This was going to be a reply to papersky ...

[truepenny]

... but then it sort of ran away with me. For context, check the comments to this post.

And, oh yes, spoilers for The Wind in the Willows.



Once you start trying to work out the biology of The Wind in the Willows, it may be a very long time before you make your way back.

And for once, I'm actually not talking about sex. I'm just talking about zoology. Their adventures in the gypsy cart always bother me just slightly now, because I'm trying to work out how they decided that the horse had to pull the cart instead of Toad. I suppose the answer is that the horse is a working-class animal, because this is also a very classist book, but it is still very bewildering that some animals are animals and some animals are furry people.

Mind you, I love it anyway.

But it's also clearly a world where reproducing one's species is Someone Else's Problem--the married animals' problem, like the Otters. Wives can exist, because that's how you get children. But if you don't want children, you don't need wives. Ergo, you only need women for plot bits, and because Toad in drag is still one of the funniest things I've ever read. I can remember howling with laughter over his failure to find his waistcoat pockets when I was seven, and I howl with laughter over it now.

It is a base calumny on the characters, the world, and the author to imply that there's sexual activity of any sort going on (except the strictly necessary procreative sort practiced by the Otters), because in a world where the default is male, male characters really might as well be sexless. This does NOT mean that making all the characters male has nothing to do with sexism, just that the sexism is part of the world instead of part of the story. Um. I'm about to invoke Peter Rabinowitz, for which you should feel free to blame heres_luck.

Rabinowitz, in this book of his I'm reading for my dissertation (and, HL, it's saying all sorts of useful things, so thank you!), makes a distinction between the actual audience and the authorial audience. The actual audience is the actual human being who picks up the book and reads it; the authorial audience is the audience that the author imagines picking up the book and reading it. One of Rabinowitz's points is that the creation of the authorial audience doesn't have to be a conscious process, and TWitW is a really good case in point. Grahame's authorial audience was people, like him, who lived in a world where women didn't matter. The story never feels obliged to explain where all the female animals are, or mention Toad's mother (though we do hear a bit about his father), because the authorial audience shares with Grahame a complete lack of interest in the female of apparently any species.

Rabinowitz also argues that part of the process of reading is the actual audience trying to read from the position of the authorial audience, and that's where the sexism comes in. Because if you can successfully bridge the gap from your actual readership to the authorial readership, you won't notice that there aren't any female animals. Especially as a child, as so many children's books have the same flaw. (Winnie-the-Pooh being a case in point, and somebody else has made the point before me, though I can't remember who (Alison Lurie?), that Kanga is sort of the archetypal image of the Mother as seen from the nursery, and thus tremendously boring.) It's a precondition of the book, not a condition within the book itself.

I said I wasn't talking about sex, didn't I? Ha.

Comments

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Wow, this is cool. And I can probably bring it up at the Frodo panel tomorrow night.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Tolkien at least does have women--but they are very much in that Future Wives Club. And he's an interesting example because, before Eowyn gets hegemonized, she gets to protest the assumptions of the authorial audience. (I love that bit, and I love Tolkien for writing it, even when I want to smack him upside the head.)

But the hobbits ... god the hobbits really ARE like Mole and Ratty. There's a whole 'nother dimension to this somewhere, how "cute" characters (animals, little people, etc.) don't have sex either, and I wonder now if that's because they're, in some dim, nebulous way, registering as children for the author and the authorial audience. Peter Carey does a brilliant job of opposing and subverting this idea in The Unusual Life of Tristram Smith (which is SF even if it never gets marketed as such). There's also something about how "cute" defaults to "male" in the absence of specific markers to the contrary, and in fact, trying to get outside my own head for the moment, I find the idea of female hobbits--little women with furry feet--somehow disturbing, whereas the little men with furry feet I'm just fine with. That's cultural conditioning at work, but be damned if I can see where it's coming from.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

Did you ever read Armistead Maupin's Maybe the Moon? It's a novel based on the life of the dwarf actor who played E.T. in the movie. In the novel it's an elf, Mr Woods. At one point she asks her best friend "Why is he cute and I'm disturbing?" She gets into the Mr Woods costume, and everyone goes "Aw! Isn't he cute!" She walks on as her own self, a woman under 3 feet tall, and gets... well, as she describes it, "dwarf panic".

