“The Selection”, by Kiera Cass

Tags

Dystopia, Young Adult

I read Kiera Cass’s The Selection the other day. It’s set in the nation of Illéa, formerly North America, which has a rigid caste system based on occupation. When the prince comes of age one girl from each of the thirty-five provinces competes in a reality TV show to marry him. The protagonist, America Singer, is a Five, the artists and classical musicians. Her boyfriend, Aspen, is a Six, the servants, and if she marries him she, too, will become a Six and a servant. America becomes one of the Selected and befriends the prince.

On the whole, I found the book quite enjoyable, and an easy read that only took me an evening. I did find the style a bit wearying at times; there seems to be a growing trend in YA fiction to write very informally, littering the page with sentence fragments and the like. I don’t mind sentence fragments when they’re used rarely for effect, but when there’s more than one in a paragraph I start mentally “fixing” them, and I did so regularly throughout The Selection.

Illéan society is quite clearly very unequal. Not only does Illéa have incredible economic inequality based on birth, but it is also very sexist. The Selection doesn’t happen for princesses, only princes; the princesses marry other world leaders. In both cases, the man has the opportunity to chose a wife, while the woman is chosen. Furthermore, a woman’s caste is dependent on her husband’s; while America and her younger sister live with their parents and work in the arts, her older sister married a Four and now works in a factory with the other Fours. The sexism is tied very closely to the caste system, but I would argue it’s also discrete.

Unsurprisingly, sex is also heavily controlled in Illéa. Premarital sex is illegal, punishable by imprisonment if people are caught or found pregnant. Ostensibly this is to protect against disease, but I suspect it’s a part of the way Illéa controls its citizens through keeping the castes and sexes separate, especially given that birth control is only accessible to the higher castes.

There doesn’t seem to be much overt racism in Illéan society, but then again I don’t think I noticed any non-white characters. This could be an oversight on the part of the author, but it’s also possible something more insidious is going on. While the Selected are ostensibly chosen at random, they fill out questionnaires and submit photographs, and it’s assumed that the “random” selection is not so random, so it’s quite possible that whoever goes through the entries has a particular idea of what a princess, future queen, and royal offspring should look like.

Having noticed these things, then, I was rather expecting a story that focusses on the inequalities rampant in Illéan society, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. While there are obviously romantic elements to the story from the start, for the first hundred or so pages I got the impression that the romance served to highlight the inequalities in Illéan society. As the book progressed, however, it felt more and more like the inequality was a vehicle for romance.

It is, however, the first book in a series (trilogy?), and there are several parts of the story that suggest later books will focus more on the social and political issues and less on the romance. For a start, there are no history books in Illéa; people are expected to “just know” their history, but the king does not permit the existence of actual books explaining it. This and other things suggest the king is not as nice as he seems, and as the prince seems to be a genuinely caring person who wants to lead the country well, I’m hopeful that there will be some conflict between them. For another, there are several attacks by rebels on the palace over the course of the books; the reasons for the rebellion are not stated, but I can think of several possibilities, as discussed above.

In short, I found the book enjoyable and thought it held promise for the rest of the series, but I did find the romance could be a bit much. If the romance takes a back seat and the series returns its focus to social justice then I think it’ll only get better, but I’m a bit worried it will end up like The Hunger Games, whose love triangle serves the main plot of the first book but grows and becomes stifling by the third.

Is The Hunger Games Feminist?

Tags

Dystopia, Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games, Young Adult

I came across an article yesterday entitled The Hunger Games is no Feminist Manifesto. Well, of course it isn’t. It’s a YA dystopian trilogy. However, that doesn’t mean it does or doesn’t have feminist themes, which I think is a topic worth considering.

It has often been hailed as feminist because Katniss, the (female) protagonist, has a mix of “masculine” and “feminine” qualities, provides for her family, and takes control and strives for agency.

The first thing the article points out is actually something that bothered me when I read the books.

She [Katniss] tells us, over and over, that she doesn’t want to get married because she doesn’t want to have children. Love, marriage and child-bearing are all inextricable in Katniss’ world view, and all associated with an absence of choice.

Umm, it’s called birth control? Sure, contraception might not be readily available for Katniss, but her mother is an apothecary. Not only that, but her mother and father were clearly very much in love before his death when Katniss was eleven, yet they have two children four years apart. Either they’re not very fertile, or Katniss’s mother knows a thing or two about not reproducing. Furthermore, at the end of the series it’s revealed that Katniss does have children after a decade-and-a-half’s persuasion, so obviously she worked out how to not get pregnant at some point.

