JRRT was more than a “man of his time” where his regard of women is concerned. A self-described reactionary, many things from his personal life and his writings point to the fact that he was a rampant sexist in excess of what one would expect even from a man who was well into adulthood before women earned the vote in his country. Yet whenever the question of JRRT’s sexism comes into a discussion, someone trots out Lúthien as an example of how, though not all of his books provide fair depictions of women, his sexism clearly wasn’t entirely unmitigated. Lúthien, after all, is not only gorgeous but has enough super-magical powers to outsmart the Dark Lord, bring Beren back to life, and move Námo Mandos to mercy. She’s a superhero in a cape woven from her own hair. JRRT’s defenders like to point to her as evidence that he valued women’s strength and independence (because, no matter what you think of the Beren and Lúthien story, she clearly possessed both).

I don’t normally put much stock in an author’s intent, as I think I make clear here on a fairly regular basis. Texts must stand on their own, independent of what their authors wished them to say when writing them. In fact, I don’t know that I’ve ever started a sentence with that loathed phrase beloved of canatics: “Tolkien clearly intended …” So this will be a first.

In 1951, JRRT had finished The Lord of the Rings and was corresponding with Milton Waldman in hopes that Collins would publish LotR along with The Silmarillion. In Letter #131, JRRT describes his opus, from the Music of the Ainur to the conclusion of LotR. In discussing the Tale of Beren and Lúthien, we get this revelation:

It is Beren the outlawed mortal who succeeds (with the help of Lúthien, a mere maiden even if an elf of royalty) where all the armies and warriors have failed: he penetrates the stronghold of the Enemy and wrests one of the Silmarilli from the Iron Crown.

Firstly, a show of hands as to who thinks Beren did most of the work in retrieving that Silmaril? Beren would be in a wolf’s belly if not for Lúthien, to say nothing of her later “help,” without which he would also have been dead, many times over. (Impressive for a mortal.) But what struck me here as particularly revealing of JRRT’s attitude towards women is his note that Lúthien is “a mere maiden even if an elf of royalty.”

The sentence before this clarifies what JRRT sees as the significance of this particular story:

Here we meet, among other things, the first example of the motive (to become dominant in Hobbits) that the great policies of world history, ‘the wheels of the world’, are often turned not by the Lords and Governors, even gods, but by the seemingly unknown and weak … .

So, in short, the fact that Lúthien is descended from one of the Powers that JRRT celebrates as exceptionally wise in the very same letter means nothing. (Of course, that Power is also a woman.) Neither does her heritage as the daughter of Elwë, one of the Elves selected as ambassadors to Aman. All of these facts–and her deeds–are attenuated by her status as a “mere maiden,” and the heroics that so many of her fans embrace and cite as evidence that JRRT understood women as competent beings, even a little bit.

(Here we go.)

Tolkien clearly did not intend this. Based on what he told Waldman, he wanted her story to serve in the same capacity as Sam and Frodo’s, illustrating how even the weak can overthrow the powerful. He assumed that his readers would understand this based on her femaleness alone.

Nor do I think that the published story can in any way be defended as a change of heart in favor of recognizing a clearly powerful character as such, rather than a product of her circumstances that serves as an apt vehicle for one of his most valued themes. According to Douglas Charles Kane¹, paraphrasing Christopher Tolkien’s notes in The Lost Road, the published Beren and Lúthien story was based on two texts, completed in 1951, the same year that JRRT wrote to Milton Waldman. In short, the story was likely fresh in JRRT’s mind, and the published Silmarillion shows no major edits in favor of shifting Lúthien from a weak to a powerful character. (Furthermore, the basic structure of B&L was among JRRT’s earliest works in The Book of Lost Tales.)

Lúthien is certainly the best evidence that JRRT wasn’t a complete and unapologetic sexist, and I’ve seen it used as such many times. I’ve probably even used it myself in presenting The Silmarillion as a work that presents women more fairly than do The Hobbit and LotR. This quote not only debunks that idea but flips it on its head. When we see Lúthien, after all, we are not supposed to see one strong enough to overcome impossible odds in pursuit of her goals. We are not supposed to see a hero who earned her place as a cornerstone in the legends of her people. Nope, she is a mere maiden. She proves to the rest of us that, on occasion, even the inherently weak can “help” the privileged and powerful accomplish good things.

1. Douglas Charles Kane, Arda Reconstructed, p. 173.

The post scathes tech companies (like Yahoo!) that continue to engage in behaviors and practices unfriendly to women, such as having strippers at trade shows, which to the writer “implies that there are no women in the audience [and] certainly sends the message that the tech world is the He-Man Woman-Haters Club.” What about other facets of geek culture? Do you, HL readers and most trusted fellow citizens of geekdom, think that males that identify as “geeks” tend to be more overtly sexist than those who do not?

