The premise of LeGuin’s Lavinia is to depict events from Virgil’s Aeneid from the point of view of Aeneas’s wife, Lavinia. Lavinia is named in the original poem but she doesn’t speak a single line; LeGuin has given her not only a voice but regard worthy of being the point-of-view character.

Lavinia, then, is a perfect model of how fantasy literature can give life and strength to the women that it depicts. Because it concerns an ancient culture of our world, Lavinia is, of course, bound more by reality than fantasy novels that occur at a complete remove from our own world.  LeGuin is bound somewhat by what is known of early Latin history and by the “canon” of the Aeneid. That she takes liberties in breaking with both, when the story (or Lavinia herself) demands it, makes me think of the novel more as fantasy rather than historical fiction, though it is flavored by both.

I would love to say that I was delighted with Lavinia, that I couldn’t put it down, that it represents a zenith of feminist fantasy fiction. Honestly, though, there were times when I was more overcome with my disappointment with the book, when I couldn’t help but to regard it as opportunity squandered. As I finished the novel today and thought on it more while in the comfortably silent company of my herbs and vegetable plants, though, I realized that it is still an important novel, if even if did fall shy of the mark in many regards.

Lavinia is a relatively short book for the subject and time period that it covers. The hardcover Harcourt edition that I borrowed from the library checks in at 279 pages, including LeGuin’s afterword. Typical for LeGuin, there were passages wrought with breathtaking skill and the introspection was beautifully handled and never ponderous; her characters achieve a delicate elevation in worth yet remain grounded, believable as human beings. The short length of the novel should, one would think, make for an intense plot, but the opposite often seemed to be the case. I found myself baffled as page after page was spent summarizing action going on off-screen: battles fought and treaties made, harvests brought in and journeys embarked upon; LeGuin opens the novel with a map, but we are privileged to see inside only three of its cities, although many more are discussed. Surely LeGuin, I thought, who is quite possibly the greatest living fantasist, doesn’t need to be told that cardinal rule of writing: show don’t tell. Yet so much of the novel does tell, through second- and third-hand news coming to Lavinia, what is happening in the world that the plot drags and I found myself sighing with relief for an clip of dialogue to relieve the endless parade of off-screen places and people.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that this was less a failure of plotting and more a failing of point-of-view. The novel is told from Lavinia’s point of view, so we see what she sees. And she is a woman in ancient Latium; she does not go to battle or even leave her home city for more than a few days at a time, being as her sacred duty is the upkeep of her household. Although a handful of scenes in a dream world where Lavinia converses with “her poet” Virgil give more intimate insights into the world beyond her own, we as readers are largely confined to the “women’s side” right alongside Lavinia, at most getting a glimpse of battle from a rooftop.

Of course, this doesn’t make those sections of the book any more effective because they are hampered by PoV rather than poor plotting. But it does, I think, reveal something interesting about literature in general and about us as readers and the expectations that we bring to stories.

Here is a question worth considering: Why must we hear about the battles at all? We are in a woman’s PoV, and if she does not ride out to battle, then why should battles (and other political maneuvers) be given anything more than cursory attention? Well, of course, the canon demands it; the Aeneid discusses those battles and events and so they form the fictional backdrop for LeGuin’s story as well. Is it possible, too, that we’ve come to expect it? That we’ve come to regard those battles and political maneuvers–the work of men, not women, in ancient Latium–as the meat of such a story? In fact, Lavinia is surprisingly devoid of details about Lavinia’s life and work as a woman in her world. While we do learn of her religious rituals and her expectations (and fears) concerning the life she faces and her political role and her stewardship of the household, I couldn’t help but to wish that more of those passages devoted to summarizing the doings of men outside of Lavinia’s sphere could have been devoted to her life instead.

But, of course, this puts LeGuin in a difficult situation. Lavinia’s character is knowledgeable about the world around her; she is trusted worthy of learning and contributing to both her father and husband’s reigns, and so the focus on the work of men like her father and her husband also proves her competence, her abilities beyond being a good wife, mother, and housekeeper. But, here, we fall into the trap of defining worthiness from a masculine perspective. Why should Lavinia’s work for her household and her people be any less worthy? I felt like LeGuin was seesawing between wanting to show Lavinia as possessing traditional competence–knowledge of the world around her, of politics, of how to get what she wanted from other people–and wanting to show the feminine contributions to that sort of life. In the latter regard, LeGuin did a good job of showing how the women in Latium were often the silent, unacknowledged backbone of the Latin people: those who provided comfort, healing, sustenance, and foresight enough to see beyond a single day’s battle to the deeper future. I just wish that there could have been more of it, and that LeGuin could have embraced tighter the worth of Lavinia’s contributions in these areas rather than attempting to define her competence in masculine terms.

Still, this represents also a shortcoming of our own perceptions concerning competence and worth. We’ve still not reached the point where “the work of small hands” (to borrow the title of one of my own stories that attempted to show how the quiet, unacknowledged influence of a woman saved her people) is appreciated the way that prowess in battle and agility in politics are. In a way, this conundrum parallels closely a conversation between Aeneas and his war-mongering son Ascanius:

“If you are to rule Latium after me … I want to know that you’ll learn how to govern, not merely to make war, that you’ll learn to ask the powers of the earth and sky for guidance for yourself and your people, that you’ll learn to seek your manhood on a greater field than the battlefield. Tell me that you will learn those things, Ascanius.”

This wisdom, gentle guidance, and piety are feminine traits: They are Lavinia. If only the story could have honed closer to Aeneas’s own ideals for his kingship and that of his son, they too could have been Lavinia.

But, as noted, these are hurdles that we are only learning to overcome in trying to depict strong women and show positively femininity in a world that traditionally has and a society that continues to view those traits as signs of weakness. I applaud LeGuin for aiming high in her novel and making a strong attempt to accomplish these goals and, at times, doing so. I give Lavinia 2.75 E.L. Fudge “Elves Exist” cookies out four.

