ABSTRACT
Lynda Barry interrogates the differences between formal schooling and informal education, student-centered versus teacher-driven curriculum, and images as the central vehicle for translating childhood trauma. Barry de-glamorizes girlhood into a self-representational reality within the time and space of the fairy tale, resisting and "repicturing" the very curricula used to educate schoolgirls into appropriate heterosexual femininity. Violence is a steady presence in Barry's girlhood. Abuse and neglect are everyday experiences through which many girls come to know, but that are erased in stories deemed appropriate for them, those in which the primary lesson is resilience or in which the good guy wins no matter what. Barry contrasts her own self-directed learning through fairy tales and other popular reading materials with stories offered at school, especially morality tales or resilience stories that she remembers being assigned. For Barry there exists a collective curriculum in which children experience violence and are then asked to cover that learning over.