I’m a woman so, of course, I’ve experienced sexism in its myriad forms. For example, at work (in a male-dominated profession), I often feel that I have to stand on my desk and jump up and down and scream in order to get my (male) supervisors to hear my thoughts and ideas on policies relating to my job, policies that often involve knowledge or skills that only I possess. (Fancy that!) And when I worked in the same office as my (male) supervisors, I got mistaken for the secretary an awful lot. But I’ve been lucky that workplace outings have never taken place on The Block, I’ve never been sexually harassed at work, and if my coworkers make off-color jokes and remarks about women, then they do it well out of my earreach. Good thing too.

But now geek culture … I am, of course, part of the Tolkien writing fandom, which is predominantly female, and I’m not going to go into whether sexism/misogynism exists in that community … not in this post anyway. And I’m in the SCA, which is a pretty equal mix of men and women. I’ve had a few SCAdians make comments about my looks, but they were always people I knew well enough to know that they meant them playfully and not offensively, and they knew me well enough to know that I would take them as such. Fair enough.

I also spent a few years as part of the subculture surrounding a popular tabletop game that shall go unnamed. I built and painted models while my husband and friends played the game. It was not uncommon to walk into the small store where we played to find it packed with twenty or thirty people and yet be the only woman in the store. (A few moms and wives would drift in and out but, in my years there, I knew only one other woman who participated as actively as I did.) I used to tell my husband that I sometimes felt, walking into the store, like half the heads would pop up from the tables, noses would start twitching, and the guys would begin gleefully muttering, “Estrogen! We smell estrogen!”

The gaming models primarily represented men, but when women were depicted, they were always buxom to the extent that hauling around that much extra boobage would make walking difficult, much less weilding a sword and exacting fancy fighting manuevers, and they were usually scantily clad or–in a few instances–unclad entirely from the waist up. Needless to say, we few female participants didn’t get the same eye candy from the gaming models that depicted men.

What of behavior? Well, possibly the most blatantly offensive act of sexism I’ve yet faced occurred in that store while I was working on a painting project. I was minding my own business, working on my current project with a few other guys at the table with me. I was wearing a knee-length dress with a halter-type top that tied behind my neck. At one point, I realized that one of my table-mates was crawling under the table. Thinking that perhaps he’d dropped something down there, I looked underneath the table at him and realized that he was trying to look up my dress. Spurred on by his behavior, the fellow beside me took the opportunity to reach behind me and try to untie the halter top to my dress.

I don’t believe that these guys were trying to frighten me much less assault me; they thought that they were being funny or perhaps paying me a compliment. That didn’t make it right, and when one of my friends who was a store employee later heard about it, he was livid. He was much angrier than I was. Interacting with most of the participants in this particular game always felt like instructing young children in the proper ways to behave in public. The two incidents that afternoon were much the same: No, guys, it is not okay to behave that way toward a woman. Even if she is your friend. Even if you’re just playing around. If you like how I look, telling me that my dress is pretty or that I look nice in it it is a much more effective and civil compliment than trying to take it off of me.

I don’t know if it ever sunk in. My husband and I both grew frustrated with that particular community in a large part because of the rampant immaturity and asocial behavior, and we no longer participate. I still have a closet full of models that I would like to paint someday, but then illumination scratches that part of my brain that demands fine motor skills just as well. I might live out my life quite happily with a bucketful of unassembled Elves in the closet in my study and my old paints mainly serving to provide convenient pop-top containers for gold-leaf sizing.

But when I read that post today, my years with this group came back. And I wondered how typical my own experiences (and, apparently, those of female employees for some of these companies) really were. Anyone have thoughts, insights, or anecdotes on this? How do other predominantly male geek communities treat female participants? What do you think is behind this tendency, if it exists?

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.

All thoughts and opinions are welcome. The only rule I have for this place is that I ask that people remain civil to each other. It is one thing to disagree with a point or idea and quite another to attack a the person expressing it. The first is okay; the second is not.

Finally, although this is a continuation of the LotR Genfic discussion, and although I am the webmaster of the Many Paths to Tread archive, my website is affiliated with neither, and this discussion is occurring independently of the list on which it originated. So, if you find yourself annoyed or angered by the conversation here, please don’t take it out on either of those groups.

My door, however, is always open to questions or concerns at DawnFelagund@gmail.com.

For those of you on the LotR Genfic list, you can find the original discussion thread here.

