Women writers, women characters
Jul. 5th, 2006 11:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyThe Mirador has a female narrator.
(For those of you who have read The Virtu, yes, it is who you think it is.)
She is the hardest damn character to write I have yet been afflicted with. (Notice the crucial word in that sentence is yet. *g*) And I've been thinking about why that's so.
There is historically a preponderance of male narrators in my work, between Booth, Felix, and Mildmay. I just did a quick tally on my bibliography, and although it's a little difficult to decide how to count, we can put it at approximately 14 to 4. (Things are a little more balanced if we make it simply protagonists, rather than narrators--17 to 9--although it's still not what you would call gender parity.)
This raises a number of questions. The first one, obviously, is Why do we care? What does it matter if I write about men? It's not like the feminist police are going to come and revoke my gender or anything.
And no, of course not, and there's a sense in which it doesn't matter, as long as I keep writing mindfully. After all, A Companion to Wolves has almost no (human) female characters at all, and it's probably the most feminist thing I've ever written. I can even claim that I write about men because I'm interested in power dynamics (especially in the psychosexual arena), and you can get at those a lot more clearly by putting a man in a feminized position than you can by putting a woman in a masculinized one.
(Remember that I have a Ph.D. I'm professionally trained in the fine art of persuasivity.)
There's another sense in which this issue does matter--and matters a lot--a sense that Virginia Woolf was talking about way back when and that we (women writers in the Anglo-American tradition) still haven't really come to grips with. I write more men than women because it's easier, and it's easier because ...
Well?
It's easier because Anglo-American narrative traditions support and expect a male protagonist. It's easier because the things we make stories about are traditionally male things. It's easier because I imprinted on male protagonists as a child far more strongly than on female. (Little Women and Anne of Green Gables did not do it for me. Tom Sawyer did.) It's easier because I, as a reader and writer, am conditioned to think about male protagonists. Part of my mind, down near the trapdoor to the subconsious, still thinks that men are more "interesting" than women.
For the record, this is complete and total bullshit.
It would be easy to get defensive here--and I have done in the past--and take a stand on the wacky ineffability of creativity. I don't control what my subconscious throws through the trapdoor at me, and attempts to do so are likely to sabotage the whole works. You have to dance with them what brung you, and what I've realized recently is that my male characters are much more likely to want to go dancing with me.
(No, this metaphor has nothing to do with heterosexuality. Felix loves to dance.)
I tend to be suspicious of metaphors for creativity that assign too much agency to made-up people. It feels like a cop-out, or like hypocrisy, or being so incredibly twee that one should be taken out and drowned in a bucket. But if we accept that the various imaginary people in my head are all aspects of my subconsious mind that don't have any other way to get expressed (i.e., they're all "me," and splitting them up into different characters with different names and behaviors and appearances and so on is merely a convenience for the story-telling engine), then I can go so far as to say that my male characters want to talk to me. Even taciturn ones like Mildmay. Or neurotically shy ones like Booth. My female characters don't.
I have a story that's been stalled out for *mumblecough* a really long time, and I think it's because I have two female protagonists who have gotten stuck in the scene where they have to talk to each other, and they stand there in the early morning sunlight on a New England beach and insist they have nothing to say. The hardest thing about writing A Gift of Wings was Agido's voice. (I'm still not entirely happy about it, but the published version is exponentially better than the original first person version.) One way I know that the ftm transsexual who's appeared in my head is genuinely a man, despite accidents of birth biology, is that he wants to talk. He wants to show me things and tell me about his life. His female cousin is, metaphorically speaking, sitting leaned way back in her chair with her arms crossed.
I don't think, by the way, that this has anything to do with the gender performances of men and women in the world outside my head. But inside my head (--it's too dark to read. --Shut up, Groucho.), among the people I make up, a characteristic of men is that they will cooperate with the narrative. Women mostly won't. The female narrator of The Mirador was actually lying to me. (Here again, that looks almost like a cop-out, but I don't know any better way to describe it.)
What does all this mean?
Damned if I know.
The whole tangled mess is a problem. In the general, it's something that feminist writers (I think) have to at least take into consideration as they write, whether they choose to allow it to affect their narrative choices or not; in the particular ... well, at least now I've articulated what the problem is.