“Like the rest of America and its genius writers,” writes one commenter,

you’re just another ‘trend-spotter’. Like chick-lit hasn’t been suffering since the START of the recession in 2007. You’re 2 years late! But congrats on being another academic whose ’study’ concludes with “we need more work here” or “______ field needs to re-invent itself”. But then again, your party scene tells that perfectly – getting a glimmer of an idea does not count as executing that idea in itself.

Another chimes in, with respect to Ms. Bilston describing a particular revision that she felt compelled to undertake: “Don’t waste your time cutting up the party scene in your book, it won’t sell any better b/c it sounds like a waste of time to read.” As I read these remarks, I was flummoxed by the fact that commenters feel the need to proclaim the utter lack of worth of a novel that they haven’t even read and to dismiss the writer’s efforts as useless. And I’m having a hard time imagining a similar type of meta article written by a male horror or sci-fi author meeting with the same scathing dismissal of his very craft.

Another commenter broadens the ad hominem attack to point out,

This sort of whiny article is precisely why the writers of chick lit are so embarassed. They should be. They write frivolous books that are basically identical to each other in content and then want to be taken seriously.

I’m not a particular fan of so-called “chicklit” or women’s fiction, and my reasons for that are a lot of the same reasons that some of the commenters give: characters whose lives and conflicts seem so unreal and, yes, frivolous that my interest just isn’t sustained. Yet, reading these comments, no matter my own personal agreeance with them as far as choosing novels to read, I find my hackles raised nonetheless and have to come to the defense of my sister-wordsmiths. Because–as escapist as their novels may be–they aren’t getting a fair shake.

Commenter LaniDianeRich–who identifies herself as an author in the chicklit genre–put it best when she wrote,

Why is it okay for Stephen King to write about grisly evil, for Tom Clancy to write about spies, for Augusten Burroughs to write about his tragic childhood, but it’s not okay for Sarah (or me, or hundreds of other writers) to write about women?

Because the arguments against writing that doesn’t fall into the “literary” genre are familiar; I heard the same spiel about a lack of realism and cookie-cutter characters during a rather uncomfortable writers’ workshop in university where a short story of mine was shredded not on its own merits but by the professor’s assessment that, because it was set in a dystopian future, then it was sci-fi and therefore of inherently less worth than my classmates’ work set in present-day reality. In Tolkien’s “On Fairy Stories,” he addresses many of these arguments, suggesting that they have had a long and vigorous shelf-life despite the sheer bone-headedness of such assertions. So it’s not the arguments, per se, against “chicklit” that I find so disturbing as the vitriol that this particular genre seems always to earn. Why?

I’m just as guilty. I’m quicker to distance myself, as a writer, from chicklit than I am from the gaudily covered hardcore “science fiction” novels that sound like a thinner, dumbed-down Star Trek, even though I am a writer of neither and, in fact, as a reader, would probably prefer Confessions of a Shopaholic to a book from the Warhammer series. And, certainly, the Warhammer books aren’t regarded as fine writing or profound, yet they also aren’t subject to the same vitriol as chicklit. Rather, they’re waved off as harmless–if at times inadvertantly humorous (at least to those of us who don’t “get” the genre)–escapism. I remember once having to sit through a movie based on a Tom Clancy novel that my husband wanted to see and being driven to distraction by the sheer improbability and inanity of the whole thing, coupled with a constant hyper-masculine need to show the size of one’s dick and the heft of one’s balls by packing as many explosions, bombs, guns, guys in camo, dark-sunglassed operatives shouting in code into walkie-talkies, careening helicopter flights, and urban car chases into an hour-and-a-half sustained roar. Replace the bombs and guns with diamonds and yachts and the guys in camo with slim thirty-somethings in designer Italian couture and the car chases with posh parties and–from the description that Ms. Bilston provides of her own novel–you have chicklit. It’s no more improbable than Tom Clancy, certainly. (Perhaps significantly less so since people, presumably, do live such padded lives somewhere yet, as of passing it on I-95 this morning, Baltimore had not yet been nuked by terrorists.)

Yet I don’t see Tom Clancy or Stephen King or Dean Koontz being berated by literati who wish these authors would just get their darned heads out of the clouds and focus on reality and people (as they are in reality, of course) and “things bigger than your everyday troubles,” to quote on of the commenters on Ms. Bilston’s article.

And now this begins to remind me of a discussion that generated on my last post where I mentioned that one of the more interesting comments that I received on Another Man’s Cage accused me of writing the novel for my own pleasure (as a woman) and that of my largely female audience because I dwelled on the emotional and psychological lives of the characters. That comment–”written for a woman’s pleasure!”–was meant to be withering to the entire premise of my novel, I’m sure. It was instant damnation. It marked me, immediately, as a most unserious writer for choosing to aim my content at people with two X chromosomes. I have trouble imagining the opposite accusation–of a story being written for the pleasure and entertainment of males–as carrying the same sort of clout. Even fandom’s obsession with “Mary Sue,” that icon of female escapism, I think, marks how little we value typical feminine fantasy as compared to typical masculine fantasy. Fantasy in general is always regarded with distaste by some. But male-oriented fantasy–Warhammer and Tom Clancy and epic CGI-enhanced battle scenes–are laughed off at worst but generally consumed as the guilty pleasure that most people feel when indulging in obvious escapism. But chicklit? We need to be puttin a stop to that! But why?

Mists joins a tradition of exploring the Arthurian legends, a tradition that includes hundreds of works and spans centuries, but differs from the vast majority of these treatments in that its concerns with the cultural mainstays like King Arthur and Sir Lancelet are secondary to the women of the legends. The story centers itself on the life of Morgaine, Arthur’s half-sister and priestess of the isle of Avalon, where old magics hold sway amid an increasingly Christianized Britain. The lives of the other women in the Arthurian stories are also focal points of the story: Morgaine and Arthur’s biological mother Igraine, Morgaine’s foster-mother Viviane, Arthur’s wife and queen Gwynhyfar, Morgaine’s aunt Morgause, and Lancelet’s wife Elaine.

