Gender-Stereotyping in Children's Literature. A Case Study on the children's novel Matilda by Roald Dahl

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature grade: 30 University of Erfurt (Anglistik/Amerikanistik) course: Language and Gender language: English abstract: This study examines the language use towards male and female characters in the children's novel 'Matilda' written by Roald Dahl. The fact of an uneven depiction of female and male characters in children's literature which is proved in many studies is the base of this analysis. With this work I examine if Dahl uses gender stereotyped language in his popular novel as well. The selection of this book has a personal background. When I was an Au pair in Australia an audiobook with all stories of Roald Dahl fell into my hands. The owner a boy said I should definitely listen to those because they are awesome. For this kind of study I thought Matilda might be interesting because the protagonist is a girl. The main emphasis of the analysis is put on the number of characters and their occupation the used adjectives to describe the characters and the verbs describing the characters' actions. That leads to the following hypotheses: Firstly female characters are underrepresented in extensive roles; secondly male characters are depicted in more different occupations than female characters; thirdly different adjectives are used to describe female and male characters; and finally female characters are portrayed predominantly in gender-stereotyped activities. The overall interest of this work is if the characters in this children's novel are mainly described in a gender-stereotyped way. My work is structured as follows: I will provide a rough introduction in Gender studies and especially in the field of Gender and Language in the first chapter. Further I point out the central matters of the research in Gender and Children's literature and introduce a few studies that support my own examination and are the basis for the hypotheses. The first part in