And maybe I can start figuring out ways to convince my female characters to talk.
(For those of you who have read The Virtu, yes, it is who you think it is.)
She is the hardest damn character to write I have yet been afflicted with. (Notice the crucial word in that sentence is yet. *g*) And I've been thinking about why that's so.
There is historically a preponderance of male narrators in my work, between Booth, Felix, and Mildmay. I just did a quick tally on my bibliography, and although it's a little difficult to decide how to count, we can put it at approximately 14 to 4. (Things are a little more balanced if we make it simply protagonists, rather than narrators--17 to 9--although it's still not what you would call gender parity.)
This raises a number of questions. The first one, obviously, is Why do we care? What does it matter if I write about men? It's not like the feminist police are going to come and revoke my gender or anything.
And no, of course not, and there's a sense in which it doesn't matter, as long as I keep writing mindfully. After all, A Companion to Wolves has almost no (human) female characters at all, and it's probably the most feminist thing I've ever written. I can even claim that I write about men because I'm interested in power dynamics (especially in the psychosexual arena), and you can get at those a lot more clearly by putting a man in a feminized position than you can by putting a woman in a masculinized one.
(Remember that I have a Ph.D. I'm professionally trained in the fine art of persuasivity.)
There's another sense in which this issue does matter--and matters a lot--a sense that Virginia Woolf was talking about way back when and that we (women writers in the Anglo-American tradition) still haven't really come to grips with. I write more men than women because it's easier, and it's easier because ...
Well?
It's easier because Anglo-American narrative traditions support and expect a male protagonist. It's easier because the things we make stories about are traditionally male things. It's easier because I imprinted on male protagonists as a child far more strongly than on female. (Little Women and Anne of Green Gables did not do it for me. Tom Sawyer did.) It's easier because I, as a reader and writer, am conditioned to think about male protagonists. Part of my mind, down near the trapdoor to the subconsious, still thinks that men are more "interesting" than women.
For the record, this is complete and total bullshit.
It would be easy to get defensive here--and I have done in the past--and take a stand on the wacky ineffability of creativity. I don't control what my subconscious throws through the trapdoor at me, and attempts to do so are likely to sabotage the whole works. You have to dance with them what brung you, and what I've realized recently is that my male characters are much more likely to want to go dancing with me.
(No, this metaphor has nothing to do with heterosexuality. Felix loves to dance.)
I tend to be suspicious of metaphors for creativity that assign too much agency to made-up people. It feels like a cop-out, or like hypocrisy, or being so incredibly twee that one should be taken out and drowned in a bucket. But if we accept that the various imaginary people in my head are all aspects of my subconsious mind that don't have any other way to get expressed (i.e., they're all "me," and splitting them up into different characters with different names and behaviors and appearances and so on is merely a convenience for the story-telling engine), then I can go so far as to say that my male characters want to talk to me. Even taciturn ones like Mildmay. Or neurotically shy ones like Booth. My female characters don't.
I have a story that's been stalled out for *mumblecough* a really long time, and I think it's because I have two female protagonists who have gotten stuck in the scene where they have to talk to each other, and they stand there in the early morning sunlight on a New England beach and insist they have nothing to say. The hardest thing about writing A Gift of Wings was Agido's voice. (I'm still not entirely happy about it, but the published version is exponentially better than the original first person version.) One way I know that the ftm transsexual who's appeared in my head is genuinely a man, despite accidents of birth biology, is that he wants to talk. He wants to show me things and tell me about his life. His female cousin is, metaphorically speaking, sitting leaned way back in her chair with her arms crossed.
I don't think, by the way, that this has anything to do with the gender performances of men and women in the world outside my head. But inside my head (--it's too dark to read. --Shut up, Groucho.), among the people I make up, a characteristic of men is that they will cooperate with the narrative. Women mostly won't. The female narrator of The Mirador was actually lying to me. (Here again, that looks almost like a cop-out, but I don't know any better way to describe it.)
What does all this mean?
Damned if I know.
The whole tangled mess is a problem. In the general, it's something that feminist writers (I think) have to at least take into consideration as they write, whether they choose to allow it to affect their narrative choices or not; in the particular ... well, at least now I've articulated what the problem is.
And maybe I can start figuring out ways to convince my female characters to talk.