The most infuriating bit about this is that I can see Katniss’s desire not to have children actually impacting her relationships. One of her love interests, Peeta, strikes me as the sort of person who would rather experience the joy of having children and hope their names aren’t drawn in the reaping than not have children out of fear. This could be a valid strain on their budding relationship, because Katniss does not want children, and thus a relationship with Peeta would end in eventual heartbreak. Instead, the strain on the relationship is that in marrying at all Katniss feels she must have children.

The other major point the article raises that I want to mention is this:

Katniss has no ambition, no interest in politics beyond a personal vendetta. She’s motivated by love for her family. She might be kick-ass but she isn’t threatening to our social order. There’s no controversy over women taking up archery or martial arts. There is controversy these days in the United States over access to birth control. The relationship between female power in The Hunger Games and the real feminist battles of 2012 is comfortably remote.

I don’t entirely agree. It’s true that the issues that women face in modern Western societies are not present in the books; I would, however, argue that this is one of its strengths from a feminist perspective. Katniss doesn’t have problems with patriarchal power in her society because there isn’t a patriarchy, and the problems lie elsewhere. I’ve discussed before how men are often treated as the “default” protagonist, and women are only protagonists when the intended audience is female or the story deals with “women’s issues”. The mere fact that Katniss’s gender is a non-issue, then, is feminist in itself, because it challenges the notion that the male is the default gender.

If Katniss were to face issues with being a female archer, I don’t think that would be any nearer to “the real feminist battles of 2012″. It’s a safe, Disneyfied version of feminist struggles. In fact, Disney recently released a film about that topic: Brave. While I haven’t seen the movie and can’t comment on how it treats the topic, the fact remains that a story about a girl wanting to shoot when it’s a male domain is also “comfortably remote” from the issues women in modern Western culture face. If Collins had made this an issue in the books, it wouldn’t have formed a suitable comparison for modern issues, but it would make Katniss’s gender an issue, thus detracting from one of its main strengths from a feminist perspective.

Perhaps, then, Katniss should have trouble accessing birth control. Maybe her mother’s methods aren’t 100% effective, and the Capitol’s general restriction of medicine to the Districts means that birth control and abortion are difficult to access. This would have tied in neatly with the main plotline and also into the love triangle and Katniss’s issues with marriage, as she would be uncomfortable having a sexual relationship where she risked having children. It would form a nice metaphor whereby access to contraception is not restricted based on gender, but on class, and thus would still allow Katniss’s gender to be ignored while addressing the consequences of restricted contraception access. Such a narrative would, however, risk the feminist themes overriding the main story, if not in the narrative itself, then in the minds of readers, because it would be bringing a major contemporary issue into a story that’s not about that. It would be better to address women’s restricted reproductive rights in a novel dedicated to that, as Margaret Atwood does in The Handmaid’s Tale.

I would argue, then, that the author is write in saying that The Hunger Games is not a feminist manifesto, but I would also argue that it has feminist themes. Feminism isn’t the point of the story, but that doesn’t mean that there is no feminist influence on Katniss’ character, the narrative, and the word in which she lives, and that by making it not a feminist story Collins does something just as worthwhile.

Thoughts on Perspectives

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Reading

The choice of whose perspective(s) from which to tell a story is something I positively agonise over, and something that I keep changing my mind about well into the writing. I’m currently about halfway through my rough draft. Most of it’s from my protagonist’s point-of-view, but a bit under a quarter of it is from other major characters’ perspectives, starting around a halfway through what I currently have written. I’m not entirely sure I’m going to keep those passages, though; at the moment I think it’s something to be considered when I get to editing and see how the whole thing flows.

It hasn’t always been this way, though. There have been times when the entire work has been told from my protagonist’s POV (something I still haven’t ruled out), and times when I have told things from other characters’ POVs throughout. Sometimes I read a book where I think one style was done very well or very poorly and it makes me second-guess my own decision.

There are, of course, advantages and disadvantages to both methods. Writing from a single perspective allows the reader to get inside the protagonist’s head more easily. I enjoy a lot of books told from multiple POVs, but I find that the ones I really adore tend to be the ones from single POVs, and I think that’s because I “bond” with the protagonist. This isn’t always the case, of course, and even in my favourite series, Harry Potter, I prefer the character of Hermione to that of Harry, in part because I identify with her better.

That, I think, is the main advantage to sticking with one POV: it allows the reader to delve more deeply into the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings. In my opinion there are two major disadvantages to this method. One is that the reader’s opinion of characters and events is developed through the lens of a single character’s own opinion, and that might not be the character the reader identifies with the most. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but if you’ve got a judgemental protagonist it can be difficult to portray the people they don’t like as sympathetic. On the other hand, this restriction can also be used to the story’s advantage by keeping the reader unsure of a character’s motivations until they are revealed to the protagonist.