The unique perspective would not be nearly as notable if the Arthurian tradition didn’t have such a lengthy history of misogyny. In works dating from the medieval period to the present, the best a woman in an Arthurian tale can hope for is to be sidelined, to be a name in a text notable only for her marriage or mothering of an important male. Her unfortunate sisters are cast as villains prone to open malice or astounding weakness, particularly in matters of self-control and morality. In The Reclamation of a Queen, Barbara Ann Gordon-Wise traces the literary history of Gwynhyfar, perhaps the most maligned of Arthurian women. Gwynhyfar’s improper sexual desires serve to bring down her husband’s paradisial kingdom in many of the works in which she plays a part while her most frequent partner in crime–Lancelet, the most beloved of Arthur’s knights–tends to be regarded favorably, despite his illicit activities in the Queen’s bed. Her inability to provide Arthur with a son and an heir is also scorned by literary history for its weakening of Arthur’s kingdom. Saddled with the lowest of expectations–to be an obedient wife and provide a child to her husband–Gwynhyfar fails at both, and literature has judged–and continues to judge–her harshly for it.

Morgaine is generally a more active villain, with the fact that she bore a child to Arthur–her half-brother–usually used as proof of that. Despite the fact that it takes two to tango, Arthur’s role in that pregnancy tends to go unexamined or is excused by Morgaine’s skill in deception and trickery. Relying on a motif that goes back to the moment that Adam first bit into the apple, he is an innocent victim of the wiles of a woman. Their son Mordred goes on to destroy the peace that Arthur has so carefully wrought. Once again, the vile actions of a woman destroy the accomplishments of a man.

To say that women have been mistreated throughout the history of literature is to state the obvious, and bemoaning the lack of gender equality as it is reflected in the literature of medieval Europe is pointless. What is disturbing is the tenacity with which these negative depictions of women have held their places in literature and other forms of entertainment, despite their coming to light in a society that is supposedly moving toward gender equality. In this, fantasy literature holds its unique power for promoting the empowerment of women.

To write historical fiction or even fiction set in the modern day is to be constrained by gender expectations and inequalities that are represented in the interest of accurately depicting reality. I have had conversations with people who complain about stories masquerading as historical fiction that attempt to level the gender playing field by showing empowered women where, in all likelihood, there would have been none, or who portray cultures with much more progressive attitudes toward gender than they in fact had. I am forced to agree, even as I lament that harmful stereotypes of women must be thrust forth again and again in literature because of it. Herein, fantasy literature possesses a unique advantage. In its most elemental definition, fantasy literature changes an aspect of reality (without concern about the mechanism of that change, unlike science fiction) and follows that change through to its conclusion. Fantasy literature is perfect for exploring a world that is not constrained by inequality towards women or that–as with Mists–turns patriarchy on its head to show what a matrifocal civilization might look like. Throughout this, there is no need to “suspend disbelief” as one must when encountering the same ideas in most historical fiction or fiction set in the modern day.

I picked up Mists for my interest in it as a piece of feminist fantasy literature. However, I found its feminist cant secondary to and dependent upon its tendency to look critically upon organized religion. While there is no doubt that Mists is meant to criticize patriarchal institutions–the Christian church in its more conservative incarnation receives particularly scathing treatment–then I felt like it looked unfavorably on both the Christian and the pagan institutions shown in the novel. Although the critiques of Christianity were much more noticeable, the institutions of heathen Goddess worship of which Morgaine and Viviane are part are certainly far from glorified. To the contrary, Mists shows both faiths–Christian and pagan–to be uplifting, positive entities in their purest forms. When tethered to power, ambition, and moral certitude, however, both institutions wreak terrible harm.

Although the pagan faith shown in Mists is Goddess-centered and treats women as higher than men in its institutions and traditions, it certainly is not a pro-woman institution. Morgaine’s mother Igraine is the most shining example of a woman treated as a tool in order to advance her sisters in a male-driven world. Igraine is given in marriage to Gorlois–a Roman much older than she whom she detests and who treats her with disregard bordering on contempt–and she is given by her own sister Viviane, a priestess of Avalon who otherwise affirms the superiority of women. It is clear, though, that this does not include all women so much as it includes women in power. When it is to Viviane’s benefit, she is no better than Gwynhyfar’s father, who gives his daughter to Arthur in marriage as part of a parcel of horses; Igraine, likewise, is used to buy Avalon favor with the Romans. Deserted by her sisters, Igraine’s life becomes focused on pleasing men, and it is no surprise that she dies in a convent, scorning her own daughter Morgaine for her autonomy. In contrast, Lancelet and Gwydion (Mordred) are both connected to Avalon and the Lady of the Lake, and neither is used as a pawn quite in the way that Igraine (and, to a lesser extent, Morgause) are used.

Likewise, Morgaine’s treatment of Kevin the Bard at the end of the novel also shows the pagan institutions as comparably brutal as the Christian church. (Actually, at this point, they are probably more so, but the novel hints at the end of the growing fervor of the Christians that will, presumably, lead into the extreme fundamentalism that characterizes the Middle Ages and continues, to an extent, today.) Kevin is most guilty of not being a religious fundamentalist; his aim is to bring the two religions together as much as possible and to preserve the old ways in conjunction with the flourishing Christianity. To Morgaine and others with a fundamentalist bent, this is unacceptable. Morgaine’s brief embodiment as the Goddess at one of Arthur’s feasts demonstrates the potential of the Britons to receive the old powers, but her refusal to compromise threatens to drive the faith in its entirety into oblivion. When Kevin is discovered to have used the regalia of Avalon in conjunction with Christian ceremonies, he is decried as a traitor, and the original sentence is that he should be brought alive to Avalon (through the trickery of the priestess Nemue, who in the process of ensnaring him must also herself fall in love with him) and there flayed and shut alive inside of a tree.

