym (Ever After 8). May’s other interactions with her mother in the

first portion of Ever After are similarly marked by mentions of food disassociated from the

foods themselves and the maternal comfort these foods may be expected to provide.

Mrs. Bird frequently uses food-based terms of endearment for May, such as

“pumpkin” (Ever After 18) and “honey” (Ever After 33, 39-40, 45; Warrior Princess 15), and

also calls May “baby” (Ever After 27, 40); however, on one of the occasions on which Mrs.

Bird calls May both “honey” and “baby,” she is trying to convince May that even though

something has terrified her in the night, she is, at ten, too old to sleep with her mother even

after a bad scare, though she does check May’s room for ghosts before sending her back to

bed alone (Ever After 38-41). Furthermore, though we often see May with breakfast and

sometimes Mrs. Bird is even in the room, it is never clear who made the breakfast. On one

occasion, May has “a bowl of oat meal and a glass of orange juice,” and although this

breakfast follows a positive mother-daughter interaction, there is no mention of who made

the meal (Ever After 25); on another occasion, “May slumped over her oatmeal” and Mrs.

Bird “putter[ed] around the kitchen,” but since the food is already there, she seems not to be

cooking and there is no reference to her having made or served the oatmeal (Ever After 42).

When Mrs. Bird talks about making food, the food does not materialize; for example, once

when Mrs. Bird is “just about to make dinner,” May goes to sleep instead (Ever After 33). At

other times, Mrs. Bird is situated in the kitchen, but using it for purposes other than food-

23
preparation, as when May goes to “the kitchen for a late-night snack” after not having eaten

all day and her mother is at the kitchen table “working on her laptop” (Ever After 48).

Naturally, when May disappears into the Ever After by way of a portal in the Birds’

back woods, her relationship with her mother changes dramatically. In some brief sections of

May Bird Among the Stars, the second book in the trilogy, Anderson provides the audience

with glimpses of Mrs. Bird’s grief over the disappearance of her daughter. She is at first

sedentary, watching the police car arrive “like an overturned bushel of apples” and receiving

“cards and cakes” from May’s very guilty classmates, who lament bullying her and not

“trad[ing] my fruit squishes for her peanut butter balls” (Among the Stars 1-2). Just over

midway through the book, however, we see her go looking for May in the forest, bringing a

bag lunch of “sandwiches and nuts” (Among the Stars 193); by bringing provisions into the

woods, Mrs. Bird is showing herself to be similar at least in one way to May, whom we ha ve

seen in Ever After go into hiding from the ghosts in a teepee in the corner of her room

covered in ghost-repelling items into which she brings “all the food she could fit in her arms”

and “her favorite canteen [filled] with water” (Ever After 50).

For her part, from the time she finds herself in the Ever After, May is motivated to get

home almost exclusively because she wants to be with her mother; in fact, in Among the

Stars, May defines home as “where my mom is” (Among the Stars 225). At first, she wants to

get home to her mother and Somber Kitty, whom she always thinks of together (Ever After

141; 293), but once she realizes that Somber Kitty is in the Ever After, she begins to worry

about her mother back in Briery Swamp because she “doesn’t have me or Somber Kitty now”

(Ever After 317). The care-giving relationship between May and her mother (and Somber

Kitty) is reciprocal; at least form May’s point of view, Mrs. Bird is as much in need of May

24
as May is of her. When Bertha Bretwaller, another living person in the Ever After who is

working against the evil Bo Cleevil, realizes that May is not interested in helping her and just

wants to get home, May explains simply, “I have a mom” (Among the Stars 169). Much later

in their trip to the Ever After, when May has started to feel that she would prefer to stay with

her found family there than return to the mundane world, Somber Kitty reminds her that they

have to go home because “[t]heir mother need[s] them” (Among the Stars 255).

Reciprocity such as that May perceives in her relationship with her mother is,

according to Avak Hasratian, an important feature of the kinship relationship. In the article

“The Death of Difference in Light in August,” Hasratian identifies modes of performing

kinship relationships that prominent anthropologists have identified and uses these

performances to discuss the role of kinship in Faulkner’s novel Light in August. Hasratian

extrapolates one such kinship performance from the work of Émile Durkheim, explaining

that “the character of kinship works by means of designation: Anyone can come together

under the same rubric, title, or name. A common designation can make a group into kin by

creating reciprocal obligations for all members” (58). By this logic, May has essentially

spoken her family relationship with her mother into being. She “ha[s] a mom,” which makes

her a daughter, and under this “rubric,” as Hasratian would call it, of family, they “need”

each other; they are under “reciprocal obligation” to each other. May’s sense that she owes to

her mother the nurturing that she has received from her, that they are in a reciprocal

relationship of caregiving and receiving care, makes them a family. Thus, May must

eventually return to the mundane world, which is her home, and to which she is obliged.

25
 Like other child fantasy heroes in magical lands,2 May also associates her mother

with other home comforts, sometimes thinking of the details of her home that she misses

when it would be too painful to think directly about her mom (Among the Stars 33). When

May thinks of food among the comforts of home, though, it is still not in a traditional food-

sharing capacity. For example, at one point during her first trip to the Ever After, May

remembers her mother having had to cut her hair into its current style after she “slept with

[her] Halloween candy” (Among the Stars 37). Ultimately, however, May chooses to leave

the safety of her friends to get home to her mother (Among the Stars 204). In so doing, May

acknowledges that there is value in even the imperfect relationship she has with her mother,

but paradoxically, when May makes the choice to return home to this imperfect relationship,

the relationship improves.

After May returns from her first trip to the Ever After, she and her mother have a

renewed understanding of one another, which is evident in Mrs. Bird’s apparent decision that

May is no longer too old to sleep with her mother, since “[f]or nights [after May’s return] she

and May slept side by side, and Mrs. Bird would reach out for her in her sleep and hold her

so tight that May promised herself she would never leave home again” (Warrior Princess 2).

In addition to this renewed babying, Mrs. Bird and May take up the hobby of baking together

(Warrior Princess 16). This new, mutually-food-sharing bond even affects the way May

perceives Mrs. Bird to smell: “sweeter” after her return from the Ever After (Warrior

Princess 1). May’s food-sharing with her mother is not yet completely realized, however.

During one of the occasions on which she bakes cookies with Mrs. Bird, May gets her first

phone call from the Ever After (Warrior Princess 18).

2
For example, Sandy and Dennys Murry in Many Waters, discussed in chapter four of this project, and Ron
Weasley in the Harry Potter series, particularly Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, discussed in chapter
three here.

26
 Another occasion on which May and her mother bake together is in preparation for

May’s birthday party, for which May apparently takes the lead because her mother is said to

be “helping in the kitchen” (Warrior Princess 26). May’s leadership role in the birthday

baking is also evident in the varieties of cookie they make, of May’s invention: “raspberry-

chocolate, violet-mint, peanut butter-banana” (Warrior Princess 27). It is Mrs. Bird,

however, who makes the more substantial food for the party, “May’s favorite home-made

lasagna”; she also serves “mugs of hot cider,” another food more nutritious than May’s

cookies (Warrior Princess 27).

Anderson certainly depicts Mrs. Bird as a more nourishing mother here than in the

beginning of Ever After, but May is apparently unready to accept this nourishment. May ends

her birthday feast by bringing up the Ever After when they get a spooky phone call for which

there is a completely practical – and food-related – explanation, the splicing of their phone

line with the pizza restaurant’s (Warrior Princess 29-31). After the guests have left, Mrs.

Bird comforts herself with a cup of tea and we see the remnants of the party through her

eyes: “the half-eaten lasagna she’d made, the balloons she’d taped to the walls, the piles of

uneaten cookies she and May had baked” (Warrior Princess 29-30). Now, Mrs. Bird

perceives the food-sharing, and thus the actualization of her relationship with May, to be

incomplete, and May is the one who is not able to quite grasp where she is going wrong. May

has some maturing to do, which means, as it often does for child heroes in this type of

fantasy story, another trip into her magical land.

When May goes to the Ever After again, this time because she has actually died,

although it takes her some time to realize it, she again wants to be with her mother. When

May realizes she is dead, one thing she mourns will never happen again is that her mother

27
will never again “[reach] for her in the middle of the night, just to make sure she [is] there”

(Warrior Princess 58); that is, May immediately misses the babying her mother has begun to

give her since their reunion. Even at the end of Warrior Princess, after May has resigned

herself to being dead and having to stay in the Ever After, now a safer place since she has

saved the day, “There was never a moment when home, and her mom, were absent from her

thoughts” (Warrior Princess 237). After May returns from the Ever After a second time, the

renewal and reinforcement of this intense mother-daughter bond is presented through their

spending “nights baking cookies” again (Warrior Princess 242), as they spent “nights”

sleeping “side by side” when their relationship was partially healed, and before May had

matured beyond the need for babying (Warrior Princess 2). Now that May has matured, she

really has outgrown sleeping with her mother, and does nurturing work, baking, side-by-side

with her, in training for her adult life as a nurturer of others.

Like many child heroes in fantasy stories, May must go to work out her problem

independently in a magical land,3 separate from the comfort and support of home, and in this

case, also separate from the problem she needs to work out. For many child fantasy heroes,

the magical land provides a space in which the child can work without a safety net,

discovering what she/he can do on her/his own; for May, there is the additional imperative

that she and her mother both need to learn to more fully appreciate and communicate with

one another, as described above, and this is work they must each do separately. Nonetheless,

3
Notable in twentieth-century children’s fantasy are J. M. Barrie’s Wendy Darling, who must travel to
Neverland in order to learn that there is value in being mothered as well as in being a mother, and C. S. Lewis’s
Pevensie children, who in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe must make a double-remove from their
everyday world, first from London to the Professor’s house in the country because of the Blitz, and from there
to Narnia, in order to become acquainted with Aslan (1; 6-759-60). Similar removes also take place in virtually
every text under consideration in this project: Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story, in this chapter; Neil
Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book and Stardust in chapter two; J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series in chapters two
and three; James Dashner’s 13th Reality series, also in chapter three; Gaiman’s Coraline and several, though
not all, of Madeleine L’Engle’s Murry-O’Keefe family stories in chapter four; and Phillip Pullman’s His Dark
Materials trilogy in chapter five.

28
May does bring with her a protector, Somber Kitty, who is frequently described in proximity

to and in terms of food.

Before he and May connect in the Ever After – they arrive separately, and Somber

Kitty must find May – many of these descriptions involve Somber Kitty not eating, or being

tricked by food. At one point during his search for May, the narration notes that Somber

Kitty “hadn’t eaten in a week” (Ever After 151), and shortly thereafter, he is lured into

captivity by the New Egyptians, who use a dish of fava beans as bait (Ever After 201-2).

Somber Kitty’s relationship with food in the Ever After begins to turn when he escapes from

the New Egyptians to continue his search for May while the servant girl guarding him leaves

the door open and is distracted preparing his milk and honey (Ever After 229-30);

nonetheless, while he has a positive experience related to food preparation, the experience

involves his using food preparation time as a dodge as his captors have used food to trick

him, not his actually getting to eat the food. The closer Somber Kitty gets to May, the more

positive his associations with food become, and he finally picks up May’s tracks outside a

bakery (Ever After 289).

In the second book of the trilogy, Somber Kitty is connected with the Lady of North

Farm, a food-sharing mother-figure for all of the Ever After, when she reveals in a note to

May that she and the cat “go way back” (Among the Stars 11); Somber Kitty again uses food

as a dodge, trying to turn the conversation away from this revelation by begging for food, and

then gloats that he has been given a cookie while another of May’s companions, a ghost who

does not need to eat, has not (Among the Stars 12-3). Like May’s relationship with her

mother, her relationship with Somber Kitty is reciprocal; once they are together, Somber

29
Kitty is able to provide May reassurance, but he, too, is deriving nourishment from the

reunion.

May’s and Somber Kitty’s mutual nourishment of one another is also evident in the

fact that at different times, each perceives the other’s physical appearance in terms of food.

These perceptions are problematic, however. At one point while Somber Kitty and May are

separated during their travels through the Ever After, Somber Kitty has a Snow White-esque

vision of May in Petrified Pass in which he sees her “lying under a glass dome, like a cake”

(Among the Stars 110); May is compared to food, but food under glass that no one is invited

to eat. In the Bird house after they return from their first trip to the Ever After, in a passage of

third-person narration from May’s point of view, Somber Kitty is described as “a cross

between melting ice cream and an extra terrestrial” (Warrior Princess 9-10); here, the

description is only part-food, and the food is becoming inedible, or at least less appetizing.

Much as the various food descriptions associated with Somber Kitty are ambivalent, his

fitness as a parent-figure is ambivalent. During his and May’s second trip to the Ever After,

he becomes “the proud father of six ghostly kittens” (Warrior Princess 237), but when May

has the opportunity to return home, he goes with her, leaving his biological family behind

(Warrior Princess 239-41). While this shows faithfulness to May, it is also an abandonment

of his mate, the ghost of May’s first cat, Legume, and their children. Somber Kitty, then,

while a comfort to May during her time in the Ever After, is not an ideal parent surrogate or

role model for her as she undertakes the work of healing her relationship with Mrs. Bird.

One member of May’s found family in the Ever After is particularly important to the

healing of her relationship with her mother by creating a context, through the performance of

family in the magical world, for May’s and her mother’s performance of family in the

30
mundane world. Beatrice, the ghost of a girl who died in childhood, has been searching the

Ever After for over a century for the ghost of her mother (Ever After 252-6). When Beatrice

gets too discouraged with her search (Among the Stars 101), May jeopardizes her mission to

get home through Hocus Pocus by sending ahead a telep-a-gram explaining where they will

be in hopes of reuniting Bea with her mother (Among the Stars 175-178). After May’s telep-

a-gram, Bea finally gets news of her mother at a death day party – while cake is being served

(Among the Stars 188-189) – and then risks being captured by ghouls in Hocus Pocus to

reunite with her mother (Among the Stars 197-201). After they are reunited, Beatrice and her

mother are food-sharers together; for example, in the final book of the trilogy, they “[serve]

refreshments” at the party in the Colony of the Undead (Warrior Princess 146). This story

arc of Beatrice and her mother serves as a model for May of a healthy, nourishing mother-

daughter bond that can inform her relationship with her own mother when she returns home,

and as a reminder for May of what she must return home for.

Other members of May’s found family in the magical land also provide both physical

and emotional nourishment that she needs in order to become a more fully-actualized person,

and thus a fuller participant in the performance of family in the mundane world. This is

signaled fairly early on in the trilogy when Anderson shows Somber Kitty connecting the

ghost world to foods he particularly enjoys: when it is first revealed he can see ghosts,

Somber Kitty is tasting “his favorite” food, “summer grass,” on his paws (Ever After 35),

suggesting that although frightening, his and May’s connection to the world of the dead may

also be nourishing.

The nourishing nature of the Ever After is also seen in its unobtrusive ruler, the Lady

of North Farm, a character similar in many ways to Childlike Empress of Fantastica, from

31
Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story (to be discussed in more detail later in this chapter).

May is initially interested in the Lady because she is the first person who has ever needed

May (Ever After 23-4). Like so many of the relationships in the May Bird trilogy and The

Neverending Story, this one is reciprocal: the Lady needs May, but she also sends her a series

of comforting gifts. First, she sends May a comfort blanket that gives may a vision of her

own bedroom when she wraps up in it (Ever After 156-160), and later in the trilogy, she

sends “two freshly baked northern cookies and two bottles of grade A North Farm milk” to

“keep [May and Somber Kitty] from getting hungry or thirsty” in the Ever After (Among the

Stars 11). The Lady is also similar to some of the female characters in The Neverending

Story in that when May meets her, she sprouts forth from a seed pod in a giant magnolia tree,

and is “as fragrant as May’s mother’s perfume” (Among the Stars 129), echoing Dame

Eyola’s natural, plantlike growth and the Childlike Empress’s home in the Magnolia Pavilion

of the Ivory Tower (Ende 404, 31). The Lady again grows out of a magnolia seed, further

reinforcing the connection between herself and Ende’s Childlike Empress, in Warrior

Princess (170-1).

Although unlike Dame Eyola, the Lady of North Farm is associated with the growth

of a non-edible plant, the magnolia blossom, she possesses some of the other motherly traits

Dame Eyola does. When May finishes telling the Lady her story and then cries with

exhaustion, the Lady soothes her and then invites her to “get comfortable” sitting at a table

(Among the Stars 130-1). Sometimes, the Lady’s motherly attentions even come in food

metaphors, as when she soothes May, “No use crying over spilled milk” (Warrior Princess

173). On another occasion, after she has been frozen in Petrified Pass, the spirits of North

Farm thaw May “as if she were a frozen turkey” (Among the Stars 115). The vision the Lady

32
is able to see of May’s future also includes food; according to the Lady, May could save the

Ever After from its nemesis Bo Cleevil or “end up selling skull dogs in Stabby Eye and

making a good living at it” (Among the Stars 132); later, when May is frustrated with what

she perceives to be the inadequate resistance she and her allies are able to level at Bo Cleevil,

she remembers this possible future, wishing that she were “just an average skulldog vendor

in Stabby Eye” (Warrior Princess 170).

Ultimately, the Lady cannot complete May’s quest for her; she can only offer her

nourishing food and good advice, and then, like a good mother, let her make her own

decisions. The Lady does, however, help May with one part of her quest: the journey home.

After May has died in the mundane world and thus returned to the Ever After to complete the

fight against Bo Cleevil, she has resigned herself to staying there like the other spirits, but

North Farm, presumably under supervision of the Lady, manufactures “REJUVENATING

RE-LIFE POWDER,” which allows May to return to life (239), and thus to return to her

biological mother when her quest is done and they are ready to enter back into wholesome

relationship.

Many of the members of May’s Ever After family, particularly the men, perform non-

traditional gender expressions and social behaviors, similar to May’s own difficulty with

self-expression among her agemates in the mundane world; May’s exposure to other non-

traditional performances of self in the Ever After provides her with a model that can help her

to overcome her shyness without sacrificing her individual identity, as she does upon her

final return to the mundane world at the conclusion of Warrior Princess. One character

whose gender and social performances are problematic is Pumpkin, a somewhat paradoxical

figure in that he is employed as a house servant, prepares food for May, is in fact named after

33
food, but “doesn’t eat or drink” (Ever After 90). Pumpkin’s relationship with May is likewise

problematic in that he vacillates between mothering her and coming to her as a child, in need

of mothering from her. Pumpkin establishes early on that he is “trying to help” May, and the

Lady of North Farm later confirms that he is her “guardian spirit,” or “protector” (Among the

Stars 131). When May professes herself “starving” on the journey to Nine Knaves Grotto

where they will hire a guide, he lays “out a feast in front of her – honey, pomegranates, three

tiny cakes decorated with tiny coffins [. . .] arranged [. . .] in the shape of a smiley face”

(Ever After 134).

Even in this moment, however, when he is apparently providing May with food-

sharing nurture, the foods Pumpkin presents are problematic: pomegranates, in particular, are

associated with being trapped in the underworld, as they are the fruit Persephone eats which

binds her to be with Hades for part of every year (Hamilton 50-55). Certainly, Pumpkin

perceives that May’s having eaten his meal creates a bond between them; shortly afterward,

he asks May for a hug (Ever After 136-7). During the remainder of the trip to Nine Knaves

Grotto, Pumpkin keeps May well fed (Ever After 138), and their mealtimes double as social

times, as they only have conversation “when it [is] time to stop and eat” (Ever After 143).

Even as Pumpkin occupies the adult role of food-giver, however, he seeks from May the

comfort that a food-sharer might rather be expected to provide; for example, May must

promise not to let the ghouls eat Pumpkin’s guts (Ever After 148), even though he, as the

resident of the Ever After and “guardian spirit” might typically be expected to offer such

assurances to May, a child and a visitor.

Pumpkin continues to look to May as a source of maternal comfort throughout the

trilogy. After May has returned home for the first time and then dies and goes back to the

34
Ever After, she finds Pumpkin hiding from Bo Cleevil in the Pit of Despair Amusement Park,

where he has created for himself a replica of May’s house, with “four Slurpy Soda machines”

(Warrior Princess 95-96); he seeks out May’s house as a place of comfort, and then adds to it

more comfort by adding more food, though this is a somewhat empty gesture, as he does not

eat or drink and May finds Slurpy Soda “putrid smelling” and cannot “bring herself to drink”

it (Warrior Princess 84). Pumpkin also sees May not only as a comfort to himself, but also to

her mother: when he realizes that May has died and will not be returning to the mundane

world again, he worries about what May’s mother will do without her (Warrior Princess

101).

Pumpkin’s habit of seeking out maternal comfort from his companions is not limited

to his interactions with May. Despite not eating, Pumpkin has the childlike habit of

requesting food from others. After they hire their guide, John the Jibber, in Nine Knaves

Grotto, he asks him for some “spirits” and later for a golden apple that John the Jibber keeps

among his treasures (Ever After 190, 197). Later, when the Lady of North Farm sends

cookies to May and Somber Kitty to keep them nourished in the ever after, Pumpkin is

jealous not to have been given a cookie, even though he does not need one (Among the Stars

13). Pumpkin is also jealous of the way he perceives May to baby Somber Kitty, asking her

to carry him as she does the cat (Among the Stars 32, 45). This childlike preoccupation with

food and with being mothered occasionally gets Pumpkin and the others into trouble as when

he gets the group attacked by ghouls when he accepts Ghouly Gum from a goblin everyone

warns him not to trust (Among the Stars 148-149), and later when he accidentally alerts the

goblins to the fact that he, Lucius, May, and Bea are sabotaging the goblins’ yoga retreat by

overturning a vat of Organic Gutgrass Juice (Warrior Princess 155-156).

35
 Pumpkin is not the only member of May’s found family in the Ever After to boast a

problematic history with food-sharing and nurturing; other male characters in the group fare

differently, but little better, when it comes to food-sharing and nurturing traits. One such

problematic figure is Captain Fabbio, who has feminine, mothering traits, but is embarrassed

of them. Captain Fabbio is traveling with Beatrice, acting as a sort of chaperone, or perhaps a

mother-surrogate, while she looks for her biological mother’s ghost (Ever After 252-4). He is

not a food-sharer; his primary relationship with food is to compose and recite poetry with

food in it (Among the Stars 35, 44, 91; Warrior Princess 159); nonetheless, he does provide

nurture in other typically-motherly ways. He sews a coat for the hairless Somber Kitty, but is

defensive about the gender atypicality of his having done so (Among the Stars 255). In spite

of his discomfort with this traditionally-feminine, motherly act, Captain Fabbio also kisses

Somber Kitty goodbye when it is time for them to part ways (Among the Stars 255).

However the characters themselves may feel about them, Pumpkin’s and Captain Fabbio’s

atypical gender expressions yoke them with May, who, as discussed above, also has trouble

engaging in gender-typical activities, thus giving their community a kind of commonality.4

Having constructed around herself a family of fellow misfits with whom she can

perform family and self in a non-threatening environment, it is naturally tempting for May

not to wish to return home. Thus, another important dimension of May’s performed family

experience in the Ever After is her time with the Colony of the Undead, a group of living

people who have made their way into the Ever After over the years without dying first, and

who can provide for her a reminder of what is valuable about her relationships with living

people in the mundane world. The colony of living people is a nourishing community for

May, as evidenced by the fact that its relationship with food begins with its first description,
4
For more discussion of how communities form around a commonality, see the next chapter.

36
as located in the Scrap Mountains of the Nothing Platte, which are full of junk, much of it

related to the preparation and serving of food, or else partially eaten: “old slurpy soda

machines, worm-eaten billboards, broken-down carriages, abandoned caskets, toasters”

(Among the Stars 152). The toasters and worm-eaten billboards also make their way inside,

where even the closeness of the pieces of junk to one another is described in terms of food:

the Colony is “walled completely with junk: crushed-up toasters and billboards and

automobiles packed like sardines” (Among the Stars 156-158). Not everything about the

relationship between the Colony and food consists of its being made of food trash, however;

there is fresh, edible food in the Colony, which contains “gardens brimming with vegetables,

fruits, and flowers” that the Undead eat (Among the Stars 163-164).

Like her home, the leader of the Colony of the Undead, Bertha Brettwaller, is

described in terms of food: “her face droop[s] like melting ice cream” when May asks why

she hasn’t died of old age since disappearing from Briery Swamp in 1897 (Among the Stars

160). She also uses food metaphors; when the members of the Colony bombard May with

questions, she admonishes them: “cool your muffins” (Among the Stars 162). In addition to

the food descriptors which circle around her, Bertha is very interested in food; the first

question she asks May is whether there is still wild garlic in the woods from which they both

disappeared into the Ever After (Among the Stars 160). Being around living people does not

immediately make May yearn for the world of the living; rather, after encountering the

nurturing, food-growing and -sharing Colony of the Undead, May begins to feel at home

there, even abandoning her plan of returning to her mother in the mundane world. When May

ultimately returns home from her first visit to the Ever After, it is because she is cornered by

Bo Cleevil’s forces with no escape except the portal home (Among the Stars 257).

37
Nonetheless, being part of a community of living people is a necessary step in preparing May

to be ready to return to the mundane world.

In the Ever After, May has the opportunity to develop reciprocal, food-sharing

relationships with characters with whom she feels kinship through shared misfit status, either

the shared atypicality of their gender expressions or their shared trait of being alive in the

land of the dead. Through nourishment of these food-sharing relationships with performed

family in the Ever After, May learns what she needs to about nourishing family relationships

so that she can heal her broken relationship with her biological mother in the mundane world.

Ende’s The Neverending Story

A story arc similar to the May Bird trilogy’s of repairing a wounded relationship

between biological parent and child by learning lessons about family love with surrogate

family in a magical world can be found in Michael Ende’s modern classic The Neverending

Story, in which the child protagonist, Bastian, and his father are finally able to figure out how

to love each other after Bastian’s trip to Fantastica. In Ende’s novel, the parent and child in

question are both biologically male, but the role of the constructed family and of the

performative act of food-sharing in constructing that family, remain central to the healing of

the relationship. Although the ultimate result of Bastian’s trip to Fantastica is a renewed

relationship with his father who has sunk into a deep depression following the death of

Bastian’s mother (36-7), before Bastian can enter into wholesome relationship with his

father, he must make peace with those parts of himself that he has trouble loving, such as his

body, which he regards as fat and unathletic.

38
 The opening of The Neverending Story is from the point of view of Carl Conrad

Coreander, in whose book shop Bastian finds The Neverending Story, his gateway to

Fantastica. Coreander, who facilitates Bastian’s trip to the magical land, is named after an

exotic spice, indicating that the trip will be both nourishing and out of the ordinary. Both

Bastian and Coreander are fat; despite being himself “a short, stout man” whose “paunch was

held in by a vest,” Coreander thinks of Bastian, critically it seems, as “fat” three times in

three pages and notes his “round face” (5-7). Coreander and Bastian have a certain amount of

kinship in that they share a body type; however, Coreander’s opinion of children in general –

and of food, which is apparently a threat to his books – is also not particularly high: “I simply

have no use for children. As far as I’m concerned, they’re no good for anything but

screaming, torturing people, breaking things, smearing books with jam and tearing the pages”

(emphasis added) (6). While Coreander is trying to get Bastian out of his shop when he says

these words, they hint at possible further kinship with Bastian; does his feeling that children

are only “good for [. . .] torturing people” stem from his own experience having been bullied

as a child? Since he and Bastian share a body-type, was he teased for his weight, as we know

that Bastian is teased (9)? Coreander and Bastian are also similar in their interest in The

Neverending Story and the happenings of Fantastica, a place where Coreander may have

found some healing – though his gruff demeanor and the fact that he is reading The

Neverending Story when Bastian enters the shop suggest that he may need more (6) – and

where he leads Bastian, intentionally or otherwise, to seek healing for himself.

Bastian himself struggles with his body image. When he regards himself in an old

mirror while in hiding with the book in the attic of his school, the third-person narration, with

him as focalizer, reads: “He was really nothing much to look at, with his pudgy build and his

39
bow legs and pasty face. He shook his head and said aloud: ‘No!’” (101). Bastian sees a

similar view of himself through Atreyu’s eyes when Atreyu looks into the Magic Mirror Gate

and sees Bastian: “He saw a fat little boy with a pale face – a boy his own age – and this little

boy was sitting on a pile of mats, reading a book. The little boy had large, sad-looking eyes,

and he was wrapped in frayed gray blankets. Behind him a few motionless animals could be

distinguished in the half-light – an eagle, an owl, and a fox” (106). Atreyu sees Bastian as he

is in the school attic, fat, pale, and surrounded by animals preserved through taxidermy.

These animals are of interest in that they may symbolize virtues, such as bravery and

intelligence, that Bastian does not consider himself to possess, a fact underscored by their

being dead and stuffed, and thus representative of dead or absent virtues; also interesting is

that the animals share with Bastian an interest in eating, as they are all predators.

Bastian so dislikes his own body that he almost allows Fantastica to be destroyed

rather than name the Childlike Empress and risk being taken to Fantastica and seen “in all his

fatness” by her and Atreyu (179). When Bastian enters Fantastica and is given by the

Childlike Empress the task of re-building it through his own wishes, his first, not even

entirely conscious, wish is to change his fat body:

In the golden mirror of her eyes, he saw, small at first as though far in

the distance, a reflection which little by little grew larger and more distinct. It

was a boy of about his own age; but this boy was slender and wonderfully

handsome. His bearing was proud and erect, his face was noble, manly – and

lean. [. . .] But most beautiful of all were the boy’s hands, which, though

delicately shaped, gave an impression of unusual strength.

Bastian gazed at the image with wonder and admiration. He couldn’t

40
 get enough of it. He was just going to ask who this handsome young prince

might be when it came to him in a flash that this was his very own self – his

reflection in Moon Child’s golden eyes.

In that moment he was transported, carried out of himself, and when

he returned, he found he had become the handsome boy whose image he had

seen. [emphasis added] (208-209)

Bastian’s first act as the master of AURYN, the symbol of the Childlike Empress, is to make

himself thin, strong, and handsome, and in this thin, strong, handsome body he completes his

quest through Fantastica. Notably, though Bastian is strong and handsome, he is also

“delicate,” a feature commonly associated with queer masculinity;5 rather than being

pejorative, however, this queer identification is for Bastian and the Childlike Empress

entirely positive, the mark of a prince.When Atreyu sees Bastian in Fantastica, he explains he

“didn’t recognize him at first” (258); when Bastian asks how he is different than he was in

the Magic Mirror Gate, Atreyu tells him, “You were fat and pale and you were wearing

different clothes,” but Bastian is “incredulous,” because with each wish he makes, he loses a

memory, in this case, the memory that he ever looked any differently than he now does (265,

211).

I flatter myself that I am not alone in my relief that despite Bastian’s radical change in

appearance when he enters Fantastica, this is not a makeover story.6 Bastian’s struggle to be

5
In his article “The Lavender Brick Road: Paul Bonin-Rodriguez and the Sissy Bo(d)y,” for example, Bradley
Boney, incorporates feminized physical features of the “sissy body” into his discussion of the “’aesthetic’
effeminacy” first identified in figures such as Oscar Wilde, which continues to characterize social perceptions
of queer men (35-6); at one point, Boney even establishes “delicate” as a synonym for “weak” in describing the
athletic prowess of sissy boys (40).
6
Fat studies scholarship in a wide range of disciplines examines the belief popular in America that it is always
better to be thin than fat. For example, Samatha Kwan draws on Peggy McIntosh’s notion of white privilege to
define what she terms “body privilege” in her 2010 article “Navigating Public Spaces: Gender, Race, and Body
Privilege in Everyday Life” published in the journal Feminist Formations. Michelle Lelwica, Emma Hoglund,

41
reconciled to his body does not end with its magical transformation into one he likes better.

Rather, in order to get home from Fantastica, Bastian must drink the Water of Life, and as the

waters explain with Falkor as translator, “the snakes [that guard the Water of Life] won’t let

anything belonging to Fantastica cross the threshold. Bastian must therefore give up

everything the Childlike Empress gave him,” most particularly his handsome new body

(433). As Bastian crosses the threshold to the fountain, “one after another of Bastian’s

Fantastican gifts f[all] away from him. The strong, handsome, fearless hero bec[omes] again

the small, fat, timid boy. [. . .] In the end he st[ands] naked before the great golden bowl, at

the center of which the Water of Life leap[s] high into the air like a crystal tree” (434). While

Bastian does not get to keep his Fantastican body or the fine clothes it wore, he does retain

the confidence with which he moved it and the memories of the time he spent in Fantastica

(439). When the Water of Life returns to him his memories of the mundane world, he is

finally whole (434-5).

In his discussion of the fairy tale of “Hansel and Gretel” in The Uses of Enchantment,

Bruno Bettelheim characterizes the crossing of water as a sign of maturation or

transcendence: “The children do not encounter any expanse of water on their way in[to the

forest containing the gingerbread house]. Having to cross one on their return symbolizes a

and Jenna McNallie apply a postcolonial reading of the spread of white western views of “’feminine’ thinness”
to the developing world through missionary activities in their article “Spreading the Religion of Thinness from
California to Calcutta: A Critical Feminist Postcolonial Analysis” published in the Spring 2009 issue of the
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. Fat positive children’s literature scholar Kate Flynn examines Pixar’s
treatment of fat characters in her 2010 article “Fat and the Land: Size Stereotyping in Pixar’s UP” from
Children’s Literature Quarterly. And in the sciences, Kathryn Pauly Morgan’s article in the spring 2011 issue
of the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, “Foucault, Ugly Ducklings, and
Technoswans: Analyzing Fat Hatred, Weight Loss Surgery, and Compulsory Biomedicalized Aesthetics in
America,” examines the constructed view of “obesity” (as she notes in her abstract, “soon to be included in the
fifth edition of the canonical Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a mental disorder”) that
pushes fat Americans into pursuing radical weight loss surgery that “permanently destroys [the] normally
functioning digestive system.” The inaugural issue of a new journal called Fat Studies was released in January
of 2012, and offers articles examining fatness in a variety of contexts and through a variety of
critical/disciplinary lenses.