The other is that the reader only gets to witness events the protagonist witnesses. Going back to Harry Potter, this isn’t a huge impediment in the first six books, where Rowling uses Harry’s own ignorance to conceal things about, for instance, Snape’s allegiance from the reader. However, I thought the seventh book could have been improved by following one of Harry’s friends, perhaps Ginny or Neville, as they returned to Hogwarts. The reader has very little idea what’s going on at Hogwarts until about three-quarters of the way through the book (because, of course, Harry and his companions have very little idea), and the events of the past year are summed up in a couple of pages. Given that one of the major criticisms of the book is that it seems to spend a lot of time following Harry and his friends on what has been referred to as the Magical Camping Trip, the possible tedium of that (though personally I didn’t find it dull) could have been alleviated by switching between Harry and a Hogwarts student, cutting out some events from Harry’s POV and showing the passage of time through the slower pace that results from switching to another’s perspective.

The above are some ways in which multiple perspectives can be advantageous. The first is especially true when a character the protagonist initially dislikes becomes his/her friend or ally. Being able to see events from the character’s POV will make him/her more sympathetic in the reader’s eyes than merely seeing him/her through the protagonist’s judgemental viewpoint.

I’ve been reading quite a few of Trudi Canavan’s books recently, and in her Black Magician and Traitor Spy trilogies she uses the multiple-POV effectively in that she can show events happening far away from each other but linked to a single thread. I particularly like her use of it in the first Black Magician book, The Magicians’ Guild, in which the protagonist, Sonea, believes the magicians want to kill her, when in fact we see from their perspectives that they want to help her. Later in the series one of those magicians goes off to another country, and the research he performs there is linked to the main storyline. Currently, I’m reading her The Magician’s Apprentice, which has five main narrators at this point. One of them didn’t appear until roughly 250 pages in and, while by the end of her first scene I was interested in her story, it was a little jarring to suddenly find a new character a third of my way into the book who had no apparent link to the other characters.

Nevertheless, I think that Canavan does the multiple-POV well in this book. Of the five narrators, three of them spend most of their time together, and usually two narrators appear each chapter. This means that it’s usually less than two chapters between leaving a narrative strand and picking it up again. This averts one of my major issues with multiple-POV in that I find it very hard to read a book when there’s a long period of time between a character’s first and second appearances. I don’t want to read about the next character, because I’m still focussed on what’s happening to the person whose narration just ended, but by the time I get back to that character I’m interested in someone else.

This last is, in fact, why I stopped reading Canavan’s Priestess of the White. I was 100 pages in and hadn’t spent more than about 20 pages in any one character’s head, nor could I tell where the three or four different storylines intersected by page 200. This juggling of characters and storylines is, in my opinion, the biggest weakness of telling a story from multiple perspectives.

There is, however, a lot more variation in how a writer approaches multiple POVs to how a writer approaches single-POV. You can have all the narrators first appear through the protagonist’s eyes or you can have them all appearing and apparently unrelated; you can have two or three or you can have fifteen; and you can do everything in between. Personally, I prefer to have a small number of narrators, preferably those met through the protagonist’s eyes first, as I find it rather jarring to read the first chapter of a book, then reach the next chapter and it’s like starting a book all over again. This may well be because I like the reader-character relationship in a single-narrator book, and this method allows some of the closeness of a single narrator while allowing the reader to see things the protagonist doesn’t.

“Write Every Day”

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Writing

Or, “How I learned that sometimes there’s a reason the advice keeps being repeated.”

When people ask me how long I’ve been writing my book for, I tell them 13, nine or one-and-a-bit years. 13 years ago marks the time when I realised I wanted to be a writer and started working on a book. Being a nine-year-old at the time, what I wrote was pretty awful, and nothing remains of that original plot besides the fact that the protagonist can do magic.

Besides that, the earliest elements that remain in my book today are from nine years ago. Through gradual refinement of the original storyline I developed the basic arc and major plot points over the next several years.

Throughout this time I would occasionally write a chapter or two when I felt the urge, but between school and general life the urge rarely came. I thought about it all the time, but in little daydreams of how one character might respond to something I saw on the news, or how I wanted to incorporate a thought into the storyline. I never got very far because every time I got around to giving it another shot I’d entirely changed my mind about the story and started back at chapter one. It was a little over a year ago that I finally realised that the only way I was ever going to get this story finished was if I could force myself to keep going. By this time I had refined the plot and characters significantly and had a more detailed framework from which to work, and for the next few months I muddled on writing new bits when the urge hit. Finally, just under a year ago I decided to take the advice I had seen so oft-cited but never followed: write every day.

I’d always been of the opinion that one should write when inspired. This serves me adequately when writing poetry, because the burst of inspiration lasts long enough to get a poem down on paper and edit it to completion. The same cannot be said for writing novels. It wasn’t until I isolated that as my problem that I started making real headway, and my draft is sitting at around 40 000 words. Finally, I have more than one chapter!