Even as she herself hands down this sentence, Morgaine is tormented by doubts. For all that she despises Kevin’s actions, he has been her friend and lover, and she wants to do him no harm. When he is delivered into her hands, she makes the decision to grant him a quick death, even if it means that she herself must bear his punishment as a traitor to Avalon. Morgaine’s refusal to play a part in cruel malice is viewed–by her at least–as a weakness; she feels that she has failed in her duty to her Goddess. In despair at Kevin’s fate, Nemue commits suicide. Again, in pursuit of their aims, the machinations of the religious elite have led to the destruction of a woman.

Throughout the novel, Kevin’s sentence remains the most explicit example of such cruelty, though Mists hints that such “blood sacrifices” were once commonplace and that ordinary people (or criminals in their places) were expected to lay down their lives in rituals to ensure a good harvest or in homage to the Goddess. The elite and powerful were, of course, exempt, unless they were traitors, in which case they were subjected to the same cruelties that would become part and parcel of their religious successors, the Christians. This seems to show, again, the short-sightedness of religious institutions, no matter what name they use in worship, and the dehumanization to which they are inclined when they believe that larger spiritual matters require it. Mistreatment of women is a part of this.

So, in the end, what did I think of the book? It is not without flaws, in my opinion, but overall, I really, really enjoyed it. I felt that the feminist purposes were a little too explicit in places, borrowing too heavily from modern discourse common on this subject (particularly in the earlier sections of the book, when Igraine is growing accustomed to living in a patriarchy and often thinks like Gloria Steinem being made to live among the Amish) and would have liked had I felt less like I was being told what to feel about this rather than being shown Igraine’s life and permitted to draw my own conclusions. (Yes, the old adage “show don’t tell” rears its warty head!) Morgaine was constantly realizing that another character was “the only friend she’d ever had” or “the only one she’d ever loved,” which would have been fine except that I think she realized this, independently, of Kevin, Lancelet, Viviane, Gwynhyfar, and Arthur. Since I am prone to this sort of hyperbole and waffling over affections in my own fiction, it leaped out at me here. And the ending happened much too fast. Mordred becomes a delightfully wicked character, and I looked forward to his climactic scene with Arthur but … there wasn’t much there. His betrayal should have been so much more memorable given the skill with which Ms. Bradley constructs his character and installs him in the hearts of those in Arthur’s court. I felt like the book rushed much to fast to its conclusion. Maybe the copy I had from the library had pages missing? It did feel that way.

But, for the past month, there were times when I would want to forsake other activities and things that needed to be done in order to read this book. It is not only an ingenious rendering of one of the most familiar tales in Western mythology but also highly entertaining. I give it 3.75 E.L. Fudge “Elves Exist” cookies out of four.

I had all intentions of reviewing the movie, being as this blog weble is primarily concerned with fantasy literature and the issues that it raises, particularly for those marginalized by traditional discussions of literature. Besides being a fantasy classic in the making, Coraline concerns a lot of these issues. However, since I can’t pick a focus and have decided that I do not want to, then this is the Coraline Grab Bag, a motley of unrelated musings on the novella and the movie.

***SPOILER ALERT!***
I am not going to shy from discussing details and outcomes of the plot when they are relevant to the points I am discussing here. So if you want to go into the book/movie without knowing the details of how it will turn out, get thee to the bookstore or theater and then come back to this post.

First, as far as general impressions of the movie, it is one of the few instances where I feel that a movie adds something significant to the book on which it is based. This is not to say that it is better than the book, but the novella Coraline nearly begs for a visual presentation, and this movie delivers. Oh, does it deliver.

Here is a hundred-word synopsis:

Coraline is an eccentric tween whose parents are workaholic-bordering-on-neglectful. Like many children in such a situation, her imagination becomes her escape. A bricked-over doorway entices her and, one night, she discovers that the door leads into a parallel life where her parents and home embody what she believes to be the ideal. As the story progresses, she realizes that the perfection is a guise for something much darker. And, yes, one of those dark attributes is that everyone in the parallel world sews black buttons into their eyes. Coraline must save herself and others entrapped here from its dark snares.

It is a dark story. It becomes even darker when ideas that were left to the wilds of ones imagination in the novella–like the buttons-for-eyes concept that the movie exploits for every squirm-inducing ounce of dark joy it’s worth–achieve the added tangibility of presentation on the big screen: like the sharp, shining needle and Coraline’s aghast eyes and the Other Father’s suavely creepy assertion that “It’s extra-sharp so it won’t hurt.” This invites the viewer to contemplate the act of exchanging one’s eyes for black buttons that is more easily avoided in the books.

To offer further anecdotal evidence about the need to take care with children at this movie, when we went last week, we had a small child seated in the row behind us. The opening scene shows a ragdoll being remade in Coraline’s image, and as a pair of scissors tore open the doll’s back, the little girl behind us gasped and cried out. This was the first ten seconds of the movie. The rest of the movie was similarly punctuated by little yelps and shrieks from the row behind us. Despite being a kid person like most cats are dog people, I felt truly sorry for the little tyke, whose parents probably saw “Animation!” and thought “Perfect to pacify little Madysyn for two hours!” Not the case, folks. Give serious consideration to taking any child to Coraline who is, well, younger than Coraline.

So there are mutterings about how Coraline is dark and misplaced as a children’s or “family” movie. Well, to be blunt, no shit. I empathized fully with the outrage directed at Despereaux earlier this year. Not only was the movie G-rated, but the previews gave no indication that it would include such scenes as a young woman being tied up to be eaten alive by rats or a rat (however deserving) being trapped by a murderous cat while we the audience are treated to his offscreen death throes. To me, it seemed perhaps the most egregious example of how “child-friendly” or “family-friendly” has come to mean “without sex or curse words,” ignoring the fact that children remain largely ignorant of the meaning of sex and curse words but understand full well what’s going on when that rat gets trapped in a helm with a hungry cat and the helm starts rattling. I was disturbed by scenes in Despereaux, and I write dark fantasy and horror fiction.

