TDIRS: Silver on the Tree, pt. 2
Mar. 26th, 2003 11:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyIt's the Feminism Post!
I should have just kept going in pt. 1 and screw the fact that it was turning into a reenactment of Moby-Dick. With hand-puppets. Because now I've lost my momentum and forgotten all the clever things I was going to say. And I have a glare-headache, because the weather gods hate me.
Right. Done whingeing. Will attempt to make sense, but please forgive if rather scattered and suffering from lack of personal pronouns. And articles.
I started by thinking about Blodwen Rowlands. She, like Mrs. Palk in OS,US, is a seemingly good and nurturing character who turns out to be a double agent. But, as if to emphasize the children's loss of innocence, Blodwen is Mrs. Palk taken to the extreme. Mrs. Palk is merely venal. Blodwen is the White Rider. Mrs. Palk is a friendly housekeeper; Blodwen is the wife of a trusted friend and herself part of the landscape of Bran's childhood. Both women have an absolute dichotomy between the way they are perceived and their true selves.
I don't really know what to make of this. So, okay, we maybe have a theme of women having power and agendas that men can't/won't see. And we have the bit where Jane gets the important message from the Lady: "Will said nothing. He stood staring at Jane with a strange medley of emotions crossing his face: blank astonishment, chased by envy, followed by the dawning of an understanding that relaxed into his usual amiable look" (Cooper 94). Here, as in Greenwitch, Will has completely overlooked Jane, and he gets called on it. The fact that Will is perfectly blind to Blodwen and the White Rider BEING THE SAME FREAKING PERSON suggests (to me--and I'm not sure if this is how I'm supposed to feel or not) something rather pointed and Tiptree-esque about the wide-spread cultural effects of patriarchy. I always want to dope-smack Will: Don't underestimate the women, you twit! Which, come to think of it, is also a perfectly valid response to Farmer Dawson in TDIR. Maggie Barnes has been working for him for HOW long?
The trouble here in SotT is that I can't get the thing to coalesce into a pattern. Greenwitch does; Greenwitch is extremely coherent. TDIR and TGK are equally simple because women are background characters; there's nothing there to interpret. But OS,US and SotT, with their betraying nurturers and their uneasy intimations of sexuality (Polly Withers, the proto-flirting between Bran and Jane (which, I have to say, I find completely sweet and touching and I hope it works out for them)) ... I can't find the pattern to explain them.
As an aside, I'm suddenly and completely pissed off by Guinevere's absence from the end of SotT. Both Bran and Arthur are treating Bran's decision like it's only about them, Bran and His Dad. But Bran HAS a father: Owen Davies. That's the point of The Grey King. What Bran DOESN'T have is a mother, reinforced by the fact that one of his surrogate mother-figures has just turned out to be a Grand High Poo-Bah on the wrong damn side. So where the fuck is Guinevere and why are we all of a sudden too manly to care about her?
I think what I'm saying is that I have problems with the way women are portrayed in SotT. I love Jane, and I think Cooper does an excellent job of depicting the onset of puberty and the way it changes who Jane is and how she sees those around her. What's lacking is the mystical dimension. The Arthurian mythos, by its nature, is Patriarchal with a capital P, and I think Cooper lets that carry too much of her story. Blodwen's femininity is all in her human persona; the Lady is great, but we almost never get to see her and her function is severely limited (whereas Merriman and Arthur pop up all over the place and do brave heroic things and so on and so forth). And perhaps most tellingly (and I kind of despise myself for even saying this), we don't meet any women in the Lost Land. If, as I was arguing earlier, the Lost Land is the heart of what Cooper's trying to say about creativity, I think it's really exceptionally disturbing that the characters we see, and whose artistry we admire, are MEN. Women in the Lost Land do things like throw flowers at Will.
It is perhaps, because this is my brain, a genre thing. Women can be heroes in narratives like that of Greenwitch, where the action taken is one of sympathy and kindness, of paying attention to what people say (which is also Jane's role in SotT). In stories that require action and bravery, they are pushed aside by boys with shiny phallic symbols. (I'm sorry. That was really catty.) Blodwen Rowlands is never recognized as a woman when she's being the White Rider; in fact the pronoun is always "he." (This is giving me terrible, hell-bent thoughts about John Rowlands and M. Butterfly and possible reasons why the Rowlands have no children and oh good god somebody please make me shut up.) Women in Cooper's world can't be heroes.