I learned that to write a novel I had to discipline myself to write every day. This is the oft-quoted advice, akin to ‘show, don’t tell’ in its omnipresence, that I’d never before put much stock in. I think this arrogance is common in beginner writers, particularly with regards to this specific piece of advice. Because we get these bursts of inspiration, when the feeling of getting the words out as quick as possible is as giddying as a pint of ale, we think writing is easy. I’ve learned since then that it’s not the case. It’s the single hardest thing I’ve done so far in my life. It’s the thing that has me sitting with a large cup of tea staring morosely at the computer screen, the thing that has me curling into a ball in tears from the fear that it will never be good enough, and the thing I cling to when I feel hopeless. And, surprise surprise, being disciplined enough to keep at it makes all those things easier to bear.

I’ve not been perfect at the whole daily-writing thing. For several weeks I wrote a thousand words a day, but then I went away for the weekend and broke the habit. Breaking the habit, it seems, is much easier than beginning it. Indeed, in the last few days I have been striving to get back into the habit of writing every day, but I find a a full thousand words more than I can reasonably handle, so I’m sticking to 500 for now in the hopes of gradually working my way up.

I said a thousand words is more than I can handle, and I’m sure someone’s laughing at that comment, because a thousand words really isn’t all that much; this blog entry isn’t much less than that that, and I’ve written it in about forty-five minutes. This brings me to the other thing I learned about writing daily: it gets easier. The first day, the day of inspiration, is fine. The second or third day is a slog, but after a week or so, it starts to become normal. Last time I was doing thousand-word days I sometimes found myself writing two or three thousand words in a single day, something I haven’t managed in months now because I got out of the habit.

More than that, though, writing begets inspiration. Getting into a character’s thoughts, into the plot and setting, happens so much more completely when trying to write it down on paper than any amount of daydreaming can make up for, and the more time I spend in the story, the more I time I want to spend there.

My book isn’t finished yet, but for the first time in a decade I’m at a point where I think I’ve got a good shot at it. More importantly, in the future when I see established authors all repeating the same advice I think I’ll be humble enough to take it to heart.

Liar, by Justine Larbalestier

Tags

Justine Larbalestier, Liar, Reading, Young Adult

Due to the nature of this book, I don’t think I can write a review without providing any spoilers. They won’t be anything major, but if you’d rather read the book without them then you should probably just read the first paragraph.

I read this book a few months ago and never got around to posting a review. The basic plot deals with the aftermath of Micah’s boyfriend going missing before being found dead. The premise of the novel is that the narrator, Micah, is a pathological liar but, as she says in the opening pages, this time she’s going to tell the truth. It soon transpires that this, too, is a lie. She first tells us about her interactions with a character, then says she invented him just to see if she could do it (this is the main reason behind most of her lies, she claims), then finally says that he was real, but he died. Each time she revises the truth she insists that this time, it’s the real truth, and gives an explanation for lying the previous time.

The book is divided into three sections. The first seems relatively straightforward, dealing with Micah’s interactions with her classmates, her family, and the police in the aftermath of her boyfriend, Zachary’s, death. There are also regular flashbacks to events before Zachary’s death; chapters are thus noted as being either ‘Before’ or ‘After’.

The second section veers into supernatural territory. It begins with a startling revelation from Micah that is at once unbelievable and at the same time explains many of the gaps in the first section. Because of what we know of Micah, this could be the truth that explains what didn’t make sense before, or it could be an elaborate lie on her part just to see if she can convince the audience. Then again, maybe Micah’s invented the entire story, in that throughout the book the reader is never quite sure of what is ‘true’ in the life of Micah the character.

The third section continues with the revelation that opened the second section and ties up the matter of Zachary’s death, amongst other things. By the end of the novel, Micah’s story seems to both be wholly explained and wholly confusing. It seems to resolve everything, but at the same time there’s always the nagging reminder that she’s the ultimate in unreliably narration.

This is one of the things I love about the book; that every single thing Micah says may or may not be true. Is her mother really from France? Does she really live in New York? Did Zachary ever even exist, or was he just another fabrication? In this way, I think it’s a book that would really benefit from a re-reading, because you ‘learn’ new things that contradict earlier statements throughout the book, so knowing the ‘truth’ about her brother that she reveals at the end would colour her interactions with him in the earlier pages. Then again, maybe that first ‘truth’ about her brother really is factual.

The way Larbalestier has woven this book together is another thing I really liked about it. I was regularly in awe of the skill it must take to keep all these stories straight without accidentally contradicting herself or revealing something that should be kept secret until later. Most authors have information they don’t reveal to the audience until an appropriate time, and many mislead the audience with false information. Generally-speaking, however, the narrator/protag is as much in the dark as the reader. In Micah’s case, however, the narrator is not misled, but misleading, and that’s what makes this such a remarkable book to read.

