Tomboys: Performing gender in popu lar f iction

In the nineteenth century, new characters exploded onto the pages of popular novels: forthright, self-reliant and self-aware girls who became known as tomboys. Like Jo March storming through the pages of Little women , these brave and boisterous young women charmed and astonished readers, and profoundly influenced generations of girls. This article examines the impact of the tomboy in literature, its confluence with other, older, archetypes such as the cross-dressing warrior maid, and its development alongside other proto-feminist heroines of the nineteenth century: the Female Gentleman and the Plucky Girl. The article interrogates not only the character traits of fictional tomboys, but also the narrative arcs and tropes with which they were often associated, such as the Tamed Tomboy, who, like Jo March, comes to learn the real meaning of womanhood, as defined through her mother and sisters, in marriage; and the Incorrigible Tomboy, like George in the Famous five books, who resists all efforts to be treated ‟ like a girl ” . The article further explores the continued relevance of these famous nineteenth- and twentieth-century tomboys, whose performances of gender and sexuality echo in recent fiction for children and young adults through characters such as Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger games trilogy, the genderfluid Micah in Justine Larbelestier's Liar , or overtly queer heroines such as Kaede in Malinda Lo's Huntress . What has the tomboy in literature meant to twenty-first century understandings of gender performativity? And, importantly, what stories about gender – what possible lives – do these characters construct for the young women who read them?

sees it, and reads about me in the newspapers, she will say, "The dear child! I always knew she would turn out an ornament to the family" (Coolidge 1887:22; emphasis in original).
But then Katy fell off a swing, stopped having adventures and learnt through pain to be patient and good and to look after the children, while Jo March got married to that boring professor 1 and learned -you'll be astonished to hear -to be patient and good and to look after the children.
The books I read, the movies I watched, showed me what the world really expected me to be: Maid Marian -the Olivia de Havilland version, that is, in silk gown rather than Robin Hood's green tights and jaunty cap. The lesson was clear. Tomboys were allowed to climb trees up to a certain age, and then they had to calm down: to be tamed by marriage, by new clothes, even by dreadful accidents; by their mothers, by their peers, and by men. I want to trace that narrative, its meanings, impact and legacy.

Why?
Kelli M. Sellers's examination of the 1903 novel Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm reminds us of the gendered nature of the act of reading, and the impact of feminist or protofeminist texts on young women. She writes, [b]ooks, like girlhood, then, create what Sally Mitchell calls a "provisional free space" that allows safe experimentation. Girls can 'try on a certain role' as they would try on a costume, and become a new character for a short time without consequences … girl readers imagined new modes of living by reading and then fulfilled their fantasies in life, becoming stronger, more independent women (Sellers 2012:121). So I wonder about the history of that reading -about all those girls, like me, reading books about other girls -and whether we can trace lines of influence, on writers and readers, through popular literature, from Little women to the Hunger games trilogy and beyond. This article focuses on some of the key fictional tomboys of the past and surveys a range of recent characters who have captured the imaginations of many young adult readers. It argues that the tomboy should be positioned in its own literary lineage, with deep roots in ancient accounts of warrior women, and through an identifiable character arc in the stories of recent centuries. What is it about the tomboy figure that has made these books sell in their millions, translated into dozens of languages, and kept them in print decades and even centuries after Although often overlooked in analyses of popular fiction, I suggest that the tomboy is as influential a narrative as the romantic heroine or plucky girl, 2 and that its literary lineage is derived from an altogether different and often more subversive sphere. The ancestry of the tomboy, as a literary form of female masculinity, began with women warriors described by Herodotus and others in antiquity. Emma Donoghue (2010) argues that classical and early modern literature firmly embedded and combined two female character types in literature and, by extension, in the popular imagination: the Amazon, a noble warrior woman, usually defending either her people or her family, and the Female Bridegroom -a female wanderer dressed as a man, who is accidentally betrothed to another woman. These two character types are the women most likely to be associated with hero quest narratives in early modern literature, and may have later developed into recognisable nineteenth century character types such as the Female Gentleman. The tomboy, then, is a modern version of an ancient archetype, the masculine woman, remodelled for the young readers of the nineteenth century, and evolving into powerful young heroines in fiction for young readers today. So I wonder what stories about gender -what "new modes of living" -these characters construct, especially for the young women who read them.

