ABSTRACT

Throughout his A Series of Unfortunate Events, Daniel Handler / Lemony Snicket defuses gender as a social construction to which children must conform; he instead heralds a post-gendered world, one which in many ways celebrates female agency and empowerment.1 The chief protagonist, Violet Baudelaire, moves freely in traditionally masculine fi elds, and other characters-both male and female-are unhampered by stereotypical gender roles and expectations.2 Roberta Seelinger Trites defi nes a feminist children’s novel as one “in which the main character is empowered regardless of gender. A key concept here is ‘regardless’: in a feminist children’s novel, the child’s sex does not provide a permanent obstacle to her development.”3 In accordance with Trites’s perspective, Violet’s freedom from traditional gender roles enables the entire series to take on a feminist cast because such a paradigm of gendered equality between the sexes is taken as the normative structure of society. Freedom from gender roles allows the Baudelaire children to be blissfully innocent of the ways in which biologically sexed stereotypes might inhibit one’s psychosexual maturation.