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<p>Current scholarship on Mary Louisa Molesworth’s <i>The Cuckoo Clock</i> frequently examines the fantastical adventures as a central mechanism through which the protagonist’s moral, psychological, and temporal education is achieved. A significant lacuna in this scholarship, however, lies in its insufficient exploration of the queer elements within the novel, specifically the failure to adequately examine how these elements reshape the protagonist’s growth narrative and challenge the traditional linear paradigm of growth prevalent in Victorian children’s literature. Reading the novel diffractively through Kathryn Bond Stockton’s <i>The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century</i>, this paper shows that the queer elements subvert the intergenerational binary ontology and non-linearly reconstruct the protagonist’s path to maturity, demonstrating the protagonist’s sideways growth rather than conventional linear growth. Re-examining the work through a queer lens not only provides fresh insights into the fluidity of child identity, the complexity of growth and the cross-generational application of queer theory but also uncovers the queer potential within children’s literature, thereby expanding its theoretical frontiers.</p>

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Re-reading Griselda’s Growth in The Cuckoo Clock from the Perspective of Queer

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年5月18日

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  • Ming Li

摘要

Current scholarship on Mary Louisa Molesworth’s The Cuckoo Clock frequently examines the fantastical adventures as a central mechanism through which the protagonist’s moral, psychological, and temporal education is achieved. A significant lacuna in this scholarship, however, lies in its insufficient exploration of the queer elements within the novel, specifically the failure to adequately examine how these elements reshape the protagonist’s growth narrative and challenge the traditional linear paradigm of growth prevalent in Victorian children’s literature. Reading the novel diffractively through Kathryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, this paper shows that the queer elements subvert the intergenerational binary ontology and non-linearly reconstruct the protagonist’s path to maturity, demonstrating the protagonist’s sideways growth rather than conventional linear growth. Re-examining the work through a queer lens not only provides fresh insights into the fluidity of child identity, the complexity of growth and the cross-generational application of queer theory but also uncovers the queer potential within children’s literature, thereby expanding its theoretical frontiers.