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

Tags

Dystopia, Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games, Young Adult

I first heard about The Hunger Games the summer of 2010 when my mum, a librarian, was reading the second book in the trilogy, Catching Fire. She mentioned it to me at the time and told me I’d like it, but I thought it sounded kind of dismal and I wasn’t really keen on reading it at the time. This was actually a stupid reason to discount it, given that so many of my favourite series are quite dark, but at any rate I put it in the back of my mind.

Over the next couple of years more friends recommended it to me, and the book finally made its way onto the (very long) list of books in my head to ‘read when I get around to it’. Then the movie came out. I have a general policy of not watching films before I’ve read the book, and with the amount the book and film were being discussed online I both realised I wanted to read it and had to read it soon before I encountered spoilers, so I placed a hold against it at the local library. At this point I kicked myself for putting this series off for so long, because there were seventy-two holds against it!

Anyway, it finally came in last Tuesday and I read the entire thing that afternoon. There’s simply so much I love about this book, and I can’t wait to get my hands on the rest of the trilogy.

The first thing I love is Katniss. For starters, she’s a female protagonist but her gender isn’t important to the story. There aren’t nearly enough stories where this is the case, so it makes me a little warm and fuzzy inside that Suzanne Collins makes her a girl and doesn’t make a big deal about it. More importantly, though, I found her a genuinely likeable character. She has a bit of a smart-ass to her (which I always love), and of course there’s the heroism of sacrificing herself for her sister. Even so, she’s not a perfect hero. She’s arrogant and rude, and while her anger at the Capitol is well-directed, it can get her into trouble and she has a tendency to elevate herself above others.

This brings me to something else I like about the book. There are two characters, Effie and Haymitch, that Katniss hates for most of the book. Haymitch, the only living person from District 12 to have won the Hunger Games, is Katniss and Peeta’s alcoholic mentor. Katniss loathes him for his alcoholism and general attitude, but from the start I found his addiction quite understandable. He survived a harrowing experience as a teenager and has spent the rest of his life training up two kids to do the same, only to watch them die. Katniss eventually realises this near the end of the book and finds him less abhorrent. What I like about Haymitch is that he shows how the Hunger Games destroy people, and how even winning doesn’t necessarily mean you survive.

Effie is Katniss’ chaperone, and seems rather vapid and far too interested in the Hunger Games, like most of the Capitol. At the same time, however, she seems to grow fonder of Katniss and Peeta as the book progresses. This suggests that she’s not entirely heartless, which makes the Hunger Games all the more chilling, because so many of the people involved in it (including many of the tributes from the wealthier districts) see nothing morally wrong with randomly selecting children to die brutally for sport, and yet they’re not wholly full of malice. It shows how easily normal people can be influenced towards terrible things by the society in which they live, and how easily morality is bound up in society, because in this society, what they’re doing isn’t immoral.

I even liked the love triangle storyline. Romance subplots, and especially love triangle ones, are something of a double-edged sword. Done well they can further plot and character development, but done poorly they become tiresome. Even though the basic storyline is somewhat cliché (girl has a best friend she has sort-of feelings for and another boy she also kind of fancies), Collins adds another dimension to it by having Peeta and Katniss play up a relationship for the cameras. While it’s terribly obvious to the reader that Peeta’s feelings for Katniss aren’t entirely fabricated, it’s believable that Katniss doesn’t realise it herself. Thus all their interactions in the Games are coloured by the fact that neither knows if the other’s behaviour is due to genuine feeling or an attempt to attract attention and, therefore, sponsors who can send them food or medicine. In this way I think Collins avoids many of the clichés that tend to arise with a teenage love triangle storyline.

Overall, I was very impressed with this book, and I can’t wait to read the rest of the series.

Characters and Gender

Tags

Reading, Writing

I know many of you probably think I’ve done this topic to death by now, but I have more to say. Feel free to ignore this if you’ve had enough of me talking about this by now, and I promise I’ll get around to book reviews soon.

As is apparent on my previous posts on this topic (here and here), I am a strong proponent of the idea that male readers should be able to identify with female characters as readily as female readers are expected to identify with male characters. I’ve recently realised, however, that almost all of my favourite fictional characters are female. More specifically, they’re almost all snarky female smart-asses (the most notable exception, Hermione Granger, is still female and has her snarky moments). I’m too concerned with being polite and don’t have a sufficiently quick wit to let my inner snark run rampant, so I live vicariously though these characters. Maybe that’s why my favourites tend to be female. Perhaps it’s because the feminist in me is just happy to see an interesting female character so I latch onto her. Or maybe it’s just that the female characters tend to have more in common with me personality-wise than the male ones. That is, it’s not their gender that makes me identify with them as such, but that certain traits I possess and admire, for instance bookishness, are more likely to be attributed to female protagonists than male ones.

