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.
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Re: I'm not really a writer
Date: 2006-07-07 02:23 am (UTC)I can't really tell what you're getting at. In your first paragraph, do you mean that most women in worthwhile post-1970's genre fiction are taciturn and prone to hiding their emotions and opinions? That isn't the impression I get, but maybe we read different books.
In your second paragraph, I'm not sure what the referents of "this kind of thing" and "it's not at all realistic" and "it's a foreign emotion" are. By "this kind of thing", do you mean that female-character-avoidant people are avoiding female characters because too many female characters are sassy and irreverent, or because too many of them are filled with angst, or something else? What is unrealistic, being spunky, suppressing angst, not suppressing angst, or something else? Is your last sentence literal or sarcastic?
I'm not arguing, I just can't tell for sure what you mean. Your statements could be interpreted multiple ways.
I've already agreed with the original poster that I was overgeneralizing. "Only" was way too strong a word to use. People are individuals, and any generalization applies only in a statistical way, like saying women tend to be shorter than men. I still think it's true, though, that as a rule women tend to be more open about how they feel, especially with their close friends and lovers, than men tend to be.
Re: I'm not really a writer
Date: 2006-07-07 04:47 am (UTC)'Having the color come from sassiness, spunk, irreverence', is what I meant by "this kind of thing." It's also what I was calling unrealistic. It's a character cliche I particularly dislike, especially because it's almost exclusively foisted on women. One of the reasons I dislike it, beyond personal taste, is because by their very nature, sass and irreverence are directed towards people in positions of power and responsibility. (Otherwise it's not sass, it's bullying.) So disproportionately giving women those character traits stacks the deck against women characters having power and responsibility -- and adulthood, I think -- themselves.
(The exception, of course, is when sass/sarcasm is a front, a cover for insecurity or self-loathing or what-have-you -- also a cliche, but one I like. (Plus it doesn't read to me as sexist.) Or when it's bravado, an effort to create in yourself the very nonchalance you're trying to project - Buffy quipping as she slays, that sort of thing. That, I like. But Buffy has tons of insecurity issues to go along with her sass.)
So anyway, I thought you were suggesting those sorts of traits as a female substitute for either angsty repression or emotional flamboyance - what I meant by my last paragraph was that angstiness is as girly an trait as they come, so it's not unrealistic to give it to a female character. But! at the same time, it's not a well-regarded or a respectable trait, so it's no 'easier' (and therefore less interesting) for a female character (or a real woman) to be angst-ridden than for a male one.
As far as reading habits go, women in the vast majority of the books I read and enjoy have multiple and sometimes conflicting motivations for their actions, often try to hide fear, shame, and embarrassment from others, and so on. But I don't think this says much about my reading tastes; it's just a description of ordinary human behavior -- I don't know how to read 'hiding your feelings' as a gendered trait -- everybody does it, if they can. I'd agree that women are socialized to hide different sorts of emotions than men are, though.
I'm not arguing
I'm not...well, maybe I am arguing a little, but I'm not hostile about it. I'm certainly not trying to fight. I do think a lot of this comes down to personal taste in character types, which can't be argued. (for instance, you mentioned George RR Martin, which reminds me that my personal perpetual grudge against that kind of fantasy is the way ideas of nonconformity in women are structured -- I look mostly in vain for some acknowledgement that a girl who likes to read books by herself all day is just as a rebel and just as much in violation of her social role as a girl (like Arya) who likes to fight and ride horses. Not that I don't want to read about physical heroism! - but it's the angst vs. sass thing all over again. There are a billion different ways for women to be interesting.)
[This excessively long comment was brought to you by the Campaign for Respectable Female Angst.]
Re: I'm not really a writer
Date: 2006-07-09 01:35 am (UTC)I was by no means advocating specifically for more spunky women and fewer angsty ones (after all, it has been noted that most of Sarah's female protagonists tend to fit neither of those models, but are instead competent, straightforward and even-tempered). It was a single toss-away comment as an example of one possible other kind of more colorful personality that was different than being either Felix-like or Mildmay-like. I could have picked any number of other examples instead. My main point was the same as your conclusion that "There are a billion different ways for women to be interesting".
I just get the impression from Sarah's writing that she likes to have fun with her characters by making them a little extreme in some way, and they're fun to read as well, even when they aren't particularly having fun. Which made me think that maybe why her female characters won't talk to her as much as her male ones is that they are less extravagant. They're believable, but maybe she's a bit bored by them.
There are not only a billion different ways for women to be interesting, there are also a billion different tastes in what kinds of people one finds interesting. Like the original poster to whom I was responding, I'm also not a writer (at least, not of fiction - just of software and technical articles.) But I think if I were a writer, and I were getting blocked with my female characters more than my male ones, I would examine the female characters that I do find myself wanting to talk to, the ones whom I keep having conversations in my head with after the book ends, and analyze what about them makes me respond that way. Even if there are fewer of them than there are of the men, there are sure to be some.