On the Movie Jungle Book which came out recently in the Theaters.

FEMINISM AND THE MAKING OF HEROES AND HEROINES IN CHILDREN STORIES Student's name Instructor's name Course Date Introduction If there is something that is universally appealing to children is a good story. Children stories most often offer rich descriptions of personalities, lives of inspiring individuals and entertain children. Through the heroes and heroines in these stories, children are thereby able to develop an understanding of the societal expectations and even norms in different places around the world. More importantly, they learn about virtues, what it is to live in some geographic regions and of being male or female. At the same time, a story character's sex is of significant weight in the understanding of literary texts (Hourihan 34). Character's gender is perhaps a huge critical variable that affects the reading of literary texts. In an era of feminism, various literary texts and presentations are inclined towards promoting feminist ideologies and conventions. The Jungle Book is one of the stories that offers children an opportunity for learning and for entertainment. It also provides an opportunity to examine carefully, realize and explore how gender roles are displayed and their effect on promoting heroism. This paper aims at identifying the significance of feminism in promoting heroism and role models in literary texts, especially in the Jungle Book. Role of Feminism in literary texts In their contact of dealing with various literary texts, children can examine closely, explore and realize the gender roles in literary texts. Children have that contact towards gender roles as they are depicted in cultural value, literature, female roles and social inequities. Further, they can discover through real life conditions and literary texts how females are living hence providing a background for gender relations (Kouklatzidou, 4). The wide dissemination of traditional perceptions plus stereotypical gender roles as they are depicted in many literary texts is very restrictive for both genders whereby girls are supposedly trapped in submissive roles, and the boys are to assume roles which don't have space for any emotional expression or sensitivity. Research has identified that on children literary texts, girls are presented to be naïve, innocent and dependant while most boys characters are to appear to be independent, dynamic, adventure seekers and very aggressive. As girls and boys socialize they learn to cope with the social definitions and narratives hence adopt traits based strictly on how the society views gender. Therefore, girls come to learn that boys have a greater value, thus the literary texts eventually become a means of social representation (Singh 6). Further research indicates that children prefer hearing stories where the opposite sex acts as per the stereotypes that are attributed to their respective genders instead of listening to tales where the opposite sex characters manage in overturning their genders stereotypes. Indeed, most young children can remember better their sex characters than of the opposite sex. Female characters remember female characteristics much better and male characters remember male characteristics. This presents a fatal presentation of sex and has eventually affected the growth of the female child hence there an urgent need to change focus on how literary texts redefines sex and sexual roles. The Jungle Book comes in to redefine the roles of both sexes just like any other popular children literary text. The roles that are played by the female characters are designed to fit with the common sex stereotypes and social interpretation. Mowgli, the lead actor, is a boy who even if lost in the forest with animals, he has the traditional male characteristics of being brave, adventurous, aggressive and resourceful (Nandini, ...