I noticed this tendency in particular in the series I’m reading right now: Kenneth Oppel’s Airborn trilogy. It’s narrated by a male character, Matt. My favourite character in the first book is his love interest, Kate. I’m onto the second book now, which introduces a new character, Nadira, whom I already like more than Matt, even though I barely know her. I don’t dislike Matt, and I empathise enough with him that I want him to be happy and achieve his goals, but he is, in a word, forgettable. The same holds true for Harry Potter. Harry himself is, to me, nothing special, but I adore Hermione. This is less of a straight example, though, as I am fond of quite a few other characters, both male and female.

Does this mean I’ve changed my mind about boys and men reading books with female protagonists? Hardly. For one thing, I still enjoy these male-dominated books. The men might not be my favourite characters, but the story’s good, and I identify enough with the male characters that I still feel some stake in their fate. For another, the books include these interesting female characters that I like. Finally, it’s not a hard-and-fast rule. There are female protagonists I couldn’t care less about, and male ones I adore. Surely, then, the reverse should hold true for men reading books with female protagonists.

Furthermore, a general preference for characters of the same sex doesn’t translate to an inability to identify at all with male characters. As I said before, I identify with the male characters enough to enjoy the book; where the distinction lies is that female characters are more often the ones that stay with me after I put the book down.

Moreover, I think we can expect men to identify with female characters because we expect them to relate to women in real life. If a man cannot be interested in a story about a woman, then how can we expect him to relate to his mother, his sister, his girlfriend, his colleague, his female friend? If he’s not interested in stories about women, then how can we expect him to be interested in the lives of real, living women? In either case, it’s not the woman’s gender that’s the issue. It’s that the man should find her story or life interesting because she’s a person, not because she’s a woman.

This is the crux of the matter, really. When we read novels, we read the stories of people, of individuals. We might gravitate toward characters of one gender over the other, but that’s because of their individual traits, not because of their gender. I don’t prefer Diana Trent over Tom Ballard in the TV series Waiting for God because she’s the female lead, I prefer her because she’s caustic and sarcastic whereas he’s a bit of an old fuddy-duddy.

More Thoughts on Female Characters

Tags

Reading, Writing

This post is inspired in part by this article on ‘Strong Female Characters’, but I’m more interested in addressing how female characters are often critiqued as representing the author or creator’s opinion of women, but the reverse does not hold true for male characters. Thus Twilight is criticised for painting women as weak and dependent on men, but not for displaying men as domineering and controlling. It would take an entire post to adequately discuss the extent to which I think Bella or Edward’s behaviour is a) condoned by the work as a whole and b) emblematic of the behaviour of their gender as a whole in the text, but I brought it up because I think Edward is at least as flawed an individual as Bella, but the books are rarely accused of misandry.

In part, I think writers themselves are responsible for such criticism because they apply the Smurfette principle, whereby male characters have discrete personalities but a female character’s personality is her gender. That is, if a writer only creates one or two significant female characters, then those individual female characters bear the burden of representing their sex in a way that the plethora of male characters do not. Other times they assign particular ‘feminine’ traits to all their female characters, like making them all physically attractive, or making them all mothers or desperately wanting to be mothers.

Sometimes, though, it’s not because of a lack of diversity in female characters. One woman does something considered ‘weak’ or stereotypical, and the writer is accused of viewing women that way. I think this is an interesting conjunction between feminism and patriarchy, in that it is said in defence of women and out of a desire to see unstereotypical female characters, but at the same time such comments appear to buy into the Smurfette principle. It is because of the idea that female characters are defined by their gender that audiences also see female characters as defining their gender. A male character with an uncontrollable temper isn’t evidence of misandry; so too a female character who adores children isn’t evidence of misogyny unless the work appears to suggest that all women ought to be this way.

I could hardly argue that the blame rests entirely with the people decrying stereotyped female characters, however. After all, these stereotypes only exist because so many people have written women like this, and there are people who still view women in this manner. Nevertheless, I think there is sometimes a freedom in writing male characters that doesn’t come with writing female characters because the character’s flaws are viewed as individual flaws, not gendered flaws. For this reason I think that attempts to make writers and audiences consider stereotyping in portrayals of female characters can backfire, because if a writer finds him or herself criticised for trying to create interesting, flawed female characters then he or she might just stick to making the interesting characters male.