42
transition, and a new beginning on a higher level of existence (as in baptism)” (164). It is

somewhat problematic to apply this reading of the crossing of water to Bastian’s departure

from Fantastica because although like Hansel and Gretel he crosses water only to leave the

magical world and not to enter, in so doing, he regresses, taking back to himself those traits

that so troubled him before his journey of self-discovery in the magical world. On another

level, though, it is by taking back his shortness, his fatness, and his timidity that Bastian is

finally able to mature. Because his troubled self-image is on the back burner during his time

in Fantastica with his borrowed, handsome body, Bastian is able to focus on finding the

other, healing wishes he must make in order to return to the mundane world a more complete

person. Once he has become that person, he can continue to be him regardless of his physical

appearance and gifts, and in finding this comfort within his own skin, Bastian truly reaches a

new level of self-actualization.

Bastian’s wishes toward the end of his time in Fantastica focus on his broken

relationship with his father, who has become emotionally distant since Bastian’s mother’s

death (36-7). The narration makes it clear that Bastian’s father is a good financial provider,

but that he has never recovered from his grief over his wife, and has cut himself off from

relationship with his son:

After that, everything had changed between Bastian and his father. Not

outwardly. Bastian had everything he could have wished for. He had a three-

speed bicycle, an electric train, plenty of vitamin pills, fifty-three books, a

golden hamster, an aquarium with tropical fish in it, a small camera, six

pocketknives, and so forth and so on. But none of all this really meant

anything to him. (36-37)

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Even the nutrition Bastian’s father provides – “vitamin pills” – is clinical, not comforting in

the way a home-cooked meal would be. This willingness to provide whatever material goods

Bastian may need but without the sentiment that might normally be associated with them

echoes Bastian’s concern that while he and his father may talk to conduct business, they are

no longer really able to enjoy conversation with each other: “Why didn’t his father ever

speak to him, not about his mother, not about important things, but just for the feel of talking

together?” (37).

Bastian’s father’s job of “dental technician” further underscores his removal from

Bastian’s emotional life. When Bastian imagines his father at work, he thinks of him

surrounded by “dozens of plaster casts of human teeth” or “possibly holding a plaster cast”

(12-3); that is, Bastian’s father is constantly surrounded not by teeth that may actually be

used for eating, but by plaster replicas of them, which are further distanced from their usual

food-consumption function by their placement not in a mouth, but in Bastian’s father’s hand.

Like the vitamin pills, the plaster models of teeth are clinical, not nurturing, in nature and are

a step removed from a wholesome, food-sharing function. Bastian’s father’s job further

provides evidence of his disrupted relationship with Bastian because it reveals to Bastian

where his role in that disruption may lie: “Bastian had never stopped to ask himself whether

his father enjoyed his work. It occurred to him now for the first time” (12).

Bastian’s relationship with his father is further complicated by the great pity he feels

for him. While he feels that his father is so emotionally distant that if he were to run away,

“maybe he wouldn’t even notice that Bastian wasn’t there anymore,” an idea he finds

“almost comforting,” Bastian nonetheless fears to disappoint him (13). When he realizes that

he was foolish to hole up in the school attic with a stolen book, he is powerless to go home

44
and risk disappointing his father with the true story of what he has done – “He’d rather die”

(140) – but he is similarly powerless to “lie to” his father, whom he thinks of as a broken

man (13).

As broken as he understands his father to be, Bastian perhaps fails to recognize all of

the brokenness in himself. Reflecting on his father’s grief, Bastian provides a context with

his own feelings of loss: “Bastian knew his father was sad. He himself had cried for many

nights, sometimes he had been so shaken by sobs that he had to vomit – but little by little it

had passed” (37). Although immediately after the loss of his mother, Bastian’s grief was such

that he could not keep down food, a symbol of her nurturing, Bastian now considers himself

recovered; however, two aspects of Bastian’s current conduct belie him. First, there is his

weight: if the initial absence of his mother as food-sharing nurturer made Bastian vomit, then

his tendency now to overeat could simply be a more advanced way of trying to fill the void

she has left.

The second indication that Bastian is not as recovered from his grief as he may like to

think is his very high expectations of the women in his life, employing scale what Joseph

Roach terms “surrogation”; as Roach explains: “Into the cavities created by loss through

death or other forms of departure, I hypothesize, survivors attempt to fit satisfactory

alternates” (2). By applying to each woman he encounters a set of idealized standards for

motherhood, Bastian is engaging in surrogation, or is trying to find a surrogate mother.

Before his visit to Fantastica, however, Bastian is looking to the wrong people to become his

mother-surrogate; rather than going to the father he already has for the nourishing love he

used to get from his mother, he instead looks to adults that are biologically female, but in

much less close relationship with him. One such woman is Anna, the single mother who

45
works part-time as a housekeeper and secretary for Bastian’s father, and whom Bastian

seems to regard as a mother-surrogate (144). Anna’s mother-like role in Bastian’s life is

evident in his belief that she makes “the best apple strudel in the whole world”; in place of

the food-sharing nurture Bastian has lost from his biological mother, he places on a pedestal

the food-sharings of the adult woman now closest to him (144). There is the slightest hint

that he would like a romance to develop between Anna and his father, who “was polite to her

but seemed hardly aware of her presence” (144). Bastian becomes “rather cross” when Anna

“sen[ds] her daughter to a boarding school in the country,” though; he takes very personally

Anna’s decision not to remain in her daughter’s daily life, despite her attempts “to explain”

why she has made this choice for her daughter (144). That is, he seems to project onto Anna

his anger at his mother for leaving him by dying, though for Anna, as for his mother,

circumstances left her without any other choice.

Bastian’s continued psychic damage from the loss of his mother is also evident in his

perception that her death is a primary component of his identity. For example, he identifies

with Atreyu because his parents are dead, but “otherwise he resembled him hardly at all,

neither physically nor in courage and determination” (46). Bastian also tends to identify with

his mother any kindly woman he encounters in Fantastica. On reading the first description of

the Childlike Empress, Bastian instantly connects her with his mother (36). Toward the end

of the story, after wishing “to be loved just as he was, good or bad, handsome or ugly, clever

or stupid, with all his faults – or possibly because of them” (392), Bastian finds Dame Eyola,

whom he nearly mistakes for his mother for a moment:

Bastian was almost overpowered by a desire to run to her with

outstretched arms and cry: “Mama, Mama!” But he controlled himself. His

46
 mama was dead and was certainly not here in Fantastica. This woman, it was

true, had the same sweet smile and the same trustworthy look, but between her

and his mother there was little resemblance. [. . .]

As he stood looking at her, he was overcome by a feeling that he had

not known for a long time. He could not remember when and where; he knew

only that he had sometimes felt that way when he was little. (400)

The sight of Dame Eyola puts Bastian instantly in mind of his mother, and fills him with “a

feeling” he has not had since early childhood. This feeling might be the unconditional

maternal love that Bastian lost when he lost his mother, but as we learn later, Dame Eyola,

like all but a very select few Fantasticans, does not love (411), so what Bastian feels is more

likely the sense of childlike-ness that Dame Eyola explains it is her and the House of

Change’s job to present to Bastian (400-5).

Dame Eyola and her house, the House of Change, are both emblematic of natural

birth and growth. Dame Eyola grows fruit from her body for Bastian to eat, a concept at

which he first expresses discomfort, wondering whether it is “all right to eat something that

comes out of somebody” (403-4). To encourage Bastian to eat her fruit, she compares the act

to nursing, arguing, “Babies drink milk that comes out of their mothers. There’s nothing

better” (403-4). Likewise, the House of Change itself calls to Bastian’s mind both food and

fullness: “Under a tall, pointed roof that looked rather like a stocking cap, the house itself

suggested a giant pumpkin. The walls were covered with large protuberances, one might

almost have said bellies, that gave the house a comfortably inviting look” (399). The food-

sharing nature of the House of Change is further indicated in Bastian’s entry into the House

directly into a dining room (400), and the House’s own mother-role is evident in its choice to

47
grow large rooms in order to give Bastian the point of view of “a small child” while he is in it

(405), even providing a crib for him to sleep in (407).

Dame Eyola herself repeatedly exhorts Bastian to “eat and drink your fill,” and to “be

small again,” providing him with “bowls and baskets full of all sorts of fruits” which, of

course, he later learns grow from her body (399-400). Once he begins eating the fruit,

Bastian cannot stop: “each new fruit gave him a more rapturous sensation than the last”

(401), and watching Bastian enjoy the fruit seems to provide rapture for Dame Eyola; his

eating makes her “bloom” (403-4). That is, like May’s relationship with her mother,

Bastian’s interaction with Dame Eyola is reciprocal; he gets nourishment from her fruit and

attention, and she gets nourishment from providing nourishment to him. Like May and her

mother, Bastian and Dame Eyola are under “reciprocal obligation” to each other (Hasratian

58); furthermore, in that the reciprocal relationship Bastian and Dame Eyola share is centered

around the sharing of food, their kinship bond is further cemented through an act of what

Durkheim calls “alimentary communion,” through which “those who share the same meal

[are made] ‘the same flesh and the same blood’” (qtd. Hasratian 59). There is, in some ways,

something sinister about this relationship, though; when, during his days with Dame Eyola,

Bastian goes out to play, “he never went too far from the House of Change, for suddenly he

would be overcome by a craving for Dame Eyola’s fruit, and when that happened, he could

hardly wait to get back to her and eat his fill” (408-409).

Bastian furthermore seems to serve a particular need for Dame Eyola, who has

“always wanted a child” and who has never known her mother (407). She explains, “We

Dames Eyola can only have a child if we wither first. And then we’re our own child and we

can’t be a mother anymore. That’s why I’m so glad you’re here my darling boy” (407). It is

48
only through a surrogate child that Dame Eyola or any creature like her can know the

experience of being a mother; however, because Dame Eyola cannot love, she views the

mother-child bond differently than might a mother or child from the mundane world, as she

explains to Bastian when their time together is drawing to a close: “I only needed someone to

whom I could give my excess” (411).

Although Dame Eyola does not love him as a mother in his own world would, or

perhaps because she does not, Dame Eyola is instrumental in Bastian’s grieving process and

in his discovery of the final wish that will lead him home from Fantastica. During his time in

the House of Change, Bastian is hungry not just for Dame Eyola’s fruit, but for “her motherly

care and tenderness. It seemed to him that without knowing it he had long hungered for

something which was now being given him in abundance. And he just couldn’t get enough of

it” (408). Even unaccompanied by motherly love as we conceive it, Bastian needs the

performance of motherly action, and this he receives from Dame Eyola’s feeding and

attention. He frequently responds to Dame Eyola as a baby to a mother. On his first night in

the House of Change, he “burie[s] his head in her bosom like a baby,” as though

breastfeeding, and falls asleep, after which Dame Eyola apparently puts him down in a crib

(407); on another occasion, he cries into Dame Eyola like a baby: “He buried his face in the

flowers on her bosom and wept until he was too tired to weep anymore” (409).

In addition to providing the attention a mother might to a small baby, Dame Eyola

also mothers Bastian as one might a child his actual age, “sen[ding] him outside to get some

fresh air” after breakfast, for example (408). Mixed in with this fairly general motherly

advice, Dame Eyola provides information specific to Bastian’s journey through Fantastica,

most particularly, the knowledge that he must drink the Water of Life to return to his own

49
world, and that in order to get to the Water, he must wish “to be capable of loving,” and in

finding that wish, must “forget [his] father and mother” (409-12). Paradoxically, a step in

Bastian’s resolving his grief over his mother and entering into renewed relationship with his

father is to forget them both, even to forget what the words “father” and “mother” mean.

When Bastian finds his last wish, to be able to love, he can no longer use it because

he has forgotten whom he wants to love (420). Part of the necessity of Bastian’s forgetting

his father and mother may perhaps stem from his need to stop thinking within proscribed

gender roles; instead of expecting nourishing love from all the women he encounters, he

must instead seek it from a man, his father, as he learns when he finds out how to use his last

wish. Once he has found the wish and thus completed the work he was to do in the House of

Change, Dame Eyola sends Bastian out in search of the Water of Life with the wish as his

“guide” (412), and he finds his way to a place very different from the nurturing House of

Change, Yor’s Minroud, the “picture mine” where he must do long days of hard labor in the

dark to find the image that will remind him whom he wants to love (417-20).

Yor is in almost every way an unlikely mother-figure. He is an “old man,” who lives

in a “hut” next to a deep mine, but when Bastian approaches him and asks for help, Yor

serves him a meal before even asking his name (417). The furnishings of Yor’s hut establish

him as a food-sharer: “It consisted of a single small, bare room. A wooden table, two chairs,

a cot, and two or three wooden shelves piled with food and dishes were the only furnishings.

A fire was burning in an open hearth, and over it hung a kettle of soup” (417). There is plenty

of food, and an extra chair; Yor expects company at his table. In addition to being a practiced

food-sharer, Yor is a practiced guide for people from the mundane world trying to find their

way out of Fantastica. He explains to Bastian the trouble with his last wish – his lack of an

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object for the love he wants to learn to give: “You want to be able to love, that’s your only

hope of getting back to your world. To love – that’s easily said. But the Water of Life will

ask you: Love whom? Because you can’t love in general” (420). Yor further explains that in

order to find out whom he wants to love, Bastian must find a picture in the Minroud of the

object of his love, and in so doing, forget himself (420).

During Bastian’s search for the right picture, Yor keeps him adequately fed, but no

more. On Bastian’s first morning with him, Yor leaves for work before Bastian wakes up, but

leaves the soup hot, although Bastian finds it “[t]oo salty. It made him think of sweat and

tears” (420). In the evenings, they sit together without talking, and there is also no mention of

a shared evening meal (421). On the first morning Bastian goes into the Minroud, Yor

instructs him, “Eat your soup and come with me” (422); the meal and the talk are pragmatic,

not a step toward relationship-building. Bastian’s time with Yor is not overly comfortable,

either in the food there is to eat or in the companionship that goes with it. Without knowledge

of his parents or anyone to love, Bastian’s life is austere.

Nonetheless, the Minroud itself is motherly toward Bastian: “Curled up like an

unborn child in its mother’s womb, he lay in the dark depths of Fantastica’s foundations,

patiently digging for a forgotten dream, a picture that might lead him to the Water of Life”

(423). Bastian’s time searching the Minroud is a rebirth. In forgetting himself and finding the

person he is to love, Bastian becomes a new person. The picture he finds in the Minroud is a

dream-version of his father as he imagines him at work: “On the fragile sheet of isinglass – it

was not very large, about the size of a usual book page – he saw a man wearing a white

smock and holding a plaster cast in one hand. His posture and the troubled look on his face

51
touched Bastian to the heart. But what stirred him the most was that the man was shut up in a

transparent but impenetrable block of ice” (423).

The picture of his father that so stirs compassion in Bastian is of him holding the

clinical plaster cast of teeth outside of a mouth, again bringing to mind the disruption of

eating; underscoring this subversion of wholesome food-sharing is the enclosure of Bastian’s

father in ice, an even more pointed symbol of his inability to be in relationship. Seeing his

father in this way inspires in Bastian the desire to love him, and thus gives him the healing he

needs to go home. Instead of seeking to love a mother he cannot have, Bastian has instead

learned to seek to be in full, nourishing relationship with the parent he does have. In the

fountain of the Water of Life, after he has given up the gifts the Childlike Empress gave him

and received back his memories of the mundane world, Bastian resolves to bring some of the

Water of Life back with him for his father to drink (435). In addition to having become

capable of loving his father, Bastian has grown to understand that his father, too, has been

rendered incapable of being in relationship. Now that he has the desire and the ability to fully

love his father, Bastian knows what to do to enter into relationship with him.

Through his food-sharing experiences in Fantastica, Bastian learns to become part of

the performed family he has in the mundane world, even without a mother present; upon his

return, Bastian’s healed relationship with his father is consummated almost immediately with

a meal. Bastian’s father sits Bastian down “at the kitchen table” to hear his story, and

“lovingly” serves him breakfast: “Bastian was drinking hot milk and eating breakfast rolls,

which his father had lovingly spread with butter and honey” (439). In addition to the

“lovingly” prepared food, Bastian’s father gives him the gift of undivided attention,

apparently listening to Bastian talk, uninterrupted, for several hours and waiting until “about

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midday” to “[call] the police to tell them his son had come home” (440). After the brief

interruption, Bastian’s father signals that his time to listen and Bastian’s to talk has re-started

by “ma[king] lunch for both of them” before having Bastian go “on with his story” (440). At

the conclusion of Bastian’s story, his father cries, “something he had never seen before”

(440) – presumably even when his mother died – and the next day over breakfast, declares to

Bastian that they will celebrate their renewed relationship with a big day of outings including

“treat[ing] ourselves to the finest lunch the world has ever seen” (441). Through these three

meals, breakfast and lunch at home while Bastian tells his story, and a lavish lunch out the

following day, Bastian and his father consummate the new nature of their relationship,

restoring the element of nurturing love to their performance of family that was lost when

Bastian’s mother died.

Conclusion

It is natural, as Roach posits, for a person, particularly a child, who has suffered loss

to search for a surrogate to fill the resulting void, but as Bastian discovers, it is not

necessarily the person most physically or biologically similar to the person lost who will

make the best surrogate. Instead of finding a woman to replace his mother, the resolution for

Bastian’s and his father’s loss and the disruption of their own relationship is instead for the

two of them to incorporate into their relationship the sharing of food and feeling that might

traditionally be part of the mother-daughter bond. In so doing, they find a performative

gesture, food-sharing, which like the kiss in the early Christian church as conceptualized by

Penn, constructs a new performed family. For May, performative food-sharings in the Ever

After and the family they help her to construct likewise help her to find the ways in which

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she and her mother can most wholesomely perform family in the mundane world. The next

chapter will explore works in which child protagonists enter into prolonged relationships

with performed families in magical worlds that are meant rather to supplant mundane-world

family relationships than to improve them.

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 CHAPTER 2: Community as a Mother

The previous chapter explored works in which child protagonists in magical lands

engage in food-sharing with the inhabitants of those lands as part of a performance of family

that is temporary and instructive, providing the protagonists with healing and with skills to

bring back to their family interactions in the mundane world. In some other works of

children’s fantasy, the performance of family through food-sharing in the magical land is not

temporary and does not serve to improve family relationships in the mundane world, but

rather to create a surrogate family in the magical world that replaces a family lost or left

behind. In these works, the performed family that comes into being through the act of food-

sharing may lack several of the commonalities around which families traditionally arrange

themselves, but through the performance of food-sharing and the acknowledgement of those

commonalities the community members do share, a lasting surrogate family comes to be.

Such a performed family has no choice but to be lasting, in fact; by claiming

membership in performed family, a child protagonist is often asserting her-/himself as part of

a group that excludes her/his previous family. As Sonja Kuftinec notes in her book Staging

America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater, while communities are generally

regarded in terms of what they hold in common, they are equally defined by their exclusion

of those who do not share that commonality; she writes:

We generally understand community as a function of commonality, whether

that commonality is one of location, class, interest, age, or ethnic background.

But commonality also implies boundaries, difference, and exclusion. In order

for a community to distinguish itself, its members must differentiate

themselves in some way from the other communities through boundaries of

 land, behavior, or background. Community thus encapsulates both

commonality and difference. (9)

That is, by sharing food with the members of a performed-family community and thus

joining its ranks, the child protagonist, previously an outsider to the community, accepts the

boundaries established by that community. Generally, this boundary excludes the child

protagonist’s previous family from community membership, ensuring that the child

protagonist now claims the family established through the performance of food-sharing, and

no other, as her/his true family. This chapter will explore three instances of a child

protagonist entering into a long-term family relationship with a new community through the

performance of food-sharing: Bod Owens entering the graveyard community in Neil

Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, Tristran Thorn becoming a member of the Fellowship of the

Castle in Gaiman’s Stardust, and Harry Potter claiming Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and

Wizardry as his family J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series.

Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book

In The Graveyard Book, Gaiman opens with his toddler protagonist’s orphaning by

the murder of all of his family members (2-7), thus leaving him with no choice but to give up

his biological family and establish membership in a new family community. The boy, to be

named Nobody Owens (Bod for short) by his found family, has many parent-figures in the

graveyard into which he wanders who share nurture and food with him in whatever ways

they are best able, beginning with the ghosts of Mr. and Mrs. Owens who accept from his

mother’s ghost, on behalf of the graveyard community, the duty of raising him (15-7).

Although Mrs. and Mr. Owens agree to become Bod’s mother and father, the responsibility

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for his care belongs to the whole graveyard community, something Mrs. Owens seems to

realize, as she uses the plural pronoun when she agrees to take responsibility for Bod: “If we

can, then we will” (16).

Initially, the only trait Bod shares in common with the other members of the

graveyard community is physical location; like them, he is present in the graveyard. This is

somewhat problematic for the rest of the community, which seems to regard being dead,

rather than simply occupying the graveyard, to be the commonality that defines them as a

community. In the words of Josiah Worthington, an eighteenth-century baronet who fancies

himself in charge, Mrs. Owens owes consideration “to the commonality of those who form

this population of discarnate spirits” (22); that is, the common trait that makes them a

community is that they are spirits without bodies, not merely that they occupy the same

space. Nonetheless, some cosmic force seems to agree that Bod now belongs to the graveyard

community because after Mrs. Owens tells Bod’s biological mother that they will take him,

she and all of the other graveyard inhabitants develop the ability to touch Bod, even though

their ghostly forms should not be able to make contact with his living, physical body (22).

That the responsibility for Bod’s care belongs to all of the graveyard occupants is

further demonstrated by the fact that Bod becomes invisible to the murderer of the rest of his

family, the Man Jack, after Mrs. Owens agrees that the community will take him in (17),

giving him more in common with the “discarnate spirits” with whom he now resides;

however, it is another graveyard occupant and not a ghost, Silas, who sends the Man Jack

away, modifying his thoughts so that he believes the graveyard to be a dead end in his search

for the boy (18-20). Furthermore, when Mrs. Owens and Silas name Bod, they claim him as

kin, following Hasratian’s paradigm that the establishment of “[a] common designation”

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constitutes performed kinship (Hasratian 58). By naming him “Nobody” (Graveyard Book

25), Mrs. Owens and Silas imbue Bod with honorary bodilessness – he is no body – and

allow him to claim kinship with the commonality of “discarnate spirits.” With these acts,

Silas and Mrs. Owens begin a lasting performed family for Bod which endures until he

becomes an adult, at which time he must seek a new community to which he may belong.

When Bod grows up, Mrs. Owens is relieved of her role as his mother by Bod’s losing his

ability to see her and the other dead, let alone touch them (299, 305-307), marking the end of

his time as an honorary “discarnate spirit.”

Because she has taken responsibility for him, Mrs. Owens insists on Bod sleeping in

the Owens’s tomb, although others also offer to have him under their roofs (27-8). Of

concern to Mrs. Owens, however, is the problem of getting food for Bod, because she cannot

leave the graveyard to get any and there is nothing there suitable for a living person to eat

(22). One surrogate mother-figure alone is not sufficient – the work of raising Bod “will take

a graveyard” (23); thus, Silas steps in as Bod’s primary food-sharer. Because he is not a

ghost whose body was buried in the graveyard, Silas is able to leave it to get Bod’s food, and

so offers to take on that responsibility (23). Silas also offers to store Bod’s food in his crypt,

where it is cold, and to make up a bed for Bod there, although Mrs. Owens declines to have

Bod sleep anywhere but in her own tomb (27-8). When it is questionable whether the other

members of the graveyard community will allow Bod to stay there, Silas even offers to take

Bod with him somewhere else, overtly identifying himself as a potential foster-mother in so

doing: “I have never been a mother. And I do not plan to begin now. But I can leave this

place. . .” (28). It is also Silas who gives Bod his name, although each member of the

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graveyard community has a suggestion of naming Bod after some friend or family member

he or she thinks Bod resembles (23-5).

Silas’s interest in Bod seems to have some relation to his own lack of ability to fit in.

As a vampire, Silas’s identity within – but set apart from – the graveyard community is

defined in part by his diet. As a creature who, as the narration puts it, “consume[s] only one

food, and it [i]sn’t bananas” (27), Silas is neither alive nor dead, and so fits in neither with

the living nor with the ghosts of the graveyard where he resides; like Bod, after all, he has a

physical body which distinguishes him from the rest of the community in what they consider

an important way. Discussing with Mrs. Owens her problem of being unable to leave the

graveyard to get Bod’s food or to take him to live elsewhere if the rest of the graveyard

rejects him, “‘It must be so good,’ sa[ys] Silas, ‘to have somewhere that you belong.

Somewhere that’s home’” (28). Part of Silas, it seems, would like to create a family with Bod

in order to gain the kind of community and sense of belonging that the ghosts have with each

other, and he uses food-sharing as the performative act through which he builds this family.

Furthermore, Silas accommodates Mrs. Owens’s need to cement her own family bond

with Bod through food-sharing; that Silas and Mrs. Owens participate jointly in Bod’s first

feeding in the graveyard demonstrates the understanding between the two of the need each

has to participate in Bod’s upbringing and forges among the three characters a special

relationship. Hasratian argues:

Taking a meal together, according to Durkheim, creates an intense bond of

kinship among those who are not otherwise related by literally making of

those who share the meal “the same flesh and the same blood.” Food is what

constitutes the group, as it ensures the sameness of its various members. When

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 it is taken as a meal, food performs an “alimentary communion,” making

group composition and bodily composition identical. (59)

That is, by participating together in Bod’s first meal in the graveyard, Silas and Mrs. Owens

make themselves family to Bod and to each other. Their joint rewards for their joint

participation in this performance of family are Bod’s first smile and first word, both

described in terms of food: “He beamed, messy and apple-cheeked” before saying the word,

“narna,” for banana (Graveyard Book 28).

When the other ghosts agree to let Bod stay with the Owenses, Silas contents himself

with fulfilling a role more akin to uncle or mentor, although he does perform the bulk of

Bod’s food-sharing duties. Bod comes to Silas with questions and he provides answers (38),

and Silas corrects the deficiencies he perceives in Mr. and Mrs. Owens’s child-rearing, such

as their failure to teach Bod how to read, which he addresses by bringing Bod alphabet books

and giving him reading assignments to do with the headstones in the graveyard (38-39). This

gift of literacy provides another kind of nourishment for Bod, who “read[s] stories as

enthusiastically as some children [eat]” (182). Silas also takes it upon himself to discipline

Bod, as when he corrects Bod for being rude to Miss Lupescu, another food-sharing adult in

Bod’s life (67).

While Silas’s food and relationship with Bod are nourishing, they are not ideal.

Because he cannot go out during the day, Silas brings Bod food that “mostly came in packets,

purchased from the kind of places that sold food late at night and asked no questions” (69).

At one point, Silas must even go away for “several months,” leaving Bod money to buy food

for himself (211-215). The lapses in Silas’s ability to provide good food for Bod parallel

certain difficulties he and Bod have forging a strong parent-child bond. On those occasions

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when Silas has to travel, Bod feels betrayed and angry (65), and Bod feels “it would be

wrong” to hug Silas (149). As Bod begins to grow up, Silas becomes even less able to assist

him. After the Jacks have been defeated, Silas takes Bod for pizza outside the graveyard, and

they discuss what Bod will do once he is grown, which will be soon; Silas isn’t able to

answer all of Bod’s questions about the future (290-292). When Bod is finally grown and his

time with his performed family of “discarnate spirits” is over, Silas sends him out of the

graveyard with a wallet of money – “Enough to give you a start in the world, but nothing

more” – a passport, and a promise, given at Bod’s request, to call for Bod if he gets into

trouble (303-305).

In one sense, Bod retains his honorary kinship with the graveyard community; his

passport is “made out in the name of Nobody Owens,” so Bod retains his nominal lack of

body (304). He cannot, however, return to the graveyard; Bod understands that if he returns

to the graveyard once he has left it, “it will be a place, but it won’t be home any longer”

(304). In the end, Silas is able to send Bod off to establish himself, but can provide him no

further aid, as is evident in his promise to call Bod for help if he needs it, rather than asking

Bod to make such a promise to him; though Silas may have made the promise merely to be

agreeable, it flows against the more expected direction for such a promise between a young

man and his mentor, as does Bod’s compulsion to request the promise. Nonetheless, for as

long as Bod needs it, his name and acts of food-sharing grant him membership in the

graveyard’s performed family, allowing him to come of age in safety and nurture.

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Gaiman’s Stardust

Gaiman again presents community as a mother-figure in his young adult novel

Stardust and its protagonist, Tristran Thorn, although unlike Bod Owens whose performed

family nurtures him into adulthood, Tristran finds his performed family as part of a journey

he undertakes upon coming of age. Tristran has always been out of step with the rest of the

community in the mundane world in which he grew up, perhaps because, although he is

unaware of it for most of the novel, he is half-fairy. Characters in the mundane village of

Wall do eat, and often eat good, traditional farm fare; but more often, they talk about food

that does not materialize, or use food or food-bearing plants in ways that do not lead to

nourishment. For example, the meadow on the far side of the wall is introduced very early in

the book as “perfectly good meadowland” on which “none of the villagers has ever grazed

animals” or “[grown] crops” (3). Not only does this description establish that there is a

supply of “perfectly good” food that the Wall villagers do not use, it furthermore introduces

the land of Faerie on the far side of the wall, and not the mundane world which contains the

village, as the source of good food.

The Wall villagers have a similar, un-nourishing relationship with food. Notably,

Tristran’s love interest in Wall, Victoria Forester, is several times connected with food that

no one is depicted eating. First, she pursues a job “as a pot-maid” at the local public house,

the Seventh Magpie, but her parents prevent her from taking it because it would be

“improper” (34-5). Shortly thereafter, she and a group of other girls, including Tristran’s

sister, discuss her various admirers, particularly a co-owner of the local general store, sitting

near and in a tree in an apple orchard (35-7). The conversation takes place, however, when

the trees are in bloom, not in fruit, so that rather than eating apples, the girls are depicted

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throwing the flowers at one another (36-7); this act is anti-nourishing not only because it

involves the flowers rather than the fruit of a fruit-bearing tree, but also because by picking

the flowers, the girls inhibit the tree’s ability to later produce fruit.

Tristran’s final interaction with Victoria before setting off for Faerie again involves

food that is talked about but never eaten. Victoria goes to Monday and Brown’s grocery store

ostensibly to bring her mother’s grocery list and responds coldly when Tristran tries to strike

up a conversation with her about the rice pudding he supposes her mother to be making based

on the list’s contents (38-40). Although she eventually picks up the conversation and agrees

to let Tristran walk her home, it is only to rebuff his attempt to kiss her, declaring: “Silly

shop-boy. It is all you can do to ensure that we have the ingredients for rice pudding” (45).

Victoria thus trivializes the importance of being able to procure food, but then in a sense

contradicts herself by thinking of Tristran as “the skinny shop-boy,” highlighting the

importance of nourishment and also establishing the lack of it Tristran receives from her and

from Wall as a negative trait (46).

Ironically, the one character in the community into which Tristran is born who has a

nurturing relationship with food is the one who is most markedly not in birth-family

relationship with him, his father’s wife and “the woman [Tristran] had always believed to be

his mother” (216), Daisy Hempstock Thorn. During their courtship, Daisy brings his father

“a small pot of shepherd’s pie” when he is on guard duty at the opening in the wall (9), and at

the market, she is depicted eating heartily at the food stall set up by Mr. Bromios, the

proprietor of The Seventh Magpie (20). Daisy in fact has a much more positive relationship

with food than Tristran’s biological mother, Una, a citizen of Faerie whom Tristran’s father,

Dunstan, meets at the market.

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 When Una first meets Dunstan, the only remote connection to food is the sound made

by a crystal violet in the market stall she is tending, which “chinkled and sang as he held it,

making a noise similar to that produced by wetting a finger and rubbing it, gently, around a

wineglass” (17). Una is again described in terms of drink, but with no literal food-sharing,

during her tryst with Dunstan, when “[s]he intoxicated him” (24). When she kisses Dunstan

goodbye, her mouth “taste[s] of crushed blackberries” (26), but again, no actual food is

present. It is unsurprising, then, that the baby Tristran she pushes through the gap in the wall

nine months later has “a red, bawling face, with screwed-up little eyes, a mouth, open and

vocal, and hungry” (29). Una is not capable of providing Tristran with the nurture he needs.7

By presenting a biological family for Tristran so far removed from nurture and food-sharing,

Gaiman forces his audience to look outside of biological family to find suitable nurturer-

figures for Tristran, beginning with Daisy, who, after Dunstan’s meeting with Una, accepts

the glass snowdrop he has purchased during this foodless scene “with fingers still shiny with

sausage grease” (20-1). Daisy is at all times grounded in nourishing food and kitchen work,

and to this extent, is a more nourishing mother-surrogate for Tristran than Una can be.

After the market, though, when Dunstan has become besotted with Una and so stops

courting Daisy, she stops eating (27-8). The love triangle in which Dunstan and Daisy find

themselves is not nourishing for either of them, Una’s disconnection from nourishment and

food-sharing extending even into Dunstan’s other relationships. Nonetheless, despite the

painful knowledge that she is not Tristran’s biological mother, Daisy is a lone nourishing

figure for him in Wall, understanding when to be in the kitchen, providing food for Tristran,

7
We later learn that the members of Tristran’s biological family, the lords of Stormhold, all have rather a
problematic relationship with food, owing largely to their fear of being poisoned by one another (54-5, 83-4).
Una is no exception to the family’s disconnection from food-sharing. When Tristran, now a young man, first
encounters her in Faerie, he is gathering “some young puffball mushrooms” and “purple plums which had
ripened and dried almost to prunes” (178); there is food present, but Tristran is the cook, not his mother.

