Bujold & Sayers

[truepenny]

melymbrosia is talking about books again, and her comment on A Civil Campaign has inspired me to post on why I find the ending of that book both incredibly satisfying and incredibly wrong. (I'll be talking about Memory, Komarr, A Civil Campaign, Diplomatic Immunity (Lois McMaster Bujold) and Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, Gaudy Night, Busman's Honeymoon (Dorothy L. Sayers). Dunno how spoilerish I'm going to get, but I don't promise not to give things away.)

And since this is going to get insanely long, if you aren't interested, don't click here.

Before I start--and I always do this, standard disclaimer type stuff, before I get out my sharp little knives--I want to say that I am a great big slavering shameless Bujold fan. Got all her books, read 'em all at least twice, etc. etc. Looking forward tremendously to the new Chalion book.

But for me, the Vorkosigan books hit their ne plus ultra with Memory. I think Memory is a brilliant book, the way that the plot and the thematics and the character development all integrate and make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Yes, Miles comes out at the end smelling like roses, but he also hits his absolute nadir as a human being in his progress through the book, and for me it feels like he earns his auditorship. The book works.

I start having problems with Komarr, and they focus on Ekaterin. She's too freaking perfect. I would like Miles so very much better if he could for once fall in love with a woman who isn't breathtakingly beautiful. And Ekaterin herself is so clearly tailor-made to be Miles's Perfect Spouse that she's boring. Boring, boring, boring like a very boring thing (as jess79 would put it). Her primary motivation is her child, and since I don't like children, I can get behind that on an abstract level, but I can't empathize with it particularly. And Bujold, who writes such fascinating male characters, never puts her back into it when she's writing women (the honorable exception being Cordelia before Miles's birth). Poor Ekaterin is stuck being the love interest, all her subversive feminist thoughts about Barrayar's patriarchal system notwithstanding. (Hang on to those thoughts, 'cause we're coming back to them.)

I love the experience of reading A Civil Campaign. I giggle insanely and cheer and love everybody at the ending. But then, because I am cursed with a brain the size of a planet, I start thinking. ACC suffers from the same problem I was talking about in an earlier post about Harry Potter: the world divides cleanly into Those Who Like Miles (Whether They Admit It Or Not) and Those Who Don't. Even in Komarr, there are characters who don't like Miles who are still perfectly decent human beings (e.g., the Komarran who proposes to Ekaterin). But in ACC that subtlety is gone, and what's worse, she's mapped it onto her political divide. It's a bad bad bad sign when the Emperor is officially impartial, but everybody knows he's secretly in favor of your protagonist's party. (Just replace "protagonist" with "antagonist" and suddenly you have a horribly corrupt and evil government. Bad.) So everything comes together too cleanly; defeating the people who are annoying Miles also means defeating the people who want bad things for Barrayar and are otherwise icky. Too simplistic.

But back to Ekaterin. The blunt brutal fact of the matter is that she caves too quickly. It's no secret that ACC is in part an homage to Dorothy L. Sayers (along with Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Georgette Heyer), and thus the parallels with the Vane Quartet (SP, HCC, GN, BH) are not only obvious, but intentional, and thus fair game.

At the end of SP, Harriet and Peter are in a roughly similar position to Ekaterin and Miles at the end of Komarr. Peter has saved Harriet from being hanged for a murder she didn't commit, is passionately in love with her, and has told her so. Harriet's still in emotional overload, and so can't process.

Now here's the key difference. It takes Sayers two insanely long books (for a total of 917 pages in my hardback editions) to get Harriet around to the point where she can accept Peter's love. She has much of the same baggage as Ekaterin (the guy she didn't kill being her emotionally abusive lover) plus the horrible obligation of being grateful to Peter. And because Harriet isn't Perfect, she behaves like a spiteful bitch all over the place and generally tortures both herself and Peter trying to come to terms with the fact that she loves him. ACC (405 pp. in the hardback) cheats by essentially switching models in midstream, jumping from Sayers to Heyer, who lets you do these rapid-fire every-plot-thread-resolved-happily endings. And the obsessive pairing off of the Koudelka girls seems borrowed from another Bronte: Anne and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

So the end of ACC is emotionally satisfying, but it's a cheat. It cheats by yanking out Ekaterin's spine and trampling her character flat. All those feminist thoughts (which Sayers deals with honorably and extensively in GN) get swept away by the passion of True Love. And no matter how much I want to be, I'm not okay with that.

The problem even carries over into Diplomatic Immunity. DI and BH are equally pieces of fluff, but BH includes some extremely serious and emotional scenes as Peter and Harriet try to negotiate their relationship around Peter's work and what it does to him. I was hoping when I bought DI that at least some of those feminist issues would come up, but no. Ekaterin is reduced to Adoring Bride and Helpmeet. Once again, she's Perfect and therefore boring. I want Ekaterin to find her Inner Bitch and tell Miles where he gets off. And I want it soon.

