Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book - Part 3: "Tiger! Tiger!"

The original animated version of The Jungle Book ended with Mowgli's leaving the forest, lured to the man village by the beckoning eyes of a winsome girl. That coming-of-age story was subverted in the new live-action version, but both alike neglect to fill in what happened afterwards.

Kipling did, however, conclude his Mowgli chapters with the story of his life in the man village and his final confrontation with Shere Kahn. The aforementioned live-action version took bits and pieces of its story from across The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book, and so Mowgli's faithful brother Gray and the buffalo stampede through the ravine were inspired by this chapter.

Historically, Mowgli was one of the inspirations behind Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan, and we see that come to the forefront in this chapter. Both are ultimately inspired by Enkidu, the wild man of the 5000 year old Epic of Gilgamesh. In that most ancient of Babylonian writings, Enkidu represents untamed nature and the untrammeled spirit of man against the powers of civilization. He is brought to heel eventually, first by the temple prostitute Shamhat (the lure of the feminine, as exemplified by the girl in the animated Jungle Book) and then by combat with the warrior-king Gilgamesh. The wild man myth has endured through the millennia, sometimes as a cautionary tale about the need to suppress violent, natural urges, and more often as a romantic vision of savage nobility. The wild man character is usually brought into confrontation with civilization, to varying effects. Tarzan had his run-in, and discovered that he operates best on the fringes of both the wild and the civilized worlds, not truly a part of either. Mowgli makes his own discovery as to his place in the world.

Indian Village. Photo: Wellcome Trust.

This encounter of the wild man with society allows the author of any given tale to divulge his or her own thoughts about society. In this chapter, Kipling satirizes the caste system and the self-importance of the village's wise old men and so-called great hunters.

Again, the complete book can be found at Project Gutenberg.

Feminism and the Disney Princesses - Part II: Tropes vs. Men in Disney

In my original article Feminism and the Disney Princesses, I set out to address specific claims about how the canon of Disney fairy tale films represents its female protagonists. My approach was academic, engaging in a close viewing of the films to determine if these claims had any justifiable basis. While that article examined – and, I believe, ultimately refuted – claims that Disney's animated films present a negative image of women, the other side of the coin is whether they carry an otherwise patriarchal message.

Just as my previous analysis attempted to examine the films without intending to ignite a debate about feminism as a social construct, my discussion of male image in Disney is not intended to ignite debate about male advocacy and men's rights movements. I am a proponent of women's rights, freedoms, and social and economic justice, as well as unequivocally denouncing misogyny, violence towards and oppression of women, and thus am not throwing my fedora into the ring on any particular side. My goal is to employ academic analysis to answer the academic question of how male image is represented in Disney films. Do they reinforce a positive image of male domination and patriarchal power relationships? And more particularly, can the same lens of negative interpretation be brought to bear on them that is frequently brought to bear on Disney's representation of female characters?