The issue with Despereaux was that these elements were sprung upon an audience that expected something very different. As Emily Bazelon notes in the article linked above, parents have a hard time finding out the extent of dark themes and violence in “children’s movies,” things that might not necessarily be revealed in the preview, reviews, or the source material. I agree. But, sorry, you can’t use that excuse with Coraline. The paperback copy of the novella that I bought identifies it as “One of the most frightening books ever written,” at least according to the New York Times Book Review. The two previews I saw of the movie in theaters–before fantasy movies as different as The Strange Case of Benjamin Button and Inkheart–left no doubt that the movie would be dark. The previews even showed the famous buttons-into-eyes scene. In other words, no one is trying to hide that Coraline is a dark story. So I must admit that my patience wears very thin with those who are grumbling that, despite all this, Coraline is a dark movie.

No shit.

I found Filthy Grandeur’s review of Coraline via Feministe. On the darkly seductive Other Mother, Filthy Grandeur writes:

Also, her whole identity is based on being Coraline’s “other mother.” She provides what Coraline desires, which amounts to what Coraline thinks a mother should provide.

Thelma Adams for Women on Film says of Coraline’s real mother:

Yet the disturbing part is the depiction of a self-involved, self-obsessed mother who can’t bother to see to her own daughter’s needs because she’s so worried about getting clean copy to her publisher. She’s a garden writer who can’t grow her own garden — or tend her own plant (Coraline).

Yet, with all due respect to these reviewers, I think they’re only halfway there. Yes, Coraline’s mother is the stereotyped image of the harried, snappish “working mother” whose priority is her career and not her child. The Other Mother is the stereotyped domestic goddess, both in her traditionally feminine interests and in the center-of-my-world treatment that she lavishes on her child. The contrast and conflict between these dual expectations is part of what drives the story. In the novella, there is a particularly revealing scene that was left out of the movie. Coraline’s Other Mother, in an effort to convince Coraline that her missed parents are alive and very well, shows her a scene of them returning from holiday:

In the mirror it was daytime already. Coraline was looking at the hallway, all the way down to her front door. The door opened from the outside and Coraline’s mother and father walked inside. They carried suitcases.

“That was a fine holiday,” said Coraline’s father.

“How nice it is, not to have Coraline any more,” said her mother with a happy smile. “Now we can do all the things we always wanted to do, like go abroad, but were prevented from doing by having a little daughter.”

Filthy Grandeur notes that it is “sort of strange that the child was trying to enforce this gender role,” but I’m don’t find it particularly strange at all. Traditional gender roles are still so prevalent and, most importantly, so subtle in mainstream Western culture and media that I don’t see how a child like Coraline could not absorb the expectation that her mother should be making her child more of a priority than she is. Overcoming these expectations take a conscious effort and a level of thought and analysis that eludes many adults. In a way, Coraline is about Coraline’s growing awareness of how such unreal expectations placed on the shoulders of women tend to play out in actuality.

The important point, for me, is what is revealed in the end of the story. Domestic bliss is an illusion literally created by the Other Mother who, amusingly, in the words of the black cat, describes the Other Mother’s motives as,

“She wants something to love, I think,” said the cat. “Something that isn’t her. She might want something to eat as well. It’s hard to tell with creatures like that.”

The ancient, devouring mother; the stage mom or soccer mom screeching at her mortified and inadequate offspring; the mother who invests herself so strongly in her children that her identity becomes lost and conflated with theirs, who figuratively consumes them in pursuit of her own self-worth: this is the dark side of the domestic bliss in Coraline’s parallel reality. It is a cautionary tale not about women who focus too strongly on something other than their children but about the opposite, about confining a woman’s worth and identity within the home (note that the parallel reality, as an explicit creation of the Other Mother, does not extend much beyond the home) and her children.

In the end, I think that the movie makes its statement about gender roles in Coraline’s choice: Left to choose between domestic bliss with the Other Mother and her imperfect life with her real mother, she chooses the latter. And a glimpse of the price of perfection is enough to change her views of her own mother and family. Especially in the movie version, Coraline’s family at the end seems much better than her family at the start. Have they changed? Or has she? Here, Gaiman and Selick play a subtle game with point-of-view and invite the audience to consider whether Coraline’s life was really so awful to start. Or was a young girl with a vivid imagination simply engaging in fantasy based on what she had absorbed of gender-role “ideals”?

The movie dwells far longer on the blissful scenes whereas the book focuses on Coraline’s quest to save her parents and the souls of other children that the Other Mother has taken. I suspect this is to show off some of the dazzling and innovative scenes and concepts: a garden in the shape of Coraline’s face, a lawnmower built like a giant mantis, the jumping mouse show, a chandelier that doubles as a milkshake dispenser, and so on. I think the shift here was mostly advantageous: Getting to share in Coraline’s discoveries and wonder was a real treat. However, the game of souls at the end felt a bit rushed to me because I was accustomed to the book version and the loving detail put into the full horror of it. Here, the movie scimped a bit, though as dark as the movie was already, I can understand that it may have been a necessary action to keep the movie from tilting into PG-13 territory by MPAA standards. Likewise, Coraline’s prophetic dream meeting with the three stolen children was much more lavishly treated in the book, a scene that I had looked forward to and missed somewhat in the movie, although the unreal sense of time essential to this scene in the book may have presented insurmountable challenges on the screen.

I give it a full four E.L. Fudge Elves Exist cookies out of four.

And, yes, this is true. If you aim for one thousand comments on your novel, you’re probably not going to get them writing Silmarillion. (Another Man’s Cage currently has 185 comments on ff.net.) You’re much better off in Twilight or Harry Potter, even The Lord of the Rings. (My friend JunoMagic’s LotR-based novel Lothíriel has 995 reviews on the same site.)

My contention is not with whether or not this is reality. It’s pretty in-your-face obvious, if you ask me. My contention lies with the very notion of recognizing rewards for our writing in such terms.