Now obviously not all flaws that female characters possess are stereotypical female flaws. However, if you’re creating multiple, different female characters you may well end up with one who displays a stereotypical female characteristic, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. All that being said, I’m not saying that people should stop commenting on and critiquing characters with stereotypical female traits, but that those traits can’t be looked upon in isolation. Is the woman who loves to cook also one who pursues her own dreams and loves good food, without caring for how it affects her appearance, or is it a story in which all women love to cook? Likewise is the woman who submits to men in her life treated as being flawed in this regard or does the book endorse her behaviour? The latter examples in both pairs are deserving of of criticism thrown at them, whereas the former are, in my opinion, treating female characters more like male characters: as a summation of characteristics, positive and negative, without necessarily giving regard to gender.

I think it’s important to note this distinction in order to see more and better female characters. It gives authors the freedom to write female characters as people, flawed people, because it means that those flaws, if treated well and assigned to individuals rather than a gender, won’t come back to haunt them, After all, the only way to attain gender equality in literature is to treat male and female characters the same: as individuals.

Kreativ Blogger Award

First of all, I want to apologise both for not posting in almost a month and for being so late in responding to this in particular. My excuse is that I’ve been visiting my family and haven’t had much time to spend online (though I have read some excellent books, so I plan on writing about Paper Covers Rock, by Jenny Hubbard and Liar, by Justine Larbalestier soon).

Anyway, I returned to my computer to find that Cecile’s Writers nominated my blog for the Kreativ Blogger Award. I’m honoured by this nomination, as I would be by any, but particularly coming from a blog I enjoy reading and whose writers I respect for their insightful posts.

The rules for the award are these:

• Display the award image on your blog
• Acknowledge the nominator
• List ten things about yourself that readers probably don’t know
• Pass the award along by nominating at least six other blogs you enjoy reading

On to the ten things you probably don’t know about me:

1. I often wear unmatching socks, at least in terms of colour and pattern. However, they have to match in texture, thickness and length so that they feel the same on my feet.
2. I’ve been a vegetarian for nine years.
3. My protagonist is currently on her fourth (I think) first name, second surname (which I think I’ll change because I don’t like it) and I have yet to settle upon any middle names. This is why I appropriated a baby name book from my parents’ house last week.
4. Cheese and jam sandwiches are the best.
5. I’m the second of four girls in my family, with no brothers.
6. I’m obsessive about ironing. Sometimes I even iron my socks and underwear if they’re stiff.
7. Actually, I’m obsessive about quite a lot of things. My bookshelves are alphabetised and divided by genre, with the books fronted (as in a library) to aid in scanning for a specific title.
8. I must be uninteresting because I’m struggling to get to ten.
9. I hated most poetry until I was 17 or 18. I particularly hated anything that was free verse. Now T. S. Eliot is one of my favourite poets.
10. I loved Twilight when it first came out. I was 15.

I’m nominating the following blogs for this award:

http://bennaga.wordpress.com/ – I love these poems: the experimentation with different styles, the poignancy, they’re great.

http://margotmagowan.wordpress.com/ – This blog is about the portrayal of female characters in children’s movies and the problems therein.

http://nonamesnofaces.wordpress.com/ – I just discovered this blog the other day, and fell in love with the honest, penetrating poems. I also like the unusual premise.

http://noellecampbelldotcom.wordpress.com/ – A stimulating blog covering a vast array of topics about writing.

http://busts4justice.com/ – In addition to being informative about bra fitting, this blog tackles issues regarding body image and the lingerie industry.

http://zeroatthebone.wordpress.com/ – An illuminating blog about feminism and other such things.

Please check them out!

On Female Protagonists

Tags

Reading, Writing

I’ve been thinking about this post for a while; indeed I’ve had a draft of it on my computer since I started this blog. I think I’ve put off really writing it for so long because my feelings on this matter are so complex and I want to make sure I state them correctly. In essence, I think that fiction (more specifically Young Adult fiction, on which I’ll be focussing) needs more female protagonists. Yes, there are some genres in which most protagonists are female, but these tend to be geared at women: chick lit, romance, etc. In contrast, the default gender for a fantasy protagonist is male. This is better in books than in movies, and indeed I’ve had Trudi Canavan’s The Black Magician trilogy, female protagonist and all, recommended to me by three different men, but the genre is still, in my experience, dominated by male characters. In many cases, the best girls and women can hope for is equal representation in a multiple-POV work, but rarely will a titular protagonist be female, in contrast to the male Harry Potter. Furthermore, an author like Tamora Pierce, who writes almost exclusively female protagonists, is often considered to be writing ‘books for girls’, whereas no one would argue that J. K. Rowling, also a woman, with many interesting female characters in her books and ‘feminine’ plotting (which I’ll discuss in a moment), writes ‘books for girls’, because her protag is a boy.