I saw the first preview for 9 before the excellent Coraline earlier this year. (Read my review of Coraline here.) The basic premise of the movie intrigued me from the outset. In a post-apocalyptic world, the only remains of humanity come in the shape of small robotic dolls created by a scientist before his demise. These little burlap-clad characters, known only by the numbers inked onto their backs, are left to navigate a hostile world dominated by intelligent machines.

I have been looking forward to 9 all summer, and I finally got to see it on Saturday. It is a bit outside my usual discussion of literature that goes on here at The Heretic Loremaster, but the movie was intriguing and, to my mind, the definition of speculative fiction, so here we go.

In some arenas, it did not disappoint. Like Coraline, despite the fact that it is an animated feature, 9 is really not a movie for kids. (Although, just as when we saw Coraline, there were a handful of tykes at 9 was well. It makes me wonder if their parents even bothered to look at a preview or just saw “Animation!” and went with it.) Aside from its bleak post-war setting, its sentient machines are often annihilated in–if they possessed flesh and blood–extremely gruesome ways. They are hacked to pieces in large propellers and crushed to “death” by giant cogs. Worst of all is the soul-sucking and unoriginally named Machine, which vacuums the life force from our little burlap-clad protagnonists and leaves them empty-eyed, slack-mouthed shells, their “spirits” abandoned and gazing confusedly around themselves before being dissipated to smithereens.

But despite its darkly detailed landscape and shudder-inducing horror, 9 falls into an unfortunate trap. In order for the viewer to care about the horrors being enacted on the little burlap people, they needed to come to life a lot more. Unfortunately, 9 is dogged somewhat by its storyline, which requires that the characters function as archetypes rather than people and fall flat as a result.

As the movie chugs along, we are made privy to the backstory that leaves the world devoid of life save sentient machines. Returning to the First Room–the room where he awoke–our hero 9 discovers how he and his eight compatriots came into being. The benevolent scientist-creator who engendered them bestowed to each a portion of his personality. Therefore, we get the cautious, the curious, the taxonomists (twice!), the good-hearted, the intuitive, the courageous, the thug, and the idealist: or we get a scientist, or a whole human personality, only fragmented into nine pieces.

While this functions beautifully from a mythological standpoint, it falls short in terms of allowing the viewer to care about the burlappies as people. And, in a movie that is packed full of action scenes, caring about who falls into a bottomless abyss or who gets sucked dry by the Machine is essential. Already, the fact that the characters are animated and the fact that they are non-human distances us from automatically empathizing with them. One of the reasons that 9 can indulge in the degree of character mutilation that it does is because the characters are clearly mechanized and clearly non-human. Remove one of the other and we would have likely ended up with the typical movie treatment of a gruesome death (save in the Saw/Hostel torture-porn enterprise): the camera sweeps away to one of the other characters cringing at his or her shoulder. The same distance that allows these scenes without flirting with a higher rating unfortunately works universally to distance the viewer from all of the characters’ experiences. Characterizing them as personality traits rather than people only hinders the movie further.

It also runs the risks of dualism: shelving the characters as Good or Evil with no allowance for overlap. 1, the conflicted and cautious leader of the burlappies, and 8, his thuggish sidekick, ease across the boundaries a bit and challenge the monochrome worldview, but the other burlappies are without a doubt on the side of good and the machines on the side of evil.

This significantly weakens the story. To contrast, consider Coraline, a story of much greater moral ambiguity. Although Coraline evolves into the classic quest against a villain, it does not shy away from ambivilent depictions of its characters. Coraline’s cruelty to Wybie, her parents’ blatant disinterest in their daughter, and even the Other Mother’s remarkable ability to create things of beauty–even if only as an illusion–suggest something well beyond the dichotomy of good and evil, dark and light, right and wrong but, rather, the human struggle to understand and cope with the shades of gray that we encounter in real life.

Ultimately, this means that the horror of Coraline is that much more potent than the horror of 9. When Coraline inquires of a button-eyed, silenced Other Wybie, “Does it hurt?” she gives voice to the query rattling around in our brains as well, a question that is at once childish and yet outlives childhood. The question and the sentiment behind it appeal to us as humans. When 7 rips a javelin-sized sewing needle from her thigh without a flinch, she marks herself as bigger than us, as more than human. It is hard, then, to empathize with her plights and those of the other burlappies, even as they try to save the world.

And what of that? What of saving the world?