Because the fact of the matter is that people who post their fiction publicly are looking for something for doing so. Oh, I’ve heard the wide-eyed assertions of people who claim, “I only post for myself!” I call bullshit. You may write for yourself–I hope that you do!–but if you’re taking the time to join groups/archives and format stories for uploading and to actually upload them and write summaries and debate the rating and so on, you’re doing so with hopes of getting something from someone else. That might be simply getting read; it might be in-depth concrit; it might be the adulation of masses claiming that Shakespeare is currently licking the taste of your road dust from his lips. So there is some hope for reward, maybe not even anything particularly tangible, but something. Write for myself, post for others: that is my motto, and I fail to see how there is any shame in standing on a stage and hoping for an audience.

And, of course–idealist though I may be–I can also see things in realistic terms, and I know that nothing I say will change the fact that there will be people for whom the sole measure of success is reaching a certain number of comments or page clicks. I count these people alongside those who take 80-hour-a-week jobs for the six-figure salaries and the ability to accrue shinies like a million-dollar home that might as well be a million-dollar motel room for all that they’re in it, complete with a professional-grade kitchen that never gets used because their dinners are slurped out of Chinese takeout boxes, and a vacation home in Bethany Beach that never gets used because they’re working eighty hours a week, every week. But the collection of such shinies is their mark of success; intangibles like contentment or personal enrichment are of little to no matter.

But, of course, there’s no meaning in such an existence, just as there is no meaning in fiction that is penned solely to entice the greatest number of eyeballs to look at it. Traffic accidents earn that much.

This concept is nothing new. In professional fiction, the term for it has been sanitized and euphemized as “writing for the market.” Those with blunter tongues call it “selling out.” Last year, horribly enough, I had to write an essay on Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara for a course called Modern Epic Fantasy, and while looking for information on the book, I found an interview with the author during which he was asked how he handles critical reactions to his work. “I write first for myself and for what I perceive to be the market” was part of his answer. Having read no further than Sword of Shannara (because, as I often admonish fandom trolls, if organisms lacking a central nervous system nonetheless possess the capability to learn a basic avoidance response, then what does it say of human beings who cannot do the same?), I can say that it is painfully obvious that Brooks writes foremost for a market. “Writing for the market” necessarily means that there must be a perceptible market in the first place, which means that there must be a body of books that is being overwhelmingly purchased (and, thus, published) over another body of books, which means walking in the ditches created by the passage of all those authors’ feet before yours, which means stale ideas and writing that lacks anything close to daring.

However, I am not so naïve not to understand that professional writers are just that: They are professionals, and so they need to make money on their work. So they must remain at least cognizant of the market for that work. I know firsthand the allure of that “market,” of leaving an idea about which I was passionate for another because I thought that the latter had a better chance of “selling.” It made me a miserable writer and drove me to give up writing for two years. I suppose it’s the same as the caveman’s urge to hoard more deer legs in one’s cave than one can possibly eat because that stack of rotting meat in the corner represents success and, ultimately, survival. Never mind that it reeks.

But this is professional writing. After my failed stint as a writer of literary fiction, it was “fan fiction” that brought me back to writing, and it brought me back in part because it was something that could not be sold. It kept me honest much in the way that a job at Denny’s and not Applebee’s keeps a recovering alcoholic honest by not even providing a whiff of temptation into the old habits. There was very little “market” for Silmfic beyond a slightly bigger audience for some characters and pairings over others; it was the closest I’d ever seen in a fiction-writing community to the ideal of 1) writing only what one’s heart and mind cries must be written and 2) having one’s work judged foremost in terms of how well it worked for its audience. This is not to say that the Silmarillion community was (and is) without any favoritism paid to some works, genres, and authors over others. But that an unknown author could march into the room with her big, hulking novel that never once touches on an event mentioned in the texts and still find readers and get comments on her work is, I think, a testament to the difference between fanfic and o-fic. Let me try the same thing with an original novel and see how far I get.

So I find this notion of recognizing and writing for a fanfic market to be dismaying. What the FanHistory posts encourage (especially the first) is abandoning one’s own passions as a writer in favor of writing to fit a perceived market. Fuck quality. My heart and mind pull me to contemplate the early lives of the Fëanorians, the quality of my writing (I hope) reflects my passion and interest in this topic, but as my “mere” 185 reviews on ff.net reveal, this isn’t enough. Never mind that I’ve never read Twilight and strongly suspect that I would object to some of the books’ basic premises, but this is where it’s at. I can surely scratch together a story about Bella and Edward (see, I know the main characters’ names at least!) that will probably get more comments in a week than AMC has gotten in three years.

I don’t object to the reality of this claim but whether this is a measure that we should be putting upon fanworks in the first place. It’s bad enough that, in order to make a living off of their art, writers must mash and corset their creative passions to suit the “market.” What is to be gained by placing the same impositions upon fan-writing? It takes fan-writing from something that is driven by creativity and the community that forms around sharing that creativity and turns it into a capitalist enterprise, only instead of success being measured in dollars or euros or pounds or kroner or pesos or yen, now we’re measuring in page clicks or comment counts and shifting our creativity and our communities to accrue those meaningless little tick marks. We can’t even feed our families off hits on ff.net. In such a system, tiny fandoms–like Silmarillion, where the stories being written are overwhelmingly of high quality and the communities are extremely dedicated, passionate, and close-knit–must necessarily lose out in favor of–what exactly? Stacking our archives with the same pulp that I saw when, two Christmases ago, I wanted to buy my husband a book by Ursula K. LeGuin (any book by Ursula K. LeGuin) and, in the local B&N fantasy/sci-fi section with its bright-colored covers featuring shovel-jawed, sword-wielding heroes and dew-eyed, diadem-wearing princesses, I found one copy of The Left Hand of Darkness? Terry Brooks, on the other hand, probably had a shelf unto himself.

The difference between piling rotting deer carcasses in the corner of your cave if you’re writing professional fiction versus fan fiction is that, in fanfic, those carcasses are never a matter of survival. They just stink.

I find the argument of those most vociferously in the NO camp to be a little disturbing.

Because what is an “academic” reading–which, based on the posts I’ve read, is being defined as detailed analysis of whether and why a story works–of fanworks if not simply one of many ways to approach a very broad and diverse topic?

