I’ve been thinking about how portal fantasies - you know, where a character travels through some sort of portal into a fantasy world - often have girls as their main characters. Alice falls down the rabbit hole, Dorothy gets tornadoed to Oz, Coraline crawls through the secret door to the Other World, Lucy is the first Pevensie to go through the wardrobe, Wendy specifically is invited to accompany Peter to Neverland.
I know this is r/books but this trend seems to extend to movies too. Pan’s Labyrinth, Spirited Away, and Labyrinth all have girl protagonists. I’m having a hard time even thinking of boys in portal fantasies. Bastian (Neverending Story) is one, although the movie version doesn’t really show him portaling until the sequels. I guess The Pagemaster (1994 movie that maybe just rips off Neverending Story?) could count. And the other Pevensies and Darlings accompany their sisters through the portals, but they’re secondary to the girls.
I wondered if anyone here had any theories about why portals seem to draw in so many girls. I have some of my own but I’m curious what others think.
Gordon Dickson the Dragon and the George features a man. So does Allan Dean Foster the Spell Singer.
It’s not only girls
Sure, it’s not only girls. I just thought it was interesting how western stories do tend to feature girls in this role more often than boys.
I think in a lot of these stories the protagonists goes through the journey and returns to status quo without any tangible results, except personally growing up, learning some kind of a lesson and better adapting to the real world. Coraline learns to appreciate her parents better, Dorothy learns that magic can’t replace personal moral growth. Wendy grows up and doesn’t return to Neverland for that reason, same as Pevensies.
Harry Potter would be a good counter example. He’s a hero, he defeats the evil wizard, goes from poor to rich and just stays in the other world, because why not. A lot of Japanese Isekai falls into similar pattern where a young man escapes his dull life to live out his power fantasy with weird sexual undertones.
Any generalization works only to an extent, but it’s safe to say that we tend to teach girls to accept their social status and their reality and be good to others (so, to be good wives and mothers), and boys to achieve, overcome and be socially mobile. Jack can outwit the giant, turn his life around and become rich, while for Cinderella social mobility is only available through marrying into higher class.
(Also, let me plug The Little Black Hen by Pogorelsky, it’s a Russian XIX century literary fairytale of a similar kind. That one has a boy MC!)
Tom’s Midnight Garden is the only one I could think of, off hand.