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

No, but it's going on my huge list of books to look for.

Dwarf Panic

[dmsherwood53.livejournal.com]

Yeah I get dwarf panic i.e. woman dwarfs (I only know one casually) are more disturbing than male dwarfs tho its not easy to talk to male dwarfs. I guess being very unoriginal its to do with subvertion of default ways of dealing with woman i.e. there's always an element of coming on to a woman beween the ages of say 17 & 50. & Yeah since we're being honest hear I'm nervous around lesbians too until I know them anyway

[papersky.livejournal.com]

You have a problem with Lobelia Sackville Baggins?

I think Tolkien was far more aware that women existed and were people and that the world needed them than either Grahame or Milne, and I think he did better with writing them than Lewis or D.H. Lawrence or most people writing at the time.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

You have a problem with Lobelia Sackville Baggins?

No, but (a.) Lobelia isn't even remotely cute and (b.) I don't think I really imagine her with furry feet. I imagine her with those Victorian shoes with all the buttons.

I meant more--and failed completely to say, because I'm an idiot--that if I try to imagine Frodo as a woman, things get really weird and kind of creepy. And I don't know why. That's the other thing. I'm not saying at all that it would be a bad thing if someone COULD write a novel with female little people (the hobbit knock-offs in Dragonlance are another example where sexless male has been set as the default), it's just that my brain has embarrassing and ridiculous amounts of trouble with it.

Actually, a really good example of someone who's defiantly bucking this trend is Ursula Vernon (http://www.metalandmagic.com/), whose wombat-protagonist of Digger (http://www.metalandmagic.com/), is furry, cute, and female. (I also adore Gothbat and the Subconscious Chupacabra, but Digger is the best example of exactly what I'm talking about.)

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Hobbits aren't that small, and they aren't that furry, and if Farmer Maggot can wear boots in wet weather Lobelia can wear fashion boots. I don't find them cute, I've never found them cute, and my only problem with envisioning Frodo as a girl is that girls by and large do not have the sense of duty Frodo has.

Actually Frodo as a girl seems like a really interesting character, especially afterwards. A bit like Aethra going to the grove to end the drought, only more so. Dammit, I really don't want to write a quest novel, but I have this person's whole life, I wonder if I could just start after the boring adventure stuff this time?

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying at all that it would be a bad thing if someone COULD write a novel with female little people [...], it's just that my brain has embarrassing and ridiculous amounts of trouble with it.

Read Mary Gentle's Grunts! :-)

INverting the sexess

[dmsherwood53.livejournal.com]

Hey JOANNA RUSS did a famous piece on why its so difficult to write as a woman by taking everything from the O to McClintock (the John Wayne movie) and summerising the plot but with the sexes inverted. Their all creepy or hilarious. If you want i'll scan and attach its only 5-6 pages

Tolkien friend to woman?

[dmsherwood53.livejournal.com]

No I can't accept that. women are periferal. With the exception of SHELOB there's no hostility to women. But women just aren't that important when your dealing with event that make and shake the world

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Mmmm. Tolkien's elves and dwarves also seem de-sexed to me, though they aren't cute and furry.

[ponders]

[vass]

Is it maybe partly that hobbits and anthropomorphic animals are diminutive versions of adults, and women are already infantilised/diminished/whateverthewordIwantis?

*jumps* No, hold on. See the C.S. Lewis thread on his attitude to women. I've never felt like Kenneth Grahame didn't think women *mattered* so much as he felt they represented something he didn't want to deal with. Something dangerous. The objectionable part would be that he thought it was OK to disappear them just so he wouldn't have to deal with them.

If women for you means man/woman games, and that's something scary and fraught with manipulation and making a pet of you and nagging you and so on, and it's all undignified and detracts from your pure romantic friendships, then you might want to avoid them altogether.