Headaches tend to make me bitchy(-er), so I may well be overstating; devil's advocates and evidence against my claims always welcome!
---
WORKS CITED
Cooper, Susan. Silver on the Tree. The Dark Is Rising Sequence 5. N.p.: Aladdin-Atheneum, 1977.
I should have just kept going in pt. 1 and screw the fact that it was turning into a reenactment of Moby-Dick. With hand-puppets. Because now I've lost my momentum and forgotten all the clever things I was going to say. And I have a glare-headache, because the weather gods hate me.
Right. Done whingeing. Will attempt to make sense, but please forgive if rather scattered and suffering from lack of personal pronouns. And articles.
I started by thinking about Blodwen Rowlands. She, like Mrs. Palk in OS,US, is a seemingly good and nurturing character who turns out to be a double agent. But, as if to emphasize the children's loss of innocence, Blodwen is Mrs. Palk taken to the extreme. Mrs. Palk is merely venal. Blodwen is the White Rider. Mrs. Palk is a friendly housekeeper; Blodwen is the wife of a trusted friend and herself part of the landscape of Bran's childhood. Both women have an absolute dichotomy between the way they are perceived and their true selves.
I don't really know what to make of this. So, okay, we maybe have a theme of women having power and agendas that men can't/won't see. And we have the bit where Jane gets the important message from the Lady: "Will said nothing. He stood staring at Jane with a strange medley of emotions crossing his face: blank astonishment, chased by envy, followed by the dawning of an understanding that relaxed into his usual amiable look" (Cooper 94). Here, as in Greenwitch, Will has completely overlooked Jane, and he gets called on it. The fact that Will is perfectly blind to Blodwen and the White Rider BEING THE SAME FREAKING PERSON suggests (to me--and I'm not sure if this is how I'm supposed to feel or not) something rather pointed and Tiptree-esque about the wide-spread cultural effects of patriarchy. I always want to dope-smack Will: Don't underestimate the women, you twit! Which, come to think of it, is also a perfectly valid response to Farmer Dawson in TDIR. Maggie Barnes has been working for him for HOW long?
The trouble here in SotT is that I can't get the thing to coalesce into a pattern. Greenwitch does; Greenwitch is extremely coherent. TDIR and TGK are equally simple because women are background characters; there's nothing there to interpret. But OS,US and SotT, with their betraying nurturers and their uneasy intimations of sexuality (Polly Withers, the proto-flirting between Bran and Jane (which, I have to say, I find completely sweet and touching and I hope it works out for them)) ... I can't find the pattern to explain them.
As an aside, I'm suddenly and completely pissed off by Guinevere's absence from the end of SotT. Both Bran and Arthur are treating Bran's decision like it's only about them, Bran and His Dad. But Bran HAS a father: Owen Davies. That's the point of The Grey King. What Bran DOESN'T have is a mother, reinforced by the fact that one of his surrogate mother-figures has just turned out to be a Grand High Poo-Bah on the wrong damn side. So where the fuck is Guinevere and why are we all of a sudden too manly to care about her?
I think what I'm saying is that I have problems with the way women are portrayed in SotT. I love Jane, and I think Cooper does an excellent job of depicting the onset of puberty and the way it changes who Jane is and how she sees those around her. What's lacking is the mystical dimension. The Arthurian mythos, by its nature, is Patriarchal with a capital P, and I think Cooper lets that carry too much of her story. Blodwen's femininity is all in her human persona; the Lady is great, but we almost never get to see her and her function is severely limited (whereas Merriman and Arthur pop up all over the place and do brave heroic things and so on and so forth). And perhaps most tellingly (and I kind of despise myself for even saying this), we don't meet any women in the Lost Land. If, as I was arguing earlier, the Lost Land is the heart of what Cooper's trying to say about creativity, I think it's really exceptionally disturbing that the characters we see, and whose artistry we admire, are MEN. Women in the Lost Land do things like throw flowers at Will.
