Mowgli is a Girl? The Jungle Book

Last week, Helena Iara was sick.  First she had strep, then a sore throat that just wouldn't go away, even with the antibiotics.  She actually felt pretty good -- except for the throat -- so we had to work hard to keep her from running around barefoot outside.  One of my solutions to force some rest was to download The Jungle Book.  Helena loved it; so much that we watched at at least seven times this weekend; when any new person would come into the house, Helena would declare, "I want to show 'The Bear Necessities' to such-and-such."  And opening that one song meant watching the whole movie again.

There are loads of things to criticize in the movie -- it is based, after all, on the stories of a bald-faced apologist for the British Empire in India -- but I'm not going to take that up this morning.  What I found more interesting this weekend was that Helena, in spite of all of the evidence to the contrary in the movie, insisted that Mowgli is a girl.

Like Mowgli, Helena lives in the jungle: yes, she sleeps in a nice brick house, but when she steps outside the door -- and she always want to be outside! -- the palms and orchids and bromeliads don't look that different from the way The Jungle Book portrays India.  The stories I tell her before nap-time always start in that sort of jungle-garden, where her imaginary dinosaur and wolf friends play with fairy tale characters.  She wants Mowgli's adventures to be her adventures, so she is quick to identify with him... so Mowgli, as a stand in for Helena, must be a girl.  Literary identification is a powerful thing.

Helena, with a friend in the favelas of Recife.

There is lots of textual evidence for Mowgli being a boy, especially the fact the the other characters always use the masculine pronoun for him, but Helena still pays more attention to image than to text.  In cartoons, the bikini top is always the key to showing that a girl in the tropics is a girl, but Helena lives in a country where little girls don't need to wear bikini tops, so she doesn't see that as a mark of gender. The real problem for Helena's hypothesis is the penultimate scene, when Mowgli is seduced to go to the "man village" by a little girl.  In the sexual politics of 1967, when the movie was made, Mowgli had to be a boy to fall for a girl in that way.

Helena found a simple solution to that narrative aporia: she see the little girl as Mowgli's mother.  Helena loves to play house, and she will turn anything into "minha filha" (my daughter): her own mother is "daughter," as are her dolls, stuffed toys, imaginary friends, real friends, even a bag of flour at the supermarket.  For Helena, the mother-daughter relationship is the axel around which the world turns, so it is unsurprising that The Jungle Book should also find its conclusion there.  Boys and girls falling in love "makes the world go round" for a teenager, but for a little girl, the fundamental manifestation of love is her Mommy.

Helena has to go through a lot of intellectual acrobatics to interpret The Jungle Book so that it makes sense to her, but she's hardly alone.  All of us do the same thing when we read: we highlight the issues that matter to us, ignore evidence that doesn't fit our hypothesis.  For the conservative Christian, the New Testament commands a strong, patriarchal family even though Jesus says "For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law." (Matt. 10:35)  I'm just as guilty: I want to see Monsters, Inc as an expression of Marx's idea of the alienation of labor, for instance.  Reading is always an act of blinding ourselves to the parts of a complex and internally contradictory text that we don't like.  Helena's reading of Mowgli is particularly aggressive, but not really that different from what any of us do.

A lot of American feminism has postulated that one of the major problems with the European concept of gender is that the masculine stands in for the generic.  "Man" means human beings, for instance, and when we think about general categories of people -- "doctor", "professor", "worker" -- we generally give them masculine characteristics.  "Child," according to that logic, will generally be understood as a boy.

I think it is a good sign that Helena hasn't (yet?) fallen into that trap.  Mowgli's mid-length hair and pre-pubescent body -- truly unmarked as to gender -- have the default meaning of the feminine to her.  So even though there is a lot of evidence against her reading of The Jungle Book, I'm letting her run with it.