In the wake of ArmadilloCon, I've naturally been thinking about my own writing, and how I can improve upon it. I mean, I don't think you should be running a workshop to teach new students if you aren't willing to also look at your own work with that same sort of eye.
This, and various conversations at ArmadilloCon, made me think about how male authors write female characters-- an area where I can certainly stand to improve. And I thought about things that, when I read them in my youth, didn't pop out at me, but now they do.
1. Female Characters As Pair-off Rewards. David Eddings was pretty bad at this, really. I mean, yes, he's got lots of female characters, and they are to varying degree snarky and charming and witty and fun. The Belgariad actually passes the hell out of the Bechdel test. BUT, the books pretty much treat pairing-off-and-getting-married as the given happy ending, and other than Polgara*, I can't think of a female character whose primary story purpose isn't be-paired-to-this-guy. In Eddings's process book, The Rivan Codex, he more or less outlines what he needs his characters to be, and one part is "a bunch of heroes" and the next part is "ladies to pair to said heroes".
2. Female Characters as Virgin/Whore Props. Oh, Piers Anthony. Again, he had female characters who did things and had agency (at least in Incarnations books, I never read anything else), but boy did he like making it very clear which ones were virgins and which ones were whores. Especially so the former were pure for the right man, and the latter could be straightened out by the right man. This is especially galling with a fifteen-year-old prostitute who learns what real love and sex are like when she gets together with a judge in his fifties. A JUDGE. IN HIS FIFTIES. And he feels just fine with this relationship, once the legal difficulties of it are sorted out. How are they sorted out? BY TIME TRAVELING FOUR YEARS IN THE FUTURE, so that she'll be nineteen on paper. Yes, this is what happens.
3. Female Characters as Someone Else's Motivation. Be it the rescue-the-princess plot token to the good-woman-to-come-home-to to the girlfriend-in-the-fridge motivation for revenge, the character herself has no agency. She exists to get guys to do something, or a reason for doing the things they do. In Asmiov's Caves of Steel, the only significant female character is Elijah's wife Jezebel, and her primary function is to be a good 50s-era housewife for him. The only thing she does that affects the plot is creating difficulties for Elijah by having the audacity to have some of her own political ideas. Which she quickly apologizes for.
I know what you're thinking: Yes, Marshall, but this stuff is pretty damn basic stuff. Am I just now getting it? No, I've had it for a while. But I've also been thinking about how this stuff is so embedded in my psyche from having read it in my youth, it takes active work on my part to move away from it. I'm doing the active work, but I can slip.
Therefore, to some degree, you could probably tweak my nose on all three of these, that I skirted too close to them in Thorn or Murder. I don't think I did, but I recognize that I can still have blinders on. I know that there are other writers today who keep doing this stuff, and I don't want to. By all means, tweak my nose, and I'll strive to keep improving.
--
*- And HER primary purpose is "be mother to Garion", until he's grown up, and THEN she gets paired to Durnik.
3 comments:
I think you did REALLY well avoiding these in Murder- I loved the strength of Satrine, the non-romantic partnership, the fact that she loves her husband even though he's so badly damaged, the way her gender is an issue only when it's an issue that she's actively having to deal with. I even loved the fact that she had gone from an extremely non-traditional role for Maradine society to a traditional one when she married, and was now going back into a non-traditional role- and I am looking forward to, at some point, her realizing that if/when she has the opportunity to go back a) she gets to choose whether she wants to and b) she may decide that she prefers what she's doing now. But I digress.
I did feel that you were in a fair amount of danger in Thorn- Kaiana felt like she was there as a prop to Veranix and to someday be his lady-friend. I acknowledge that you likely have some other plans for her in further books, so she doesn't feel that way to you, but that was my feeling from only having Thorn. This wasn't helped by the fact that her constant threat came from the fact that if she was tied too closely to Veranix she would be fired- and not because of a rule like 'staff must not fraternize with students', but because if she, a woman, spent time with a male student then she was a whore. So it's framed as 'we know she's a virgin but she's being unjustly treated as a whore', INSTEAD of as 'it's not justifiable to do this even if she WAS sleeping with Veranix'. It's all fairly subtle, and no-where near the level of Piers Anthony (who don't even get me started, I literally threw out his books after I read Firefly), but it would be good to keep an eye on that.
Yeah, I see that. I think I did a better job with what's going on with Kaiana in the second book. But that's not entirely for me to judge.
If you need a beta reader for the next Thorn book, let me know. Please! ;-)
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