And now I feel like a bitch myself. But I can't turn my critical faculties off, even when I want to. Mea maxima culpa

Comments

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Well, I think that one of the things you can do to solve the problem of not having women do anything is to take a traditional action-driven story and replace the hero with the heroine. If it's set in our culture--or even a reasonable derivative of a real one--and you pay attention to the characters, then you're going to find your plot deformed by gender anyway. (This is one of the very cool things about Buffy, I think, although according to Joss's usual origin story, gender was an issue from the very beginning, and Buffy started off telling the underside, the other (Other) side of the story, the girl's side.) Hth had a pertinent complaint (http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=bettyp&itemid=74229) about Kushner and Sherman *not* doing that in The Fall of the Kings, and how it deformed both plot and worldbuilding.

I'm not sure, even, what difference is between a woman and a man with tits. I mean, the latter just makes me think of various awful stories where the (usually male) writer just keeps having to remind the reader how *girly* the female narrator is, and they always drive me up a wall.

Narrative structure fascinates me. I'm very bad at writing traditional structures, and this frustrates me, because there's quite a lot I like about them. Trying to find the bits of the wreck I can bring up to air and reuse.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

You mean Kushner and Sherman have a female pirate and it isn't a big deal? I don't know, that world is very weird, gender does matter, they're all men at the university. It's a strange thing, the whole thing is peculiar whether you do anything with it or whether you don't.

I had a character who was female, and who was someone who had been a warrior when she was young because she thought it was fun and now she was middle aged and she was fighting and risking other people's lives because it was her duty to, and the difference between the way she'd been heedless of stuff when she was younger and the way she was now required to be and indeed actually responsible was the interesting thing. This was a poem (http://www.bluejo/demon/co.uk/poetry/poems/sword.htm) and it became two novels, and the hardest thing was actually coming up with a background in which it was possible for a woman to say that. I had to completely deform biology with magic to get there. Nobody who has read the books has actually noticed this, or anyway, commented. They all go on saying "never shrill" and "post feminist" (huh?) but not that I had to eliminate infant mortality, with consequent effects on general health, and make nobody have more than four babies ever by divine fiat, and make unmarried women 99% infertile. It's not what the story's about. The story's about keeping fighting after it stops being fun, as I said.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

You mean Kushner and Sherman have a female pirate and it isn't a big deal?

Hth's point is that gender does matter in that world, except that in FotK it doesn't stop any of the female characters from doing whatever they want to, which makes it all feel fantastical and unreal, in a bad way. I do agree with this, and it is part of my problem with the book, although not my major dissatisfaction.

Truepenny, the book oddly enough does support Richard as Alec's Great Love, if not Only. But it's not a love story, which is the main if not only reason I don't love it the way I love Swordspoint, or even like it the way I do the source novella. It's also not urban in some significant respects, which is the other big reason I was unhappy with it.

I hadn't noticed the four children limit until The Prize in the Game, though I was more nonplussed by then at the existence of queens and the ambiguity around homosexuality. But to the degree I did get what you were doing with gender, I'm still confused by the whole issue about writing women as distinct from writing men--because the Sulien books do seem like a good example of trying to take a traditional hero tale and fit it around a woman, and doing it thoughtfully and honestly enough that it ends up altering the worldbuilding so the plot can follow generic conventions without violating character.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I haven't been able to read The Fall of the Kings, because I got to the point where they have Alec (Duke Whatever-he-is) having affairs with all these people, both men and women, and the part of my brain that has been madly in love with Swordspoint since I first read it just howled, That's not Alec!, and refused to go on with the story. Rationally, I can agree that I am overinvested in Richard and Alec's relationship, but I still can't make myself read TFotK.

The two "men with tits" characters I'm particularly thinking of are Honor Harrington (David Weber) and Kerowyn (Mercedes Lackey). In both cases, it's all too clear that the author has said, I will take this masculine archetype and make it FEMALE. Which means that the characters behave like men except when the authors want to remind us that they're women--and those are always moments of emotional tension and general sappiness, rather than, oh, say, what do you do if you've got menstrual cramps on the day of the Big Battle?

Buffy is quite different. BtVS is all about the ways in which Buffy's gender role--emphatically girly--does and does not mesh with her narrative role as a Hero. Firefly is also quite good in this regard, especially with Kaylee, who's a mechanical genius--the domain of men (as "Shindig" points out)--but also unrepentantly girly with her silly pink layer-cake of a dress.

Oh, good lord, where's my point? I don't know. Maybe I don't have one. Maybe these are just random thoughts on the subject of gender and Heroes. And overinvestment in books that came as epiphanies when one was 18.