The tomboy narrative
The word 'tomboy' was first applied to rowdy young men (Oxford English dictionary cited by Abate 2008:xiii), but by the beginning of the seventeenth century was used to describe young women: a hint that by then, in life as well as in literature and on the stage, young women were confounding gender. According to The Oxford English dictionary, a tomboy was either a 'bold or immodest woman' (in use by 1579) or, by 1592, 'a girl who behaves like a spirited or boisterous boy; a wild romping girl; a hoyden' (Burchfield 1961:121). The Oxford English dictionary also notes that 'hoyden' is probably derived from 'heathen'.  2001:40). In other words, by the time Jo March erupted onto the page, the world was familiar with the concept of the girl or young woman who performs gender in ways traditionally seen as masculine -perhaps even in ways outside the western Enlightenment definition of civilisation. Tomboys were wild, they were outrageous by definition, they were defiant and heroic and uncontrollable -and also wholesome fun.
But the tomboy narrative was also traditionally one of control. In fiction and in life, tomboys faced pressure to conform to the very constraints against which they rebelled, positioning them in a complex series of relationships with families, institutions, and readers. The life stories of real tomboys and the fictional adventures of young women like Jo March reflected the cycle of often idyllic childhood, overshadowed by an inevitable coming-of-age process, which led to womanhood and marriage. More recently, a new narrative of tomboy chic tells young women that the tomboy is a transitory costume to be worn for a while, like comfortable 'boyfriend' jeans (Skerski 2011). What had been an identity is now a commodity -a fashion option for your adolescent phase. Barbara Creed (cited by Grosz & Probyn 1995:95)

claims that '[t]he
liminal journey of the tomboy -one of the few rites of passage stories available to women in the cinema -is a narrative of the forging of the proper female identity'.
And so, to the other part of the story in which tomboys must be tamed -Little women must become Good wives. 3 Tomboys are all well and good, until they get their periods.
Jack Halberstam (1998:6) suggests that tomboy behaviour is merely tolerated (and not always even that) up to pre-pubescence, but only within the context of 'blossoming womanhood', and not tolerated at all if it extends into adolescence, [v]ery often it is read as a sign of independence and self-motivation, and tomboyism may even be encouraged to the extent that it remains comfortably linked to a stable sense of a girl identity. Tomboyism is punished, however, when it appears to be the sign of extreme male identification (taking a boy's name or refusing girl clothing of any type) and when it threatens to extend beyond childhood and into adolescence.
This taming narrative leaves no space for female masculinity continuing beyond puberty, and approval may be swiftly revoked if it turns out that the story is actually a transgender narrative. It is -or has been -a narrative which offers girls and young women some temporary privileges of masculinity while still fostering traditional womanhood; Anna Kolos (2014:2) goes so far as to argue that tomboyism actually 'sustains the binary gender distinction by rejecting femininity in favour of appropriating various prerogatives of masculinity'. Since the term first came into vogue, tomboyism has received certain forms of approval because it performs traits thought to be masculine and therefore inherently superior -so it seems perfectly sensible for girls to want to present themselves as the superior gender, until they can pretend no longer.
It may even offer protection in a hostile world. Laura Lane-Steel (2011:481) has documented the use of tomboy characteristics as a protective identity, specifically for black lesbians in South Carolina, as it enables young women to 'strategically construct and perform their masculinity in ways that shield them from sexism, racism, and homophobia both in and out of their Black community'.
Karen Quimby (2003:1), however, suggests that the tomboy does not simply perform a form of masculinity, but also offers a profound questioning of notions of gender and sexuality, [t]he tomboy, by definition, points up that such categories as male and female, or masculine and feminine, are indeterminate and unstable. The tomboy, in other words, exemplifies that the notion of gender identity is not anchored to any secure, incontestable foundations. … By refusing to learn and enact femininity, the tomboy destabilizes gender as a 'natural' construct.
Moreover, because some tomboys refuse to perform femininity over a lifetime, preferring a variously male-identified expression both physical and psychic, they expose the assumption that such tomboyism is temporary and safely confined to childhood. I now explore some of these tensions by surveying a few key literary representations of the tomboy story, and their impact on the young women who read them.

Hoydens and whirlwinds
No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine. … She was fond of all boys' plays, and greatly preferred cricket … she had neither a bad heart nor a bad temper, was seldom stubborn, scarcely ever quarrelsome, and very kind to the little ones, with few interruptions of tyranny; she was moreover noisy and wild, hated confinement and cleanliness, and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house (Austen 1981:817).
Northanger Abbey's Catherine Morland is one of Jane Austen's youngest protagonists, and arguably one of the first tomboys in English literature (the novel was published posthumously in 1817). In the first pages of the book, Catherine grows out of her love of cricket and baseball, is 'almost pretty' and discovers novels, but she tells us that tomboys existed in Austen's world, and sets the scene for those who came later.