64
and when to leave, providing him space. When Tristran comes home from having rashly

promised to go beyond the wall to bring back a fallen star for Victoria Forester, she

“bustle[s] out of the kitchen,” at Dunstan’s request, to give him space to talk to Tristran alone

(46). While Tristran is packing for his journey, Daisy “[brings] him six red, ripe apples and a

cottage loaf and a round of white farm-house cheese, which he place[s] inside his bag” (47);

and when Tristran returns to Wall and finally learns from his father the true story of his

parentage, he goes to his house to find “a steaming breakfast on the stove and on the table,

prepared for him, lovingly, by” Daisy (216). Unlike Bod Owens, who leaves his childhood

home knowing he can never return, Tristran has from his loving mother-surrogate, even after

he knows she is not his biological mother, assurance that he will always be welcomed and

nurtured in her kitchen.

In a way, Tristran’s two mother-figures are transposed; Daisy, the nourishing mother-

surrogate is in Wall, which is otherwise largely disconnected from nourishment, while Una,

for whom food is almost exclusively metaphorical, lives in the land of Faerie, which is

exotic, like her, but also nourishing. Both Tristran and his father perceive the visitors who

come to Wall for the market in terms of exotic foods. Dunstan sees the visitors as “men and

women with skins as pale as paper, skins as dark as volcanic rock, skins the color of

cinnamon, speaking in a multitude of tongues” (4), and notices some “paying for their

lodgings [. . .] with herbs and spices” (5). Even the word Gaiman chooses for “language” in

this passage is “tongue,” reinforcing Dunstan’s focus on the gustatory. Later, Tristran, too,

perceives the wind from Faerie to smell like fruits, herbs, and spices: “But there were times

when the wind blew from beyond the wall, bringing with it the smell of mint and thyme and

red-currants” (37). When Tristran first crosses the wall, the wind again smells like food: “A

65
warm wind stroked Tristran’s face: it smelled like peppermint, and blackcurrant leaves, and

red, ripe plums” (50).

Faerie’s dual nature as nurturing and exotic is perhaps best summed up in Tristran’s

reflection on the lion he sees in Faerie, which he perceives “looked little enough like the lion

Tristran had seen at a fair in the next village [in the mundane world], which had been a

mangy, toothless, rheumy thing” (Stardust 106). Tristran’s experience of Wall is so far from

nourishing that the lion at the fair is not only thin but also toothless, both underfed and

unable to feed itself better because it can’t chew meat, and these features detract from its

power as an exotic animal, placing it in opposition to the truly exotic and well-fed lion

Tristran encounters in Faerie. As the predatory nature of the lion suggests, there is a dark side

to Faerie’s relationship with food. Some of Faerie’s dangers are predatory, like the serewood

it contains, which consumes unwary travelers, so that, in the words of one of Tristran’s

traveling companions, the hairy man, “One day some other poor bugger lost in the wood’ll

find our skellingtons picked clean as whistles and that’ll be that” (76). In this moment, the

hairy man identifies himself as a member of the performed family community with which

Tristran eventually accepts membership in Faerie (234), the Fellowship of the Castle;

wondering aloud how to escape being consumed by the serewood, the hairy man mentions

that he “could castle” (76), a remark Tristran remembers later when he first encounters the

fellowship’s symbol (174).

Although they have little in common by the standard of Sonja Kuftinec’s criteria for

the kinds of commonality that foster community, commonality of “location, class, interest,

age, or ethnic background” (9), by uniting under the symbol of the castle, the members of the

fellowship make themselves kin following the model established in Hasratian’s reading of

66
Durkheim and discussed above; they share a common “title” and assume “reciprocal

obligations” (58). Once the group of fairy characters establish themselves as the Fellowship

of the Castle, they undertake mutual responsibility for each other’s welfare and, when the

hairy man takes him on, for Tristran’s as well. The hairy man establishes community

membership with Tristran, again following Hasratian’s model, by performing an act of

“alimentary communion” (59): he is the first character to share a meal with Tristran in Faerie.

The meal the hairy man provides Tristran is simple but comforting fare: “fried field-

mushrumps” (69); however, the hairy man seems to believe – or at least to act as though he

believes – that no one from the far side of the wall could possibly be content with such a

breakfast, reacting with possibly feigned modesty when Tristran declares the mushrooms

“the finest thing he had ever eaten” (69). The purpose of the hairy man’s feigned modesty is

unclear, though. At first, he seems to be trying to keep the lion’s share of the food for himself

– a decidedly unmotherly trait – as he “sigh[s] mournfully, and reache[s] into the pan sizzling

on the fire, with his knife, and flick[s] two large mushrooms into Tristran’s tin bowl” when

Tristran requests more (70); but the hairy man continues his show after Tristran has finished

the remaining mushrooms, declaring, “they’ll undoubtedly disagree with you” (70), when

doing so can no longer help him keep more of the food, suggesting that there may be some

other motivation, possibly fishing for compliments. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of

this breakfast the hairy man shares with Tristran is that when they have finished, he “packed

up the morning’s breakfast – fire, pans and all – and made it vanish into his pack” (71); that

is, the hairy man essentially wears a kitchen on his back, carrying a center of home with him

wherever he goes.

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 Whatever relationship the hairy man cultivates with Tristran is, as Hasratian argues is

necessary of performed kinship relationships, “reciprocal” (58); it does not always consist of

the hairy man as the giver and Tristran as the receiver of food. When they break for lunch, he

accepts provisions from Tristran, which, as the narration notes, “his mother had given him”

(72). Afterward, though, he makes tea for them both, and uses the tea-sharing as an occasion

to learn more about what Tristran is doing on this side of the wall (72-3). Food-sharing, for

these two, is a site of relationship-building, accompanied by important conversation; the

motherly nature of that relationship is evident in that the food Tristran and the hairy man

share at this meal was prepared by a character already identified as a mother. Furthermore,

the nurturing that is part of the relationship goes both ways – there are times for each

character to nurture and to be nurtured.8

The nurturer’s need for nurture again surfaces after Tristran and the hairy man have

their near-miss in the serewood, when the hairy man asks Tristran, “I don’t suppose you have

such a thing as a bottle of something spirituous upon you? Or perchance a pot of hot, sweet

tea?” (78). After that trauma, the hairy man needs the comfort that comes from someone else

giving him a drink. When Tristran has none to share, however, the hairy man very secretively

unlocks his pack and produces “an enamel bottle” of “an amber-colored liquid, which to

Tristran smells “intoxicating, like honey mixed with wood smoke and cloves” (78 -9).

Although the hairy man must provide the beverage himself, Tristran must nonetheless be the

one to do the sharing, because the hairy man has paws and cannot open the bottle (78-9). In

this interaction, Tristran and the hairy man each need the comfort that comes with being

8
Reciprocal mothering is an important part of other young adult protagonists’ food-sharing relationships, as
well; for example, the importance of reciprocity to May Bird’s relationship with her mother was discussed in
the previous chapter, and that of Harry Potter’s relationship with his surrogate parents Remus Lupin and Sirius
Black is discussed in the next.

68
served a drink, and each receives it from the other because they participate mutually in the

serving and provision of the beverage.

Once the shared drink has done its job of settling their nerves, the hairy man asks

Tristran, “You hungry?”, and then, rather than offering him something to eat, follows with

another question: “What’s in your bag?” (81). The hairy man then divides Tristran’s

remaining provisions between the two of them (except a can of “fishpaste” which he tells

Tristran to “Keep”) (82). As at lunch, Tristran provides the food and the hairy man the

drinks, continuing the pattern of mutual food-sharing. This pattern shifts at their next – and

also their final – meal together; for this meal, the hairy man goes into a village and returns

with new clothes to “spice” up Tristran’s appearance as well as a meal “of smoked trout, a

bowl of fresh shelled peas, several small raisin-cakes, and a bottle of small beer” (93).

Another member of the Fellowship of the Castle who shares food with Tristran is

Captain Johannes Alberic of the free ship Perdita, the sky-ship on which Tristran later

reflects he has spent “one of the happiest periods of his life” (172). After rescuing Tristran

and Yvaine, the star he has set out to find, from a rapidly evaporating cloud and introducing

himself, the next thing Captain Alberic does is to offer two motherly gifts, healing and food:

“Meggot’ll see to your hand. We eat at six bells. You shall sit at my table” (171).9 Meggot,

apparently the ship’s healer, not only possesses the motherly gift of healing, which she

performs using a food-like salve (171, 173), but is also described in terms of food (“carrot-

9
Captain Alberic, like another food-sharing male fantasy character, Trufflehunter the badger from C. S. Lewis’s
Prince Caspian, is queered in the film version of the book. In the 1989 BBC television series of The Chronicles
of Narnia, Trufflehunter is actually made female – voiced by two different female actors, Julie Peters and
Joanna David; and in the 2007 Paramount film of Stardust, Robert De Niro’s Captain Alberic is a cross-
dressing, apparently gay, man, and Meggot, Captain Alberic’s female counterpart and possible love interest
from the book, is cut altogether.

69
red hair”) and is the one who leads Tristran and Yvaine to their first meal on board the

Perdita (171).

When Tristran and Yvaine arrive at dinner they find that “the captain’s table” is the

only “table in the mess” (172), rendering the captain’s invitation both unnecessary and thus

more significant. Captain Alberic prides himself on his ability to share food with these

strangers, and the food provides both nourishment and comfort, as we learn from narration

through Tristran’s point of view: “The food was a thick soup of vegetables, beans and barley,

and it filled Tristran and contented him” (172). Furthermore, dinner is for Captain Alberic, as

tea was for the hairy man, a site of relationship-building, though in Captain Alberic’s case,

while he and Tristran both do their share of eating, the conversation flows mostly in one

direction: the captain does “all the talking” during dinner “with his ale-pot in one hand, and

the other hand alternately concerned with holding his stubby pipe and conveying food into

his mouth” (172).

Tristran and Yvaine’s departure from the Perdita is also centered around food and

community-establishment. The captain offers to drop them off when they dock “to take

provisions,” and when they leave, sends them off with food – “a leather shoulder-bag filled

with dried meats and fruits” among other things – and food-focused advice – “you should tell

the young lady that if she fancies trying to pass for other than what she is, she might try to

give the impression that she eats something – anything – from time to time” (173-5). Also

during this leave-taking, Captain Alberic establishes himself as a member of the Fellowship

of the Castle, marking its symbol “in the condensation on the polished wood” of the ship and

acknowledging his connection to the hairy man and others “with an interest in [Tristran’s]

return to Wall” (174), thus establishing, at this time of food-sharing and community

70
identification, the fellowship’s sense of “reciprocal obligations” where Tristran’s welfare is

concerned (Hasratian 58).

During his coming-of-age journey to collect the fallen star, and eventually to fall in

love with her, the members of the Fellowship of the Castle welcome Tristran into their

community by sharing meals with him and then assuming with him mutual interest in each

other’s concerns. The members of the fellowship keep Tristran safe and well-cared-for

during his quest, and once it is complete, he participates in meeting the fellowship’s other

obligations, such as being “instrumental in breaking the power of the Unseelie Court” with

them (234). Although Tristran and Yvaine marry and return to the ancient home of Tristran’s

Faerie family, the narrative of his life ends with this account of his participation in the affairs

of the fellowship, marking his membership in this community as of paramount importance; in

Faerie, Tristran’s most lasting performance of family is with the fellowship, a group who

establish themselves as kin through arrangement under a common name and the sharing of

food.

Rowling’s Harry Potter Series

A similar pattern of inadequate biological family forcing an adolescent male

protagonist to find a more nurturing found family may be found in J. K. Rowling’s Harry

Potter series, in which a community, the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, is

again a prominent mother-figure. Noel Chevalier hints around this idea in his article “The

Liberty Tree and the Whomping Willow,” in which he discusses the role of the large

Whomping Willow on the Hogwarts grounds as a disciplinarian (406-7), but the role of the

school as mother-figure is evident not only through the tree’s corporal punishment, but also

71
through the nurturing acts of food-sharing of the school community and at times, the school

itself.

Harry’s first contact with Hogwarts is through Rubeus Hagrid, the groundskeeper

who comes to rescue him from his unfit Muggle biological family, the Dursleys,10 by inviting

him into the wizarding community. When Hagrid bursts in on Dursleys to hand-deliver

Harry’s Hogwarts acceptance letter, he gives Harry a birthday cake and then cooks for the

two of them, producing from his pockets “a copper kettle, a squashy package of sausages, a

poker, a teapot, several chipped mugs, and a bottle of some amber liquid that he took a swig

from before starting to make tea” (Sorcerer’s Stone 47-8); he then gives to Harry “the first

six fat, juicy, slightly burnt sausages from the poker” and “[takes] a gulp of tea” before

finally starting to explain the wizarding world to him (Sorcerer’s Stone 48-9). The following

morning, Hagrid again prioritizes food, instructing Harry to have breakfast (more cake and

sausages) before taking him to Diagon Alley for the first time to buy school supplies (63);

Hagrid and Harry continue their food-sharing activities during this outing first by entering

Diagon Alley through the Leaky Cauldron, “a tiny, grubby-looking pub” (68) and then by

having “large ice creams together” (78)

At the end of Harry’s first week of school, Hagrid again takes up the role of food-

sharer when he invites Harry for tea (Sorcerer’s Stone 135-6). Much of the narration that

describes Hagrid in his own home focuses, in fact, on his serving tea and rock cakes to Harry,

Ron, and Hermione (e.g., Sorcerer’s Stone 140-2, 191-2; Chamber of Secrets 116-7, 260; et

al.); even when the three appear on his doorstep the night he gets back from a diplomatic

mission to the giants, he immediately starts making them tea, though he has not yet even had

time to unpack (Order of the Phoenix 421-423). Hagrid continues his tradition of having
10
For more discussion of what makes the Dursleys unfit, see the next chapter.

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students to tea even after Harry is grown, inviting Harry’s son Albus Severus to tea at the end

of his first week of school in the epilogue to Deathly Hallows (758).11

In addition to using tea for social, relationship-building time, Hagrid is also able to

use it to provide comfort and healing, as when he makes Harry “a cup of strong black tea”

apparently as a restorative after his broomstick is cursed at his first Quidditch match

(Sorcerer’s Stone 191-192). When Harry goes to see him after his return to the castle from

the fight at the Ministry during which Sirius is killed, Hagrid again offers Harry a comforting

beverage, inviting him in for “a cup o’ dandelion juice” (Order of the Phoenix 853). During

this visit, though, Harry rejects Hagrid’s comfort; Hagrid tries to talk to Harry about Sirius,

but the result is that Harry bolts half of his dandelion juice to shorten the visit and then ends

it abruptly, leaving the remaining half unfinished (854). Hagrid again pairs appropriate food-

sharing with appropriate first aid in Chamber of Secrets, when Harry and Hermione bring

Ron to his house vomiting slugs from a backfiring curse, and he “d[oes]n’t seem perturbed,”

but instead puts “a large copper basin in front of him” while serving tea and “treacle fudge”

to Harry and Hermione (116-117). Hagrid is also able to use food-sharing as an occasion for

parental instruction; he uses food in such a way in Prisoner of Azkaban, when he invites

Harry and Ron over for tea to scold them for giving Hermione the silent treatment when they

believe her cat has eaten Ron’s pet rat (272-5).

As much attention as Hagrid shows to motherly food-sharing for Harry, Ron, and

Hermione, he is at his most motherly with Norbert, his pet baby dragon, in Sorcerer’s

11
It is interesting to note that at the end of Sorcerer’s Stone, Hagrid and Harry’s mother-child relationship is
essentially inverted when Hagrid, having realized that he leaked information that almost got Harry killed,
breaks down and Harry has to comfort him by giving him a Chocolate Frog (Sorcerer’s Stone 303-4); however,
Hagrid continues his food-sharing connection with Harry throughout the series, often giving Harry gifts of food,
such as the “vast box of sweets” he gives him for Christmas in Goblet of Fire (410).

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Stone.12 Hagrid procures Norbert when he is still an egg, and so is responsible for his

gestation and hatching, as well as his first feedings (233). Hagrid calls himself Norbert’s

“mommy” 13 and like many mothers of newborns finds “beautiful” the infant that is to other

eyes awkward and alien (235-6; 240). When it is time to smuggle Norbert out of the country,

Hagrid makes sure he is well-supplied with food and “his teddy bear in case he gets lonely”

(240). Hagrid likewise fusses over other animal child-surrogates, including the acromantula

Aragog, whom he also raises from an egg, “feeding [him] on scraps from the table”

(Chamber of Secrets 277).

Perhaps Hagrid’s most effective performance mothering a non-human creature,

though, is with his half-brother, Grawp. Though Grawp is mostly a danger and then a weapon

in Order of the Phoenix, by the end of Half-Blood Prince, Hagrid’s plan to tame Grawp’s

giant nature by keeping him “company” seems to be working; at Dumbledore’s funeral,

Grawp comforts Hagrid. First, during the service, “Grawp patted Hagrid hard on the head, so

that his chair legs sank into the ground” (643); and afterward, “The crowd had almost

dispersed now, the stragglers giving the monumental figure of Grawp a wide berth as he

cuddled Hagrid, whose howls of grief were still echoing across the water” (651). Grawp

12
Hagrid is not the only male mother-figure and Hogwarts staff member in the series to mother a baby animal.
In the fifth book of the series, during the battle at the Ministry of Magic between the Death Eaters and the Order
of the Phoenix, Albus Dumbledore’s phoenix Fawkes swallows an Avada Kedavra curse, dies, and is reborn
from his own ashes (Order of the Phoenix 815). Dumbledore carries the baby bird home and as soon as he
returns to his office at Hogwarts, places him in a bank of “soft ashes” under the adult Fawkes’s perch (822).
13
In addition to his use of this feminine appellation to define his relationship with Norbert, Hagrid also marks
himself as traditionally-feminine in other ways, such as his tendency to burst into tears at emotional times, often
blotting his eyes with table linens (Prisoner of Azkaban 93, 94, 422), and his participation in needlework,
knitting to pass the time on the train to London (Sorcerer’s Stone 65) and darning socks (Goblet of Fire 265).
Hagrid’s interest in needle crafts again aligns him with Dumbledore, who remarks to Horace Slughorn, “I do
love knitting patterns” (Half-Blood Prince 73). A fondness for needlework may also be found in male mothers
in other works, such as the pirate bo’sun Smee, who, in the 1911 novel version of Peter Pan is depicted keeping
a sewing machine on board the pirate ship (183). I have in fact argued elsewhere that Smee is a more fitting
mother-figure for the pirates than Wendy, despite his sharing the other pirates’ wish to have Wendy for a
mother (Bienvenue 24).

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appears fully socialized after the Battle of Hogwarts, when the celebrating defenders are

gathered in the Great Hall: “Grawp peered in through a smashed window, and people were

throwing food into his laughing mouth” (Deathly Hallows 745). Hagrid’s interactions with

Grawp show at its best his power to, on behalf of Hogwarts, nurture its surrogate children

and help them mature until they are able to participate non-threateningly in the wholesome

food-sharing, or “alimentary communion” (Hasratian 59), that marks them as members of the

Hogwarts community.

As in the performed-family communities in The Graveyard Book and Stardust, the

Hogwarts family relies on the participation of more than one member to function well;

Hagrid is perhaps the member of the Hogwarts staff who most frequently shares food and

maternal attention with Harry, but his offerings are not all that they might be. As early as his

first meeting with eleven-year-old Harry, Hagrid’s propensity for strong drink is present in

the “amber liquid” he “swig[s]” while making Harry’s dinner (Sorcerer’s Stone 48), and in

his leaving Harry alone his first time in Diagon Alley so that he can go “fer a pick -me-up in

the Leaky Cauldron,” during which time Harry meets Draco Malfoy, who tells him that

Hagrid is known for being a “drunk” (76-8). Hagrid’s tendency to overindulge in alcohol

continues throughout the series (Sorcerer’s Stone 204, 265-6; Chamber of Secrets 77;

Prisoner of Azkaban 120-2, 202; Goblet of Fire 321-2; Deathly Hallows 80, 92).

Hagrid’s relationship with food is also problematic in that he is not a particularly

good cook; in fact, after the “slightly burnt” dinner on the night of their first meeting

(Sorcerer’s Stone 48-9), his cooking grows steadily worse, ranging from the strange – “stoat

sandwiches” (Sorcerer’s Stone 231) and a casserole containing “a large talon” (Goblet of

Fire 265) – to the inedible, perhaps best characterized by his famous rock cakes (Sorcerer’s

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Stone 140; Goblet of Fire 28; Half-Blood Prince 232). Harry thinks little enough of Hagrid’s

cooking that on two occasions, he politely refuses the food Hagrid offers because, in the

same words of narration each time, “he had had too much experience with Hagrid’s cooking”

(Prisoner of Azkaban 273; Goblet of Fire 28).

Filling in where Hagrid’s attempts at food-sharing and nurturing do not succeed,

other Hogwarts staff members also figure as potential mother-surrogates for Harry. Notable

among these other mother-surrogates is Minerva McGonagall, Harry’s Head of House.

Professor McGonagall is the first staff member to offer food to new Hogwarts students when

they arrive, leading them to the “start-of-term” banquet, but this is tempered with regulation

– she also explains to the first-years that they must be “sorted” before they can eat

(Sorcerer’s Stone 114). In general, though she recognizes the importance of festive

occasions, Professor McGonagall does not seem overly interested in feasts, a trait which

occasions the need for yet another mother-figure at Hogwarts to balance her regulated food-

sharing with a more wholehearted approach to feasting.

As Head of Hogwarts, Dumbledore is well-fit to share food with gusto, balancing out

McGonagall’s food-regulation; one of his ceremonial duties is to organize, open, and close

school feasts. At the start-of-term feast in Harry’s third year, Dumbledore even seems to

cause the food to appear by declaring, “Let the feast begin!” (Prisoner of Azkaban 93); many

of Dumbledore’s other feast-opening speeches are even briefer and more enthusiastic, as

when, on two occasions, he simply exhorts the students to “Tuck in!” (Goblet of Fire 180;

Order of the Phoenix 208). In Harry’s third year, when only thirteen occupants remain in

Hogwarts castle over winter break, Dumbledore abandons the traditional Christmas feast in

favor of a family-style meal in which everyone sits together at a single table and he plays

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host, inviting Harry, Ron and Hermione to “Sit down, sit down!” and then telling everyone to

“Dig in!” (Prisoner of Azkaban 227-8). Whether the meal is formal or familial, Dumbledore

is able to preside with joy and a strong sense of community-building through food-sharing,

adding a new facet to the kind of mothering Hogwarts is able to provide.

McGonagall again provides a clear counterpoint to Dumbledore’s mothering style in

Deathly Hallows when, even in the chaos surrounding the Battle of Hogwarts, she attempts to

maintain conventional rules of decorum in the Great Hall rather than sharing Dumbledore’s

interest in abandoning traditional behaviors when the occasion merits it. When she gathers

the students to alert them of Voldemort’s impending attack and evacuate those who are

underage or choose not to fight, she has them seated by House table (Deathly Hallows 600).

Following the battle, almost as soon as the Great Hall is no longer needed to triage the

wounded, “McGonagall [replaces] the House tables,” but the rest of the Hogwarts

community resists her rigidity, as “nobody was sitting according to House anymore: All were

jumbled together” (745). Although McGonagall adheres to the Great Hall’s customs, the

other members of the Hogwarts community choose to subvert her gesture by not sitting at

their own House tables when she replaces them; although McGonagall seems somewhat

inflexible in this moment, she does not try to force others to their House tables when they

resist her arrangement.

Likewise, Professor McGonagall is able, with Dumbledore’s help, to show flexibility

on other occasions when food and discipline intersect. On the first day of Harry’s second

year, Professors Dumbledore and McGonagall must again combine the roles of food-sharer

and disciplinarian when Snape brings McGonagall to his office to punish Harry and Ron,

whom he has apprehended flying onto the campus grounds by enchanted car, during the start-

77
of-term feast. Dumbledore leads Snape out of the room in search of “a delicious-looking

custard tart” at the feast, acting the motherly food-sharer, and leaving McGonagall space to

perform the traditionally-fatherly role of disciplinarian, as her position as head of the boys’

house calls on her to do (Chamber of Secrets 82). The first thing Professor McGonagall does,

however, is light a fire in Snape’s fireplace, and then, after giving Ron and Harry each a

detention, she magically produces “[a] large plate of sandwiches, two silver goblets, and a

jug of iced pumpkin juice” for the boys (Chamber of Secrets 80-3). In this performance,

McGonagall balances the fatherly and the motherly, discipline and food-sharing: while she

instructs the boys to eat in Snape’s office and then go to bed rather than to the feast, to which

she returns after doling out their punishment and their dinner, she deprives them only of the

opportunity to boast at the feast about their unusual arrival at school, not of a good meal – the

plate and pitcher magically refill until the boys have eaten everything they can (83).

In Order of the Phoenix, Professor McGonagall again couples discipline with food-

sharing when Professor Umbridge refers Harry to her to be disciplined. After Harry admits to

having “shouted at Professor Umbridge,” “called her a liar,” and “told her He-Who-Must-

Not-Be-Named is back,” she tells him, “[h]ave a biscuit, Potter” (247-8). Once Harry has

started eating his Ginger Newt, she warns him to be careful what he says around Umbridge,

who is a spy for the Ministry, sounding “somehow much more human than usual” as they

have a conversation over food (248). This humanity is short-lived, however; when their talk

is concluded, she tells him “irritably” to “Have another biscuit,” answering, “Don’t be

ridiculous” when he declines, and thus prompting him to acquiesce (248-9). Here,

McGonagall goes through the motions of offering food as comfort, but without the

naturalness or skill with which Dumbledore is able to do so, as when he smoothes over the

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trauma of the opening of the Chamber of Secrets with judiciously applied feasting and hot

chocolate (Chamber of Secrets 330-4); while McGonagall can provide nutritious food and

nourishing practical advice, her motherly sharings fall short of the emotional nourishment

Dumbledore’s can provide.

A further manifestation of Dumbledore’s function of providing emotional

nourishment can be seen in Hogwarts’s need that he be regularly present at student meals. In

fact, in Half-Blood Prince, Hermione deduces that Dumbledore must be leaving the school

frequently because she can conceive of no other reason for his frequent absence from the

staff table at mealtimes than that he is absent from the school grounds (222). Dumbledore

also incorporates sharing meals into his performance of his other duties as headmaster, as in

Goblet of Fire, when he goes to console Hagrid after he has been outed as a half-giant. At

Hagrid’s house, where a more cheerful Hagrid would ordinarily take great pleasure in

playing host, Dumbledore makes the tea (452-3), and even in his refusal to accept Hagrid’s

resignation, Dumbledore again ties school duties to the sharing of meals, declaring, “You

will join me for breakfast at eight-thirty in the Great Hall. No excuses” (454).

Dumbledore’s understanding of the importance of food-sharing to his and other staff

members’ relationships with their students extends to his consumption of bad food to keep

others safe. In Half-Blood Prince, when he and Harry find one of the Horcruxes that keeps a

part of Voldemort’s soul alive submerged in potion, Dumbledore knows he must consume

the potion in order to retrieve and destroy the Horcrux. He does so stylishly, “conjur[ing]” a

“crystal goblet” and toasting Harry’s “good health” as he drinks the first gobletful (568-70).

In this moment, a role-reversal between Harry and Dumbledore begins. In order to protect

Harry, Dumbledore must drink, and because the potion is designed to repel the drinker, Harry

79
must force him to continue. As he drinks the potion, Dumbledore becomes increasingly

childlike, drinking the “sixth gobletful” “obediently,” throwing a tantrum after the eighth and

“hammering his fists upon the ground,” and taking the ninth “like a child dying of thirst”

(572-3). When they are leaving the cave after the ordeal and Harry tells Dumbledore not to

worry, he responds, “I am not worried, Harry [. . .] I am with you” (578), words one would

expect to flow from child to mother, and not the other way around.

The adult-child role-reversal, and thus mutual nourishment, between Harry and

Dumbledore is apparent again at the conclusion of Deathly Hallows, when Harry, after

letting Voldemort use the Killing Curse on him, speaks to Dumbledore’s spirit in the

metaphysical King’s Cross station. Here, Dumbledore is characterized as “a child seeking

reassurance” from Harry, the adult (713), and an errant child at that: “He looked fleetingly

like a small boy caught in wrongdoing” (713). When Harry enters the headmaster’s office

after the Battle of Hogwarts is over, his and Dumbledore’s roles seem finally to have leveled

out; they are two adults in the “reciprocal” relationship deemed so important to performed

kinship by Hasratian and Durkheim (58), so that the Dumbledore portrait on the office wall

can regard Harry with both “pride and gratitude” (747), the emotions of both the proprietary

adult and the satisfied child.

Like Hagrid and McGonagall, Dumbledore alone could not be a suitable mother-

figure for the Hogwarts community, but rather presents a joyful approach to food-sharing that

needs the balance of McGonagall’s pragmatism. He is marked as less-than-ideal by his

association primarily with non-nutritious foods, such as the lemon drop he offers

McGonagall on Privet Drive (Sorcerer’s Stone 10), the custard tart with which he tempts

Snape (Chamber of Secrets 82), and the parade of candies whose names he uses as passwords

80
for his office door (Chamber of Secrets 204; Goblet of Fire 579; Order of the Phoenix 466;

Half-Blood Prince 181, 426, 493). Interestingly, after Dumbledore’s death, when Snape is

Head of Hogwarts, the password to the headmaster’s office is “Dumbledore” (Deathly

Hallows 662). Since all of the previous known passwords to the office have been the names

of foods, this suggests that in a sense, Dumbledore is a kind of food – nourishment or

perhaps a treat – for those loyal to him.

Dumbledore’s role as nourishment for the rest of the Hogwarts community is also

evident in the absence of food descriptions from the narration on the morning of his funeral;

with him gone, food is gone as well. Thus, his chair at the staff table is left empty at breakfast

on the morning of his funeral (Half-Blood Prince 639); Professor McGonagall, though acting

headmistress, does not claim it. Though “Tom, the landlord of the Leaky Cauldron [ . . . ] the

barman of the Hog’s Head and the witch who pushed the trolley on the Hogwarts Express”

are all at the funeral (641), they are there as mourners, as guests, and thus not fulfilling their

customary food-sharing duties. Also at the funeral is Tonks, her hair miraculously returned to

vividest pink” (641), but not “bubble-gum-pink,” as it has previously been described (Order

of the Phoenix 867). Likewise, when “Cornelius Fudge walk[s] past toward the front rows,

his expression miserable, twirling his green bowler hat as usual” (642), the hat is not, as it

usually is, described as “lime green” (Chamber of Secrets 261; Order of the Phoenix 138,

190; Half-Blood Prince 4, 12). Until Dumbledore is laid to rest, nourishment at Hogwarts is

suspended.

A more reluctant mother-figure at Hogwarts, and certainly one with a more

problematic relationship with food, is Professor Snape, whose relationship with Harry begins,

from Harry’s point of view, with Snape eyeing him with hatred from the staff table during

81
Harry’s first “start-of-term banquet” (Sorcerer’s Stone 136). In subsequent books of the

series, the association between Snape, Harry, and the Hogwarts dining schedule revolves

largely around punishment. In Chamber of Secrets, after catching Ron and Harry sneaking

into Hogwarts after flying to school, Snape leads them “away from the warmth and light” of

the start-of-term feast, from which a “delicious smell of food was wafting” and into his

dungeon office to await punishment (78). In Half-Blood Prince, Snape has frequent

opportunities to punish Harry with a series of detentions that restrict his mealtimes

significantly. Early on, his detention doesn’t leave Harry “much time for dinner” (232), and

also requires him to turn down a party invitation from Slughorn (233-236). Later, during his

first Saturday detention with Harry, Snape keeps Harry until “ten past one,” more than half

an hour after Harry starts to feel hungry for lunch (533). In each of these cases, narrated from

Harry’s point of view, the initial focus is on Snape’s preventing Harry from getting to meals;

however, Snape never prevents Harry from getting the nourishment he needs. While Harry’s

dinnertime is shortened in one case, and while he misses a party and has to have a late lunch

on other occasions, Harry always has the opportunity to eat; Snape’s punishments may

occasionally cost Harry the socialization that goes with food-sharing, but he, like another

strong mother-figure in the series, Mrs. Weasley,14 does not punish Harry by withholding

food from him. Furthermore, as he presides over these detentions, Snape, too, has his

mealtimes shortened; Snape suffers with Harry lost opportunity to socialize and limited

opportunity to eat when he feels the need to use detentions to instruct him.

14
For a full discussion of Mrs. Weasley as a mother-figure, see the next chapter.

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 As Hogwarts’ Potions master, Snape is in a unique position within the school’s

performed family to combine cooking with healing;15 as described in the Harry Potter books,

potion-making is a hybrid of cooking and pharmacological chemistry. The first potion Harry

and his classmates brew is “a simple potion to cure boils” and in Snape’s instructions to the

class, and in their process as described in the narration, there is a combination of knowledge

of the chemical properties of various plants and understanding of how to prepare and cook

various herbs; Snape also uses a combination of technical (“exact science”) and culinary

(“simmering”) vocabulary (136-9). Elsewhere in the series, Snape brews healing potions for

other characters to drink, such as the Mandrake Restorative Draught that will revive the

victims of the basilisk attacks in Chamber of Secrets (144), and “an entire cauldronful” of the

complicated Wolfsbane Potion that prevents Lupin from being a danger to the other

inhabitants of the Hogwarts castle when he becomes a wolf at the full moon in Prisoner of

Azkaban (156-7). By healing others with potions, Snape thus combines the motherly acts of

feeding others and healing them.