Except for the washerwoman's niece, and it flatters Toad's vanity to think she's in love with him, when really she loves animals as pets.

Or something.

[loligo.livejournal.com]

Is it maybe partly that hobbits and anthropomorphic animals are diminutive versions of adults, and women are already infantilised/diminished/whateverthewordIwantis?

*jumps* No, hold on. See the C.S. Lewis thread on his attitude to women. I've never felt like Kenneth Grahame didn't think women *mattered* so much as he felt they represented something he didn't want to deal with. Something dangerous.

I dunno -- I think the Kanga theory works better for me, for Tolkien as well. Women as grown-ups. Women as Mom.

When I first read all the Tolkien books and fell in love with them, my mom didn't want to dampen my enthusiasm, but she did want to plant the seeds of critical analysis in my young mind. So she asked a few pointed questions like "Why do you suppose all the male hobbits have inventive names, and the women are named after flowers?"

In the races like elves and men, who are presented largely as grownup, there are some powerful female characters. But as for the hobbits, with all their eccentricities and innocence and childlike enthusiasms, I don't think he could really picture women being like that. And so the female hobbits are mostly boring, and not really hobbitty (like Truepenny, I have trouble picturing Lobelia's feet).

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

This may also be tied, now that I come to think of it, to one of papersky's gored oxen, the idea that women's work is inherently dull--and that women's proper sphere does not contain any of the interesting male activities. So that, if you have an infantilized group (like hobbits or anthropomorphic animals) where procreation is definitely not a topic for discussion, there's no way to bring women into it. Again, this is exactly what Eowyn complains about.

Also, it's true for "comic relief" characters, who aren't supposed to have an interior life anyways and therefore obviously don't have sex. Gimli (and the entire vexed question of dwarf women) is a good example. Terry Pratchett makes fun of this relentlessly, and it's one of the things I like about his take on dwarves. But your generic comic relief person is the Funny Little Man. And if your comic relief person is female she's likely to be Tall and Clumsy. Little Women are apparently not Funny.

Is that making any sense?

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

Mmmm. *nods*

I have a similiar problem with the Dr Doolittle books. Which are totally sweet and anarchistic and I love them, I do, despite their racism (which makes me uncomfortable even though I tell myself to consider the time at which they were written: other authors writing at the same time weren't that racist) and again, their serious lack of women. (Tommy Stubbins and Doctor Doolittle! Theirloveissoforbidden!)

But when it comes down to it, even when I was a kid, even when even now I just dive in and let it all flow past me, well, I do have this problem about Doctor Doolittle's diet. It's a problem that even the movie noticed, by making him a vegetarian. (And eliminating Tommy Stubbins. Ahem.)

Doctor Doolittle can talk to the animals. And they can talk back. But more than that: he has discovered that the entire animal kingdom is sentient, from the insects up. This isn't a fantasy world, this is supposed to be ordinary Middle England, with the animals as the oppressed classes: yet the one thing that is never touched on inside the books is, well... he's not a vegetarian. He eats meat. He knows cows and pigs and hens are sentient beings, quite capable of holding a sensible conversation, but he eats beef and bacon and chicken as if, well.. they weren't.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh god I'd forgotten about that. And when I was a child, clearly it didn't even register, because I went through the Dr. Doolittle books like a tornado. Yeesh.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

Well, I was brought up vegetarian. So I had a head start on figuring out that something was not right....

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

there's the same problem with Narnia. I mean, ok, there is this huge taboo about eating Talking Animals, but once they're sure that they're not eating talking beasts they are quite happy to sit down at table with talking beasts and eat their non-sentient brethren in front of them.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

While I totally agree about the authorial audience (who I call the "perceived reader", and I think that footnotes are a sign that the people who publish the book imagine that the gap between the perceived reader and the actual reader has become a problem) I think the axiom you're supposed to be buying into is that neither sex nor females are of any importance.

I really don't like it. It doesn't help that I've had to work with men who went to public schools and are still just like that.

My childhood reaction to tWitW was that it was silly -- the horses and the humans and the motor car, the scale was wrong and it bothered me. It wasn't until carandol read it to zorinth when Z was about four that I noticed the sexism.