1852) upends gender roles as well as expectations around race and faith. As Michelle
Ann Abate (2008:35) has argued, in stories from the United States, the tomboy is heavily racialised, [a]s her name suggests, the young black girl is literally and figuratively topsyturvy. Nearly every aspect of her physical appearance, personal temperament, and daily behavior violates the heavily raced and classed notions of what was "womanly" and 'feminine' during this era. Rather than possessing long feminine locks, for instance, Topsy has a "short and unkempt mane" … Moreover, rather than displaying the feminine traits of spiritual piety and familial respect, Topsy is "heathenish".
In the decades after the US Civil War, a series of wildly popular books for girls featured "I can't think of her as a girl … she seems to me a boy. She climbs trees, she scales fences, she keeps rabbits, she straddles upon your old mare. I found her this morning wading in the pond. She is growing up a hoyden; you ought to give her more civilising influences than she enjoys hereabouts; you ought to engage a governess, or send her to school. It is well enough now; but, my poor fellow, what will you do when she is twenty?" (James 1878:37).
Nora, like Topsy, is a heathen -'a brand snatched from the burning' (James 1878:29) -who must be converted to conventional faith as well as to womanhood.
In colonies of the then British Empire, the narrative was slightly different. White girls Franklin began writing the novel when she was 16, and perhaps we can hear her own voice when Sybylla describes her youthful self as 'a romp, a hoyden, a boisterous tomboy, a whirlwind' (Franklin 1965:196 Many fictional tomboys, such as Sybylla, were portrayed as strong from labouring on the farm, as expert horse-riders and as being capable in the bush, reflecting the reality of many girls' lives and the rhetoric of nation-building, as 'it is the necessity of adventurous actions or rough work in extraordinary circumstances in imperial locations that makes them acceptable for these fictional girls to perform' (Smith 2011:106). One figure written against this imperial expectation is, arguably, Rebekah in Olive Schreiner's unfinished and posthumously published From man to man (1927). Rebekah is described as a tomboy as a small child, but grows into motherhood and adoptive motherhood as a New Woman, and an emblem of Schreiner's hope for a new South Africa.
Most of the tomboy bildungsroman narratives tell a tale of hardship, defiance, crisis or misadventure, leading to learning and acceptance, epitomised for many readers by the story of Jo March and her sisters in Little women. Each of the sisters has their own quest, but Jo is the discontented, 'topsy-turvy', creative, gangly colt, with 'big hands and feet, a fly-away look to her clothes, and the uncomfortable appearance of a girl who was rapidly shooting up into a woman and didn't like it' (Alcott 1910:9). As Anne Boyd Rioux (2018:[sp]) notes, '[w]hat does it mean that this venerated story of girlhood centers on a girl who doesn't want to be one at all?'. Jo's character is tested throughout -by her sister, Amy's, accident, caused by Jo's tearaway temper, the death of her beloved Beth, and the sacrifice of her hair to raise money for her mother.
Jo's haircut is a transition that makes her even more boyish on a physical level, but is a key marker of her taming -a step on her Pilgrim's Progress towards Good wives, and an example of the ways in which gender is used to support 'defining institutions … [such as] compulsory heterosexuality' (Butler 2006:xxxi). Jo is painfully aware that the world of Little women is constricted and requires restraint and submission to marriage. In contrast, her male friend, Laurie, can travel, study and be independent.
Jo struggles to juggle the demands of family and society with her own desire for freedom and a creative life. She struggles most, though, with her own passions, Jo's rebellion against conventional femininity is inextricably linked to her anger, which is made into the key to Jo's personality and the special fault that she must conquer on her Bunyanesque journey towards self-improvement … Jo's own description of her anger characterizes it as "savage" and sadistic, and she fears it will make her do something "dreadful" (Monnet 2009:89