Snape does not only use potions to heal, however, but frequently threatens his

students with poisoning in order to improve their performance. The first time we see Sna pe

use the threat of poison to improve student work is in Prisoner of Azkaban, when he decides

to “encourage” Neville’s potion-making skills by threatening to feed Neville’s potion to his

pet toad at the end of class, since, if Neville has made the potion correctly, it will not poison

Trevor (125-128). When Neville’s potion succeeds, Snape is disappointed and docks

15
Snape also heals wounds by performing other motherly acts, such as singing over the wounded as if crooning
a lullaby, an act placed by Elizabeth Mackinlay and Felicity Baker within “the domain of women” in the
literature review of their article “Nurturing Herself, Nurturing Her Baby Creating Positive Experiences for
First-time Mothers through Lullaby Singing” (71). Snape first heals through singing when he holds Malfoy and
sings over him as if rocking him to sleep to cure the wounds Harry has inflicted on him using the Sectumsempra
Curse, “wip[ing] the residue from Malfoy’s face” before bringing him to the hospital wing (Half-Blood Prince
523), and is later depicted singing over Dumbledore’s wounded hand after it is cursed destroying a Horcrux
(Deathly Hallows 680).

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Gryffindor house points from Hermione for helping Neville, although he has no proof that

she did so other than the toad’s not having been poisoned (128). In Goblet of Fire, Snape

encourages Harry’s Potions class to learn antidotes by “hint[ing] that he might be poisoning

one of them before Christmas to see if their antidote worked” (234); after Harry is made a

Triwizard Champion, Snape states fairly explicitly that he plans to poison Harry (300-1).

Later, in a showdown with Harry, Snape threatens to slip Harry Veritaserum and make him

embarrass himself by divulging all of his secrets (517).

If Snape were to transgress Hogwarts’ tradition of food-sharing by using his potions

to poison students, he would subvert the “alimentary communion” that makes Hogwarts

work as a performed family, but as one of the “abandoned boys” for whom Hogwarts was his

“first and best home” (Deathly Hallows 697),16 Snape is unlikely to perform such a betrayal,

and in the books, he never uses a potion to harm any student. He never follows through on

his threat in Harry’s fourth year to poison one of his cohort by Christmas, and while he does

make Neville feed his potion to Trevor in their second year, the audience already knows from

his lecture on Harry’s first day of Potions class that he has a universal antidote on hand

(Sorcerer’s Stone 136-9), and thus could have revived the toad if the potion had gone wrong.

Likewise, when Professor Umbridge twice requests Veritaserum with which to dose Harry in

Order of the Phoenix, Snape dodges the second request by arguing that he gave her his “last

bottle” the first time she asked (744), and it is later revealed that the original bottle Snape

gave to Umbridge was fake (833). Although he uses talk about poison to create a certain

persona among the students, Snape would not harm them.17

16
For more discussion of Hogwarts as a home for the “abandoned boys,” see below in this chapter.
17
Snape frequently acts as a protector and teacher to his students even when he seems to be the villain of the
piece. After he has killed Dumbledore, when Harry is pursuing him from the Hogwarts grounds, Snape prevents
Harry from using any of the Unforgivable Curses, thus protecting his innocence, and continues to act as Harry’s

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 More so than other male food-sharers at Hogwarts, Snape is concerned about gender

identity. When Professor Lupin coaches Neville to queer Snape – imagining Snape in his

grandmother’s clothes – in order to defeat a boggart, a creature that transforms into whatever

its victim fears most, it prompts Snape to begin “bullying Neville worse than ever” (Prisoner

of Azkaban 135; 142). Likewise, when Snape wants to goad Sirius, he feminizes him,

dropping, in Sirius’s words, “snide hints that he’s out there risking his life while I’m sat on

my backside here having a nice comfortable time … asking me how the cleaning’s going”

(Order of the Phoenix 83). Later in the same book, Snape belittles Sirius by accusing him of

“hiding inside his mother’s house” (Order of the Phoenix 520). Nonetheless, there is

something feminine about Snape’s chosen profession; the cauldron, symbol of his specialty,

even functions as a womb in Goblet of Fire, when Lord Voldemort is reborn from one

described as “a great stone belly large enough for a full-grown man to sit in” (640).

Another male Hogwarts staffer possessed of some traditionally-feminine traits is

Remus Lupin, the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher for Harry’s third year. The first

time he meets Harry, Ron, and Hermione, Lupin shares food with them, giving them

chocolate to counter the effects of the dementors on the Hogwarts Express (84-7). Lupin

must urge the children, particularly Harry, three times to eat the chocolate (84-6), but when

Harry finally does, it instantly counteracts the cold the dementors have brought (86-7). Even

Madam Pomfrey, the school nurse, is impressed by Lupin’s knowledge of “remedies” (90),

which ties him to other healing mother-figures like Snape and Mrs. Weasley. Another benefit

of Lupin’s distribution of chocolate to the children is that when he breaks the chocolate to

share with them, it makes a loud noise and distracts the others from fussing over Harry, who

Occlumency teacher, reminding him to “keep your mouth shut and your mind closed” if he expects his curses to
land; also during the fight, Snape stops another Death Eater from using the Cruciatus Curse on Harry (Half-
Blood Prince 602-3).

85
is embarrassed to have fainted (84). Lupin, one of the more effective nurturers in Harry’s life,

can accomplish a number of ends at once by sharing food.

Lupin again offers Harry food as comfort by inviting him for tea when Ron and

Hermione go on a trip into the village of Hogsmeade and Harry, who has been unsuccessful

in getting the Dursleys to sign his permission slip, must stay behind (Prisoner of Azkaban

153-7). Harry is in fact so comfortable during this visit, that he screws up the courage to ask

Lupin why he didn’t let Harry fight the boggart and learns that far from thinking Harry was

not up to the task, Lupin rather thought he had faced so much that his worst fear was likely to

be more than his classmates could handle (155).

During their private Patronus-conjuring lessons, Lupin and Harry have many more

opportunities to share chocolate. Rather than the nondescript “enormous slab” he produced

on the train (84), during these sessions, Lupin goes in for variety, giving Harry “a Chocolate

Frog” on one occasion (239) and “a large bar of Honeydukes’ best chocolate” on another

(242), indicating that he regards the chocolate that they share on these occasions as

celebratory, a sign of the familial bond they are forging, rather than merely medicinal.18

Further marking these sessions as a special bonding time, when Harry has made some

progress with his Patronus, Lupin rewards him with butterbeer (246). As during their

conversation over tea, Harry feels comfortable enough while sharing butterbeers with Lupin

to ask him a difficult question, “What’s under a dementor’s hood?” (246-7).

18
This familial bond between Harry and Lupin is complicated by the ulterior motives each seems to bring to the
Patronus lessons. Lupin appears to be trying to re-live his friendship with James by seeking to bond with his
son, while Harry secretly wants the dementors to get to him because when they do, he relives his memory of his
mother’s murder and thus gets to hear her voice (Prisoner of Azkaban 239, 243)

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 Despite the many positive aspects of Lupin’s relationship with Harry at Hogwarts,19

ultimately, Lupin is not a completely nourishing mother-figure for Harry there, symbolized

by the type of food he shares with Harry, which though comforting, is not nutritious; just as

the chocolate heals after a dementor attack but is not the stuff of a steady diet, so Lupin in

Prisoner of Azkaban is not a fit mother-figure without the complementary gifts of the other

members of the Hogwarts community. Fittingly, Lupin’s appearance in the book is frequently

described in terms of malnutrition with narration from Harry’s point of view regularly

focusing on his thinness, reflecting that he seems to “ha[ve] had a few square meals” (130),

or that “His old robes were hanging more loosely on him” (185). Even his departure from

Hogwarts is coupled with an absence of food where food is customary; when Lupin has had

to leave Hogwarts, Black is on the run, and Harry “had never approached the end of a school

year in worse spirits” (Prisoner of Azkaban 429), the end-of-term feast, usually described in

voluminous detail, is dashed off in two sentences (430).

The third-year end-of-term feast is an exception, however, to Harry’s typical

experience of Hogwarts’s school feasts. Even in Harry’s fourth year, when Cedric Diggory

has just died, the Leaving Feast is recounted in more detail than is the feast following

Lupin’s departure. Rather than the two-sentence description offered of the third-year feast,

Harry’s fourth-year end-of-term feast is described over four pages (Goblet of Fire 720-4),

featuring a description of the decorations – “black drapes” in memory of Cedric rather than

the usual, more colorful banners (720) – and two toasts, one to Cedric, and one to Harry for

his “bravery” in having “return[ed] Cedric’s body to Hogwarts” (721-3).

In fact in many ways, Hogwarts itself, with its voluminous feasts that seem constantly

to feature Harry’s favorite foods, is a strong mother-figure for Harry. At his first start-of-term
19
For discussion of Lupin as a mother-figure once he has left employment at Hogwarts, see the next chapter.

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banquet, Harry “had never seen so many things he liked to eat on one table” (Sorcerer’s

Stone 123); for a boy who has “never been allowed to eat as much as he liked” (123), this is

an exceptional circumstance, and Harry continues to look forward to school feasts throughout

the series. In Goblet of Fire, which culminates in the Leaving Feast honoring Cedric, the

earlier feasts are particularly copious and varied, due to the presence of international visitors

at Hogwarts. At the Halloween Feast that opens the Triwizard Tournament, for example,

“[t]he house-elves in the kitchen seemed to have pulled out all the stops; there was a greater

variety of dishes in front of them than Harry had ever seen, including several that were

definitely foreign,” although Harry is suspicious of what Hermione identifies as

bouillabaisse, which he perceives to be “some sort of shellfish stew that stood beside a large

steak-and-kidney pudding” (251).

In addition to providing physical nourishment, the feasts provide emotional

nourishment for Harry and his classmates. During the end-of-year feast in Harry’s first year,

at the awarding of the House Cup, Professor Dumbledore affirms the positive character traits

of Harry and several of his friends, most notably Neville, who “had never won so much as a

point for Gryffindor before” (Sorcerer’s Stone 304-6). Dumbledore and McGonagall also

hold an impromptu, all-night celebratory feast that is not “quite like” any of the “several

Hogwarts feasts” Harry has been to before to celebrate his defeat of the basilisk at the

conclusion of Chamber of Secrets (339). The feasts also provide Harry with a sense of

comfort and normalcy at Hogwarts; as he begins his fifth year amid a certain amount of

turmoil, he reflects, “But this, at least, was how it was supposed to be: their headmaster rising

to greet them all before the start-of-term feast” (Order of the Phoenix 208).

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 In addition to providing a space for affirmation, celebration, and comfort, Hogwarts

mealtimes also provide the students with a different kind of an emotional nourishment

through the connection to home established by the delivery of the mail each morning at

breakfast (Sorcerer’s Stone 135, 164; et al.). This emotional nourishment is not always

affirming, but also includes a different kind of parental contact, “the very worst thing a

Hogwarts student could receive over breakfast – a Howler” (Prisoner of Azkaban 271);

students receive corrective as well as affirmative parenting – both nourishing in their own

ways – during their Hogwarts meals.

Unsurprisingly given its nourishing environment, Harry frequently thinks of

Hogwarts as a home, both for himself and for other boys from less nourishing family

environments. As early as Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry reflects that Hogwarts “felt more like

home than Privet Drive ever had” (170), and expects, in response to Malfoy’s suggestion that

he must stay at school for the winter because he is “not wanted at home,” that “this would

probably be the best Christmas he’d ever had,” which it turns out to be (194-5, 204). While

Harry’s classmates might think of Hogwarts as a space away from home, for him, it is the

home to which he is privileged to return each fall. Following the start-of-term feast in

Harry’s third year, he and his classmates “reached their familiar, circular dormitory with its

five four-poster beds, and Harry, looking around, felt he was home at last” (Prisoner of

Azkaban 95).

In Goblet of Fire, Harry explicitly links this feeling of home to mealtime and to his

parents when he has been drafted into the dangerous Triwizard Tournament which could kill

him, and for entering which he has drawn the scorn of most of the student body. Harry

considers fleeing the castle, “[b]ut as he look[s] around the Great Hall at breakfast time, and

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th[inks] about what leaving the castle would mean, he kn[ows] he c[an’t] do it. It [is] the only

place he ha[s] ever been happy … well, he suppose[s] he must have been happy with his

parents too, but he c[an’t] remember that” (339). The Hogwarts Great Hall during a mealtime

is a home Harry is willing to face death to hold onto, and is the only place he remembers ever

having been happy as other children are with their parents.

In times of difficulty, when another child might long for the comfort of his mother,

Harry wants the home comfort of being back at school. In Deathly Hallows, while he and

Hermione are in hiding and they hear word of some goings-on back at Hogwarts, where their

former classmates are now working to undermine Death Eater control of the school, “Harry

experience[s] a split second of madness when he imagine[s] simply going back to school to

join the destabilization of Snape’s regime: Being fed, and having a soft bed, and other people

being in charge, seem[s] the most wonderful prospect in the world at that moment” (Deathly

Hallows 314-5). Harry is again willing to die to preserve this home during the Battle of

Hogwarts. Faced with difficult and frightening choices in the battle, he reflects on what,

exactly, his home is:

He wanted to be stopped, to be dragged back, to be sent back home. . . .

But he was home. Hogwarts was the first and best home he had

known. He and Voldemort and Snape, the abandoned boys, had all found

home here. [author’s emphasis] (697)

Harry will do whatever he must to save Hogwarts because it is a surrogate mother not just to

him, but to all “the abandoned boys” 20 who need one.

20
In this concept of “abandoned boys” who find their first real home at Hogwarts, Harry finds kinship between
himself and Snape that extends to his understanding of his own father and Ron. When he sees Snape’s memory
of his first trip to school on the Hogwarts Express, he sees his father at eleven through Snapes eyes, possessed
of “the indefinable air of having been well-cared-for, even adored, that Snape so conspicuously lacked”

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 Harry is not the only member of the Hogwarts community to identify Hogwarts as a

home for the motherless. According to Dumbledore, Hogwarts is “the first and only place

[Voldemort] had felt at home,” a sentiment that makes Harry “slightly uncomfortable [. . .]

for this was exactly how he fe[els] about Hogwarts too” (Half-Blood Prince 431). Hagrid

expresses a similar feeling later in the same book, arguing, when they begin to discuss

closing the school following Dumbledore’s death, “It’s me home, it’s bin me home since I

was thirteen” (628). Dumbledore himself also claims Hogwarts as a home. When the rest of

the Hogwarts staff discusses his funeral arrangements, McGonagall reveals that Dumbledore

is strongly enough attached to the school that he wanted to be buried on its grounds (629).

In one important way, Hogwarts is not able to be a mother-figure to its children; it

cannot, itself, produce food, as the creation of food is “one of the five exceptions to Gamp’s

Law of Elemental Transfiguration” (Deathly Hallows 578). Nonetheless, the school finds

ways to provide food for its children without creating it out of thin air. One of the school’s

mechanisms for providing food is through the Room of Requirement.21 Frequently a safe

haven for drunk staffers (Order of the Phoenix 386-7; Half-Blood Prince 540-1; et al.), in

Deathly Hallows, during the Death Eaters’ regime at Hogwarts, the Room plays host to a

slightly more noble group of outlaws, Dumbledore’s Army, led by Neville Longbottom. As

Neville explains to Harry, Ron, and Hermione when they arrive at the school shortly before

(Deathly Hallows 671); this chief difference between James Potter and Snape, two black-haired boys on the
Hogwarts Express, mirrors an insight Harry has had earlier about himself and Ron, after their first good meal on
the run: “This was their first encounter with the fact that a full stomach meant good spirits; an empty one,
bickering and gloom. Harry was least surprised by this, because he had suffered periods of near starvation at the
Dursleys’. [. . .] Ron, however, had always been used to three delicious meals a day, courtesy of his mother or
of the Hogwarts house-elves, and hunger made him both unreasonable and irascible” (287-8).
21
Another apparatus through which Hogwarts feeds its children is through the house-elves, who from Goblet of
Fire on are shown to be the reality behind the unseen hands which Harry previously assumed did the cooking
and serving at the school; there is an imperialist cast to the house-elves’ participation in food-sharing, though,
because although they prepare the food consumed by the community, they are not regarded as members of the
community.

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the Battle, “I’d been in here about a day and a half, and getting really hungry, and wishing I

could get something to eat, and that’s when the passage to the Hog’s Head opened up. I went

through it and met Aberforth. He’s been providing us with food, because for some reason,

that’s the one thing the room doesn’t really do” (578); although the room cannot magically

produce food, it can lead its children to those who can feed them.

Like the graveyard community in The Graveyard Book and the Fellowship of the

Castle in Stardust, Hogwarts presents for students who need it a performed family through

the sharing of food in group settings, as at school feasts, and in one-on-on interactions with

various faculty members; even the building itself will alter its shape in order to facilitate

food-sharing by opening a passage leading to a willing nurturer. Based on the commonality

of wizard birth, Hogwarts draws children and faculty together into a community, and through

acts of food-sharing, or alimentary communion, it makes them kin. For students like Harry,

Snape, and Voldemort, this kinship is particularly powerful, providing a home for boys who

did not have one before their arrival at school.

Conclusion

In accordance with Hasratian’s explanation of “alimentary communion” (59), for

child protagonists whose birth families cannot be healed, the performance of family through

food-sharing in a magical land can build a new kinship community that fills the gap left by

the lost or inadequate family in the mundane world, though as Kuftinec argues, because such

communities exclude that which is different as well as uniting around commonality (9), such

performed families do seek to supplant the protagonist’s previous family relationship. Bod

Owens finds in the graveyard community a family that nurtures him from toddlerhood to

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young adulthood in safety and love, while in the Fellowship of the Castle, Tristran Thorn

finds a performed family with whom to share reciprocal food-sharing and nurturing during

his adult life. Hogwarts provides not only to Harry Potter but to all of the “abandoned boys”

of the wizarding world a home more nourishing than the ones they leave to attend school.

While this chapter has explored the role of food-sharing in establishing homes for child

protagonists who need them, the next will focus on how performances of food-sharing

establish gender-relationships among the parent-generations and how child-generations learn

– and fail to learn – from those gender performances as they begin their own adult lives.

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 CHAPTER 3: Progressing Backward?

In the conclusion of Gender Trouble, Judith Butler argues that “gender is an ‘act,’ as

it were, that is open to splitting, self-parody, self-criticism, and those hyperbolic exhibitions

of ‘the natural’ that, in their very exaggeration, reveal its fundamentally phantasmic status,”

and expresses hope that “The loss of gender norms would have the effect of proliferating

gender configurations, [and] destabilizing substantive identity” (200). Thus far, parents’

attempts to bring about this “proliferat[ion of] gender norms,” largely through the parenting

style popularly termed “gender-neutral,” have not succeeded. According to Cordelia Fine’s

Delusions of Gender, gender norming is so pervasive an aspect of popular culture, and so

ingrained a part of our own behaviors, that even those who strive to parent gender-neutrally

find themselves raising gender-normed children (189-91).

Fine draws on a number of studies with the goal of illuminating why contemporary

gender-neutral parenting is missing the mark, demonstrating the early age at which gender

socialization begins for most children by noting, for example, that babies as young as ten

months old have been shown to register “surprise” at men or women pictured with cross-

gendered “objects” (211). Citing another study, Fine writes, “Developmental psychologists

Carol Martin and Diane Ruble suggest that children become ‘gender detectives,’ in search of

clues as to the implications of belonging to the male or female tribe” (211-2). Fine goes on to

note that “Martin and Ruble have reported finding it difficult to create stimuli for their

studies that children see as gender neutral, ‘because children appear to seize on any element

that may implicate a gender norm that they may categorize it as male or female’” (212). That

is, by their “toddler years” (211), children are so attuned to gender performance that they

actively seek to identify any behavior or object they encounter as a masculine or feminine
gender norm. Later, Fine argues that children will begin to “police” their peers’ gender

expressions once they begin school (217-8), where their “views about gender differences

reach ‘peak rigidity’ between five and seven years of age” (231).

Some quite recent fantasies that sit on the brink between juvenile and young adult

designations bear out this hypothesis that even the most conscientiously gender-neutral

parent is likely to raise heteronormative children. Both Rowling’s Harry Potter series and the

13th Reality series by James Dashner, for example, feature a gender-progressive parent

generation, but child protagonist groups who adhere strictly to traditional gender norms,

suggesting that in spite of anti-heteronormative, positive adult role-models, these child-

protagonists have nonetheless fallen into the gender norms presented to them by society at

large, even when these norms are modeled by characters who are otherwise very negative

influences in the children’s lives.

Rowling’s Harry Potter Series

In the Harry Potter books, the parent generation provides both models of

heteronormative families who are toxic or even evil, such as the Dursleys and the Malfoys,

and more gender-progressive families who are the child protagonists’ positive role models,

such as the Weasley family and the family comprised of Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, and

Nymphadora Tonks.22 In the toxic families, the parents adhere to rigidly heteronormative

gender performances, particularly regarding food preparation and sharing, but these

performances do not lead to healthy nourishment for the children in the families’ care.

22
For more discussion of heteronormative behavior in antagonists where positively-portrayed characters engage
in more fluid gender expressions, see the next chapter.

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 The Dursley family dynamic, for example, goes through the motions of

heteronormative gender performance, but in a way that is bankrupt of any of the potential

positive outcomes of such a family structure, featuring frequent images of food preparation

and food symbols bankrupt of actual food or nourishment. Such imagery begins with Harry’s

entry into the Dursley family; Aunt Petunia first finds Harry on her doorstep when she goes

outside “to put out the milk bottles” for the milkman (Sorcerer’s Stone 17); since Aunt

Petunia is putting the bottles out for the milkman rather than collecting them from him, they

are empty of milk. The first depiction of Aunt Petunia working in the kitchen features a pot

on the stove, but she is dying Harry’s school uniform gray, not cooking (Sorcerer’s Stone

33). Later, Aunt Petunia “shred[s] the letters [from Hogwarts] in her food processor”

(Sorcerer’s Stone 40); this is particularly interesting in that she is not only using a food-

preparation tool for a purpose other than cooking, but is also keeping Harry from the

emotional nourishment that Hogwarts will soon provide him.

Despite her foodless interaction with it, Aunt Petunia’s province within her home is

undoubtedly the kitchen. Even Dumbledore, when he sends a letter to Aunt Petunia,

addresses it “Mrs. Petunia Dursley, The Kitchen, Number Four, Privet Drive” (Order of the

Phoenix 40), though Harry’s correspondence from Hogwarts has always been addressed to

him by where he sleeps (Sorcerer’s Stone 34-51). Her chief interaction with the kitchen,

though, instead of cooking, is to keep it clean. In Order of the Phoenix, the kitchen is

“scrupulously clean” with “an oddly unreal glitter” (25), and later “surgically clean” (37); in

Half-Blood Prince, Harry walks in on Aunt Petunia “wearing rubber gloves and a housecoat

over her nightdress, clearly halfway through her usual pre-bedtime wipe-down of all the

kitchen surfaces” (46); and in Deathly Hallows, the members of the Order of the Phoenix

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who come to escort Harry to his safehouse “s[it] themselves upon Aunt Petunia’s gleaming

work surfaces, or [lean] up against her spotless appliances” (45). Far from using the kitchen

as a center of nourishment and nurture, Aunt Petunia goes to great lengths to keep it as free

of food residue as possible. The one mention of food storage in Aunt Petunia’s kitchen has

more to do with status than with food-sharing, a function underscored by the mention in the

same breath of an appliance not at all connected to healthy food-sharing: “the top-of-the-

range fridge and the wide-screen television” (Order of the Phoenix 37); and to further drive

home this appliance’s disconnection from Harry’s nourishment, Uncle Vernon admonishes

Harry a few pages later “not to steal food from the fridge” (45). By scrupulously maintaining

the outward appearance of the kitchen with no regard for the nourishment it should provide,

Aunt Petunia is performing a motherhood that is itself hollow; though her family appears

outwardly to be ideal from a traditional standpoint – father working outside the home, mother

staying at home, and a son attending a prestigious school – beneath this surface appearance,

the family is dysfunctional and non-nurturing.

In Chamber of Secrets, when Aunt Petunia is finally depicted cooking, the food is

insubstantial and never gets eaten; for example, the dessert she makes for Uncle Vernon’s

important dinner party is “a huge mound of whipped cream and sugared violets” with no

mention of any cake or other food of substance inside (10), and Dobby destroys it before it

can be served (19-20). Likewise, when discussing his plans for the dinner party, the only

specific foods Uncle Vernon names are “drinks” and “coffee”; his most specific reference to

“dinner” is not as a meal to be eaten, but as a time during which to “get in a few good

compliments” (6-7). The first time the audience actually sees Aunt Petunia cook a meal and

then sees other characters eat it is in Prisoner of Azkaban, and the meal ends in a violent

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incident, when Aunt Marge makes remarks about Harry’s parents that anger him until he

loses control of his powers and causes her to inflate and float away (26-30). Most of the time,

instead of cooking herself, Aunt Petunia delegates food-preparation chores to Harry, in

essence placing Harry in a feminine role in relation to Dudley, for whom Harry is to cook, as

with Harry’s first depiction in the series as a school-aged boy, in which he is made to cook

Dudley’s eleventh-birthday breakfast (Sorcerer’s Stone 19). Harry likewise serves as

feminized food-sharer to Uncle Vernon who, when Harry tries to get one of his mysterious

Hogwarts letters, “shout[s] at Harry for about half an hour and then [tells] him to go and

make a cup of tea” (Sorcerer’s Stone 39).

In addition to his forced service to Dudley, Harry is frequently in a position in which

the Dursleys withhold food from him in order to give Dudley more than he needs or even

should have. On Dudley’s eleventh-birthday outing to the zoo, Dudley and his friend get

“large chocolate ice creams,” while Harry gets “a cheap lemon ice pop” only because they

cannot refuse him anything in public without losing face (Sorcerer’s Stone 26); and on the

heels of that outing, during which Harry inadvertently causes the glass to vanish from a snake

enclosure, Uncle Vernon punishes him with confinement to his room and “no meals,” and

then sends Aunt Petunia “to run and get him a large brandy” (29). In Chamber of Secrets,

Aunt Petunia again punishes Harry, for the mere threat of doing magic, by attempting to hit

him in the head “with a soapy frying pan” (he ducks) and “the promise he wo[n’t] eat again

until he’[s] finished” a long list of chores (10); at the same time, she is overfeeding Dudley

because she “[doesn’t] like the sound of that school food” and has to “build him up” (2). On

two other occasions, the Dursleys punish Harry with confinement to his room and feed him

scant meals through a “cat-flap” in his bedroom door (Chamber of Secrets 22; Order of the

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Phoenix 44). When Dudley comes home from his third year of school on a specially-

prescribed diet, Aunt Petunia makes everyone in the family follow it, and “seem[s] to feel

that the best way to keep up Dudley’s morale [is] to make sure that he d[oes], at least, get

more to eat than Harry” (Goblet of Fire 26-7).

Although the Dursleys’ intent is at all times to treat Harry worse than their own child,

the result of their policy of withholding from Harry to spoil Dudley is in fact the opposite,

and Rowling presents a sinister glimpse of what could be Dudley’s future in the character of

his Aunt Marge, a glutton and alcoholic. After a sumptuous dinner, during which Uncle

Vernon “uncork[s] several bottles of wine,” Aunt Marge drinks four large brandies before

launching into a tirade about Harry’s parents that even Uncle Vernon seems to feel crosses a

line as he tries to change the subject and remove Harry from the room; unfortunately for

Aunt Marge, she insists that Harry stay and hear her insult his parents, with the result that he

loses control of his magical ability and causes her to magically enlarge until she floats away

(Prisoner of Azkaban 25-30). Toward the end of his life, Dumbledore reinforces the danger

likely to result from the Dursleys’ having spoiled Dudley when he declares to them, much to

their surprise: “You have never treated Harry as a son. He has known nothing but neglect and

often cruelty at your hands. The best that can be said is that he has at least escaped the

appalling damage you have inflicted upon the unfortunate boy sitting between you” (Half-

Blood Prince 55). With these words, Dumbledore attempts to tell Aunt Petunia that her

surface-only approach to performing motherhood – keeping a clean house and spoiling

Dudley – has failed to produce the healthy son she seems to believe it has; even her

deprivation of Harry has prepared him for adulthood better than what she has thought was

her preferential treatment of Dudley, who has instead suffered “appalling damage” from her

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shallow performance as a mother, and is ill-equipped to care for himself outside his parents’

home.

Rowling also presents a model of a toxic, heteronormative wizarding family in the

Malfoys. It is possible that Draco recognizes the toxicity of his own family dynamic, because

he fixates on the Weasley family, particularly on Mrs. Weasley’s body type, possibly out of

jealousy of their healthier family dynamic. Draco often tells Ron that Mrs. Weasley is

“porky” (Goblet of Fire 204), “fat and ugly” (Order of the Phoenix 412), or “could do with

losing a bit of weight” (Goblet of Fire 204); however, he also frequently frames his insults of

the Weasleys’ poverty in terms of food, noting that they “will go hungry for a month to pay

for all” the new textbooks they have to buy in Chamber of Secrets (61), a type of insult

seemingly at odds with his other comments that Mrs. Weasley, at least, is very well fed.

The contradictory nature of these two lines of bullying suggests that they cannot both

be true and hints, again, at Draco’s jealousy of the way the Weasley family operates; indeed,

although Draco gets a steady “supply of sweets and cakes from home” by owl post (Goblet of

Fire 194), the Malfoys are never depicted sharing a meal together. We only see Narcissa

Malfoy with food in one scene of the series, and it is only wine, used medicinally by Snape

when she is overcome with worry for Draco (Half-Blood Prince 22-37). Likewise, we see

Snape’s memory of first arriving at Hogwarts, in which he goes after being sorted “to where

the Slytherins [are] cheering him, to where Lucius Malfoy, a prefect badge gleaming upon

his chest, pat[s] Snape on the back as he s[its] down beside him” (Deathly Hallows 673); a

time associated by Harry and his Gryffindor housemates with a decadent meal around their

house table is for Snape and Lucius Malfoy linked only to the social networking that takes

place within the house, and the table and food are completely absent from the scene.

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Mealtimes and house associations for the Malfoys are designated for social climbing, not for

partaking in nourishment, physical or otherwise. This is perhaps why the Malfoys do not

know how to behave in the Great Hall after the Battle of Hogwarts, where they again appear

apart from the emotional and nourishing interaction of the others in the hall, “huddled

together as though unsure whether or not they were supposed to be there” (Deathly Hallows

745-6).

The primary, positive wizarding family model in the series may be found in the

Weasleys. What is arguably Mrs. Weasley’s greatest departure from the traditional role of

stay-at-home mother occurs near the conclusion of the series, when Bellatrix Lestrange tries

to kill Ginny and she “knock[s]” the more traditional, male hero, Harry, out of the way to

duel her to the death, shouting “NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!” (Deathly Hallows

735-6). Nonetheless, with less income than either the Dursleys or the Malfoys, the Weasleys

are less heteronormative than those families in subtler ways throughout the series, not by

choice but out of necessity. While Mrs. Weasley’s low income and large family lead her into

traditionally-feminine acts of domesticity, such as the preparation of elaborate, home-cooked

meals when others might eat out (Sorcerer’s Stone 101-2; Prisoner of Azkaban 72; Deathly

Hallows 109, 118-9) and home-baked and handmade gifts when others might buy something

(Sorcerer’s Stone 200-3; Chamber of Secrets 212; Prisoner of Azkaban 222-3; Goblet of Fire

28, 410, 549; Order of the Phoenix 502), this combination also leads her to delegate food

preparation tasks to the rest of her family – her husband, Harry, six sons, and only one

daughter – that male members of another family might not be expected to perform. At first,

these chores are confined mostly to setting the table, as Bill, Charlie, Hermione, Ginny, Ron

and Harry do in Goblet of Fire (58), but beginning in Order of the Phoenix, Rowling depicts

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other members of the Weasley family helping with the cooking as well, notably beginning

with Mr. Weasley magically “chopping meat and vegetables” (82). This trend of men

cooking in the Weasley household extends into Half-Blood Prince, in which Mrs. Weasley

makes Harry and Ron peel “a mountain of sprouts” without magic (325), a “character-

building” task, as Fred notes (328), but also an important domestic skill.

That Mrs. Weasley’s brand of mothering is more wholesome than Aunt Petunia’s or

the Malfoys’ is evident in that her kitchen, though called “small and rather cramped” in

Chamber of Secrets (33) and “tiny” in Goblet of Fire (51), is far more productive of food and

fellowship than either of theirs. On her own or with the help of her family, Mrs. Weasley

produces plenty to eat for everyone under her roof, not only her own family and Harry and

Hermione (Chamber of Secrets 42, 47, 65; Goblet of Fire 60-3, 65-7; Order of the Phoenix

122, 157; Half-Blood Prince 89, 105), but also to any member of the Order of the Phoenix

that might be nearby during a mealtime (Order of the Phoenix 61; Deathly Hallows 90) and

on one occasion, to the disembodied head of Amos Diggory that has popped into the

fireplace with a message for Mr. Weasley (Goblet of Fire 160). Furthermore, while the

Dursleys frequently punish Harry by starving him, Mrs. Weasley never withholds food as a

punishment. When she is angry with Fred, George, and Ron for taking the family car without

permission, she scolds them while preparing a hearty breakfast for them and then, once the

meal is ready, stops talking about the incident until all the boys are done eating (Chamber of

Secrets 34-5). This refusal to withhold food from children extends not only to main meals or

to biological children, but also to treats and to her children’s friends; when she thinks

Hermione has jilted Harry, Mrs. Weasley sends her a smaller Easter egg than she sends Harry

or Ron, but still sends one (Goblet of Fire 549).

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 That the Weasleys provide a more nourishing family environment than the Dursleys

is significant because they consciously set themselves up as a surrogate family for Harry, in

competition with the Dursleys and other potential surrogate wizarding families. The

Weasleys begin presenting themselves as a surrogate family for Harry in Goblet of Fire when

they stand in for his biological family on the day of the third Triwizard task, both during the

ceremonies preceding the task and in the hospital wing following Harry’s duel with

Voldemort at the conclusion of the task (614-9, 699-700). When Mrs. Weasley gives Harry a

hug during her visit to the hospital wing, the narration from Harry’s point of view reflects,

“He had no memory of ever being hugged like this, as though by a mother,” and in response,

Harry consumes the sleeping potion that both Dumbledore and the school nurse have been

unsuccessful in getting him to drink (714-5). In Deathly Hallows, the Weasleys continue to

act as Harry’s surrogate parents, giving him a watch for his birthday, the traditional gift for

wizarding parents to give their sons when they come of age (114); that Harry accepts, at least

to some extent, their parent-role in his life is evident in that he is still wearing the watch in

the book’s epilogue, when he is a grown-up, married father himself (757).