It is perhaps, because this is my brain, a genre thing. Women can be heroes in narratives like that of Greenwitch, where the action taken is one of sympathy and kindness, of paying attention to what people say (which is also Jane's role in SotT). In stories that require action and bravery, they are pushed aside by boys with shiny phallic symbols. (I'm sorry. That was really catty.) Blodwen Rowlands is never recognized as a woman when she's being the White Rider; in fact the pronoun is always "he." (This is giving me terrible, hell-bent thoughts about John Rowlands and M. Butterfly and possible reasons why the Rowlands have no children and oh good god somebody please make me shut up.) Women in Cooper's world can't be heroes.
Headaches tend to make me bitchy(-er), so I may well be overstating; devil's advocates and evidence against my claims always welcome!
---
WORKS CITED
Cooper, Susan. Silver on the Tree. The Dark Is Rising Sequence 5. N.p.: Aladdin-Atheneum, 1977.
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Re: Limitations of the story
Date: 2003-03-28 07:23 am (UTC)Re: Limitations of the story
Date: 2003-03-28 07:39 am (UTC)Yes. That's what I was trying, in my incoherent way, to get at. It's the same thinking that leads to: Women's work is tremendously important, but boring. And it's wrongheaded, but very difficult to combat. I fall prey to it all the time. And the common solution is to say, Women can SO play with the men, and write action/adventure stories with feminine protagonists. And while I applaud that and enjoy those stories and want to see more of them, they're only addressing half the problem.
Re: Limitations of the story
Date: 2003-03-28 12:07 pm (UTC)Le Guin said she should have shown Estraven looking after children, but that isn't it either.
Something I didn't realize when I first started being published is that when you write a first published book, you don't worry about repeating yourself and using what you know. So I cheerfully used one answer to this problem, and now it occurs to me that in every world I ever make this is going to be a problem needing an answer, and wanting a different one every time, because the defaults are in a place that's impossible for me. This makes me feel terribly weary. I sometimes think that in my last life I must have been one of those dreadfully taking it for granted sexist men who thought women shouldn't bother their pretty little heads about things, and I picked this body so I wouldn't have that option this time.
Re: Limitations of the story
Date: 2003-03-28 12:25 pm (UTC)Or is presented as the Token Female (as so often happens to women SF writers, like Le Guin herself). This is an especially cheap shot in pseudo-medieval fantasy, where the heroine who wears trousers and cuts her hair off is automatically sympathetic to modern female readers because she's more like us. And we can sneer with her at the girly, shallow women who do embroidery and marry who they're told. (Aravis and Lasaraleen again, but I'm also thinking of Kerowyn in whichever Mercedes Lackey book that is.) The patriarchal oppressive rules are still in place; they just don't apply to our heroine, because she's Special. (And the ironic capital S is definitely for Lackey.) So it looks like the writer's being feminist--Look! A strong female protagonist!--but they don't have to deal with the societal restructuring that a genuinely feminist approach would demand. (David Weber also does this. Egregiously.)
The standalone novel gave me fifty thousand fits on exactly this subject, because I had to rewrite all the language to be gender-neutral without being PC (because it wasn't about being sensitive to oppressed minorities--it was just how the world worked) and to indicate just how alien to our norms the marriage practices of this culture were without indulging in infodumps that a reader would chew their own leg off in order to escape. It's extremely annoying not to be able to refer to soldiers as "men." Which, of course, is the point.
Re: Limitations of the story
Date: 2003-03-30 11:02 am (UTC)I know you said you don't write poetry, but consider the difficulty of writing poetry on great universal themes from a POV where women are unquestionably assumed to be people. I am more proud of the way I got that as an axiom into my "Comfort" poem than that I managed to get the rest of the world view into it!
(http://www.bluejo.demon.co.uk/poetry/poems/comfort.htm)
It's not just language though, (though I can be infinitely distracted by language) it's when the whole structure of the way stories want to be interesting, the whole expectation of what things are focal things is pushing against, when the way in which it is possible to say something in itself makes saying the thing you want to say difficult. I think that's Le Guin's problem, and I think it may be what happened to the absence of Guinevere in SotT. What could she do, if she were there? Cooper would have had to find a new way of doing something -- but she did in _The Grey King_.