The New Girl
The explosion of youthful tomboys in the mid-nineteenth century was part of the emergence of a more diverse range of fictional female characters, such as scheming crones and plucky but virtuous girls, such as Mrs Clennam and Amy in Little Dorrit.
This helped create space later, in the fin-de-siècle, when authors such as Olive Schreiner, Miles Franklin and George Egerton were defining the New Woman in fiction. 5 Divorce and property laws were changing in many countries, a powerful Queen was on the British throne, and barriers to women's education, employment and legal recognition were gradually being dismantled -at least for some (usually white) middleclass women. It was also what Sarah Bilston (2004) has dubbed 'the awkward age' in fiction for women and girls, where the increasing number of female authors struggled to balance representation of womanhood or nation-building with ideas of gender rebellion, independence and creativity -and indeed their own lived experience. The ideal child of earlier didactic tracts gave way to more complex, and sometimes much naughtier, girls (Foster & Simons 1995:7).
The child, Lyndall, in Schreiner's The story of an African farm is sent away to boarding school, returning years later -pregnant but a 'manly woman' (Parkin-Gounelas 1991:103). Lyndall has been called 'unmistakably a prototype New Woman' (Ledger 1997:2) and is fiercely feminist -'I am not in so great a hurry to put my neck beneath any man's foot' (Schreiner 1986:184). Still, she has few options, and dies too young on the farm where she once ran free. For while the New Woman novels explored the impact of certain freedoms and notions of gender, in most representations, 'women's lives are presented as inherently problematic, and unhappiness is the norm. Whatever path they choose, whether they conform to or break with convention, women are likely to be thwarted and frustrated' (Pykett 1992:148  To many readers and writers, it seemed that only boys had adventures, in stories and in life. So to have an adventure, you must be a boy or aspire to be like a boy. Or, perhaps, have a boy trapped somewhere inside you. Even Pippi Longstocking was once described as being 'a boy in disguise' (Pinsent 2013:25 "I'm George," said the girl. "I shall only answer if you call me George. I hate being a girl. I won't be. I don't like doing the things that girls do. I like doing the things that boys do. I can climb better than any boy, and swim faster too. I can sail a boat as well as any fisher-boy on this coast" (Blyton 1942:19).
George is not like a boy. She's better than one. In a later volume, Dick says to her, "[j]olly girlish-looking boy you are, that's all I can say." George flared up at once. "Don't be mean! I'm not girlish-looking. I've far more freckles than you have, for one thing, and better eyebrows. And I can make my voice go deep" (Blyton 1947:64).
As problematic as the phenomenally popular Blyton books are in other ways, including their racism, they were adventure stories -mysteries, usually -in which male, female, and tomboy characters all had parts to play. George, like Jo March, is often shown to be angry, and with good cause. Her cousin, Julian, constantly tries to assert his authority, and insists that adventures belong to boys. George ignores him. Her power comes from her capability, her anger, and her utter inability to surrender to society (Rudd 1995). And she never does.
A book of one's own: girls reading tomboys It is impossible to over-estimate the cultural impact of popular novels of the nineteenth [t]he preoccupation with self that is characteristic of adolescents makes them particularly receptive to fiction. They tend to identify strongly with a story's characters, share their dilemma, and participate in the choices that the characters make, keenly aware of the values that their actions imply (Brown & St Clair 2002:9).
In Little women, Alcott captured this zeitgeist so perfectly that the identification between reader, writer and character survives generations. As Anne Scott MacLeod (1995:15) page 13 of 22 writes, 'Alcott retraced and also reshaped the patterns of her own life; truth and wish were bound together … As every reader recognizes, Jo March is the author, the author is Jo March, and so is every girl that reads the book'.
That magical thinking process of truth and wish on the part of the author reflects the reader's experience of immersion in the text, in the character of Jo, and so in the author as represented by Jo. In 1883 Alcott said, just as Jo might have done, 'I am a man's soul, put by some freak of nature into a woman's body' (Monnet 2009:146).
Jo, the author/character, is the artistic spirit who writes and performs plays, falls into a 'vortex' (Alcott 1910:316) where nothing matters but her writing, and later (secretly) publishes pot-boilers of the very sort that Alcott wrote under a pseudonym. And it was this creative independence, as well as her boisterous, boyish manners, that was adored by an increasingly diverse range of readers, from Maxine Hong Kingston to bell hooks to Susan Sontag (Rioux 2018).
The essayist and fiction writer Cynthia Ozick (1984:303) recalled in her memoir of growing up as the child of immigrant parents, A drugstore in winter, I read Little Women a thousand times. Ten thousand. I am no longer incognito, even to myself. I am Jo in her "vortex"; not Jo exactly, but some Jo-of-the-future.