I’m interested in first examining The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien himself was something of a misogynist, commenting that his female students seemed quite capable of grasping the concepts taught by their professors, but rarely of going any further. I think whether or not his seminal work reflects that misogyny is another matter, however. I want to discuss Éowyn in particular, or more specifically her defeat of the Witch King. Arguments about Éowyn herself run the gamut from condemning her as a confirmation of gender roles to praising her for representing a rejection of them, and a full discussion of that would be material for another blog post entirely.

Anyway, back to the Witch King. The Witch King is convinced he is immortal because it has been prophesied that no man will kill him, thus he believes that no person can kill him. For me, this equating of ‘man’ with ‘human’ (or, indeed, humanoid individual, considering Merry’s involvement), and the fact that it leads to the Witch King’s downfall, is a key reason why I tend to think that Éowyn, in spite of Tolkien’s actual beliefs, is a feminist figure. The use of ‘man’ as the default in referring to humans effaces the woman. Tolkien, of course, does this himself often enough, given that the humans in his universe are referred to as Men. This actually bears further discussion, in that Tolkien as a philologist was no doubt aware that ‘man’ used to be the gender-neutral term for humanity, with the male form having a prefix just like the female form. It is possible, then, that Tolkien calls his human race ‘Man’ in light of this; nevertheless, he must have known that most of his audience would not have been aware of the etymology and would read the term within its modern context. At any rate, it is a man’s ability to ignore women and non-humans that leads to his downfall. The Witch King sees only male humans as a valid threat, and thus extrapolates the ‘man’ in the prophesy to be the general term for people. Éowyn, then, demonstrates the dangers to men of ignoring women.

To return to the idea that the default protagonist in non-female-oriented genres is male, this is problematic for two main reasons. For one thing, it delineates YA books into those that are acceptable for boys and those that are unacceptable. Sure, most boys probably aren’t interested in romantic stories, but some are. The idea that romantic novels are ‘for girls’ means that there’s something wrong or different about a boy who likes them. This is emphasised by romance being one of the few categories of fiction that consistently has female protagonists. This leads into the other issue, which is that because male is the default gender in a lot of YA fiction the female remains the ‘other’. Many girls and women see nothing wrong with watching a film in which the only female character is a one-dimensional love interest for the male protagonist, yet can you imagine a boy watching a film in which the only male character is a one-dimensional love interest for the female protagonist? It’s called a chick flick, and to my understanding, no, most boys and men don’t watch them.

To go back to my comment about boys identifying with female protagonists, a man once told me that men can’t. In my opinion, the only reason why a boy might struggle to identify with a female protagonist is because he’s never had to. Any book with a female protagonist in it is one that he wouldn’t be very interested in anyway, because issues like female puberty or romance just don’t interest most teenage boys, and that’s OK (provided, of course, that the boy doesn’t feel this way due to societal pressures). Because of this, he sees female protagonists as inherently different from male ones and, as a male himself, allies himself with the male protagonists and struggles to relate to female protagonists. The only way to bridge this divide is to reject the default male and write protagonists of all genders, regardless of content. It’s not as though teenagers don’t notice the gender disparity, either; when I was 13 I created the protagonist and antagonist for a high fantasy series I’m still working on, and I made them female. I didn’t do it for the in-depth reasons I’ve described here, because at 13 I didn’t really notice them, but what I did notice was the elation I felt when I opened a fantasy book and saw a female protagonist and, for once, felt represented. We need more female protagonists for male and female readers. Not only will it help to eliminate the duality of male versus female, but in doing so it will hopefully allow for better representation of those who do not fit into the male/female (heterosexual) paradigm.

With regards to the male/female duality, I mentioned the idea of ‘feminine’ plotting earlier. I’ve heard before that men tend to stick to a main storyline whereas women are more inclined towards multiple layers and subplots. Whether or not this is true is moot, as long as there are people who believe it to be true and base their reading choice accordingly. Taken in conjunction with the default male idea above, this means that girls and women should have no problem with reading stories which follow one main storyline, with only minor deviations into subplots, but that boys and men should not be expected to read stories with numerous concurrent plotlines.

I think that many of the points I’ve raised here apply not only to women, but to other minorities. People of colour are underrepresented as protagonists in works that do not deal specifically with their ethnicity, as are LGBT individuals regarding their sexuality. I’m reminded of a story I heard, though I don’t know if it’s true, that JK Rowling published Harry Potter under her initials rather than her first name because JK is androgynous and boys would be more likely to read it. I don’t want to deny my gender like that, yet at the same time by writing female characters as a woman I risk reinforcing the idea that female characters are for women and male characters are for men. That’s not going to stop me writing female characters, of course, because even though male protagonists can be interesting I’m more inclined to even out the imbalance a little, but it does feel like as long as women are ‘the other’, my writing will be viewed through the lens of my gender.