That the Weasleys are Harry’s longest-enduring parent-figures may stem at least in

part from their being the longest-lived, however. The most intense competition Mrs. Weasley

seems to feel for the role of parent-figure to Harry is with Sirius Black, the man Harry’s

biological parents chose as his godfather (Prisoner of Azkaban 204). In her competition with

Sirius, Mrs. Weasley holds against him motherly behaviors they have in common, such as

opening their tables to everyone they know; though she happily feeds anyone who is nearby

when she is about to serve a meal, she blames Sirius for Mundungus Fletcher’s bad influence

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on the children because he invites Dung to stay for dinner after the Order meetings (Order of

the Phoenix 86-7).

The most vivid moment of controversy between Mrs. Weasley and Sirius occurs

shortly after her complaint about Dung coming to dinner, when she argues with Sirius over

what Harry should be told about Voldemort and the Order, an argument during the course of

which Mrs. Weasley calls on her spouse, and Remus Lupin comes to Sirius’s aid,

establishing him as a spouse-equivalent and parenting partner in relationship with Sirius and

Harry (87-90). The argument takes place after a meal, when Sirius invites Harry to ask

questions about what the Order is doing, and his invitation prompts Remus to pause in the act

of “tak[ing] a sip of wine” (87); that Sirius’s invitation interrupts Remus’s consumption of a

drink would seem to undermine his role as a food-sharer, but it also draws a connection

between Sirius and Remus and signals that Sirius is not primarily a food-sharing mother-

figure. Sirius’s invitation also signals the beginning of a turf-war between two sets of

potential parent-figures for Harry, in which the two mother-father pairings become clear

when Mrs. Weasley turns to her husband for support:

“Arthur!” said Mrs. Weasley, rounding on her husband. “Arthur, back

me up!”

Mr. Weasley did not speak at once. He took off his glasses and cleaned

them slowly on his robes, not looking at his wife. Only when he had replaced

them carefully on his nose did he say, “Dumbledore knows the position has

changed, Molly. He accepts that Harry will have to be filled in to a certain

extent now that he is staying at headquarters – ”

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 “Yes, but there’s a difference between that and inviting him to ask

whatever he likes!”

“Personally,” said Lupin quietly, looking away from Sirius at last, as

Mrs. Weasley turned quickly to him, hopeful that finally she was about to get

an ally, “I think it better that Harry gets the facts – not all the facts, Molly, but

the general picture – from us, rather than a garbled version from. . . others.”

(89)

In this portion of the argument, Remus marks himself as a spouse to Sirius at least in the

context of the argument by entering it after Mrs. Weasley has gone to her own spouse for

support,23 and by mirroring Mr. Weasley’s body language when he does so, “looking away

from Sirius,” as Mr. Weasley is “not looking at his wife.” Mrs. Weasley further identifies

Remus as specifically a wife-figure to Sirius by assuming that since the two husband-figures

have banded together, Remus will function in the argument as her “ally.”

The battle over the role of surrogate parent to Harry comes to a head when Sirius

claims outright the role of Harry’s parent, arguing that while Molly can decide what to tell or

not to tell the Weasley children, she doesn’t have this right with Harry, and later saying

explicitly, “He’s not your son” (88-90). Mrs. Weasley counters by referring to herself as

“someone who has got Harry’s best interests at heart,” implying that Sirius does not and

bringing up his jail time, and then by saying Harry is “as good as” her son (90). Ultimately,

though, Mrs. Weasley concedes defeat, sending a message to the children through Sirius

23
Rowling recalls this moment to establish another paring as a husband-and-wife equivalent later in the book
when Hermione, trying to convince Harry not to use the fire in Umbridge’s office to communicate with Sirius,
appeals to Ron for support, “and Harry was forcibly reminded of Mrs. Weasley appealing to her husband during
Harry’s first dinner in Grimmauld Place” (Order of the Phoenix 658). By referring to Mr. Weasley not by name,
but as “her husband” Rowling underscores the importance of the relationship role of the person being called
upon; Hermione is looking to Ron as a husband-figure who should for that reason come to her aid in the
argument.

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when they plan to start a covert Defense Against the Dark Arts club that Ron is forbidden to

participate and that she “advises Harry and Hermione not to proceed with the group, though

she accepts that she has no authority over either of them and simply begs them to remember

that she has their best interests at heart” (370-1). By repeating the phrase “best interests,”

Mrs. Weasley invokes the argument she lost that night in Grimmauld Place even as she

ostensibly “accepts that she has no authority over” Harry and Hermione.

Once Sirius and Remus are settled as Harry’s primary parent-surrogates, their

relationship with Mr. and Mrs. Weasley becomes much more nourishing, marked by Sirius

and Mrs. Weasley cooking a meal together: When Mr. Weasley is attacked while on guard

duty in the Department of Mysteries, Sirius invites the Weasley family to stay with him in

Grimmauld Place, near the hospital, “with such obvious sincerity” that Mrs. Weasley

reconciles with him by immediately “beg[inning] to help with breakfast” (480). Sirius and

Remus seal their position as joint parent-figures to Harry shortly after this reconciliation, by

giving Harry a Christmas gift together (501). Sirius’s and Remus’s roles as a father-mother

pairing for Harry continue even after their deaths; at the conclusion of Deathly Hallows,

when Harry uses the Resurrection Stone, his two closest, deceased pairs of parent-figures

appear to him: his biological parents and Remus and Sirius (699); though Tonks, Remus’s

wife, has also died, she does not appear. Remus is the mother-figure here, to Sirius’s father-

figure.

Thus Harry’s most direct surrogate parent relationship is with perhaps the least

heteronormative mother-father coupling presented to him in the series. Gender is at times

problematic for both Sirius, who is troubled by the feminizing effect of having to stay in his

family home and clean – it hasn’t been lived in “for ten years” – while others, including

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Snape, go out on assignment for the Order (83). When Harry looks into Sirius’s bedroom in

Grimmauld Place in Deathly Hallows, Harry discovers signs that Sirius used his sexuality to

make his parents uncomfortable, decorating with “posters of bikini-clad Muggle girls” (179);

while his interest in Muggles would certainly bother the pureblood Black family, Sirius

seems also to be asserting his masculinity by showing so much “nerve” (178) in asserting an

interest in pictures of scantily-clad women.

Remus seems to be more comfortable than Sirius with his non-traditional gender

expression. While watching Sirius die, he holds Harry, and afterward, he openly goes

through the grief of a man who has just lost his lover, speaking to Harry “as though every

word was causing him pain” (Order of the Phoenix 806-8). In fact, Remus is a more effective

mother-figure to Harry than he is a father to his biological son, whom he abandons twice,

once when he first learns Tonks is pregnant and leaves her, and then again then Teddy is an

infant and Remus goes off to fight and be killed in the Battle of Hogwarts (Deathly Hallows

212-6, 661). Despite this attitude toward his own son, Remus has, before his marriage to

Tonks, presented himself as a willing mother-surrogate, and not only to Harry: When Mrs.

Weasley expresses her fear that she and Mr. Weasley will be killed and their youngest

children left orphans, he chides her, “what do you think we’d do, let them starve?” (Order of

the Phoenix 177), offering himself and Sirius, through use of the plural pronoun, as potential

surrogate parents and food-sharers to Ron and Ginny, as well as Harry.

Sirius likewise presents himself as an enthusiastic food-sharer and surrogate parent,

though his offers are more impulsive and less nutritious. He first offers to take Harry in while

he is still standing in front of the rubble of the Potters’ house, from which Hagrid has just

rescued baby Harry (Prisoner of Azkaban 206-7), and he renews the offer to thirteen-year-old

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Harry the moment it seems likely his name will be cleared (379). Sirius is not able to make

good on either of these offers, though, and his food-sharing is likewise sweet and tempting,

but not nourishing enough to last; for example, Sirius sends Harry one of the “four superb

birthday cakes” he gets when he turns fourteen (Goblet of Fire 28), but seldom gives him

nutritious food. Sirius again shares treat food, butterbeer, with Harry and the Weasley

children to keep them occupied while they await word about Mr. Weasley’s condition after

he has been attacked, but when he summons the bottles, they “[scatter] the debris of Sirius’s

meal,” the nutritious food he was eating before they arrived, and when it is time for him to

offer the children a substantial meal, Mrs. Weasley helps him prepare it (477-80).24

Sirius’s performance as a parent is complicated by his difficulty demonstrating

affection for Harry. He places “a hand on Harry’s shoulder” as he tells the difficult story of

Voldemort’s return and Cedric Diggory’s murder at the conclusion of Goblet of Fire (694),

but though he first presents himself as a parent-figure to Harry in the third book of the series,

he does not hug him until the fifth, and then he is in dog form when he does so (Order of the

Phoenix 183). When, later in the same book, Sirius finally hugs Harry in human form the

morning he returns to Hogwarts after Christmas break, it is “a brief, one-armed hug,”

accompanied by an admonishment to, “Look after yourself, Harry,” that cuts off whatever

Harry might have wanted to say to him (524).

Despite this difficulty with physical affection, Sirius and Remus seem to be the

parent-figures of Harry’s choice. When “he really want[s] […] someone like a parent: an

adult wizard whose advice he could ask without feeling stupid, someone who cared about

24
After Sirius’s death, when there is another Weasley family crisis – the fall of the Ministry during Bill and
Fleur’s wedding, resulting in everyone having to flee for fear Death Eaters will arrive – Lupin mimics Sirius’s
comforting gesture, bringing “a few butterbeers” to Harry, Ron, and Hermione, again at Grimmauld Place
(Deathly Hallows 204).

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him” (author’s emphasis), Harry writes to Sirius, not Mr. or Mrs. Weasley (Goblet of Fire

22); much later, after Sirius dies, Harry mourns the loss of “someone outside Hogwarts who

cared about what happened to him, almost like a parent” (Half-Blood Prince 77).

Perhaps one aspect of his relationship with Sirius and Remus that is attractive to

Harry as a young adult is its reciprocity; at an age where he is beginning to practice adult

behaviors, more than many other children his age as a result of his being the Chosen One,

Harry is drawn more strongly toward those adults to whom he can give nurture as well as

from whom he can receive it. In one of his first face-to-face interactions with Sirius after his

escape from the dementors at the conclusion of Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry meets Sirius in

Hogsmeade, obeying Sirius’s instruction to “[b]ring as much food as [he] can” (Goblet of

Fire 510). Sirius does address Harry’s needs, but first he ravenously consumes the food

Harry has brought (520-8); even as he accepts nurture from Harry, though, Sirius also

provides nurture to another, feeding his table scraps to Buckbeak, the hippogriff on whose

back Harry helped him to escape to freedom, and with whom he is now in hiding (523, 528).

In this context, both food-sharing and problem-solving are mutual: Sirius receives food from

Harry and gives food to Buckbeak; Harry helped Sirius escape on Buckbeak in the previous

book, and now Sirius helps Harry with his problems. This pattern of reciprocal nurturing

comes even more full-circle when Remus appoints Harry godfather to his own son, placing

Harry in the same role Sirius filled for him, and also requesting from him a significant gift of

nurturing (Deathly Hallows 514).

Despite the diverse gender performances of their positive role models, in Deathly

Hallows, when Harry, Ron, and Hermione first find themselves on their own together

functioning as adults, they immediately fall into traditional patterns of gendered behavior,

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most especially in that from the moment the three leave the Burrow, when they do not have

access to an older adult or house-elf to do their cooking, there is an unspoken agreement that

the procurement and preparation of food is Hermione’s responsibility. At Grimmauld place,

when the house-elf Kreacher is on an errand and the three await his return, they have “a

supper composed largely of moldy bread, upon which Hermione ha[s] tried a variety of

unsuccessful Transfigurations” (201). Despite her lack of aptitude for cooking, Harry and

Ron continue to expect Hermione to take full responsibility for their meals after they have to

leave Grimmauld Place and camp in different places each night. The first night of camping,

Harry organizes the night watch and adds, “[a]nd we’ll need to think about some food as

well” (276); though Harry says “we,” the narration that follows makes it clear that he, as well

as Ron, expects Hermione to be the one doing the “thinking”:

Hermione had not packed any food in her magical bag, as she had assumed

that they would be returning to Grimmauld Place that night, so they had had

nothing to eat except some wild mushrooms that Hermione had collected from

amongst the nearest trees and stewed in a billycan. After a couple mouthfuls

Ron had pushed his portion away, looking queasy; Harry had only persevered

so as not to hurt Hermione’s feelings. (277)

Although neither Ron nor Harry is carrying food either, only Hermione is singled out in the

narration as guilty of the omission, and although the two boys did not like her cooking at

Grimmauld Place and do not like it better now, neither makes any attempt to scavenge for

other food or cook what Hermione has found.

Ron in particular seems to be the chief holder of the expectation that Hermione will

take sole responsibility for the food, suggesting that there should be no need for someone to

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go out looking for food at all when he remarks, “My mother [. . .] can make good food

appear out of thin air” (292). When Hermione argues that “[i]t’s impossible to make good

food out of nothing!”, explaining the magical principles that make it so, Ron falls back on

simply insulting the quality of Hermione’s cooking as “disgusting,” prompting Hermione to

note that Ron is the only member of the group not participating in food-preparation in some

way, but also that she seems to be held chiefly responsible: “Harry caught the fish and I did

my best with it! I notice I’m always the one who ends up sorting out the food, because I’m a

girl, I suppose!” (author’s emphasis) (293).

While Ron argues that he expects Hermione to do the cooking not because she is the

only girl, but because she is “the best at magic” (293), the unspoken expectation, and the

comparison to his mother, remain. Ron seems to expect Hermione to be the same kind of

adult woman he perceives his mother to be, a point driven home later in the book, when

Hermione begins to read “The Tale of the Three Brothers” and he “stretche[s] out, arms

behind his head, to listen,” making corrections to the story as Hermione reads to make it

more like the version his mother tells, as though she is tucking him into bed at night, not

trying to solve the mystery of what artifact Voldemort is looking for (406). On his own for

the first time, without older adults to rely on, Ron tries to substitute the dynamics of his

relationships with older adults for those he has already established with his young adult

support group. In so doing, he furthermore oversimplifies his mother’s character, focusing on

her food-preparation and bedtime stories, and pruning away the more anti-hegemonic aspects

of her character, such as her requirement that he help with meals, that do not fit his idealized

memory.

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 By reducing his memory of his mother’s character to her roles as cook and storyteller,

Ron engages in one of the “mothering ideolog[ies]” of concern to Lisa Rowe Fraustino in her

article “The Apple of Her Eye”: “A Good Mother Does Nothing But” (58); what Ron values

about the adult woman closest to him, Mrs. Weasley, is her skill as a mother, and so, trying

to negotiate a newly-adult relationship with another woman, Hermione, Ron tries to situate

his value of her within the context of what he values in Mrs. Weasley, her persona as

“Nothing But” a mother. Although the roles Ron settles on at first for his relationship with

Hermione are problematic in what they say about his opinion of her and of his own mother,

the activity in which he engages by trying out new roles is one Bettelheim identifies in his

reading of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” in which he argues that by trying out bowls of

porridge, chairs, and beds, what Goldilocks is really trying to discover is where she fits into

the family dynamic (218-9). Just as Goldilocks has to break some chairs in her quest, so

Ron’s first attempt at establishing adult relationship roles is a failure, but testing out roles in

search of the right ones is part of his coming-of-age.

While Ron’s emotional need for Hermione to act as a food-sharing mother-figure

within their newly-adult family may be his alone, he is not alone in his assumption that

Hermione will take primary responsibility for the group’s meals during their time on the run.

After he is thwarted by a group of dementors on his first attempt to get food for the group,

Harry leaves the bulk of the food procurement to Hermione, as well (285-7, 315). It is only

after Ron’s return to the group when he desires to make amends to Hermione – and also to

limit his time with her until she forgives him and is thus more pleasant to be around – that he

and Harry begin gathering food together in order to show Ron’s contrition and to create an

occasion for social time together (388-9).

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 Ultimately, though, the three youths’ heteronormative expectations of one another

alter as they mature, allowing them to move fluidly in and out of those expectations in order

to best provide for one another’s emotional needs, perhaps best demonstrated when Ron’s

overtures of food-sharing for Hermione shift from being a show of contrition to a becoming a

genuine expression of the desire to nurture. Throughout Deathly Hallows, Hermione makes

tea as a source of comfort when the group encounters setbacks (274, 351, 360); after their

escape from the Death Eaters at the Lovegoods’ house, though, where they have learned that

Luna is the Death Eaters’ prisoner, Ron makes tea for the group (425). In this moment, Ron

and Hermione undergo what Butler terms a “transformation” of their gender expressions,

when they engage in a “de-formity” of a repeated gender performance (192); that is,

Hermione has been performing feminine nurturing by making tea for herself and her found

family in times of crisis, and by taking up this act, Ron de-forms the repeated performance,

taking a turn being the one to mother Hermione instead of expecting mothering from her.

Having had some time to evaluate the nature of his relationship with Hermione, Ron is now

able to understand her as a person who is not “Nothing But” a mother-figure; she, too,

requires motherly nurturing from time to time. Their willingness to abandon rigid gender

performance in favor of a more fluid and practical model of interaction, as demonstrated in

their relaxed expectations toward Hermione as chief food-sharer, is one sign that Harry, Ron,

and Hermione have matured to true adulthood during the course of their year together

working against Voldemort.

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Dashner’s 13th Reality Series

A similar trend of anti-heteronormative positive adult figures and heteronormative

child figures appears in James Dashner’s 13th Reality Series. As in the Harry Potter series,

protagonist Tick Higginbottom’s parents are largely heteronormative, but gender-progressive

in ways that best serve the family. Typically of literary father-characters, Edgar

Higginbottom does a lot of eating (Journal of Curious Letters 148; Hunt for Dark Infinity

22), and is frequently described as overweight (Hunt for Dark Infinity 22; Blade of Shattered

Hope 17). He is also not much of a cook; while he is separated from his father, Tick’s

characteristic memory of him is that he catches the grill on fire every time he barbecues

hamburgers (Hunt for Dark Infinity 201). Even in this characterization of a non-cooking

father-figure, though, there is a hint of the anti-heteronormative, as the barbecue grill is the

traditional province of the father in pop culture. Edgar’s anti-hegemonic behavior goes

beyond this, however; he is the one to wake the children up for breakfast (Journal of Curious

Letters 22-3), and when they were babies, took responsibility for all of their night feedings

because he could not sleep when they were unsettled (Journal of Curious Letters 62).

On one occasion, Tick’s older sister perceives their father as distinctly feminine, in a

way that echoes, in a children’s literature context, Butler’s remarks about drag performance’s

ability to “[reveal] the distinctness of those aspects of gendered experience which are falsely

naturalized as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence” (187). When

the family returns to their home after a long and harrowing absence, Tick’s sister compares

Edgar in her mind to Julie Andrews as Maria von Trapp: “Dad stood in the middle of the

room, slowly turning with his arms outstretched like that lady in the wildflower-strewn

mountain field in The Sound of Music” (Blade of Shattered Hope 329). By presenting Edgar

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not as a more generalized grotesque of a woman, but as experiencing a particular moment,

the return to a much-beloved place, with a specific physical performance that echoes the

performance of a particular female character, Dashner imbues Edgar with a distinct,

traditionally-feminine characteristic that is a part of his distinct, personal make-up, not a

cartoonish sign that he is somehow wholly un-manly, or a suggestion that women in general

naturally behave in a certain manner in places they love.

Likewise, Tick’s mother is a distinct character exhibiting both traditionally-feminine

and some less traditionally-feminine traits. She is typically gendered in that she “love[s] –

absolutely love[s] – to cook” (Journal of Curious Letters 15), and is frequently depicted

making yet another family-favorite recipe (Journal of Curious Letters 15, 22-4, 143; Hunt for

Dark Infinity 39). Lorena Higginbottom is also traditionally feminine in her tendency to fuss

over her children, a trait linked by her husband to her food-preparation duties: “She’d worry

herself to her deathbed quicker than she can make a batch of peanut-butter cookies” (Journal

of Curious Letters 138). The tendency to worry is again linked to motherly food-sharing

when Lorena tearfully sends Tick and his friends off on an adventure after making them

“[stuff] food and clothes into their backpacks” (Hunt for Dark Infinity 65). Like her husband,

though, Lorena is not a complete gender stereotype; her meat loaf “disgust[s] [Tick] like

fried toenails” (Journal of Curious Letters 104), and she doctors store-bought spaghetti sauce

instead of making her own from scratch (Hunt for Dark Infinity 22). Perhaps most against

gender-type, Lorena, not Edgar, was as a young woman a member of the Realitants, the

group of physics-manipulating do-gooders to which Tick and his friends now belong (Blade

of Shattered Hope 217).

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 The adult Realitants function even more strictly against gender type than the

Higginbottom parents, presenting the type of “hyperbolic exhibitions” of gender identity that

Butler is so hopeful will “have the effect of proliferating gender configurations” (200). In

particular, Rutger functions both as the group’s chief engineer and as its chief chef. Although

Rutger is, like all the inhabitants of his Reality, very short and fat (Hunt for Dark Infinity

176-7), and when Tick first meets him, is constantly hungry and hinting that someone ought

to give him something to eat (Journal of Curious Letters 122-3, 216), at Realitant

headquarters, Rutger is the Realitant primarily in charge of feeding the others, and he does so

lavishly. When Master George asks him to bring “victuals from the pantry,” Rutger serves

“enormous plates of steaming food,” each of which he says contains, “roasted duck, thrice-

baked potatoes, succulent legs of lamb with basil and – my favorite – roast beef. Plus a slice

of cherry cheese cake” (Journal of Curious Letters 309-13). Later, when Mothball takes Tick

and the three other child Realitants, Paul, Sofia, and Sato, out on their first mission, Rutger

packs their dinners (366). Rutger again cooks for the Realitants in Hunt for Dark Infinity,

when he provides enough “Chocolate Chip-Peanut Butter-Butterscotch-Pecan-Walnut-

Macadamia-Delight, one of [his] specialties,” for the entire Realitants’ council (180).

Master George, the leader of the Realitants, has a slightly less straightforward

relationship with food. He frequently eats and serves food to others, but his own food-

sharings are primarily with his cat – incidentally, named Muffintops (Journal of Curious

Letters 77) – and with the Realitants’ prisoner, Frazier Gunn, to whom he brings “delicious

food” in his cell “three times a day” (Journal of Curious Letters 244). Paradoxically, Master

George frequently delegates the feeding of people he likes, such as the Realitants, to others

(Journal of Curious Letters 309; Blade of Shattered Hope 345-6), though he does serve them

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“a scrumptious meal of pork chops and mashed potatoes” one evening, followed by breakfast

the next morning (Hunt for Dark Infinity 340).

Another of the adult male Realitants who is particularly motherly even has a feminine

name: Master Sally. When he first meets Tick, Sofia, and Paul, he takes them to a restaurant

for a big meal, their first in a couple of days (Hunt for Dark Infinity 92). Later, when Tick

has to continue his journey without his friends, Master Sally soothes him: “’Ah, now,’ Sally

said. ‘Ain’t no time for that. You ain’t got nuttin’ but brave inside you, boy. Suck it on up,

hear?’” (302), and when the Realtiants’ arrange a rescue mission for children who have been

kidnapped by their nemesis, Mistress Jane, Master George puts Sally in charge of caring for

the rescued children, though it should be noted that he does not discuss feeding the children,

and refers to himself not as a mother, but rather says, “Just call me Papa Sally” (Blade of

Shattered Hope 345).

The most prominent female member of the Realitants, Mothball, is not a cook,

although she comes from “the Fifth Reality, where quirks of evolution, diet, and climactic

factors ha[ve] led to an unusually large race of humans” (Blade of Shattered Hope 113), and

where all of the families have big fruit and vegetable gardens and commonly break from

work for “afternoon tea” (Blade of Shattered Hope 95). When Mothball takes Tick, Paul,

Sofia, and Sato out on a mission, she serves them food Rutger has prepared for them (Journal

of Curious Letters 366-8). In some ways, Mothball falls into the second-wave/liberal feminist

paradigm in that she seeks fulfillment in work outside the home, but at the same time, though

she does not cook herself, Mothball is able to appreciate the value of what the domestic

sphere has to provide; when she, Rutger, and Sato visit the Fifth Reality, she demonstrates

her appreciation for the performed motherhood through food-sharing of one of her parents by

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insisting that they have dinner prepared by her father, Tollaseat, who is an excellent cook

(Blade of Shattered Hope 126).

Indeed, Tollaseat performs traditional femininity and motherliness in a number of

ways. When Mothball brings Rutger and Sato to his house, Tollaseat immediately serves

them tea, and he is scandalized at the suggestion that they might not stay for supper, which

he prepares alone, while Sato and Rutger sit with the women (107-10). Tollaseat is also

somewhat feminine in that while he enjoys feeding others, he eats little himself, preferring

“after eating only one helping” to smoke while “enjoying every second of watching Sato eat

like a starved hyena” (126). In one way, though, Tollaseat and his wife, Windasill, fall into

more traditional performance: Windasill, not Tollaseat, performs the traditionally-motherly

act of trying to push more food on Sato than he wants, and Tollaseat intercedes (127).

Despite the diversity of gender-expressions to which they are exposed in their adult

role-models, among themselves, Tick, Paul, and Sofia, exhibit primarily heteronormative

behaviors. Sofia, the lone girl in the group, is characterized as motherly – even talking to her

butler “like she was his mother” (Journal of Curious Letters 183) – and cooks spaghetti for

the rest of the group, following the Pacini family’s secret recipe (Hunt for Dark Infinity 16-

9). Sofia’s identity is in fact so closely tied to her family’s food business that when Sofia

solves the sixth clue faster than he does, Tick jokingly insults her, “you’re not a woman.

You’re a girl. And I hate spaghetti” (Journal of Curious Letters 201), attacking her self-

identified gender expression and her attachment to food simultaneously. Later in the book,

when the three protagonists have finished their first mission together and are about to part

ways, Tick takes his leave of Sofia by demanding “more free spaghetti sauce,” again pegging

her identity to her usefulness as a cook (412).

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 In other contexts, both Tick and Paul think of food as trivial. In prioritizing the

various catastrophes to which he’s been a party, Tick reflects, “if he’d just helped destroy

every last Reality, that made the fiasco with Chu’s Dark Infinity and Mistress Jane look like

a food fight” (Blade of Shattered Hope 209), establishing food as his benchmark for the

unimportant, as Armin A. Brott does in “Not All Men are Sly Foxes” (287). In an e-mail to

Tick and Sofia, Paul directly belittles Sofia through her connection to food: “When the

highlight of your day is getting an e-mail from some chick in Italy about how she hurt her

pinky toe in a vicious spaghetti sauce can incident, you know it’s time to change things”

(Blade of Shattered Hope 20). In Paul’s remark, the dismissive “some chick,” the literally

small “pinky toe,” and the hyperbolically comical “spaghetti sauce can incident” amalgamate

to render Sofia’s identity as a woman and as a food-preparer unimportant and ridiculous.

Despite their apparent low opinion of people who concern themselves with preparing

food, both Tick and Paul eat with gusto, and Dashner depicts them eating a wide range of

foods, from junk to gourmet (Journal of Curious Letters 59, 280, 366; Hunt for Dark Infinity

208-9). Furthermore, in the more objective eye of the narrator, food is not so trivial, and it is

fortunate for Tick and Paul that Sofia does not share their cavalier attitude toward the

importance of food preparation. When the three of them find themselves alone in the desert

with Master George, Sofia is the first of the four to realize she may be dying of thirst, and

also the first to remember that before the incident that left them stranded, Mistress Jane must

have brought “plenty of food and water” to the spot, which they should now find and use

(Blade of Shattered Hope 227-30). Thus, while Tick and Paul regard Sofia’s interest in food

to be trivial, the story, in a more objective sense, does not necessarily share this opinion;

Sofia is depicted as a competent young woman who recognizes the importance of food, a

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privileging of what Lissa Paul in “Feminism Revisited” calls “feminine culture” (116) over

the more careless attitude of her teenage male companions.

Conclusion

In both Rowling’s Harry Potter and Dashner’s 13th Reality series, positively-

portrayed adult characters perform gender in a variety of ways that are nurturing for the

children in their care and oppose strict heteronormativity of gender expression; nonetheless,

and in keeping with the findings Fine draws together in the final section of Delusions of

Gender, the child protagonists in the books, when they are first expected to act as adults

without a safety net of older adult caregivers, fall into traditional gender roles. Where the two

sets of characters differ is in how they respond to this gender norming once left to their own

devices to function as adults.

Because Dashner’s series is not yet complete, it is not yet possible to make fully-

realized conclusions about the child protagonists’ gender expressions once they are fully

mature; however, at this point in the series, Dashner’s depiction of his child protagonists

seems to fall into the cultural feminist camp of third-wave feminism, depicting a

traditionally-feminine girl hero who is celebrated for her expression of “feminine culture”

(116). In the Harry Potter series, Harry, Ron, and Hermione – but most especially Ron –

move out of their strictly heteronormative patterns as they grow to maturity by the conclusion

of the series, demonstrating Butler’s principle that “[g]ender ought not to be construed as a

stable identity” but rather “is an identity tenuously constituted in time” (191), subject to

variation as a subject’s behaviors vary, and thus to maturity as a subject matures.

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 CHAPTER 4: Proliferation versus Normativity

Cordelia Fine writes in Delusions of Gender that “images of women fretting over

their appearance or in ecstasy over a brownie mix, although they have nothing to do with

mathematical ability directly, nonetheless make gender stereotypes in general more

accessible” (43); that is, she argues that the sheer volume of media images depicting

women’s trivial concerns compound to create “stereotype threat,” which is “the ‘real-time

threat of being judged and treated poorly in strange settings where a negative stereotype

about one’s group applies’” (30). It is unsurprising, then, that those concerned about

counteracting stereotype threat would seek to do so by saturating the media with depictions

of women in more traditionally masculine-centered contexts. One way that researchers have

sought to determine how many such depictions exist is through studies on the model of the

one performed by Lenore Weitzman and colleagues in 1972, identified by Fine and by Roger

Clark, Heidy Kulkin, and Liam Clancy as paradigmatic in the way it evaluates the depiction

of female characters in award-winning picture books (Fine 219; Clark et al. 71-2). The

Weitzman study was concerned, in particular, that “not one woman in the Caldecott sample

had a job or profession” (author’s emphasis) (qtd. Fine 219; Clark et al. 72). The study, a

product of second-wave feminism, is naturally particularly concerned with women’s equal

opportunity in the public sphere, and this focus has carried over into other content analyses

using the Weitzman study as a model (Clark et al. 74-80).

A common pattern, and logical conclusion, of studies following the Weitzman

paradigm is to seek to change the gendered behavior of children, creating more opportunity

for girls to engage in boy-dominated activities, by creating picture books in which male and

female characters engage in behaviors that cross traditional gender lines (Clark et al. 75).
Clark, Kulkin, and Clancy caution that “experimenters investigating the power of reverse

stereotypes are themselves promoting a stereotype, one that would idealize ‘feminine’ boys

and ‘masculine’ girls” (75-6). To recast their concern in Judith Butler’s terms, those calling

for the portrayal of reverse stereotypes are still, as she puts it, issuing “[t]he injunction to be a

given gender” (199), when a more productive approach would be “to redescribe those

possibilities that already exist, but which exist within cultural domains designated as

culturally unintelligible and impossible” (203), by looking at characters, both male and

female, whose gender expressions exist outside of a masculine-feminine binary through the

performance of a combination of acts traditionally ascribed to different genders. That is,

rather than presenting a male character who performs only traditionally-feminine acts or a

female character who performs only traditionally-masculine acts, which, as Clark, Kulkin,

and Clancy note, is only inverting the problem (75-6), a more successful approach to

subverting gender norming in children’s books would be to display male and female

characters who are masculine in some ways and feminine in others, or better still, to seek to

understand characters based on, in Bornstein’s terms (10), what they “do,” what the actions

they perform say about them, rather than what they “are,” their biological sex.

The previous chapter explored works in which the parent generation models such

non-traditional or even anti-heteronormative gender-expressions to their children, and the

degree to which the child protagonists learn, or fail to learn, from these models when they

enter adulthood. The works under consideration in this chapter, Bruce Coville’s Jennifer

Murdley’s Toad, Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, and Madeleine L’Engle’s eight books about the

Murry-O’Keefe family, to which the bulk of the chapter is devoted, present an even more

explicit message not only to child protagonists within the stories, but to child readers of the

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stories as well, regarding healthy expressions of femininity, in particular. In these works,

positively-portrayed characters tend to perform anti-heteronormative gender expressions

through their relationships with food, while negatively-portrayed characters interact with

food along fairly traditional gender lines, suggesting to children that to attempt to “do

gender,” as Fine might put it (82), strictly in accordance with one’s biological sex is itself

villainous.

Coville’s Jennifer Murdley’s Toad

A fairly simplistic version of this anti-heteronormative good guys versus

heteronormative bad guys model, one that skirts the problem Clark, Kulkin, and Clancy warn

about of “idealiz[ing]” the “reverse stereotype” in place of the original (75-6), is evident in

Jennifer Murdley’s Toad, one of Bruce Coville’s Magic Shop books. The adult characters in

the novel fall fairly neatly either into the category of genderqueer positive character or

heteronormative negative character, although some ragged edges remain. In the case of

Jennifer’s parents in particular, these ragged edges seem to relate to a finding Fine cites in

Gender Trouble: “A fascinating interview study conducted by sociologist Veronica Tichenor

revealed the psychological work that both husbands and their higher-earning wives perform

to continue to ‘do gender’ more conventionally within their marriage, despite their

unconventional situations” (82). Although in Jennifer’s household, her parents for the most

part perform transposed gender roles, they incorporate traditional traits into these cross-

gendered performances that balance out the way they are perceived by others to “do gender.”

