The fantasy of the female : gender construction in the fantasy genre

Abstract

I have always been an avid reader of fantasy fiction. I enjoyed, and still do, the infinite possibilities which its created worlds offered to explore and discover a new, different reality. However, as I grew older, I began to notice that the possibilities for female characters within these worlds were not as infinite as they initially appeared – perhaps because the fantasy worlds were not, themselves, so separate from reality as they appeared. While fantasy offers the possibility to create worlds where the rules of our own do not apply, no world of fantasy offered a world free of patriarchal rule: while I was asked to suspend my disbelief in order to enter this new, imaginary world, the female characters within it suffered experiences of abuse and discrimination which I recognized as all too real. This realization, brought on partly thanks to my background in literary studies, made me interested in analyzing the particularities of female representation within the fantasy genre – and hence the idea for this dissertation. My choice of narratives for this study was influenced not only by what I had read and loved before, but also by my intention to fill what appeared to me as a void within literary criticism – the analysis of fantasy fiction in contemporary literature. Throughout my years of dedication to literary analysis, it stood out to me how focused literary criticism was in works from the twentieth century backwards, which of course makes sense: the twenty-first century has only just begun, and a measure of critical distance towards one’s object of study undeniably helps perceive it with better clarity.