Swatkat24 put it best: “I find the anti-aca/fen debates that make the rounds in fandom every now and then worrisome, and very opposed to that aspect of fannish culture I’ve come to cherish over the years: tolerance of other people’s weird obsessions.“

The argument against “acafen” (those fans who enjoy and engage in academic analysis and discourse about fanworks) seems to revolve primarily around the idea that to analyze a work too deeply ruins it. In K.A. Laity’s original post that spurred this current round of discussion, one commenter put it as, “Funny thing I’ve found– when you cut the living dog into pieces, it never acts the same afterwards, even if you put the pieces back where you found them.” Twistedchick drew a similar parallel with, “I have never liked dissections and vivisections” and goes on to write,

See, when you take all the living bits of a story apart, out of context, skin them and stake them out and dance around them while they’re drying, what you’ve got is something that you’ve killed, and it’s dead. It might make stew, but it’s not a story any more. You haven’t ‘controlled the narrative’, you’ve slaughtered it, and it’s attracting flies and smelling pretty bad. You can say you’ve got Einstein’s brain, in a jar on the shelf, and you can measure it and figure out what shade of pinkish-gray it is this week, but it’s not a living mind any more, is it?

These are pretty extreme reactions, I think, when one considers that under discussion is a single way to read and interpret literature. We are not, in fact, talking about cutting apart living, sentient beings. The argument against literary analysis in no way parallels the argument against vivisection. (Take it from one who has spent a good part of her life firmly in the camp making the latter argument.)

The above arguments fail to account for the fact that a story analyzed by one reader does not leave that story in shambles for subsequent readers. If one takes apart that hypothetical dog, then that dog can be wholly restored for no one. It’s not as though you can cut him to pieces and I can adopt him and take him home, healthy and whole, the next week.

Which gets to a second issue that is being discussed in this context. The comments on Twistedchick’s post reveal both hurt and anger about having work discussed in such a fashion without consent and her own opinions being disregarded because she wasn’t thought capable of understanding the discussion because she was not an academic.

With the latter, I have to empathize … but I don’t think that it’s the same question as to whether academic analysis is appropriate when applied to fandom or fanworks. Such experiences as Twistedchick describes don’t belong to academics. They belong to assholes.

Can academics be assholes? Sure.

Can non-academics be assholes? If ff.net proves one thing, it is that stupid people can be jerks too.

Telling someone that she is not intelligent enough to understand the discussion of a story that she crafted takes a galling amount of condescension. Providing someone with unasked-for critical analysis of a story is a completely different can of worms and not that much different than the ongoing discussion/debate about constructive criticism and whether or not it is polite or appropriate to critique a story where the author has not given his or her permission to do so. Publicly critiquing a story is even more of a touchy issue.

Why should the question be any different if it is an “acafan” talking down to me about my competency as an author or a barely literate commenter on ff.net who can nonetheless lecture me on the myriad complexities of eschatology in Tolkien’s world?

Personally, I’m inclined to write off both as socially inept and possessed of overinflated senses of self-importance and to seek constructive comments from those whom I trust to provide a kind of critique with which I am comfortable.

But the reality of publicly posting online is that, with it, one opens himself or herself to public comments and “use” of the material as inspiration, example, and so on. I touched on this in a previous post, The Many Faces of LiveJournal, about how some LiveJournal users want their public posts to remain available to a public readership … but to simultaneously inhabit some nebulous twilight realm as far as commentary and fair use of that material goes. My feelings on this remain mixed, to an extent, but I find myself leaning toward regarding this outlook as an example of wanting to have one’s cake and eat it too: If public authorship confers benefits that locked/limited or private authorships do not–such as an increased readership and level of discussion or positive attention from peers–then it seems a bit unfair to ignore the negatives that come with public authorship, such as negative attention or fair use of one’s words for purposes with which the author may not necessarily agree, as when one LJer discovered that her public LJ posts had been referenced in a published book. At the same time, I do understand that a nuanced understanding of commenting on and using another fan’s work–even when that work is public–has been not only tolerated but encouraged in fandom. So while I find myself raising my eyebrows at the writer who would publicly share a story and yet expect that story to remain off-limits for certain kinds of critique, then I nonetheless do understand from where such an attitude derives.

Rolanni brings up a related point about the appropriateness of academic study and discussion of “genre” fiction, particularly science fiction, also related to Laity’s original post. I think this is relevant to fan writings. “Genre fiction” has long been derided by many in the “literary fiction” arena; my writing program in university made its utter disdain for “genre” shamelessly explicit. But authors of both types of fiction have found common ground in their hatred of “fan fiction,” those derivative works that are subpar and escapist at best and theft at the Robin-Hobb extreme of the worst. It is a typical example of defining ourselves not by what we like but by what we hate and stomping down other people’s work to make our own stand taller.

Yet, despite the long loathing, both genre and fan fiction have found academics suddenly peering past thresholds they once wouldn’t be caught dead crossing. Rolanni writes, “Science Fiction has had an Inferiority Complex almost since its mass market birth, when it was viewed (by academics, my mom, high school English teachers, and other Right Thinking People) as being on the same intellectual level as porn, and was often displayed on the same spinners in the newstands,” and goes on to argue for the value of escapist fiction.

With which I would agree wholeheartedly.

But, again, I am puzzled by the assumption that a piece of writing must be one or the other–either worthy of analysis or simply “escapist”–and cannot exist as both to different people or even the same person. I read Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness for pleasure and loved every minute of it. I didn’t attempt to analyze it or figure out what it means. Yet it is a science fiction novel that could definitely be analyzed and could also hold its own against many works of so-called “literary” fiction. Likewise, I was rivetted by the plot, characters, and world-building of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, not with trying to figure out what she was trying to say. She was definitely trying to say something, but it wasn’t why I read the book. Oh, and Margaret Atwood is definitely a “literary” author.

For that matter, are novels so easily dichotomized as “literary” or “genre”?