Jennifer’s father, for example, is a stay-at-home dad (15, 19-20), who is highly

concerned with how media messages are affecting his daughter’s self-esteem, but his concern

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manifests itself in some fairly traditionally-masculine ways. In an incident the family refers

to as “Dad’s Great TV Tantrum,” he smashes the family’s television when he sees Jennifer

crying over the feminine beauty ideal established in “a commercial for an impossibly

beautiful fashion doll,” later giving her a geode and having a talk with her about inner and

outer beauty, and finally “bur[ying] a Barbie doll in the backyard, under a tombstone that

said Beauty Victim” (18). The burial of the doll, but particularly the violence of destroying

the television to stop the harmful message, would seem odd performances for a female

mother-figure, but in Mr. Murdley, they serve more to mediate his otherwise wholly-

feminine, almost drag-like gender performance, providing a more balanced character.

Likewise, Jennifer’s mother in many ways performs a very masculine role in the

Murdley household, as the sole parent working outside the home, putting in long hours in the

high-powered occupation of attorney (62, 19). Mrs. Murdley furthermore “hate[s] to cook”

(62), and is thus not a traditional, food-sharing mother; however, when she has “had a bad

day” at work, Mrs. Murdley finds solace in cooking, finding that she can “let off steam by

slicing up some vegetables” (62). In addition to finding an emotional release in cooking –

albeit a more violent, traditionally-masculine one than one might expect – Mrs. Murdley also

works consciously to perform feminine gender for the neighbors. When Jennifer wants to

have a friend to dinner, even though she is aware that Mrs. Murdley has had a hard day at

work, “[d]espite her mother’s mood, Jennifer kn[ows] that the odds [are] good that she w[ill]

agree to this request. Sensitive to the neighborhood gossip that she [is] too busy with her

career to be a good mother, Mrs. Murdley [is] always glad to have an outside witness of the

times she actually d[oes] cook” (63). Even though Mrs. Murdley brings other skills to the

table, in order to be a “good mother” in the eyes of the neighborhood, she must be a food-

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sharing mother, and so, when she shares food, she seeks corroboration from observers

outside the family.

The other major adult character in the book is its villain, a conventionally-beautiful

witch, who is revealed to be the one of the sisters from the French fairy tale “Diamonds and

Toads,” whose mother loves her more than her sister because of her beauty, and thus

delegates to the less beautiful sister all of the work of the house, which centers around food-

preparation (84-5). When she and her mother send the sister off “to gather strawberries” in

the winter, she “gives the only crust of bread she has” to an old beggar woman who in return

gives her the magical gift of dropping precious stones from her mouth when she speaks (85).

Hoping for the same gift, the beautiful sister goes looking for the old woman and “asks her

where to find the strawberries,” but will not give her anything to eat and so is cursed to drop

vermin, including the book’s title character, a talking toad named Bufo, from her mouth

every time she speaks (85-6).

In his retelling of “Diamonds and Toads,” Coville foregrounds both food-gathering

and food-sharing and the role of the mouth in meting out the old beggar woman’s

punishments and rewards. When the ugly sister encounters the beggar woman, she is out on

the impossible errand, assigned to her by a cruel mother and sister, of finding berries in the

winter. Food-sharing is at the center of the story even before she gives away her only food.

Food and consumption remain central when the girl’s reward comes from her mouth, with

which she speaks, but also eats. The sister who refuses to share food with the beggar woman

also gets her just reward through her mouth, and since her punishment is that live creatures

drop from her mouth, there is an element in her punishment absent from her sister’s gift:

unlike the kind, ugly sister, the cruel, beautiful sister’s magical punishment makes her a

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mother-figure, giving birth to new creatures. After he knows she is the girl from whose

mouth he dropped, Bufo even calls the witch “Mom” (132).

Although she performs a traditional femininity through her physical beauty and her

motherhood, the witch’s failure to be a nourishing character is signaled not only in her failure

to share food with a hungry old woman, but also in the confused use of the parts of her body

in her gender performance. The two motherly functions of food-sharing and giving birth are

collapsed; instead of consuming shared meals with her mouth and carrying children in her

womb, the witch gives birth with her mouth, and to unwanted, nuisance animals. Unlike

Jennifer’s parents, however, the witch does not express a hybrid gender-identity; rather than

performing some feminine and some masculine acts, she performs acts that are strictly

feminine, but empty, inverted, or broken in their expression.

While the witch presents a disturbing view of strictly-performed femininity, the

story’s child protagonist, Jennifer Murdley, lives up to Butler’s hope of gender performance

outside of a masculine-feminine binary, performing a combination of traditionally-masculine

and traditionally-feminine acts in the events that lead up to her defeat of the beautiful witch.

After she purchases Bufo at Elives’ Magic Supplies to be her pet toad (10), he demands to be

fed “Flies!”, eliciting from Jennifer the response, “Don’t be disgusting. Besides, I don’t have

any” (32). Jennifer’s real problem with feeding Bufo flies is thus not her revulsion at Bufo’s

eating habits, but rather that she simply has no flies to feed him. When he says he will “settle

for some raw hamburger,” she agrees and feeds him some (32); Jennifer willingly takes

responsibility for sharing food with Bufo, who is under her care, and brings him the most

appetizing food it is in her power to give, despite its not being a food she herself finds

appetizing.

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 Later, Jennifer takes on the more active, traditionally-masculine role of fairy tale hero

by allowing herself to be made into a toad, taking her brother’s place (127). In toad form, she

defeats the witch by having Bufo kiss her several times, making her enlarge a little each time

until she is “the size of a Volkswagen,” and then catching the witch with her tongue (138-9).

Jennifer echoes the witch’s own subverted use of her mouth by using her own mouth to

defeat the witch, but in her food-sharing with Bufo, also maintains a traditionally-feminine,

motherly gender performance. By combining these traits, and by defeating a villain who is a

model of traditional feminine beauty, Jennifer becomes a model of gender expression outside

of a masculine-feminine binary, part of the “proliferation” of gender expressions for which

Butler calls (200-3).

Gaiman’s Coraline

Like Jennifer Murdley’s Toad, Coraline offers a fairly simple opposition between

anti-heteronormative positive adult figures and heteronormative antagonists; toward the

conclusion of the story, the book’s title character and child protagonist even reflects, after

rescuing her parents from an evil witch in an alternate dimension and in the midst of

performing a ruse to lure an enemy into the open, that “the hardest part” of the adventure is

performing traditional femininity by having a tea party with her dolls as part of the ruse

(157). As in Coville’s work, though, Gaiman’s portrayals do not exist completely within a

masculine-feminine binary. Rather, while the antagonists tend to function within the

traditional expectations of binary gender expression, the more positive characters perform

gender more in line with the “redescrib[ing]” Butler calls for; they are well-rounded

characters who perform acts associated with different genders, falling in line with the

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“proliferation” of real-life ways of expressing self “that already exist” rather than adhering to

rigidly-defined, “unnatural” notions of masculinity and femininity (Butler 203).

Both of Coraline’s parents work from home. A second-wave/liberal feminist might

note that this is first disclosed when Coraline goes looking for her father in his study, even

though she has already seen her mother at home in the middle of the day (7), suggesting that

it is only the presence of Coraline’s father in the house during working hours that requires

explanation; but while both parents are, to some extent, involved in food-sharing, Coraline’s

mother is the inferior food-sharer. When Mrs. Jones does cook, Coraline does not enjoy her

cooking, which “was always out of packets or frozen, and was very dry, and it never tasted of

anything” (29); furthermore, one of the primary functions of Mrs. Jones’s interest in meals

has nothing to do with sharing food, but is rather to create occasions for Coraline to check in

when she is playing outside, by having “her come back inside for dinner and lunch” (6), or

requiring her to “be back in time for lunch” (153).

That meals are more a means of timekeeping than providing nourishment for Mrs.

Jones is further evident in that she keeps no food in the house; on one of the rare occasions

when we see Mrs. Jones actually set out to prepare a meal, “Coraline’s mother looked in the

fridge and found a sad little tomato and a piece of cheese with green stuff growing on it,”

prompting her to “dash down to the shops and get some fish fingers or something” (24-5),

again looking for nutritionally poor prepared foods rather than wholesome ingredients. She

then leaves Coraline alone in the house to go food shopping, and never returns (49); we later

learn that Mrs. Jones fails to return and make lunch because she and Mr. Jones have been

abducted by the story’s antagonist (53), the other mother, who has fed Coraline a delicious

lunch in her real parents’ absence (27-8). To use Holly Blackford’s terminology from her

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article “Recipe for Reciprocity and Repression,” part of Mrs. Jones’s failure as a food-sharer

in these passages arises from her preference of “the dangerous food of the marketplace” over

“good ‘homemade’ food” (47); instead of providing food appropriate to the domestic sphere,

Mrs. Jones ventures out into the public sphere to bring food back, and that food does not

nourish like a mother’s home-cooking.

Coraline, however, is no happier with “good ‘homemade’ food” than she is with her

mother’s fare from “the marketplace” (Blackford 47). Although Mr. Jones is a superior cook

to his wife and seems to be the primary cook in the family as it is he and not Mrs. Jones who

“stop[s] working and ma[kes] them all dinner” (9), it is debatable whether he is a more

successful food-sharer for Coraline, whose response to the first meal he prepares in the book

is to lament, “you’ve made a recipe again” (author’s emphasis), and then to ignore the

elaborate dinner Mr. Jones has cooked and to “[get] out some microwave chips and a

microwave minipizza” to eat instead (9-10). Thus, Coraline rejects her father’s “good

‘homemade’ food” in order to eat “the dangerous food of the marketplace,” which she

prepares herself. Narration from Coraline’s point of view later expands on her opinon of her

father’s cooking: “When Coraline’s father cooked chicken he bought real chicken, but he did

strange things to it, like stewing it in wine, or stuffing it with prunes, or baking it in pastry,

and Coraline would always refuse to touch it on principle” (29). While Coraline’s father is

apparently an excellent, or at least adventurous, cook, since Coraline will never “touch” his

cooking, it provides her little nourishment.

That Coraline rejects her father’s cooking and instead makes for herself the same

prepared foods she disdains when her mother offers them suggests that her parents’

difficulties with food-sharing may say less about them, and about the comparative value of

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“homemade” and “marketplace” food within the context of the story, than they do about

Coraline. By rejecting the food-offerings of both her father and her mother, on some

occasions even eating different food than them at mealtimes, Coraline is rejecting

“alimentary communion” with them (Hasratian 59). That Coraline refuses to participate in

this sharing with her blood family indicates that she seeks to create a distance between

herself and her parents, not entirely surprising in a school-age girl seeking to test boundaries

and establish herself as an individual. Coraline wants to exercise her own agency, and so

rejects the performance of family through food-sharing her parents offer her instead seeking

to join a different performed family she chooses for herself.

Dissatisfied by both of her parents’ modes of food-sharing, Coraline initially has her

head turned when she makes her first trip into the other flat and meets the more

heteronormative other mother and other father who live there. Coraline first sees the other

mother in the kitchen (27-8), and after that, goes looking for her in the kitchen when she

wants to find her (70-1). Immediately after they meet for the first time, the other mother

declares it “Lunchtime” and asks Coraline to call her other father, already a reversal from the

situation in Coraline’s real flat, where Mr. Jones has been the one to prepare dinner. The

meal turns out to be not only elaborate for a lunch, but also a very different type of cuisine

from those offered by the Joneses. Instead of Mrs. Jones’s prepackaged foods or Mr. Jones’s

haute cuisine, the other mother offers “[a] huge, golden-brown roasted chicken, fried

potatoes, [and] tiny green peas,” which she serves while Coraline and the other father sit

(28).

Both the food and the manner in which it is prepared and served are more traditional

than what Coraline can expect from her real parents, and the difference is not lost on

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Coraline who actively compares the other mother’s cooking to her own parents’ offerings,

deciding that the other mother’s is “the best chicken that Coraline ha[s] ever eaten” (29).

That Coraline enjoys the nourishing, from-scratch cooking of the other mother sets up an

inversion of the pattern Blackford identifies in girls’ coming-of-age novels of female

antagonists being “evil women who make food abject”; rather than being the traditional “evil

witch,” the other mother, despite her role as antagonist in the story, is initially set up as one

of the positive “women who nurture with food,” thus subverting the traditional “categories

that Melanie Klein thought endemic to infantile perspectives on mothers” (Blackford 43).

While the other mother’s food-sharing is at odds with Blackford’s expectations of the food-

sharings of “evil women,” it falls in line with Bettelheim’s reading of the witch in “Hansel

and Gretel,” who before she reveals herself to be a cannibal offers the children “good food”

and “pretty little beds” (163).25

Furthermore, the other mother takes pains to present herself as the “sacrificial object”

that tradition dictates a good mother should be (Blackford 43). Simply by serving an

elaborate meal in the middle of the day – roasting a chicken takes about two hours, and the

other mother would have to remain in the flat the whole time the oven is running in the

interest of household safety – the other mother has already centered her life around domestic

work; however, she takes this a step further by announcing explicitly to Coraline that life in

the other flat revolves around her. As she feeds her, the other mother tells Coraline how

much she and the other father value her: “It wasn’t the same here without you. But we knew

25
Gaiman’s depiction of the Jones family’s flat and the other flat also dovetails with another aspect of
Bettelheim’s reading of “Hansel and Gretel,” “that what happens in the parental home and at the witch’s house
are but separate aspects of what in reality is one total experience” (163). By making the other mother’s
gingerbread house-equivalent a duplicate of Coraline’s own family home, Gaiman neatly underscores the
function of the events that take place there as simply one facet of Coraline’s exploration of her relationship with
her own parents in their own home.

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you’d arrive one day, and then we could be a proper family. Would you like some more

chicken?” (29). The other mother tells Coraline that their life is not complete without her at

the same time that she offers her more to eat, suggesting that there is something nourishing

for Coraline in that declaration. Coraline’s real parents, because they work at home, must

frequently shoo her away so that they can do their jobs, sometimes betraying as they do so

that they perceive Coraline to be a nuisance, as when Mrs. Jones suggests that Coraline “Go

and pester” the neighbors (6), or when Mr. Jones begs her to “leave me alone to work” (7) or

sends her out of his office without even “turn[ing]” from the computer “to look at her” (18).

Parents who have nothing to do when she is not with them offer a sort of nourishment

Coraline craves: undivided attention. Then, once she has had her fill of this attention,

Coraline is at liberty to do as she pleases, free from any expectation that she might do

household chores; after the lunch of roasted chicken, Coraline goes off to play while her

other parents do the dishes (30).

In her more traditional approach to cooking and to being attentive to Coraline, the

other mother, like Mrs. Weasley in Ron’s idealized memory of her 26, exhibits the motherly

trait Lisa Rowe Fraustino identifies in “the majority of picture books” that: “A Good Mother

Does Nothing But” (58-9). Fraustino elaborates, citing the 1972 Weitzman study, what it

means to do nothing but mother:

The Tale of Peter Rabbit shows the mother only as a mother, performing the

duties deemed good under patriarchy, to the exclusion of other possible

activities a woman might choose to suit herself [. . .] Mrs. Rabbit supports

Weitzman’s conclusion that “Loving, watching, and helping are among the

few activities allowed to women in picture books” [. . .]. (59)

26
For a full discussion of this motherly trait in relation to the Weasleys, see the previous chapter.

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There is, initially, something very attractive to Coraline in the idea that the other mother has

nothing to do but, as the other mother presents it to her, “love you and play with you and feed

you and make your life interesting” (Coraline 60); but ultimately, Coraline rejects the

ideology that a good mother only mothers, preferring instead “her real, wonderful,

maddening, infuriating, glorious mother” (134), frozen chicken, work demands, and all. She

enjoys the diversion of the other flat, but never intends to stay, and once she has discovered

that the other mother has taken her parents, she immediately begins working to get them

back, simply because “they are [her] parents” (59), and furthermore explicitly rejects the

other mother’s invitation to engage in “alimentary communion” in the other flat, twice

refusing hot chocolate (61, 93), a drink earlier associated with maternal comfort and affection

(55).

After she has rescued her parents from the other mother, Coraline’s interactions with

them, especially those involving food, become more positive. The first time Mrs. Jones

speaks to Coraline after the adventure is to call her to dinner (139), and in response to this

call, Mr. Jones becomes a more demonstrative father to Coraline, “carr[ying] her into the

kitchen” for the first time “since he had started pointing out to her that she was much too old

to be carried” (140-1). At the same time that Coraline receives from her father the sort of

affection she has been looking for, she also accepts with more grace the food-sharing he

offers her, trying his cooking even when it does not appeal to her: “Dinner that night was

pizza, and even though it was homemade by her father (so the crust was alternately thick and

doughy and raw, or too thin and burnt), and even though he had put slices of green pepper on

it, along with little meatballs and, of all things, pineapple chunks, Coraline ate the entire slice

she had been given” (141). Although on this occasion, Mr. Jones is not only an adventurous

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cook but an unsuccessful one in that his pizza crust fails, Coraline understands the

importance of eating the food he offers her as a symbol of the bond between them. Her need

to separate herself from her parents to assert her own individuality has passed.

At the same time that Coraline has found she can assert herself as an individual and as

a part of her family through the sharing of a meal, Coraline also learns to respect that her

parents are more than the roles they perform; or, in Blackford’s terms, she comes “to the

realization that mothers are actually more than mothers” (51). After the adventure in the

other flat is over and the Joneses have reaffirmed their family bond through alimentary

communion, the narration finally refers to Coraline’s mother as Mrs. Jones (Gaiman 153).

Previously, the narration, third-person but from Coraline’s point of view, had always referred

to Mrs. Jones only as Coraline’s mother, suggesting that Coraline only thought of her as the

performer of that role, not as a person with other interests. Once she has had her adventure in

the other flat, Coraline is able to understand that she can perform the role of daughter and

remain an individual because she has grown to understand that Mrs. Jones is still a complex

individual as she performs the role of mother, an understanding aided by the realization that

the other mother’s textbook, gender normative performance of the role of mother is delicious

for an afternoon but without long-term appeal, whereas Mr. and Mrs. Jones’s more diverse

gender performances are nourishing to Coraline in a more lasting way because of their

authenticity.

L’Engle’s Murry-O’Keefe Family Stories

Like Coraline, the books about the Murry and O’Keefe families by Madeleine

L’Engle work to combat Fraustino’s concern that “in the majority of children’s books” (59),

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“A Good Mother Does Nothing But” (58). The Murry-O’Keefe family stories abound with

both food and mothers, but present a variety of avenues for food-sharing and for self-

expression that strive to move far beyond a masculine-feminine gender binary. The three

female characters who get the most attention in the books are three generations of biological

mother and daughter: Dr. Kate Murry, her daughter Meg Murry O’Keefe, and Meg’s

daughter, Polyhymnia O’Keefe.27 These women perform femininity, food-sharing, and

motherhood in three distinct ways again reaffirming Butler’s argument that there is no single

way that femininity is performed in the real world, and that to identify a “proliferation” of

authentic gender performances is not to create new performances, but merely “to redescribe

those possibilities that already exist” (author’s emphasis) (203).

One chief way in which the Murry women perform femininities far outside the norm

is that they are good at science. One of the areas of gender difference on which Fine is the

most focused in Delusions of Gender is the disproportionate representation of men over

women in science-related jobs, stemming, her opponents argue, from the differing brain

“hardwiring” of the two sexes (27-39); in the chapter entitled “Backwards and in High

Heels” and throughout her book, Fine argues that this purported “hardwiring” is in fact the

result of socialization that affects brain function and behavior. One outcome Fine identifies

for women who pursue high-profile jobs such as those in the science and engineering fields,

is that women who are more successful than their husbands tend to take on additional

domestic responsibility, presumably as a means of reducing the likelihood that their success

27
Throughout the books, Polyhymnia is referred to by the nickname “Polly,” but its spelling changes. In The
Arm of the Starfish and Dragons in the Waters, in which she is a school-age child, she uses the spelling chosen
by her parents, a simple shortening of her name: “Poly.” Beginning in A House Like a Lotus, in which she is a
young adult, Polly elects to change the spelling of the name, adding the second -l to make it less unusual and
easier to pronounce (7-8), and this spelling continues in the latest-published book featuring the young-adult
Polly, An Acceptable Time. In this project, I will follow the spelling convention of the book I am discussing,
referring to “Poly” in The Arm of the Starfish and Dragons in the Waters and “Polly” in A House Like a Lotus
and An Acceptable Time.

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in the public sphere will damage their husbands’ egos (82). A cursory reading of L’Engle’s

work might suggest that this is the case for the Murry family, but the interplay of

traditionally-masculine interest in science and traditionally-feminine concern for domestic

matters, including food-sharing, is in fact more complex than this reading allows.

The Murry matriarch, Dr. Kate Murry (not to be confused with her husband, Dr. Alex

Murry or in later books, her teenage niece, also named Kate Murry), is both a well-known

scientist and a lavish food-sharer, but it would diminish her husband’s success as a scientist

and her own as a food-sharer to suggest that the latter is intended as an antidote for the

former. Certainly, she is a prominent scientist; her granddaughter, Poly, boasts to a new

acquaintance, “Our grandmother – Mother’s mother – is a bacteriologist and a biologist with

two earned doctorates; she won the Nobel prize when she isolated farandolae within a

mitochondrion” (Dragons in the Waters 105). It does not necessarily follow, however, that

she outshines her husband, an accomplished physicist who in A Wrinkle in Time learns,

through some trial and error, to travel through space and time using only the power of his

mind, and whom we learn in A Swiftly Tilting Planet “the White House has been in the habit

of consulting” on matters of national security “[f]or a number of years” (16).

Nonetheless, Dr. Kate’s life as a scientist and her life as a food-sharing mother are

deeply, if problematically, intertwined, beginning with the location of her home laboratory,

“in the old stone dairy right off the kitchen” (Wrinkle in Time 15), a fact repeated throughout

the series (Wind in the Door 67; Acceptable Time 13). Furthermore, though she is an avid

food-sharer and is frequently depicted preparing food in the kitchen (Wrinkle in Time 16-7,

23, 41; et al.), her family thinks of her as cooking primarily in the lab (Swiftly Tilting Planet

11). Many of the dishes Dr. Kate makes in the lab are non-nourishing desserts, such as

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cookies heated over the Bunsen burner, which her twin sons declare merely “edible” (Swiftly

Tilting Planet 19), and fancy “Dutch cocoa,” which they sneak into the lab to sample (Many

Waters 7); however, she also prepares her signature main dish in the lab, a “beef

bourguignon” the family affectionately calls “Bunsen burner stew” (Wrinkle in Time 39, 41;

Many Waters 8, 307; Acceptable Time 22, 131). When Sandy, one of the same twin sons who

passed such harsh judgment on the Bunsen burner cookies, finds himself stuck in another

time, his bouts of homesickness focus on the Bunsen burner stew as symbolic of home and

motherly attention (Many Waters 84, 158).

When she does prepare food in the kitchen, Dr. Kate frequently thinks over scientific

problems while she works. In A Wind in the Door, she thinks through the problem of her

youngest son’s difficult-to-diagnose illness while preparing spaghetti, a dish she has chosen

because it is “easy,” but which she then proceeds to make from scratch, beginning with fresh

vegetables from the twins’ vegetable garden (30-3). Also in this scene, Meg’s admiration of

her mother is split between her cooking and her scientific accomplishments; Meg first wishes

to “learn to cook as well” as Dr. Kate and then suggests wistfully that having a “double

Ph.D.” will somehow make her life less “complicated” (32-3). Her mother’s response plays

up the importance of food-sharing while downplaying the value of her academic background:

“At this point I’m more interested in knowing whether or not I’ve put too many red peppers

in the spaghetti sauce; I’ve lost count” (33). It turns out that Dr. Kate is right to be worried

about the sauce; Dennys later complains that there aren’t enough peppers and she forgets

dessert altogether (34, 39), whereas she later solves the scientific problem she has been

working on while preparing the meal and wins the Nobel prize for it (Swiftly Tilting Planet

21). Interestingly, when Meg reminds Dennys of Dr. Kate’s work “isolat[ing] farandolae

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within a mitochondrion” over Thanksgiving dinner in A Swiftly Tilting Planet, he is indignant

that she feels the need to remind him because “That’s what she got the Nobel prize for” (21)

– not because having done so helped to save his younger brother’s life. In this moment, and

in Dennys’s mind, at least, Dr. Kate’s work as a scientist is quite separate from – and

superior to – her work as a mother.

Likewise, Dr. Kate’s other children seem to focus on her triumphs in the public

sphere more than those in the domestic sphere; putting on “a multi-colored knitted tam

o’shanter,” for example, Meg reflects that the hat is “one of her mother’s rare successful

ventures into domesticity” (Wind in the Door 76), discounting all of the cooking her mother

has done in the lab and in the kitchen, and which she has praised and aspired to replicate a

mere two chapters earlier. Much later in the series, when her granddaughter, Polly, is a

teenager, an adult Murry-O’Keefe family friend, Max, reveals to Polly: “Your Uncle Sandy

told me that your mother suffered as an adolescent because her own mother was beautiful

and successful in the world of science,” leaving out Meg’s hope of attaining her mother’s

skills in the kitchen (House Like a Lotus 82). In some ways, it seems as though the Murrys

feel they must downplay Dr. Kate’s facility as a food-sharer in order to allow her to excel in

the public sphere as a scientist; for her to excel in both the masculine-identified field of

science and the feminine-identified field of food-sharing is too difficult to conceive.

This conflict between success in the public and domestic spheres is indicative of a

problem Butler identifies with “the foundationalist frame in which feminism as an identity

politics has been articulated. The internal paradox of this foundationalism is that it presumes,

fixes, and constrains the very ‘subjects’ that it hopes to represent and liberate” (203). Within

the context of a male-female gender binary and of established feminist rhetorics, Dr. Kate is

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free to be a second-wave/liberal feminist Nobel-prize-winning bacteriologist or a third-

wave/cultural feminist 28 stay-at-home, food-sharing mother, but for her to be both is

“culturally unintelligible and impossible” (203). That the members of the Murry-O’Keefe

family feel that to be successful in the public sphere is anathema to being a nurturing, food-

sharing mother is also evident in that, also according to Max, Meg “held herself back”

academically to spare her daughter, Polly, her own suffering (House Like a Lotus 82); to be a

good mother, Meg feels she must sacrifice scientific accomplishment.

L’Engle also depicts a woman whose motherly and scientific accomplishments are a

nexus of conflict in the Murrys’ family friend, Dr. Louise Colubra. In the earlier books of the

Time Quintet, no mention is made of Dr. Louise’s family, but we learn in An Acceptable

Time that as a young woman, she was married and had a child, but that her young family was

in a train accident that only she survived; only after she lost her husband, her infant son, and

her second pregnancy as a result of the accident did Dr. Louise pursue scientific achievement

by entering medical school (176), even using, as we learn when we meet her brother, her

maiden name (14). The post-family Dr. Louise is, according to Dr. Kate, “a perfectly

adequate cook, but it’s not foremost on her mind” (103).

In the earlier books of the Time Quintet, in which there is no reflection on Dr.

Louise’s life before the loss of her family, her food-sharings are couched in her experience as

a medical doctor. In A Wind in the Door, Dr. Louise essentially prescribes Charles Wallace

28
By pairing the labels “cultural” and “third-wave” feminism in this way, I mean to situate cultural feminism as
one of the many feminisms that comprise the more broadly-framed third-wave feminist movement, an umbrella
title which can be applied to many branches of feminist thought that seek to broaden the goals of the feminist
movement beyond the narrow focus of public-sector equality between men and women sought by the second-
wave and/or liberal feminist movements. As defined by Jill Dolan, cultural feminism “proposes that there are,
and should be maintained, clear differences between men and women which might form the basis of separate
cultural spheres” and “seeks to reverse the gender hierarchy by theorizing female values as superior to male
values”; because of this focus on privileging “female values,” however, “[t]he oppressions wrought by gender
polarization constructed through dominant theories of sexual difference remain peculiarly unattacked in cultural
feminist thought” (5-6).

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hot chocolate, stepping in as his doctor to overrule Dr. Kate’s opinion as his mother that

Charles Wallace should go to bed. She makes the cocoa herself, from scratch “over a Bunsen

burner,” and they drink it in the lab (68-72). Over hot cocoa, Dr. Louise tells the children

about a pet snake she used to have, which she fed “cream-of-mushroom soup,” and which

“was a delightful companion in the evenings, affectionate and cuddly” (73). Taking into

account what we learn later about Dr. Louise, that she has lost her children, there is an

element of wistfulness in her wanting to mother the snake and wanting to give Charles

Wallace permission to stay up past his bedtime and have sweets. Like Dr. Kate, she has a

scientific nature and a food-sharing, maternal nature and if not fully reconciled, they are at

least both evident in her performance of self in the books.

Almost an inverse of Dr. Louise, Meg Murry is largely masculine-identified as a

teenager, and gives up her interest in mathematics to favor traditional, food-sharing

motherhood after the birth of her first daughter. In A Wrinkle in Time, during a bad day at

school, the teenage Meg “rough-house[s] a little to try to make herself feel better” at

lunchtime and beats up a boy who makes fun of Charles Wallace on the way home (Wrinkle

in Time 4); she is also very bright, particularly excelling at math (10, 42-4). When Dr. Kate

meets the teenage Calvin O’Keefe, who will later become Meg’s husband, for the first time,

she even tries to soften Meg’s masculine gender expression by conceding that “[s]he’s a little

one-sided” but that “[s]he still enjoys playing with her dolls’ house” (44); however, Meg’s

food-sharings during this phase of her life are minimal. She occasionally makes cocoa for

herself and her family (Wrinkle in Time 7-8), but most of her participation in meal-

preparation consists of activities that do not involve cooking, such as setting or clearing the

table (Wrinkle in Time 44; Wind in the Door 84), washing the dishes (Wind in the Door 40),

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or fetching ingredients so that others may cook (Wind in the Door 69). On one of the few

occasions when Meg feeds another character in the books that take place during her teen

years, she does so not by cooking and sharing a meal but by sustaining a dying creature,

metaphorically, with “her own life’s blood” (Wind in the Door 194).

Halfway through the Time Quintet, when Meg is a young adult, married to Calvin and

pregnant for the first time, L’Engle begins to depict her preparing food for others, though she

often does so at her mother’s urging. Preparing for Thanksgiving dinner in A Swiftly Tilting

Planet, Meg arranges the centerpiece while her mother does all the cooking (9), and

eventually makes the hard sauce that will top their dessert, but only after Dr. Kate asks

specifically (13-8). Later, and also at her mother’s request, Meg fixes food for a stray dog,

Ananda, that has found her way into the house (39). Now that Meg is about to have a child,

her mother seems to show some interest in educating her as a food-sharer, making her less

“one-sided” and more well-rounded in her expression of gender.

Although in A Swiftly Tilting Planet Meg seems on the cusp of performing

motherhood in a way that blends a newfound gift for food-sharing with the interest in

mathematics she has fostered since high school, it becomes clear in the three books about the

family she and Calvin start together that after she gives birth, in order to become a skilled,

food-sharing mother, Meg sacrifices some of her more traditionally-masculine gender

expressions. Meg’s shift in character is perhaps most evident in her changed name. In The

Arm of the Starfish, Dragons in the Waters, and A House Like a Lotus, L’Engle never refers

to Meg by her first name, and having married Calvin, her last name is now O’Keefe, no

longer Murry; she is a completely different person: Mrs. O’Keefe. In The Arm of the Starfish,

told in the third-person, but from the point of view of a visitor new to the O’Keefes’

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acquaintance, Adam Eddington, Meg is a traditional, stay-at-home mother: Adam first sees

her with a baby on her hip (114); she then serves lunch, enlisting her daughters’ help (123),

and the next day, she entertains Adam with coffee “while the doctor was busy at his desk”

and later “br[ings] him tea, but le[aves] him alone” when he is working on his own in the lab

(199-200). As Poly puts it in Dragons in the Waters, “Mother’s a whiz at math; Daddy says

she could get a doctorate with both hands tied behind her back, but she just laughs and says

she can’t be bothered, it’s only a piece of paper” (105). Meg chooses to give up her

aspirations to excel in the male-dominated field of mathematics in order to focus instead on

the more traditionally-feminine pursuits of food-sharing and motherhood.

That Meg has made a conscious sacrifice becomes evident in A House Like a Lotus,

when her now-teenage daughter, Polly, discusses her mother’s choice to be a stay-at-home

mother with a friend of her uncle’s, Max Horne. Max surprises Polly by telling her that Meg

is “restless,” from having “a fine brain, and not enough chance to use it” (81). When Polly

counters that her mother “helps Daddy a lot in the lab, does all the computer stuff,” Max

concedes that this is at least some mental exercise for her mother, but not enough because it

is “not her own thing,” going on to suggest that a lesser person would have abandoned her

family by now (82). Max further explains to Polly what she has learned from Meg’s brother

about her choice:

Your Uncle Sandy told me that your mother suffered as an adolescent because

her own mother was beautiful and successful in the world of science [. . .]

Your mother felt insufficient because of your grandmother, and she didn’t

want the same thing to happen to you, to make you feel you had to compete.

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 So she’s held herself back, and it’s beginning to tell. She will get to her own

work, eventually, but eventually no doubt seems a long time away. (82)

Presented with two sanctioned gender performances, the scientific researcher endorsed by

second-wave/liberal feminism or the food-sharing, stay-at-home mother favored by third-

wave/cultural feminism, Meg, already the mother of a daughter when it comes time to make

the choice, chooses the third-wave feminist path, privileging her mother-daughter

relationship above her public-sphere aspirations, because to hybridize her two sets of values,

to perform gender outside of the binary of masculine/public sphere versus feminine/domestic

sphere would be, as Butler puts it, “impossible” (203).

