Another blogback to one of Rebecca's articles, this time on gender politics in fiction and fanfiction.

And Should I, After Tea and Cakes and Ices...?

Ah, I get to talk now about the anxiety of authorship, Deborah Tannen, and a host of other goodies as relates to fiction writing. Italicized passages are RJA's.

I got the impression that many people feel the reason Lewis and Tolkien had trouble with women characters was because of their Christian background -- based on the assumption that Christianity is inherently misogynist, so the more seriously an author takes the Bible, the more inevitable it will be that they short-change female characters in their fiction. I don't think that's the case, however.

I agree; I should think their being British males of the early twentieth century would have more to do with it. And so far from being inherently misogynist, Christianity has depended on women for both its strength and character since its beginnings, Pauline strictures on order of worship or no. Any misunderstandings on that point, in my opinion, are born of a lack of contact with history, on the part of both modern uber-conservatives and those reacting against them. If Lewis (I can't speak to Tolkien, having not read him) has difficulty with women characters in the Narnia books, it is merely that he has a weakness as a writer -- one I would put down to lack of personal experience. I note that after he meets Joy Davidman, his female characters accrue more depth and his own narrative portrayal of them reflects the rise in his consciousness -- Till We Have Faces being the best example. I also note that in later years Lewis's anti-feminist arguments take a different tone from his earlier gleeful bashing whimsy: his article "Priestesses in the Church?" as well as his chapter on Eros in The Four Loves are weighted heavily with painful awareness that male dominance of any variety is not healthful except under severely limited circumstances -- that those circumstances are currently limited hardly at all -- and that that situation is responsible for a great deal of both male and female suffering. Despite the fact that I think Lewis is mistaken about femininity in several key points, I respect his arguments, and I certainly would never parade him through the streets with a sign saying MISOGYNIST hung around his neck.

In fact, in some respects I am quite sure I am more conservative than Lewis or Tolkien on the subject. And yet the problems and prejudices evident in their fiction regarding women are not, I think, present in mine. Of course, it might well be said that my attitude is different from that of Lewis or Tolkien because I am a woman and therefore naturally more interested in portraying women characters fairly and giving them significant parts to play.

I think RJA is right in saying that this is a false conclusion. It's a matter of badly-linked syllogisms with faulty premises:

a) Men don't understand how to write women.
b) Lewis and Tolkien are men.
c) Therefore they don't know how to write women.

d) Non-men know how to write women.
e) Women are not men.
f) Therefore women know how to write women.

g) Women (knowing how to write women) are interested in writing strong women characters.
h) RJA (or X) is a woman.
i) Therefore, RJA (or X) knows how to write women and is interested in writing strong women characters.

Neither a), d), or g) is completely sound, for multiple reasons I won't go into here. It's certainly true that as a woman, a writer such as RJA is more likely to know what women's collective experience is like. But whether or not that is important to her writing ethos is an entirely different matter, dependent, as with male writers, on prejudice, education, philosophical and moral systems, and politics. That women should so often be socialized and educated to think from the male point of view when writing is Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert's lament -- but it is the individual who does or doesn't respond to that issue.

Musing a bit further on what I've written to date, I realize that the theme of men reduced to a state of physical and/or emotional helplessness and needing to be in some way assisted or even rescued by women comes up again and again. It's in four out of my six DOCTOR WHO stories, it crops up repeatedly in D&L, it's in my Trekfic, my X-fic... wow, I'm a radical feminist and I didn't even know it! And the hero, instead of resenting the heroine's intervention on his behalf or mentally disparaging it, recognizes and acknowledges that he couldn't have made it through the crisis without her. He sees her as an indispensible part of their team, someone he needs by his side, not just the obligatory female sidekick or love interest. (Plus, she's often the viewpoint character, so the story needs her, too.)

This isn't necessarily a feminist trope. It's much more a reflection of the common female wish for a situation in which male emotional helplessness/surrender creates an opportunity for the female to be needed, loved, or something other than nonessential. This trope can occur in both a feminist and an anti-feminist context. Much more feminist, in my opinion, is a narrative in which the female characters' relationships with men (whatever their nature) are not the defining issue for their existence in the story. Of course, it's very difficult to write a story of that type without succumbing to agenda, and so most stories with this trope serve both feminist and anti-feminist philosophies, depending how you read them, or how you want them to be read. I haven't read Knife, RJA, so I couldn't say, but its premise sounds much more feminist to me than the Darkness and Light trilogy.

So there you have it. *sound of two pennies hitting the floor*