Winnie the Pooh, which I do like, doesn't bother me anything like as much, because they're toys, because they're all part of Christopher Robin's head, and because they're children, and therefore of course genderless/default male, except Kanga, and I never liked Kanga. I can remember reading the Tigger bit aloud to my sister when I'd have been maybe four and she'd have been three, and her being bitterly disappointed to the point of tears when Tigger wound up with Kanga eating Roo's medicine. Zorinth, at the same point, groaned. (Where I've seen that about Kanga/mother is Crews's The Pooh Perplex, but no doubt you had it from somewhere more respectable.) Kanga is also an adult, Roo's mother, but motherly to everyone, the rest of them, even Owl, are free children living in a wood, and we the reader are well aware that these are stories being told to Christopher Robin and not reality.

What I think the two Pooh books are about is the child coming out of the female world of infancy and having a little time of freedom as a child to do nothing before going to school. ("Gon out. Backson. Bisy. Backson.") I think Milne understood this really well. And the characters are such well observed types, and genuinely universal types, not just male types, I've known Rabbits and Piglets and Eeyores of all genders.

Ah. You know how grammatians say that "he includes she"? Milne's "he" feels as if it includes me, whereas Grahame's feels as if it specifically excludes me in a cloud of cigar smoke.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Does it make sense to say that Milne's characters are genuinely sexless (Kanga, after all, has a baby because ALL plushy kangaroos come with babies ... I testify from personal experience with a non-Kanga plushy kangaroo (and joey), and there's certainly no interest in the child's mind, or in Milne's world, where the baby came from; it just is), whereas Grahame's are only falsely sexless?

I don't have the problem(s) with TWitW that you do. The scale problems didn't bother me as a child, and since I did (and still do) identify very strongly with Mole, I was able to read "him" (and therefore the Water-Rat and the others) as sexless in the same way that the stuffed toys in Winnie-the-Pooh are sexless. But I agree with you that that is in fact, and much more seriously, a thing that has been done to the story by the author's mindset rather than a thing that springs naturally out of the story itself (i.e., Christopher Robin and his toys).

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

Does it make sense to say that Milne's characters are genuinely sexless (Kanga, after all, has a baby because ALL plushy kangaroos come with babies ... I testify from personal experience with a non-Kanga plushy kangaroo (and joey), and there's certainly no interest in the child's mind, or in Milne's world, where the baby came from; it just is), whereas Grahame's are only falsely sexless?

I think so. Toys are sexless - speaking from my own close relationship with a number of toys when I was that age, most of them never really had gender. Yes, I suppose you're supposed to know what sex your favourite toy panda is, but thinking back: Some of my toys were definitely male. Some were definitely female. Quite a lot just weren't: they were Panda and Lamb and Cub and so on, but they weren't either male or female. And most of the people in the Pooh books are toys - the only two exceptions are Rabbit, who I think is a real rabbit (and all his friends-and-relations), and Christopher Robin.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Oh, this is just brilliant, and I love it. It also explains why some male characters I can totally identify with--Alec Ramsay in The Black Stallion is a generic universal freckled redheaded kid, one each, gender irrelevant. He is all horse-crazy kids everywhere. Thus, I can (in my eight year old head) be Alec Ramsay.

I could never quite manage to be any of the characters in Narnia. But I always liked Edmund best (I know, go figure) because he was the outsider. Which is why, I think, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is my favourite Narnia book.

Genuinely sexless bs falsely sexless

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Yes, that makes sense to me.

Have you read Jan Needle's The Wild Wood which is tWitW retold from the POV of the animals of the wild wood who take over Toad Hall? I haven't read it myself, but carandol and zorinth have. I was wondering if it does anything to address the gender issues, or only class ones, and there's no point asking Carandol or Zorinth about that because they would just look at me like porpentines contemplating a database restructure.

Re: Genuinely sexless vs falsely sexless

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Another book to go on the list.

porpentines contemplating a database restructure

I love that image. Profoundly and with passion.