Again, I think that the dualist tendencies of 9 dog its ability to speak meaningfully on its theme of our relationship with science and technology. We are given glimpses of backstory throughout the movie, enough to know that the machines that eventually destroy civilization were devised with benevolent intentions by an idealist technologist working for peace. But he was deceived and the machines were hijacked by a nefarious agency (whether corporate, government, or something else entirely is not clear) and corrupted unto destruction. Indeed, their original creator later gives his soul, piecemeal, to the burlappies to ensure some continuance of society and, eventually, rebuilding.

But, again, this dichotomizes it too neatly. Questions concerning the appropriate roles of science and technology in our lives are the bread-and-butter of many speculative genres and certainly an apt subject for consideration. But technology cannot be plunked into Good and Bad, and modern life makes it nearly impossible to interact solely with the Good while excluding the Bad. Consider, for example, the Industrial Revolution. The same technology that improved almost universally the quality of life in Western civilization (and is since making its way to the rest of the world as well) also pollutes our planet, creates opportunities for sweatshop and slave labor, destoys the skilled and fulfilling trades of artisans, and often tethers survival to employment with (and loyalty to) a factory or corporation.  Automobiles afford us opportunities of which our ancestors could not have dreamed, yet they also pollute and cause over one million deaths worldwide each year. Non-human animals suffer terribly and die to make the medicines and the chemicals that grant us safe, healthy lives. Western women are no longer given a life sentence of spinning, weaving, and sewing clothing but, in exchange, women and children in third-world countries make our warm, comfortable, cheap clothes in sweatshops for pennies each hour. Are we better or worse for the technological advances of the last two hundred years that allow these things? It’s an impossible question to answer definitively, and it is even less possible to point our fingers at any individual, entity, or even moral outlook as the reason for technology’s darker side. There is no evildoer to turn the Machine against us and so a dualist examination of the question is going to fall short.

There were a few interesting points in 9 that I’d like to address before concluding my review. Firstly, there is the presence of a female character. At first, her presence irked me because, as one woman out of nine, her inclusion reeked of tokenism. (Someday, I hope, the creative folks who make movies and write books will realize that women are actually a majority of the world’s population and character groups will be structured accordingly.) Then, when I realized that the burlappies represented facets of their creators’ personality, her inclusion becomes a little more complex. Is 9 recognizing gender as more fluid as absolutely male or absolutely female? It certainly seems so. Without 7, I don’t know that I would have thought much about gender at all. Without 7, I would have been content to accept the robots as asexual, inclined towards male because the creator from whom they were derived was male. As it is, though, I’m curious about the motive behind 7’s inclusion. Is she present because the feeling is that a group of heroes must have a woman, so much so that the writers are willing to overlook gender ambiguity that will be an uncomfortable subject for many mainstream viewers? Or are the writers commenting on gender with 7’s inclusion? Or a bit of both?

Then there’s the ending. When I realized what the ritual at the end was to accomplish–”freeing” the spirits drained by the Machine heavenward–I rolled my eyes a little at the need to conform any discussion of death to Christian mythology.

But then it began to rain. And I understood that the ritual was not to “free” the souls to an afterlife but to free them to effect works upon the world.  Rather than moving “beyond the circles of the world” (to borrow from Tolkien) and no longer affecting or being affected by it, death is instead depicted as a means by which a corporeal and spiritual entity bound to the world it inhabits is transformed to enrich and return to life in that world. It’s a very pagan concept.

This leads me to consider whether our idealistic creator-scientist may have done this deliberately. The raving “disbelief” in global warming perpetuated by the most fundamentalist of Christians originates from the conviction that a single lifetime upon a planet–shorter “come the rapture”–does not require stewardship of it. After all, they expect to move onto a better place after death. Perhaps our creator-scientist recognized this and made sure that such destructive delusions would have no place in the mythology of the future world?

Finally, I have to ask myself if I am missing the point with my main critique of the movie, which is its heavy reliance on archetypes and dualism. But, at the same time, this is really a creation story. It is a story of a world destroyed and renewed. (And, as a student of Tolkien, I can’t avoid mentioning that it is renewed by something a lot like subcreation sans the religious angle.) But with its grand quest against evil and the ultimate purpose of its characters to restore life upon an annihilated planet, it certainly has a mythic feel to it. Am I missing the point in comparing it to stories like, say, Coraline, which concern themselves much more intimately with the conflicts of the individual and family? Are the two going to be at odds with each other?

In conclusion, I give 9 2.25 E.L. Fudge “Elves Exist” cookies out of four. Even if I am asking too much of a myth, the flat characterization and simplified depiction of a complex debate made it difficult for me to become invested in the movie. It had some astounding and creative concepts, and it certainly raised some interesting questions for me. But it fell shy of its potential.

“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.