SOURCE: Trites, Roberta Sellinger. “Re/Constructing the Female Writer: Subjectivity in the Feminist Künstlerroman.” In Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children's Literature, pp. 63-79. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Trites evaluates a sub-genre of the children's künstlerroman—the feminist children's book künstlerroman—where the protagonist is a child developing self-identity through her desire to become a writer.

Margaret Mahy's The Tricksters examines what it means to one girl that she is a writer; so does Patricia MacLachlan's Cassie Binegar. Both of these novels depict a girl who claims the subject position by learning to use her voice, but significantly, each character learns to use her voice not only as a matter of speaking but also as a matter of writing. Because writing and re-visioning have so much potential to help people understand their agency, quite a few feminist children's...