I am under an enchantment.
African American writer Ann Petry (cited by Kerber, Kessler-Harris & Sklar 1995:260) remembers Little women as the first book she read on her own as a child, I couldn't stop reading because I had encountered Jo March. I felt as though I was part of Jo and she was part of me. I, too, was a tomboy and a misfit and kept a secret diary … She was a would-be writer and so was I.

Memoirs of a dutiful daughter,
[i]n Little Women Jo was superior to her sisters, who were either more virtuous or more beautiful than she, because of her passion for knowledge and the vigour of her thinking; her superiority was as outstanding as that of certain adults and women read texts the way they want to -read themselves into the story -they go over and over the first sections of Little women and many abandon the story of the March family at the moment of Jo's containment, just as they skip those tedious chapters in which Katy is brainwashed into the Victorian school of saintly infirmity.
Alcott's consciously 'perverse' marriage plot in Little women forced young readers to change the way they read the text to meet their own emotional needs; just as young queers always have to read beyond texts or into the margins to see themselves.
Quimby ( in distress still exists as a counterpoint to the tomboy, often needing to be rescued or to teach a lesson to the heroine -in some recent texts, the damsel no longer has to die for the lesson to be learned and is likely to be a spiritual guide to the heroine. Malindo Lo's queer fantasy novel, Huntress (2011), features a young, intelligent, female martial arts expert, Kaede, who understands that strength is about more than fighting (although there is also excellent fighting in the novel). Her partner is the mystical seer, Taisin. Lo (2012) has written that her novels Ash and Huntress are, It is no surprise that speculative fiction enables these narratives. In recent decades, young readers have followed the adventures of female knights in Tamora  about what is popularly and annoyingly called the "strong female character" in fiction and media for young adults today. Strength -physical, psychological or emotional -is still construed as being uncharacteristic of young women, as indeed is being the centre of a narrative (Hamilton et al. 2006 Peter, watches the now-tamed and more appropriately feminine Kit with their children.
One protagonist who is never tamed by gender expectations is the ultimate lone wolf, Tomboy hearts This all matters deeply because generations of girls and young women have felt as if tomboy was a definition of gender that they could perform, that modelled independence and courage and mastery -a definition that said "there are other ways to be".
It might offer you protection, it might enable you to seek out other gender or sexual identities. You might be a famous detective. Or queer. Or, yes, a boy.
It matters, too, because generations of girls have had the tomboy trained or scrubbed or beaten or blackmailed out of them. Maybe it is really a phase in some lives -or perhaps it enables a spirit of adventure that never quite leaves you.
It matters because we know how much we are influenced by the stories we read or see or hear. The tomboy tells young readers that while they may access the benefits of performing masculinity, it is still masculinity that matters the most, while the taming narrative tells them that those benefits might only be bestowed temporarily.
So it matters greatly that from that remarkable literary lineage we can now read tales of new tomboys -who may not even be defined by that term -and characters who operate at newly fluid gender boundaries. These characters may be trans or clearly nonbinary, and open up spaces for stories such as Alex Gino's transgender protagonist in George (2015) and Ivan Coyote's (2016:115) memoir, Tomboy survival guide, [y]ou don't have to look a certain way to be a tomboy. Don't let anyone tell you that, ever, and please don't find that here in my words. If it is in you, you already know. Tomboy blood is so much bigger than the outside of you.
It matters because those fictional tomboys reflect the real lives of girls, nonbinary kids, and young women in many communities; the pressures and dangers with which they live, and the solace they find in reading stories that speak to the truth of their experience.
Just like me.
Notes 1. In a letter to Elizabeth Powell dated 20 March 1869, Louisa May Alcott wrote: 'Jo should have remained a literary spinster but so many enthusiastic young ladies wrote to me clamorously demanding that she should marry Laurie, or somebody, that I didn't dare to refuse & out of perversity went & made a funny match for her' (Alcott 1995:124-25).
2. Rioux (2018) claims that Little women is arguably the most influential book ever written by an American woman. 8. This is a narrative that has become even more urgent in the current political climate in the US, in which

Good wives
Katniss's salute of defiance is often used on social media as an indicator of resistance to right-wing forces. The salute was banned during 2014 protests in Thailand and students seen performing it were arrested. The film version of the third book in the trilogy, Mockingjay, was also banned (Mydans 2014).
9. Or not. Micah is a liar, and there are several possible readings of the book and several possible endings.
She may not even be a werewolf. But she is definitely a tomboy.