Meg’s mother reinforces the impossibility of a gender-performance that incorporates

excellence in the sciences and in food-sharing and motherhood when Polly asks her about her

mother’s choice, though Polly’s focus in her conversation with her grandmother is not on

Meg’s choice to stay home, but rather on her choice to have “so many kids” (Acceptable

Time 40). Dr. Kate at first seems to defend Meg’s choice, arguing, “If a woman is free to

choose a career, she’s also free to choose the care of a family as her primary vocation,” but

then takes this defense away from Meg, saying that while that might be why some women

choose to be stay-at-home mothers, she thinks Meg’s decision “was probably partly because

of me,” elaborating that Meg’s “estimation of herself has always been low” and affirming

Polly’s suspicion that her mother “was afraid she couldn’t compete” with her own mother,

Dr. Kate, in the public sphere (40). That is, the choice to focus primarily on one’s children is

as viable a life-choice as that to pursue success outside the domestic sphere, but in terms of a

specific case of a woman actually making that life-choice, it is invalid, motivated by low

self-esteem and fear. The result of what Butler might call the “constraining” working-mother

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versus stay-at-home-mother binary constructed by the “foundationalist framing” of liberal

and cultural feminisms is that the Murry women are constantly divided both within

themselves, having to decide between scientific and food-sharing expressions of self, and

among one another, second-guessing each other’s motivations for making choices they do

not understand.

For the men in the Murry-O’Keefe family, there is less conflict between association

with food and association with science. Dr. Alex Murry, the Murry patriarch, for example,

works out equations on the tablecloth during dinner (Wind in the Door 35, 37, 85), and

participates cooperatively in serving Thanksgiving dinner, carving the turkey while his wife

and children, male and female, all also engage in food-preparation or food-serving tasks

(Swiftly Tilting Planet 18). The reach of Dr. Alex’s food-sharing overtures is, however,

limited. In the context of the Thanksgiving dinner, he carves the meat, performing the

ceremonial duty traditionally associated with the patriarch. As an older man, Dr. Alex also

grows vegetables and even bakes bread, a contribution that does not place him in competition

with his wife’s cooking because “[b]read is something Kate can’t make on the Bunsen

burner” (Acceptable Time 33); furthermore, like his cooperation in the serving of

Thanksgiving dinner, Dr. Murry’s gardening and bread-baking are in service of his wife’s

food-sharing; she uses the raw materials he provides – vegetables and bread – to cook meals

for the family (101), as she has used vegetables grown by her twin sons, Sandy and Dennys,

earlier in the series (Wind in the Door 30-4).

Once Calvin O’Keefe becomes an adult and starts a family with Meg, he, like his

father-in-law, incorporates food-sharing into his life in the traditionally-male-dominated field

of science. Like Meg, Calvin has a somewhat inverted gender-expression, telling Dr. Kate

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Murry when they first meet, “I’m okay on anything to do with words, but I don’t do as well

with numbers” (Wrinkle in Time 42). Also like Meg, Calvin expresses gender along more

traditional lines as an adult, becoming a marine biologist and even overtly working to

gender-norm his children. While telling Adam about some of the danger associated with his

work, Calvin says, “It’s better right now for Poly to help my wife than to work with me here,

so I seldom allow her out her until after the younger ones are in bed” (Arm of the Starfish

129). Since any time Poly spends in her father’s lab will expose her to information that

Calvin’s enemies may hurt her to procure, going to the lab after her younger siblings are in

bed will not protect her from those enemies; it will, however, protect “the younger ones”

from the danger of seeing their older sister perform traditionally-masculine interest in

science, which must thus presumably be Calvin’s goal.

In other ways, however, the adult Calvin takes a leaf from his mother-in-law’s book.

Just as Sandy thinks of the smell of his mother’s lab and the Bunsen burner stew she cooks

there when he is homesick in Many Waters (48, 158), the smell of Calvin’s lab represents to

Adam “safety”: “It was home, it was comfort, and it was, for the moment, escape from

confusion” (Arm of the Starfish 125). Also like Dr. Kate, Calvin prepares food over his

Bunsen burner and shares it with the child-figures in his life, though he sticks to non-

nourishing cocoa and cookies, even encouraging Adam to help him prepare the snack (Arm

of the Starfish 195-6), leaving the more substantial stews to Meg and the kitchen. One of

Calvin’s most nourishing acts of food-sharing is achieved through science, when he goes to

South America “to investigate Dragonlake” in Dragons in the Waters, seeking to determine

whether “[i]ndustrial effluents containing mercury” have made the food supply unsafe (265).

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Thus, while Dr. Alex, Calvin, and other positive male characters 29 in L’Engle’s Murry-

O’Keefe books are at home to some extent with traditionally-feminine food-sharing, they

often find venues for this gender expression that are situated within extant, traditionally-

masculine frameworks.

As in Jennifer Murdley’s Toad and Coraline, many of the antagonist characters in

L’Engle’s works are portrayed in unproblematically heteronormative terms. In A Wrinkle in

Time, for example, the dystopian society created by IT on the planet Camazotz features

mothers who all call their children in to dinner at exactly the same time (103). IT’s

mouthpiece, the Man with the Red Eyes, likewise uses mealtimes as a site for the exercise of

control. He boasts that “[s]tarvation does work wonders” for inspiring obedience, and then

offers Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin “synthetic” food that is “far more nourishing” than

the natural foods humans eat on earth but only tastes good to those whose minds he can

control (127-30). In so doing, the Man with the Red Eyes is able to present himself to

Charles Wallace, however ironically, as “a kind, jolly old gentleman” who just wants “to

give them a turkey dinner” and ultimately to convince Charles Wallace to open his mind to

IT (130-1).

The hypnosis through which IT controls IT’s subjects’ minds operates through a

steady, pulsing rhythm, which the children and Dr. Alex Murry attempt to throw off with

29
Among the other notable, positively-portrayed male food-sharers in L’Engle’s Murry and O’Keefe stories are
Meg’s youngest brother, Charles Wallace Murry, who is very sensitive to the extent that he can read others’
thoughts (Wrinkle in Time 8-10; Swiftly Tilting Planet 22-3), a traditionally-feminine trait, and who cooks for
his mother and sister (Wrinkle in Time 8-15, 27), though at the Thanksgiving dinner depicted in A Swiftly Tilting
Planet, he, like the other men, is relegated to serving food at the table while the women do the cooking (18);
Captain Pieter Van Leyden and the Crew of the Orion in Dragons in the Waters, who represent a
nourishing/nurturing, all-male performed family group, and who are particularly adept at providing hospitality
to friends (35, 197-201), and tea and nourishing food to passengers on the ship in need of warmth and comfort
(15, 216-7); and Mr. Theo, also in Dragons in the Waters, whose very name, Theotocopoulos, genders him as
feminine by invoking the traditional icon of the mother of Christ, the Theotokos, and who is graciously
“attentive” to Aunt Leonis at dinner, when she is distraught over the disappearance of her ward (220).

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original, creative thought. Meg is at a disadvantage in this effort, however, as the

multiplication table, periodic chart, square roots, and even plodding nursery rhymes she

recites to stake a claim on her own mind are far more susceptible to IT’s rhythm than

Calvin’s recitation choice of the Gettysburg Address (122-3, 159-62). In the end, in order to

save Charles Wallace from the sinister nurturing of IT and the Man with the Red Eyes, Meg

must abandon the tactic of clinging to her academic knowledge and instead use her ability to

love to bring Charles Wallace back from IT’s control (207-8). In this moment, the seed is

planted for Meg’s adult rejection of life as a scholar of mathematics in favor of the vocation

of full-time mothering.

In order to discover the power of loving nurture so that she can return to Camazotz

and face IT, Meg must first spend time under the power of more positive nurturing from

Aunt Beast. When their first attempts to resist IT and the Man with the Red Eyes fail, Dr.

Alex must flee Camazotz with Calvin and Meg, leaving Charles Wallace behind and injuring

Meg both physically and spiritually as they pass through the Black Thing that shrouds the

dark planet of Camazotz (162-73, 178-9). The race of creatures on the new planet on which

they find themselves, who offer the three humans aid and healing, appear truly alien: eyeless,

covered in fur, and with four arms each that terminate in “tentacles” instead of hands (174,

179). Furthermore, the creatures have no concept of gender; they must confirm with Calvin

their use of a gendered word to describe Meg (179), and when they refer to themselves, they

slip fluidly among English words that cross gender lines.

The creature directly responsible for Meg’s care, with whom Meg forms a special

bond, tries out masculine, feminine, and gender-neutral titles for herself before settling on the

feminine “aunt”:

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 No, mother is a special, a one-name; and a father you have here. Not just

friend, nor teacher, nor brother, nor sister. What is acquaintance? What a

funny, hard word. Aunt. Maybe. Yes, perhaps that will do. And you think of

such odd words about me. Thing, and monster! Monster, what a horrid sort of

word. I really do not think I am a monster. Beast. That will do. Aunt Beast.

[author’s emphasis] (184)

Despite Aunt Beast’s strangeness, it is with this alien creature, genderless but having adopted

a feminine title in order to perform nurturing, that Meg develops the strength and ability to

love that enable her to save Charles Wallace. Aunt Beast feeds and dresses Meg like a baby

at first (179-83), but also encourages Meg to mature, urging Meg to sit at a table and eat with

her family as soon as she is strong enough (187); and although she offers to “go too, and

hold” Meg while she faces IT, Aunt Beast knows that the mission is one Meg must undertake

alone (196-7). It is such positive nurturing, within sensible limits and with the goal of helping

Meg grow into self-sufficiency, that Meg later practices with her own children, as when she

knows Polly is upset but “d[oesn’t] try to use a can opener” to push her to open up about her

problem (House Like a Lotus 268).

In contrast to IT and the Man with the Red Eyes, whose rigidly controlling

relationship with food and with people is tied to their rigid and rhythmic application of the

formulae of Meg’s beloved math and science, Aunt Beast and the other creatures like her

present Meg with a model of positive nurturing that is freer and more loving, but also not

based on any comfortable rules. Because they are blind, Aunt Beast explains that the

creatures of her race are completely intuitive: “We do not know what things look like [. . .]

we know what things are like” (author’s emphasis) (Wrinkle in Time 181). While on one

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hand, this sounds like a positive and liberating way of interacting with the world, for

someone like Meg who is so comfortable with the rules of science, it must represent an

intimidating break with the practice of seeking empirical evidence. Nonetheless, as the Man

with the Red Eyes presents Meg with a negative model of controlling nurture associated with

rules and formulae, so does Aunt Beast present a positive model of nurturing that requires the

abandonment of mathematical rigidity in favor of intuitive, freely-offered love, a model Meg

apparently takes to heart as she grows into adulthood, starts her own family, and chooses not

to pursue a doctorate in mathematics.

Other villains of the Time Quintet also celebrate heteronormativity, and rule-based

math and science, while opposing the power of love. In A Wind in the Door, the Echthroi

who threaten to extinguish the planet earth and are defeated by Meg’s ability to love those

who are unlovable (203), when they masquerade as Charles Wallace’s school principle,

concede that “Charles Wallace’s interests are different from those of the usual first-grader”

because “he has been taught by an eminent physicist father” (106), with no mention of his

eminent bacteriologist mother, whose double-Ph.D. is the subject of much discussion earlier

in the book, and whose work Charles Wallace has drawn negative attention to himself by

discussing at school (33, 13-6). Like IT, the Echthroi think in heteronormative terms, and so

Dr. Kate’s public-sphere accomplishments escape their notice.

The antagonists of Many Waters likewise express gender along more heteronormative

lines than their positively-portrayed counterparts. Noah’s family features characters who

embody Butler’s “proliferation” of gender expressions (203), like Noah’s father, Grandfather

Lamech, who keeps a fruit and vegetable garden (86-7, 131-3), preserves food for the winter

(132-3), and cooks nourishing stews that make Sandy homesick for his mother’s cooking (84,

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156-8). The nephilim and their wives, however, adhere to gender norms; Tiglah, for example,

brings Sandy food and attempts to seduce him (228-32), and seeks self-actualization as a

woman through having a baby with the Nephil Rofocale (204).

Perhaps the most heteronormative of L’Engle’s villains are the Cutters in The Arm of

the Starfish; possibly because they are human villains in a realistically-portrayed world,

rather than science fiction creatures or characters from a time long past, their

heteronormative behaviors are particularly evident to a real-world audience. Kali Cutter, the

first member of the family that Adam meets, is the teenage daughter of the book’s primary

antagonist, business tycoon Typhon Cutter, a single father for whom she functions not so

much as a daughter, but almost as a trophy wife, a role she relishes, and for which she

possesses a self-professed “flair” (8):

Because Kali had no mother she acted as her father’s hostess for all his

entertaining. “And we do lots and lots of it,” she said. “Daddy’s a sort of

unofficial cultural attaché, only lots more so. I mean he’s ever so much more

important. Good public relations and stuff. Fine for business, and fun, too.”

(8)

When the audience gets to see Kali as her father’s hostess for the first time, she performs the

role with “quick and loving obedience” (63). Later, when Typhon Cutter needs Adam’s

allegiance, he deploys Kali to earn it, arranging a dinner date between the two to which he

and a henchman tag along. During this date, he then excludes Kali from Adam’s company,

using the heteronormative custom of the men “lingering over the port for a brief respite after

dinner” to leave Kali, the only woman in the group, alone; she expresses her feelings of

exclusion with heavily-feminine gender performance, leaving the company with “a stricken

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look” and “reluctant and pouting” (180). Like the witch in Jennifer Murdley’s Toad and the

other mother in Coraline, the Cutters attempt to use the trappings of traditional,

heteronormative family life to draw in their victims, and then to extract from them the

materials, information, or allegiance they seek.

L’Engle replicates the daughter-as-trophy-wife relationship in A House Like a Lotus,

though because the book targets a more young adult readership, the relationships are more

complex and difficult to classify as protagonist or antagonist than those in the earlier books.

Like Kali Cutter, the Murrys’ family friend Max Horne is, as a teenage girl, the daughter of a

widowed business tycoon who did his “business deals” in the dining room “over port” (121 -

4). As young adults, Max and her sister, again like Kali, “became Papa’s hostesses. After

Mama died, he got a good housekeeper, but M.A. and I sat with him in the dining room every

night, were with him when he entertained his business guests. I think it was expected that

eventually we would marry from the guest list” (124). As in the business world depicted in

The Arm of the Starfish, the business world in which the teenage Max Horne finds herself is

one in which the heteronormative performance of the trophy wife hosting a dinner party is

essential to dealing, and one in which the young adult daughter is a pawn to help business go

smoothly by charming difficult clients.

Gender performance in A House Like a Lotus is more complex than in The Arm of the

Starfish though, as two of the primary characters, Max and her partner Ursula, are a lesbian

couple who slip fluidly between masculine and feminine gender expressions in a way

L’Engle’s heterosexual female characters seem less able to do. In the home, Max and Ursula

fall into a fairly heteronormative dynamic in which Max, symbolized in part through her

adoption of a masculine nickname, performs her father, while Ursula plays a more feminine,

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food-sharing role, which Polly consistently conceives not as “wife,” but as “housekeeper.”

This may perhaps relate to Ursula’s role outside the home in the male-dominated field of

neurosurgery (31); for Polly, a holder of the Murry-O’Keefe family mindset that one cannot

excel in both the public and domestic spheres, it may be necessary to couch Ursula’s

domestic accomplishments in the framework of commerce. When Polly first sees Ursula, she

believes her to be a servant, though she later discovers this is a game Max and Ursula play

(31). Later, when Ursula mentions her fondness for the kitchen in Max’s family home, Polly

as first-person narrator expresses incredulity: “At Beau Allaire it wasn’t always easy to

remember that Urs was at the top of her profession. She seemed to enjoy acting the

housekeeper” (64).

When she finally gets to know Ursula well enough that the rhetoric of commerce will

no longer do, Polly finds a new way to excuse her domestic virtue: as therapy for the stresses

of her demanding, traditionally-masculine, public-sphere job. One of Ursula’s primary modes

of food-sharing is baking bread, an activity depicted elsewhere in the series as more a

masculine avocation than a feminine vocation, and one that is medically indicated: just as

Ursula kneads bread as therapy for her mind (House Like a Lotus 121-4), Polly’s grandfather

does so as therapy for his arthritis (Acceptable Time 33). Finally, however, Polly learns to

understand that food-sharing and care-giving are as much a part of Ursula’s character as

excelling in the sciences, and that Ursula expresses gender through Butler’s “proliferation” of

performative acts, both traditionally-masculine and traditionally-feminine (203). When her

younger brother reflects that Ursula has made him re-think his notions of what lesbians are

like because she “[does] a good job. I mean, being a neurosurgeon is tough,” Poly finally

reconciles in her mind Ursula’s many performances of gender into a single character: “And

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Ursula managed it without playing God. She came home and baked bread. And took care of

Max” (House Like a Lotus 135).

Like her partner, Max performs gender through a proliferation of expressions. Her job

in the public sphere is more traditionally feminine: she is an artist (34-5). At home, however,

she identifies herself strongly with her father. She allows Ursula to play caregiver and

hostess while her primary mode of food-sharing is, as her father’s was, to serve alcohol (8,

87-8, 95-6). On a night when she has let her alcoholism get the better of her, leading to a

display of behavior that is ambiguous in the text, but which presumably culminates in her

attempting to sexually abuse Polly, Max even compares herself to her father: “’Pa!’ she

screamed out, staggering toward me, carrying the statue. ‘Damn you! Damn you! I’m just

like you, damn you!’” (185-7).30 This moment is interesting in terms of Max’s gender

expression in that it makes clear that Max perceives her performance of self to be masculine

and fatherly; she is “just like” her father.

Max’s self-description casts in an interesting light Max’s mentorship of Polly. Ursula

refers to Polly as a “Christmas present to Max” (159), and “the child [Max] couldn’t have”

(150), referring to Max’s daughter, who died in infancy (126, 173). Max, however, clarifies

through her self-description that she sees herself as a father-figure, thus constructing her

mentor-relationship with Polly as a father-daughter relationship and setting up Ursula as a

mother-surrogate. By the conclusion of the events told in flashback in A House Like a Lotus,

Polly seems to accept the possibility and the value of the complexity of gender expression

30
In terms of Max’s sexuality, this moment is problematic because it creates a scenario in which one of only
two gay characters in all of the Murry-O’Keefe stories is a sexual predator, and furthermore suggests that she
has become a lesbian and a predator because she was sexually abused by her father. Furthermore, it tarnishes
the depiction of Ursula, L’Engle’s only other gay character, whose response to learning of the abuse is to cover
it up by giving Polly a sleep aid against her will so that she has to sleep in the house and no one will have to
wonder why she has gone home early (205).

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within Max and Ursula’s household. Furthermore, she seems able to apply this complexity to

other, heterosexual households; at the start of the book, the narrator Polly, speaking from a

place of wisdom and of having come to terms with the events she is about to narrate,

explains, “My parents are both scientists” (3). The wise Polly who has learned from her

experiences with Max and Ursula is able to apply to her mother the title of scientist without

needing to reconcile this title with her mother’s primary life as a food-sharing mother of

seven. Polly has learned from her relationship with Max and Ursula to understand the

“proliferation” of gender expressions Butler seeks.

Conclusion

In the works under consideration in this chapter, the complex and distinct gender

expressions of positively-portrayed characters, combined with the more two-dimensional and

heteronormative performances of antagonists, serve to convey the message to a child

audience that gender outside of a masculine-feminine binary is both intelligible and possible.

For Jennifer Murdley, that possibility is the chance to be a food-sharer and a fairy tale hero,

if never a beautiful princess; for Coraline, it is the ability to understand her parents as people

outside of their roles in her own life; and for the Murry-O’Keefes, it is, through Polly, the

chance to reconcile unproblematically and without shame their love of food with their love of

the sciences. The characters in these works, mostly female, find the freedom to perform

feminine gender while also pursuing interests in the traditionally-male-dominated public

sphere; the next chapter will explore the fate of male characters whose interests and abilities

lie in the traditionally-female-dominated domestic sphere: those characters Fine would term

“sissy boys” (221).

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 CHAPTER 5: Kick-ass Girls and Sissy Boys

In her introduction to Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine quotes eighteenth-century

proto-feminist Mary Astell’s sardonic response to the problem “that women who made great

achievements in male domains were said by men to have ‘acted above their Sex. By which

one must suppose they wou’d have their Readers understand, That they were not Women

who did those Great Actions, but that they were Men in Petticoats!’” (qtd. Fine xix-xx).

Though presumably not what she intended, Astell provides a fairly effective picture of how

queer gender expression works; a woman who excels in a public-sphere occupation, in 1705

or 2012, can be said to be performing traditionally-masculine gender. What has changed is

the cultural response to such gender performance by women. More and more, parents seek to

see their daughters excel in traditionally-male-dominated fields and work to provide

childhood settings that foster excellence in these areas. In her chapter entitled “Parenting

with a Half-changed Mind,” Fine cites a study by Emily Kane in which she “found that these

parents ‘celebrated’ and even encouraged gender nonconformity in their young daughters. ‘I

don’t want her to just color and play with dolls, I want her to be athletic,’ one father said”

(203). According to the studies Fine draws together, many twenty-first-century parents are

happy to raise boys in petticoats.

What parents are less happy to do is to raise girls in pants. The same study by Emily

Kane found that although parents “mostly ‘accepted and often even celebrated’ activities they

thought would promote domestic skills, nurturance, and empathy in their sons,” they did so

with trepidation, ensuring that “the gender border was being carefully negotiated and

patrolled” (Fine 203). Fine goes on to quote Kane’s finding that “frequently parents

indicated that they took action to craft an appropriate gender performance with and for their
preschool-aged sons, viewing masculinity as something they needed to work on to

accomplish” (qtd. Fine 203). Fine sums up, “Cross-gender behavior is seen as less acceptable

in boys than it is in girls: unlike the term ‘tomboy’ there is nothing positive implied by its

male counterpart, the ‘sissy’” (203).

The previous chapter explored works in which positively-portrayed characters, most

of them female, express gender in complex ways, focusing in particular on the primary

mother-characters in Madeleine L’Engle’s books about the Murry and O’Keefe families and

how their gender expressions are “constrained” by “the foundationalist frame in which

feminism” is so often situated (Butler 203), so that while they perform traditionally-feminine,

motherly food-sharing and traditionally-masculine excellence in math and science, they feel

ambivalence about the possibility of one woman performing both gender expressions. This

chapter will examine Bruce Coville’s Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher and Philip

Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, focusing on a group in some ways even more

constrained by preconceived notions of what gender expression should look like: what Fine

and others call “sissy boys” (221).

That there is discomfort surrounding cross-gender behavior in male characters as well

as in real-world boys is evident in social sciences studies of gender stereotyping in children’s

books. Fine notes studies by Diane Turner Bowker and by Amanda Diekman and Sarah

Murnern which both find that while girls represented in picture books are taking modest

strides in “the bucking of gender stereotypes,” as Fine puts it, “it is easier to find an

adventurous girl than a sissy boy” (220-1). The Diekman and Murnern study finds that works

are considered “nonsexist” when girls in the books “tak[e] up masculine traits, roles, and

leisure activities,” but that “these nonsexist books were no more likely than the sexist ones to

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portray males as femininely tender and compassionate, in domestic servitude, or contentedly

engaged with girlish activities or toys” (221). By seeking to define what, exactly, social

sciences critics of children’s books mean when they declare works “nonsexist,” Diekman and

Murnern are in a sense continuing the work begun by Roger Clark, Heidi Kulkin, and Liam

Clancy when they first expressed their concern about picture book studies like the 1972 study

by Lenore Weitzman and colleagues discussed elsewhere in this project. Both the Diekman

and Murnern study and the Clark, Kulkin, and Clancy article highlight the problem of

championing a single, often-unarticulated set of gender-expressive acts as the standard to

which all characters should perform – not only regardless of biological sex, but furthermore

without regard for the value of diversity in performances of self.

In Staging Masculinities, Michael Mangan articulates what these so often unspoken

traditionally-masculine traits and activities sought after in male and female characters might

be; he reprints a list of such characteristics compiled by Ian M. Harris in 1995, which

includes the long-established qualities Clyde Franklin attributes to “the classical man” and

adds to the list newer “modern expectations” Harris has identified (qtd. Mangan 207 -8). The

fifteen traits of the “classical man” fall roughly into four categories: he is sexually and

athletically “aggressive,” he is competitive to the point of ignoring pain and exhaustion, he is

hard-working with the goal of becoming financially secure (preferably well-off), and he is

powerful and in control (207-8). One of Franklin’s traits sums up the other fourteen rather

neatly: the “classical man” is a “Superman”; he is “perfect” and unwilling to “admit

mistakes” (208). While Harris’s “modern expectations” complicate the list by adding traits

earlier generations might have considered more feminine, such as showing kindness to

animals and providing “Nurture” (207), they do so problematically at best. As Mangan notes,

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“the list seems to contradict itself at several points” (209). Though Mangan’s example is of

the “modern expectation” that a man be a “Faithful Husband” in contrast with the expectation

that the “classical man” be a “Playboy” (209), not all of the contradictions take the form of

new traits challenging the old; two of Harris’s “modern expectations” are in direct opposition

to one another: that a man be a “Rebel” and that he abide by “The Law,” including

specifically that he not “question authority” (208). While the traits of the “classical man”

have become fairly set, the “modern expectations” carry with them a great deal of

ambivalence.

It is perhaps this ambivalence about what exactly defines a manly man, and thus by

contrast a “sissy boy” that occasions the relative silence of scholars on many such characters

in contemporary children’s books. Whatever the reason, scholars do not focus as much

attention on works featuring such characters; while it is not at all difficult to find scholarship

of works by Coville and Pullman, finding criticism focusing on this particular novel by

Coville or on the character of Will Parry within the His Dark Materials trilogy is a much

greater feat, and yet these works depict interesting cross-gender behavior that should be of

great interest to those who, like Butler, seek a “proliferation” of models of gender expression

(203). Bruce Coville’s Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher features a male protagonist,

Jeremy, whose decision to mother a baby dragon sets him apart from his male best friend and

throws him into the company of a female classmate with whom he has more in common,

while Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy features two heroes, Lyra Belacqua and

Will Parry, whose gender performances are transposed to their biological sexes and whose

complex and interesting gender expressions unfold over the course three highly-acclaimed

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novels. In each of these works, male characters perform traditionally-feminine gender

expression through food-sharing and other motherly behaviors.

Coville’s Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher

Much of the available criticism of Coville’s work is of his science fiction books for

juvenile readers, such as My Teacher Is an Alien and its sequels. Finding scholarship of

Coville’s fantasy works is unfortunately a much more difficult task, though the messages and

gender-play in books such as the Magic Shop series are interesting and merit critical

attention. In Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher in particular, Coville celebrates the

traditionally-feminine values of food-sharing and nurture through characters both

biologically male and biologically female, privileging in the process a friendship between a

male and female middle-school-age pair over their friendships with classmates of their own

sexes with whom they have fewer common interests.

As in Jennifer Murdley’s Toad, another of the Magic Shop Books,31 the primary

parent figures in Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher express some crossed gender in their

parenting behaviors. Jeremy’s father is at home during the day, where he works in a caring

profession, running a veterinary practice from the barn on the property, while Mrs. Thatcher,

like Mrs. Murdley, works outside the home (13-4). Unlike Mrs. Murdley, however, Mrs.

Thatcher does most of the cooking for her husband and son, sending Jeremy off to school

with a cooked breakfast in one scene and putting him to bed with “warm milk” in another

(65, 125). Mrs. Thatcher takes great pains to make it clear that her food-sharing nature does

not make her passive, though; when Dr. Thatcher teases Jeremy about a girl friend he has

made while she is cooking dinner, she notes that the elaborate meal she is making is for one
31
For a discussion of the parents and other characters in Jennifer Murdley’s Toad, see the previous chapter.

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of Dr. Thatcher’s business contacts and insists that he help, directing him to “cut some

rhubarb” (79). Both of Jeremy’s parents have primary, public-sphere employment, and both

contribute to domestic tasks for the family, blending traditionally-masculine and

traditionally-feminine roles in their performance of family.

In his own performance of self, Jeremy takes after his father, especially when it

comes to his father’s traditionally-feminine gender expressions. Like his father, Jeremy

enjoys caring for animals, and has several pets for which he has chosen to take responsibility

even before he purchases a dragon’s egg from Mr. Elives (12-5). Jeremy’s interest in caring

for animals is even more femininely-expressed than his father’s in some ways. While Dr.

Thatcher cares for animals in a for-profit veterinary practice, thus fulfilling several of

Franklin’s characteristics of the “classical man,” who is a hard-working breadwinner, judged

by others based on how much money he makes (Mangan 207-8), Jeremy’s choice to care for

animals is a hobby, not a career. In fact, it seems unlikely that Jeremy would follow his

father’s career path since he is “bad at math” (Coville 37), another traditionally-feminine trait

(Fine 27), and one not likely to help Jeremy excel in veterinary school.

Without the mitigating factor of earned income, caring for animals becomes a

distinctly feminine-aligned avocation. Although Harris includes “Nature Lover,” defined in

part as demonstrating “Respectful treatment of plants and animals,” among his nine “modern

expectations” of masculinity (qtd. Mangan 208), this designation is somewhat problematic.

In exploring whether Harris intends his “modern expectations” to constitute “an evolutionary

development from an old-fashioned model of masculinity, which is being superseded by a

more modern (and domesticated) one” (Mangan 209), Mangan demonstrates in his own word

choice the scant likelihood that this is the case. By calling the “modern” masculinity

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“domesticated,” rather than “domestic,” Mangan is using not the language of the feminine

sphere, but rather the language of taming a pet, to describe the “evolutionary development”

of masculinity. Even as he tries to highlight a new dimension of socially-sanctioned

masculinity, by calling such a performance of manhood “domesticated,” Mangan condemns

the move by disdainfully comparing this “modern” man to a lapdog. By using the language

of household pets in his condemnation, Mangan specifically returns to his readers’ minds that

modern expectation of the “Nature Lover” who is kind to animals, linking in his readers’

minds those animals the man is kind to and the man himself as less-than-human.

Emily Gaarder reinforces the notion that caring for animals, particularly in a not-for-

profit capacity, remains the province of women in her article “Where the Boys Aren’t: The

Predominance of Women in Animal Rights Activism,” in which she cites a number of studies

to establish clearly that women make up a substantial majority of animal rights activists (55),

and then goes on to explore how women animal rights activists view their gender in relation

to their activism. One possible explanation Gaarder cites for women’s increased tendency to

become involved in animal activism is what Sarah Ruddick calls “maternal thinking,” the

argument “that women’s disproportionate role in childrearing makes them more adverse to

violence than men, and more active in peace movements” (57), thus establishing the link

between care for animal welfare and other motherly behaviors. It is thus unsurprising that

Jeremy takes his traditionally-feminine interest in caring for animals so far as to purchase not

a pet dragon but a dragon’s egg which he then cares for until it hatches before beginning his

care of the baby dragon inside (12-29), making himself a mother, giving birth to his dragon,

much like Hagrid in the Harry Potter books.32

32
For a discussion of Hagrid as a mother-figure to a baby dragon and other characters and creatures, see chapter
two of this project.

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 Once the dragon, whom Jeremy later names Tiamat, has been hatched, Jeremy must

continue his role as mother to a newborn; his “Care and Feeding” sheet for her even

reinforces this comparison, explaining of the dragon that, “[l]ike any infant, it must be cared

for if it is to survive” (33). In addition to feeding Tiamat “small gobbets of meat,” the

instructions tell Jeremy to “save the skin” when she sheds, “as well as the baby teeth,” as

though he is saving mementos for a baby book (34). Jeremy’s willingness to preserve

mementos of Tiamat’s infancy further serves to reinforce the argument of another study of

“maternal thinking” cited in Gaarder’s article, this one by Jasper and Jane Poulsen, which

posits that there are “symbolic similarities between children and animals” which leave

women, most often children’s “primary caregiver[s],” especially susceptible, in Poulsen and

Poulsen’s words, “to appeals portraying animals as innocent victims in need of protection”

(qtd. Gaarder 57). In his willingness to take into his care a creature both very vulnerable and

very dangerous because he accepts that it is “innocent” and needs his “protection,” Jeremy is

thinking like a mother.

Despite his maternal instincts toward Tiamat, Jeremy, like Jennifer Murdley, finds the

food he must feed her unappetizing. Tiamat eats chicken livers, “chunks of slippery purple

meat” which he thinks are “[g]ross,” and is “[t]otally disgusted” to feed to his animals (35).

Nonetheless, he feeds Tiamat her food of choice, because that is part of being a good food-

sharer. Jeremy’s food-sharing relationship transcends even the typical level of feeding a pet

an unappetizing food when he begins to feel his baby dragon’s hunger (41-8). As Tiamat gets

older and more able to fend for herself, though, the nature of Jeremy’s food-sharing

relationship with her changes. Once she is old enough to become a danger to his pets if she

gets hungry while he is at school (46-8), Jeremy begins essentially drugging her with milk,

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keeping her sleepy so that he can trust her alone (56). Then, when she is old enough to go out

hunting, her unappetizing diet finally takes its toll on him; he gets nauseous watching her

catch prey out in the woods (124). That Jeremy’s discomfort with Tiamat’s eating habits

reaches its peak when he must watch her kill and eat other animals reinforces his “maternal

thinking” that animals are to be protected.