Part of the reason that I insist on using the annoying quotation marks each time I type those words is because I don’t believe in the pure existence of either form of fiction. Really, what separates “literary” from “genre”? When I inquired in one of my writing courses about how science fiction is defined, I was told that it takes place in a dystopian future and uses “formulas” of the genre, like unrealistically perfect protagonists. In this case, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (which is celebrated in literary circles) can be dismissed as “genre” because it takes place in the future (and that future is definitely dystopian)?

And the acceptable “literary” stories written by my classmates–which inevitably dealt with divorce or alcoholism or prematurely dead friends–no matter how bland the writing and tired the subject, were not formulaic?

The more I write and the more I study literature (and–full disclosure–I am not an academic: I have one Bachelor’s degree in psychology and am working on a second in English, and my money is made doing work related to neither for the government; I do, however, hope to earn advanced degrees in my studies someday), the more I balk at classifying literature as one or the other of anything. Literary, genre; serious, escapist; original, derivative … I think that every story falls somewhere on a continuum between these extremes (and where on this continuum will vary from reader to reader), and no story can be wholly one and none of the other.

So, my point is that while I won’t fault Rolanni for her pride in her “escapist genre fiction,” I think that attempting to define what this is is essentially pointless: It will vary from person to person. For example, plenty of people write off Tolkien as escapist, genre tripe. And yet plenty of people also see Tolkien as a serious author with Something to Say that is worth studying.

Therefore, excluding a work from study because it meets one individual’s classification of “escapist genre fiction” is just as pointless. I may think that your escapist genre fiction really and truly does have something to say.

But, later in Rolanni’s post, she goes on to say,

What seems not to be understood is that academics don’t study and write articles in order to Validate the object of their study. Academics study and write articles in order to Validate themselves. As more and more people become academics, they must look further and further afield for subjects, and lo! suddenly Science Fiction isn’t genre trash anymore; it’s a way to secure tenure.

Ouch.

Considering that she froze and eventually made invisible the comments to this post, I suspect that I’m not the only one who takes umbrage at this point.

Clearly, if I think your escapist genre fiction has something to say–or your fan fiction, for that matter–then if I wish to study it, then this has little to do with my own enjoyment as a reader or curiosity as a researcher as it does attempting to strike into new territory and being hailed as pioneer in my discipline, presumably with great personal gain (i.e., tenure). This sort of broad-sweeping ad hominem attack is not only untrue but terribly unfair.

And, here, I think the argument about academia and fandom comes full circle.

The heart of the debate really has nothing to do with ruining fiction by “dissecting” it or ignoring its escapist purposes to search for something deeper (which, apparently, does not exist, no way, no how). It has to do with an intense dislike of academia and academics and–perhaps beyond that–intellectualism or finding pleasure in analysis. Here is where I come back to my original point that this is a disturbing argument.

It is disturbing because, as Swatkat24 pointed out in the above-referenced quote, fandom is obsessively tolerant of all sorts of people and ideas. While it is generally accepted that everyone be permitted their preferences in what they do and don’t like to read, it is frowned upon in most fan communities to attempt to bar someone from writing what they wish, be it smut or slash or AU. Or academic “dissections” of stories. People are trusted to avoid what they don’t like. And fandom especially stresses the importance of critiquing stories and not authors. Attempting to exclude a person from participating in fandom as an author or a reviewer because of his or her sexual orientation, race, religion, marital status, or gender identity would cause an uproar.

So why are fans sitting idly by and allowing fans to be excluded based on their chosen careers, fields of study, and level of education?

If I stated that people without college degrees should refrain from commenting on stories because their comments are inevitably shallow, uninsightful, and useless, I would (rightfully) be derided because I am not judging a review but a reviewer, much as telling an author that “Young authors like you should wait until you have more life experience before trying to write love stories,” I am not critiquing the story but the writer, and we generally accept that this is irrelevant and wrong.

Here, I find a rather intriguing connection to real (read: outside of fandom) life, at least in the United States, where there is lately an ever-escalating debate on “intellectualism” that increasingly attempts to cast the opinions of those deemed as “intellectuals” as unwelcome or inferior to those of “ordinary folks.” As the current presidential campaign really got underway, I found myself baffled at how many people I heard scorning Barack Obama’s “intellectualism” as somehow making him unfit to serve as President of the United States. “Why so?” I often wanted to ask; it seemed to me that devoting one’s life to careful thought and reasoning and problem solving was an asset in a presidential candidate.

But, as I delved deeper into this debate, I found aspects of it striking … and remarkably similar to the “acafen” discussion going on in fandom. It seemed that many people proudly titling themselves “anti-intellectuals” often spoke of suffering hurt and condescension from those whom they considered intellectual. Slate magazine’s XX Factor blog had a discussion about this, and conservative blogger Melinda Henneberger wrote of how “I did work for an intellectual at one point—and I know this because he spoke of it constantly; in fact, he talked so much about his own heapin’ helpin’ of smarts that one wondered, as he would have said, how wide-ranging his great thoughts really were.” Rachael Larimore–also conservative–wrote that, “What makes people angry, and blood-thirsty, if we must go there, is when elites and intellectuals condescend to everyone else and belittle their views.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

And whether applied to politics or fandom, this view is troubling because it excludes people based on perceived intelligence or preferred way of interpreting information. It does not analyze the merit of what they have to say but judges that, whatever is said, it will be offensive simply because of who is saying it. Being an “academic” isn’t a guarantee of asshattery, nor do academics and intellectuals hold monopoly on being jerks.

I don’t believe that all authors need to encourage or even welcome an academic reading of their work. Just as intellectuals aren’t the only pains in politics, I’m sure we could all name certain kinds of review(er)s that we find annoying or detestable and would prefer not to receive. In some spaces–like on LiveJournal–an author can control this, screening or deleting comments that she or he finds contrary to her or his purpose in writing, and I would not protest that right. But I think that it is quite a leap–and a dangerous one–to say that a certain type of thinking or people who enjoy that type of thinking are wholly unwelcome in fandom or their preferences any less worthy than anyone else’s.