One further interesting aspect of Jeremy’s relationship with Tiamat, and of what it

says about his performance of self, is that not everyone can see her. Jeremy, at least,

perceives the dragon to have some power over to whom she “reveal[s] herself,” and during

his time caring for her, the only people who see her are Jeremy, a female classmate, Mary

Lou Hutton (74-5), and possibly his father, who seems to almost see Tiamat, and gives

Jeremy antiseptic ointment that he seems to suspect is to be used for a dragon after Jeremy

confirms it works on “any animal” (author’s emphasis) (102-3). Thus, the characters who see

Tiamat all perform, at least some of the time, feminine gender, and apparently, this is how

Tiamat wants it. Mary Lou seems to attribute her ability to see Tiamat to her “love” of

dragons, an extension of one of the character traits she shares with Jeremy, a love of reading,

particularly fantasy literature (45-6). Jeremy himself regards this as a traditionally-feminine

trait, and one in which he takes pride, challenging Mary Lou when she comments on the

number of books he has checked out of the library: “’What do you think?’ he asked angrily.

‘Only girls like to read? I read lots’” (45).

Despite their shared interest in fantasy books and their unique, shared ability to see

Tiamat, Jeremy finds his kinship with Mary Lou threatening. Because he is physically small,

and because Mary Lou is known to have a crush on him, Jeremy has become the target of his

class’s bullies, Howard Morton and Freddy the Frog Killer (3-5). Jeremy attributes Mary

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Lou’s interest in him to his physical stature; she writes in a note that an unsympathetic

teacher makes public that she thinks he is “cute, even though [he is] the shortest boy in the

sixth grade” (3), but Jeremy reflects later that “being small made things cute” and that his

size is actually responsible for Mary Lou’s liking him (38). The stature that makes Jeremy

“cute” also marks him as feminine. In his discussion of J. M. Barrie’s original play version of

Peter Pan in Staging Masculinity, Mangan credits in part Barrie’s “physically diminutive”

body type for prompting Max Beerbohm to write, as reprinted by Andrew Birkin, “Mr.

Barrie has never grown up. He is still a child, absolutely. But some fairy once waved a wand

over him, and changed him from a dear little boy into a dear little girl” (qtd. Mangan 197).

Explicit in Beerbohm’s review is the suggestion that an interest in fantasy creatures, such as

Barrie’s fairies or Jeremy’s dragon, is feminizing, and by framing the Beerbohm quotation

with his description of “the physically diminutive Barrie” (197), Mangan adds the implicit

suggestion that Barrie’s size is also a factor in his feminine gender expression.

As long as Jeremy is professing dislike of Mary Lou, his male best friend, Specimen,

works to protect him; he helps Jeremy to hide from Mary Lou, Howard, and Freddy when

Mary Lou first announces her intention to kiss Jeremy (5). This position is tenuous, however;

if Jeremy begins to identify too strongly with a female acquaintance, he will fall victim to the

bullies. Even Jeremy’s decision to discuss books with Mary Lou is motivated by a hope that

the conversation will distract her from thoughts of kissing him, further marking him as a

target for bullying, and he is embarrassed to think they might have been seen together (45-6).

Jeremy’s embarrassment turns out to be prudent. When Specimen learns that his sister has

seen Jeremy walking home from the library with Mary Lou, he grows suspicious, and

Jeremy’s explanation that he “had [his] arms full and couldn’t run away” is ineffective, given

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that Specimen has to ask what Jeremy’s arms were full of, unable to draw the inference from

the fact that Jeremy is walking home from the library (62); not just being seen with Mary

Lou, but also carrying an armload of books, feminizes Jeremy for Specimen, who finds

Jeremy’s interest in books about dragons “slightly strange” (62).

Once Mary Lou has seen Tiamat, though, and once Tiamat gets big enough that

Jeremy has trouble caring for her alone, he has no choice but to enter more willingly into

friendship with Mary Lou, his only possible source of support. When she wants to do

something to help Jeremy to care for Tiamat, and also to cope with his coming loss when the

dragon has to return to her own world, Jeremy agrees to let Mary Lou help feed Tiamat, and

she “r[ides] her bike over with a gallon of milk every day that week,” until she runs out of

money (112-5). Once Jeremy and Mary Lou have an open friendship, Jeremy is ostracized by

the other boys in his class; Specimen continues to be friendly with Jeremy, but he is “the only

boy in the class who w[ill] still walk with Jeremy” (115). In order to give Tiamat the care she

needs, Jeremy must separate himself from the other boys in his class and instead ground his

traditionally-feminine caregiving instincts in friendship with a girl. Although he and

Specimen remain friends, this process causes them to grow apart; when Jeremy learns that

his art teacher, whom he had always thought hated him, admires his talent and only regrets

his lack of discipline, Jeremy does not want to tell Specimen because “lately he hadn’t felt

like talking to Spess so much” (120); in expressing traditionally-feminine, caregiving gender,

Jeremy has lost his connection to his male best friend.

Like Jennifer Murdley’s Toad, Coville presents in Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher

a primer in transgressive gender behavior which uses care for an animal as a vehicle for

exploration of traditionally-masculine and traditionally-feminine gender expectations. As

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Jeremy’s caregiver relationship with Tiamat develops, he discovers also an interest in female

friendship, suggesting that he is on some level aware of the feminizing influence of his love

of animals on his personality. Although he loses the friendship of some of the boys in his

class, Jeremy ultimately gains a new and more fulfilling friendship with Mary Lou Hutton,

and also retains his friendship with Specimen, though it changes in nature. Coville depicts in

Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher a pre-teen boy whose comfort with his non-traditional

gender expression enables him to develop fulfilling friendships and pursue his interests in a

safe environment.

Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy

Like Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher, Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy

focuses on a friendship between an adolescent boy and girl, grounded in food-sharing and

nurturing. The Golden Compass and the other books in the trilogy have been widely praised

in feminist circles for their portrayal of Lyra Belacqua, an orphaned girl who is very much a

masculine-type fantasy hero. Bitch magazine included The Golden Compass in both versions

of its infamous33 2011 list of “100 Young Adult Books for the Feminist Reader,” a selection

of titles the compilers praise for their “kick-ass teens and inspiring feminist themes”

(McAllister). A member of the Bitch editorial staff, Katie Presley, goes on to praise The

Golden Compass and the rest of Pullman’s trilogy because “Lyra, the main character in the

trilogy, is clever, witty, rebellious, and she more than holds her own with much older, scarier

33
The controversy over the list, most of which plays out in the comments section of the web log entry providing
access to the list, arose from the removal of three titles, Tender Morsels, Sisters Red, and Living Dead Girl, in
response to online comments that those titles might be “triggering” or promote “rape culture,” inspiring a heated
argument about how one defines “triggering”; whether any depiction of victim-blaming behavior, however
negative or naïve the character professing those beliefs is in the larger context of the story, constitutes a
promotion of “rape culture”; and whether removal from a list of recommendations constitutes censorship. The
Golden Compass was not implicated in this debate.

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characters.” By calling Lyra “clever” and “rebellious,” Presley invokes two of Harris’s

“modern expectations” of masculinity, “Scholar” and “Rebel” (208), and in so doing,

underscores Lyra’s role as a masculine-type fantasy hero in Pullman’s series. Lyra is not,

however, the only hero of the trilogy; certainly, Lyra is the central character in The Golden

Compass, as Will Parry has not yet been introduced, but in the rest of the series, she shares

the stage with Will, as much a nurturing, sensitive boy as Lyra is a “rebellious,” “kick-ass”

girl.

That no mention is made of Will in the Bitch write-up certainly owes, at least in part,

to whom they perceive their audience to be; teen girl readers need strong teen girl role-

models. Will is also given short shrift in other writing about the series, however. For

example, my Project Muse search for “His Dark Materials” yielded 109 results, while my

search for “His Dark Materials” AND “Will Parry” yielded only three. Of those three, only

one, “Reconfiguring Nurture in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials” by Amelia A.

Rutledge examined Will’s role in the story at any length. In reviews of the Nicholas Wright

stage adaptation of the trilogy, Lyra is consistently presented as the main character, while

Will is described as her “trusty companion” (Haywood), or her “beloved” (Wolf), never as a

central character in his own right. That critics shy away from discussing Will’s centrality to

the story stems, I would argue, from discomfort inspired by his “sissy boy” gender

expression that Lyra’s “boy in petticoats” persona no longer evokes.

Despite the inclination of critics to shy away from Will’s tendency toward more

feminine behavior, Rutledge touches on the role of adult male characters as nurturers in her

article “Reconfiguring Nurture in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials,” which opens with a

quotation from one of Lyra’s adult, male companions: “the aeronaut Lee Scoresby describes

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Lyra Belacqua’s plight to the assembled witches in his customary laconic style: ‘that little

girl has had bad luck with her true parents, and maybe I can make it up to her. Someone has

to do it, and I’m willing’” (119); Rutledge goes on to discuss Scoresby as one of several adult

characters in the trilogy to offer nurturing to Lyra and Will, both of whose parents have

failed them. In addition to their nurture-relationships with adults they encounter, Lyra and

Will, who are on their own for portions of their quest, develop a nurture-sharing relationship

with each other.

Like Lee Scoresby, Will is a male nurturer, but while Lee Scoresby, an “Adventurer”

and a “Warrior,” exhibits other traits that identify him as Franklin’s “classical male”

(Mangan 207-8), Will expresses gender in ways more unusual for an adolescent boy. As The

Subtle Knife, the book that introduces Will as a character, opens, Will must run away, and

brings his mother to be cared for by his former piano teacher, Mrs. Cooper, leading her to

Mrs. Cooper’s house by the hand, while she follows, trusting him implicitly like a small

child. Will then offers “some packets of food, enough to last, I should think,” to feed his

mother (1-2). Mrs. Cooper’s clear perception is that Will, not his mother, is the adult in their

family, and “was in charge of this business, whatever it was” (4).

As Will’s story unfolds, it becomes clear that his mother is mentally ill, likely

schizophrenic; Will has been serving as his mother’s caregiver for some time, after first

realizing that his mother is ill while they are in the supermarket (8-9), a place where she

should be buying food to provide nurture for him, but where instead he learns that he must

nurture her. Once he has discovered that his mother is ill, Will keeps up the pretense she

originally created to protect him that her paranoid compulsions are part of a game, so that she

will not have to worry about him, turning the tables so that the game now protects her (9).

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Will also learns from his mother how to do household chores when she is lucid so that he can

do them when she is not (9-11). As the child of a single, mentally ill mother, Will has taken

on responsibility for her care, and in so doing, has begun to perform gender in a way very

much informed by his role as Mrs. Parry’s mother-figure.

Like Jeremy Thatcher, Will also expresses feminine, motherly tendencies by caring

for animals. He rescues a cat from the children in Ci’gazze who are torturing it, feeding it

condensed milk (109-111). Later, it becomes clear that Will’s care for the cat is a direct

extension of the motherly behavior he expresses toward Mrs. Parry, a demonstration of the

tendency identified by Poulsen and Poulsen of “maternal think[ers]” to perceive “symbolic

similarities between children and animals” (Gaarder 57), though in this case, the child in

Will’s care is his own, ill mother. He tells Lyra that the children torturing the cat had

reminded him of a group of boys who assaulted his mother once when she went out alone

during a period of dementia, explaining that he protected her by hurting the “leader” of the

boys badly enough that he knew that if there was any more trouble, “I’d kill them another

time. Not just hurt them” (261-2). In his maternal drive to care for Mrs. Parry, Will performs

traditional femininity through his food-sharing and housecleaning, but also performs a more

aggressive kind of caregiving, which, though some might call it masculine, is very similar to

the kind of mothering Mrs. Weasley displays in Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows when

she kills Bellatrix Lestrange to protect her daughter (735-6).34

Even while he is on his quest through the parallel worlds with Lyra, Will continues to

show concern for his mother, asking Lyra to use the alethiometer to make sure she is all right

(Subtle Knife 226). Although Will is unable to understand it, his inverted relationship with

his mother has colored the way he sees the world; trying to articulate his feelings about
34
For more discussion of Mrs. Weasley’s gender expression in this moment, see chapter three of this project.

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finding his father in one of the parallel worlds through which he travels with Lyra, Will does

not understand that “he long[s] for his father as a lost child yearns for home [. . .] because

home [is] the place he ke[eps]safe for his mother, not the place others ke[ep] safe for him”

(307). Having taken on the responsibilities of a mother to care for Mrs. Parry, Will is a lost

child who does not know he is a lost child.

Although his feminine traits endear him to others, like Mrs. Cooper who “c[an’t] say

no” to his request that she care for his mother when she sees the “trust” with which his

mother looks at him and the “love and reassurance” with which he smiles back (3), Will’s

performance of adulthood hampers him in his journey. He performs adult motherhood by

rote35 without realizing how much he needs a mother, and when the realization does hit, it

creates for him an almost-insurmountable obstacle. When he is trying to use the subtle knife

to cut a door between dimensions and is distracted by thoughts of his mother, the knife

breaks (Amber Spyglass 153-4, 163). Will’s care for his mother is so great that at the

conclusion of his adventures, after he has had the experience of being a young adult on his

own without the responsibility of caring for a mentally ill parent, he resolves to go home to

his Oxford and take care of his mother (460-461); however, he is spared this vocation by

Mary Malone, a research scientist and former nun who has aided the children on their

journey, and who helps Will get services for his mother and invites him to live with her until

he grows up (504, 510-511). Although Will is willing to take on adult, motherly

responsibility, he is not yet ready; he needs help, and it is thus fortunate that during his

35
The rote nature of Will’s performance of motherhood brings to mind Wendy Darling’s performance of
motherhood in Peter Pan, which is likewise dangerous. Her strict adherence to the rule that the lost boys not
swim for “half an hour after the midday meal,” for example, nearly gets the whole group killed by pirates
because she would rather follow her rule than alert the boys to impending danger (117).

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journey, he is able to impart some of his motherly wisdom to Lyra, who reciprocates

motherly nurture with him.

For her part, before having met will, Lyra has already had a set of experiences that

have taught her to expect food-sharing and nurturing from the men and boys in her life, and

to prefer lessons in food-sharing to come from men rather than from women. Lyra’s

“particular friend” in The Golden Compass is Roger, “the kitchen boy” (31), and the kitchen

servant the gyptians have assigned to watch over Lyra while she is at Oxford is also male,

Bernie Johansen, “the pastry cook” (110). That food-sharing is a cross-gendered occupation

for men even in Lyra’s parallel universe is evident in that Bernie Johansen, a food-sharing

male, is “one of those rare people whose dæmon was the same sex as himself” (110),

suggesting that his gender expression is aberrant. The gyptians seem in general to appeal to

Lyra as role-models, and she is also receptive to lessons in traditionally-feminine behaviors

from male gyptians who are not otherwise marked as transgressive in their gender

expressions. She receives sewing lessons from Jerry the seaman, which she “scorned” when

Mrs. Lonsdale tried to teach her at Jordan College, and helps the male cook on the gyptian

ship “in mixing plum duff” (145-6). By the time she meets the aeronaut Lee Scoresby in a

café in Trollesund and sees him roast seal meat (168-70, 179), Lyra is well-conditioned to

accept as typical such acts of nurture from an otherwise traditionally-masculine man.

Thus, when she meets Will Parry in The Subtle Knife, his food-sharing and other

nurturing overtures do not surprise Lyra, and she strives to emulate them. Just before he

meets Lyra, Will leaves money in the till of an abandoned café in Ci’gazze to pay for a

lemonade he takes, leaving the money already there untouched (Subtle Knife 16-7). He does

this again when he takes clean clothes from a store there for Lyra, explaining to her when he

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does so that “You’ve got to pay for things” (63). Later, when she must take food from a

vacant farmhouse as the group travels to the land of the dead, she leaves a coin and another

companion raises an eyebrow, to which she responds, echoing Will’s words, “You should

always pay for what you take” (Amber Spyglass 244).

Will’s lessons to Lyra extend beyond basic honesty in procuring food to food-

preparation and hygiene. When he first meets Lyra, Will makes her an omelet and shows her

how to open cans of beans and soda, ordering her around the kitchen like his child and

making her wash the dishes after supper (Subtle Knife 21-6). Later, having seen Will cook an

omelet once, Lyra tries for herself “and twenty minutes later she s[its] down at a table on the

pavement and [eats] the blackened, gritty thing with great pride” (56). Will also insists that

Lyra bathe before he takes her into his world, unintimidated by the aggressive animal forms

her dæmon, Pantalaimon, uses to try to get him to back down (62). After these lessons in

feminine food-preparation and hygiene, Lyra seems to feel the need to assert the femininity

she already possesses; when they go to the abandoned store to get her some clean clothes, she

refuses to believe Will that girls in some worlds wear pants and insists on a skirt (63).

Lyra is proud of her early attempts at cooking and happy to learn domestic skills from

Will, rudimentary though they may be, but she eventually becomes so skilled at the kinds of

food-sharing Will teaches her that she surpasses him. After Will has been injured getting the

subtle knife and has gotten back her alethiometer from Sir Charles, an antagonist connected

to her mother, she takes charge and begins mothering Will: “You got to come and lie down in

a proper bed, else you’ll catch cold. We’ll go in that big house over there. There’s bound to

be beds and food and stuff. Come on, I’ll make a new bandage, I’ll put some coffee on to

cook, I’ll make some omelette [sic.], whatever you want, and we’ll sleep. . . . We’ll be safe”

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(206). Once Will is hurt and Lyra must take over, she assumes a set of the traits of the

stereotypical mother: cooking, healing, sending Will to bed, and fearing he will catch cold.

After this, Lyra becomes the primary food-sharer of the two for the remainder of their

journey. She makes coffee and toast for Will, draws him a bath, and finds him clean clothes

as she has promised (222-3), and then at another point in the story, again buys food and clean

clothes for Will and prepares their meal (265-7).

Finally, at the conclusion of the trilogy, Lyra has become both Will’s romantic

partner and his mother-surrogate. In the Adam and Eve story that is to save the multiverse,

Mary Malone, who has learned from the Dust that she “must play the serpent” by urging

Lyra to eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil (Subtle Knife 250), tells Lyra the story

of how she fell in love with a man when he fed her marzipan at a birthday party (443-4).

When Lyra wants to tell Will she loves him, she remembers Mary Malone’s story and does

so by feeding Will a piece of fruit, and in recognizing their love for one another, the two

achieve adult understanding (465-6). With that understanding, Lyra not only becomes Will’s

beloved, but also supplants his mother as object of his motherly worry. When Will needs to

break the subtle knife on purpose, he tries to do so by thinking of his mother and it no longer

works; he no longer needs to worry about her because he and Mary Malone are going to get

help for her. Instead, thinking of Lyra, whom he must leave behind in her own world, is the

distraction that breaks the knife (509-10).

In the His Dark Materials trilogy Pullman depicts in Will a young man whose

performances of traditionally-feminine traits are endearing, but whose premature

performance of adult nurturing is harmful. As Rutledge argues, through his quest with Lyra,

Will finds trustworthy adult surrogates whom he can allow to nurture him (120), but he also

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helps Lyra to learn how to share nurture, so that the two can form a reciprocal relationship in

which they share motherly, food-sharing performances of nurture. In so doing, Will prepares

both of them for adulthoods as people whose gender expressions are fluid, providing the

attention that needs to be provided.

Conclusion

Although Fine rightly bemoans that “it is easier to find an adventurous girl than a

sissy boy” in the corpus of children’s literature (221), some such characters do exist, and are

merely awaiting critical attention. That such characters seem often to remain unstudied may

be the result of the “unease” that Mangan argues so often accompanies salience of the

usually-unspoken criteria for masculinity that pervade our culture (209). As Mangan puts it,

“The very existence of this unspoken and largely unconscious ‘shopping list’ of gender

requirements gives rise to the ‘anxiety’ which is so much a commonplace of modern

discussions of masculinity” (209). Talking about the gender expression of male characters

forces the “shopping list” into the fore of the mind, increasing “anxiety” about masculinity.

To discuss the proliferation of gender expressions in which male characters engage can

potentially help to combat this anxiety in the long run, however; examining performances of

masculinity not found on the “shopping list” can eventually make it irrelevant, disposing of

the unspoken, often ambiguous standard of masculinity it represents.

The gender performances of Jeremy Thatcher and Will Parry, by working outside of

the criteria for masculinity to be found in Harris’s “shopping list,” can begin the process of

chipping away at these unspoken and yet imposing criteria for how to be masculine. In both

Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher and the His Dark Materials trilogy, adolescent boy

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characters who are inclined to share food and nurturing with others find themselves, through

this traditionally-feminine trait, developing important friendships with girls. For Jeremy, the

nature of this friendship is strictly platonic, while for Will, it becomes a romance, but in both

cases, it is the boy characters’ ability to nurture that provides the foundation from which the

relationship develops. Within the safety of a loving, able family, Jeremy is able to explore his

friendship with Mary Lou Hutton in a way relatively free from risks, and in which they each

nurture a pet, rather than finding themselves in a position where they need to act as surrogate

nurturers for each other. For Will and Lyra, the stakes are higher; Will must mother Lyra

until she has learned enough to first take care of herself, and then finally, take care of him

when the strain of being a nurturer for so long, so much before reaching adulthood exhausts

him. Both of these models present a framework for important, nurturing relationships that

require gender expression outside of the heteronormative frame to begin and to sustain.

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 CONCLUSION

In the introduction to Staging Masculinities, Michael Mangan writes, “[g]ender, then,

is always a relationship” (9); that is, gender is not just a codified set of behaviors that are the

product of one’s biological sex, but rather, it is an expression of how one interacts with

others. In Gender Outlaw, Bornstein elaborates that in hir view, the characteristics most

relevant to the understanding of the gender role are not “appearance, sexual orientation, and

methods of communication,” but rather “jobs, economic roles, chores, hobbies; in other

words, positions and actions specific to a given gender as defined by a culture” and not

pegged to biological sex or to sexual desire (26). In the works under consideration in this

project, the performative act of food-sharing informs the gender expressions of characters as

they interact with their families, biological, performed, or a blend of both. As an act which

informs characters’ roles in relationship with one another, then, food-sharing is a

performance of the gender of mother or nurturer, and a gendered performance of family.

This study has examined a total of thirty books by eight authors with the aim, in the

words of Roger Clark, Heidi Kulkin, and Liam Clancy, of “‘listening’ to” what performances

of food-sharing in the works say about gender-as-relationship (81), in order to develop a

framework for conceiving how, exactly, the act of food-sharing constructs and engenders

family. Furthermore, by “listening to” what characters “do,” to the ways in which their acts

of food-sharing inform gender expression in these texts, rather than “looking for” what

characters “are,” how the acts of food-sharing performed by certain characters perform

gender in a certain, preconceived way, it was my hope, in Judith Butler’s words, “to

redescribe those possibilities that already exist, but which exist within cultural domains

designated as culturally unintelligible and impossible” (author’s emphasis) (203). In all of the
works under consideration here, completed gestures of food-sharing indicate wholesome

relationships, but the shapes those relationships take fulfill Butler’s hope for a “proliferation”

of expressions (203); the chapters of this project are organized around works in which family

relationships take similar shapes, but even within each chapter, the general shape of the

performed family relationship presents a “proliferation” of nuances.

The texts discussed in chapter one, the May Bird Trilogy and The Neverending Story,

present characters in fantasy lands who use food-sharing to create nourishing family units

that teach child protagonists how to engage in healthy, nourishing relationships with their

biological families when they return home. For May, this means learning from the food-

sharers she meets in the Ever After how to interact more wholesomely with her female, adult,

biological mother in the mundane world. For Bastian Balthasar Bux, though, whose mother

has died, the lessons of the magical world are more complex, as he must learn not only how

to give and accept nurture within a wholesome relationship, but how to accept motherly

nurture from his one remaining parent, his father, rather than seeking it from women less

closely connected to him simply because they are women.

Building on the idea of found family in a fantasy land developed in chapter one,

chapter two explores texts, The Graveyard Book, Stardust, and the Harry Potter Series, in

which orphaned characters or others who have lost their biological families use food-sharing

to forge new kinship bonds with found communities to provide the nurture that their first

families cannot. These performed family communities must be long-term because there is no

family for the protagonist to which to return once he has learned the lessons of the

community. For Nobody Owens, the performed family of the graveyard nurtures him from

toddlerhood to his coming of age, while for Tristran Thorn, the found family of the

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Fellowship of the Castle is a nurturing family group to support him and receive support from

him in his adulthood. Harry Potter grows to understand Hogwarts – not only its staff, but on

some occasions the building itself – as a nurturing, performed family home not only for

himself but for all the “abandoned boys” who, like him, come to school from inadequate

family backgrounds.

Chapter three continues to focus on the Harry Potter books, now exploring the use of

food-sharing in the gender-performance of the child characters as they come of age, which

differs from the food-sharing and gender expression of the parent-generation; while initially,

when Harry, Ron, and Hermione find themselves on their own trying to function as adults,

they turn to the comfort of heteronormative gender categories, as they mature, they learn to

view each other as individuals whose offers of and need for nurturing transcend easy gender

expectations. In the as-yet-unfinished 13th Reality series, the outcome for the characters

remains to be seen, but the work’s narration seems to celebrate the feminine wisdom and

facility with food-related concerns of the books’ young adult female protagonist, Sofia, who

is frequently in a position to provide vital nourishment to her male counterparts who tend not

to value food enough to plan for it.

In chapter four, which considers Jennifer Murdley’s Toad, Coraline, and Madeleine

L’Engle’s books about the Murry and O’Keefe families, the focus is again on the dichotomy

between one group in which gender expression tends to, as Butler would put it, “proliferate”

(200), and another in which it follows stricter heteronormative lines, but the two groups in

conflict are positively-portrayed characters and antagonists, rather than parent- and child-

generations. In Jennifer Murdley’s Toad, positively-portrayed adult figures are almost what

Clark, Kulkin, and Clancy would call “reverse stereotypes” (75), feminine-aligned male

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characters and masculine-aligned female characters, while the antagonist is a traditionally-

feminine woman, all of whose feminine behaviors are abject. The positively portrayed adult

characters in Coraline also exhibit cross-gender behavior, while the antagonist is a

heteronormative woman and successful food-sharer, but in the end, the book’s child

protagonist chooses the imperfect, cross-gendered, but fully-individualized offers of food-

sharing from her biological parents to the other-mother’s more traditional, but also more two-

dimensional gestures. The Murry O’Keefe family stories offer a wide range of proliferative

gender expressions in their positively-portrayed adult characters, though female characters in

particular exhibit some ambivalence about whether it is possible for one woman to excel at

both positively-feminine and positively-masculine pursuits. As in Coville’s and Gaiman’s

books, the antagonists in L’Engle’s works tend to behave more predictably along gender

lines, but perhaps most interesting are Max and Ursula, lesbian characters neither entirely

protagonist nor entirely antagonist, whose gender expressions successfully marry the

traditionally-masculine and the traditionally-feminine in a way that allows Polly O’Keefe to

reconcile such traits in the adult women in her own family.

The last chapter builds on the discussion of the problematic gender expressions of the

Murry women in chapter four to consider characters Cordelia Fine and others would call

“sissy boys” (221): Jeremy Thatcher in Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher and Will Parry in

the His Dark Materials trilogy. In their interest in the care and nurture of animals and of the

other people in their lives, Jeremy and Will distinguish themselves from their male agemates.

By choosing to care for a baby dragon, Jeremy finds himself in a position where he must

begin to separate himself from his male classmates and instead cultivate a friendship with a

girl in his class with whom he shares more interests in common. As the child of a mentally ill

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single mother, Will is already a practiced child-mother before his introduction in The Subtle

Knife, and his story arc in the His Dark Materials trilogy consists largely of his imparting his

motherly wisdom and skills to Lyra so that she can give him respite from his premature

performance of adult motherhood and prepare him to accept motherly nurture from Mary

Malone, an adult nurturer in his own world, when he returns home.

It is my hope that other scholarship will continue to “listen to” what characters “do,”

that is, what their acts of food-sharing say about gender and family relationships in works of

children’s and young adult fantasy literature. These gender expressions will surely

“proliferate,” but some works also certainly lend themselves to consideration within the

categories established in this project. Fortune’s Magic Farm, by Suzanne Selfors, like the

works considered in chapter one here, presents a model of healing through food-sharing

experiences with a performed family, followed by a return home, though the notion of the

return home is complicated by the child protagonist’s having biological ties to both the

magical and mundane worlds. In a work for adult and sophisticated young adult readers,

Neverwhere, Gaiman again presents the theme of community as a mother-figure for the

orphaned young adult present in two of his other works, discussed in chapter two here.

A number of works merit scholarly consideration for their presentation of food-

sharing young adult male characters whose gender expressions, like those of the young male

protagonists discussed in chapter five here, map in some ways as traditionally-feminine, or

“sissy.” Charles’ de Lint’s The Painted Boy features several food-sharing male characters

whose gender expressions incorporate a noteworthy blend of the traditionally-masculine and

the traditionally-feminine; among these characters, Jay Li is of particular interest in that he is

a young Asian-American man and thus already at risk in American culture of being perceived

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through the lens of what Wenying Xu calls “emasculating” stereotypes (78), and who is

furthermore employed as a cook in the bulk of the novel’s action. Jay’s navigation of

feminine and masculine gender expressions, and the extent to which these expressions

present themselves through his relationship with food, is material for an interesting study.

Further drawing on the works discussed in chapter five, the role of a gender-transgressive

male character teaching nurturing acts, such as food-sharing, to a child protagonist, as Will

Parry does for Lyra Belacqua, is again present in the relationship between Gaudior the

unicorn and Charles Wallace Murry in A Swiftly Tilting Planet.

The choice to “listen” to what the performance of food-sharing does to shape

gendered family relationships in these works instead of to “look” for performances of food-

sharing that inform such relationships in a specific, preconceived way based on what

characters “are” led to some unexpected discoveries. First, in these works, food-sharing is

part of a performance of family that centers around reciprocity; characters who are given

food and nurturing tend later to be food-sharers and nurtures themselves, returning these gifts

of nourishment to those who nourished them. Avak Hasratian identifies reciprocity as one of

the keys of a performed kinship relationship; by uniting as family, members of a performed

kinship first coalesce around some source of what Sonja Kuftinec would call “commonality”

(9), a shared trait or interest that binds them, and then, in Hasratian’s words, the group

members assume “reciprocal obligations for” one another (58). Members of a performed

kinship group, then, perform family roles reciprocally, so it is not uncommon for a child-

figure either as a child or once s/he comes of age, to offer a gesture of food-sharing or

nurture to one of her/his parent-figures. May Bird, Bastian Balthasar Bux, Tristran Thorn,

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Harry Potter, and Lyra Belacqua, to name only a few of the child-figures considered here, all

return gestures of food-sharing to nurturer-figures who first offered food to them.

When food-sharing becomes reciprocal in this way, it turns into what Émile

Durkheim, as paraphrased by Hasratian, calls “alimentary communion” (59). By sharing

food, members of a performed family make themselves one body; metaphysically, they are

the same blood, related. In this way, the performances of food-sharing in these texts forge

new, true families. Some characters in the texts under consideration here who enter into

deeply-binding family relationships through moments of alimentary communion are Bastian,

Nobody Owens, and Coraline Jones.

Another aspect of performative food-sharing and the way in which it constructs

gendered family relationships particularly relevant to a study of children’s literature is

modeling; because the works target a child readership, there is on some level the assumption

that these works are meant to instruct. By performing gender in ways outside the strictures of

heteronormative expectations, the majority of the positively-portrayed characters in the

works under consideration in this study provide models for child readers of the varied

“possibilities” for proliferative gender expression (Butler 203). As Bornstein puts it, “there

are as many truthful experiences of gender as there are people who think they have a gender”

(8), and by modeling such expressions of self to a child audience, these works can help to

soften children’s tendency to set themselves up as “gender detectives” (Fine 211), and

instead prime them to accept a more open field of possible performances of self for

themselves and their agemates.

Certainly, the broad corpus of children’s and young adult literature provides a number

of gender representations that fall within the scope of the traditional, the heteronormative,

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and in some cases, the disempowering or openly-negative. I take great pleasure, however, in

reading this corpus with an open ear, hoping that by “listening to” the performances of self in

which the characters in these texts engage, I can find the different, the transgressive, the

proliferative. The works under consideration here are a small cross-section of the vast field of

children’s and young adult fantasy literature, which is itself a small cross-section of the field

of children’s and young adult literature as a whole, and even these works are in many ways

problematic. They are also, however, works in which gender is fluid, its expression complex,

varied, and above all, nourishing.

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 ABSTRACT

Much of the extant feminist criticism of food in children’s literature, including that relating

to the relationship between food and motherhood in such literature, uses a second-wave or

liberal feminist approach, approving that the position of food-sharer is by definition

marginalized and seeking to explore mothers as figures who would be better served in roles

outside the domestic sphere, or who limit the possible futures of girl readers by depicting

women too much within the domestic sphere. Such an approach limits not only working class

female readers for whom work outside the home is a necessity rather than an ideal, and male

readers who may prefer situation within the domestic sphere that is denied to them, but also

limits the possible interpretations of the works themselves. This dissertation seeks to apply

Roger Clark, Heidi Kulkin, and Liam Clancy’s principle (81) of “listening to” what

performative acts of food-sharing say about a character’s role as a nurturer in a performed

family relationship rather than “looking for” characters who perform the role of nurturer in a

particular, predetermined way in hopes of answering Judith Butler’s call “to redescribe those

possibilities that already exist, but which exist within cultural domains designated as

culturally unintelligible and impossible” (author’s emphasis) (203). By exploring thirty

works of fantasy literature targeted at juvenile and young adult audiences, this dissertation

strives to identify ways in which food-sharing is part of a performance of nurturing within a

family that operates outside of traditional, heteronormative expectations, and to examine how

such performances serve to create new models of gendered family interaction for child

readers.
 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Danielle R. Bienvenue Bray was born June 3, 1980 in State College, Pennsylvania, to

Gordon R. Bienvenue and Kathleen M. Bienvenue. She holds a Bachelor of Arts and a

Master of Arts in English from the State University of New York College at New Paltz,

where she completed a thesis entitled “Teaching with Terror: Tropes of Horror in Children’s

Litearture” in partial fulfillment of the requirements for her Master of Arts degree. She is an

Instructor of Composition in the University of Georgia at Athens Department of English, and

lives in Athens with her husband and son.