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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no subject
Date: 2003-03-26 11:05 am (UTC)I think the question of where the women are, where women's power is, is something that must have been in Copper's mind, writing these in the seventies, and I don't know what she was intending in SotT but it doesn't get there.
Bran and Jane can't have a romance, though, that's something else that's lost with memory, it would be hard enough, him being an Old One and her mortal, but for him being an Old One and having no respect for the integrity of her mind and her having no memory, no, it would be manipulating a puppet, ugh, I think better of him than that. Jane intact, yes, maybe, she'd have been up to it and helped the human side of him.
Sorry about your head, hope you are feeling better soon. Peppermint tea might be soothing.
What?
Date: 2003-03-26 11:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-26 11:23 am (UTC)Are you thinking "Will" and writing "Bran"? Because Bran ISN'T an Old One; he and Arthur and Merriman are all very specific about how he's going to be an Ordinary Boy when he gets back to Wales. So Bran and Jane are in the same boat.
Otherwise, yes, I think you're right that Cooper was trying to talk about something without having the conceptual vocabulary she needed. And I like your answer to the Where's Guinevere? problem. 'Cause that would work.
I'm thinking a long hot bath for the headache. Now to find a book to read ...
no subject
Date: 2003-03-26 12:24 pm (UTC)In that case, goodness knows, but half of what they have in common they won't remember.
Limitations of the story
Date: 2003-03-26 08:22 pm (UTC)In some ways, the series seems to me to be as much about families, about the way you are with (or without) your family shapes and influences who you turn out to be. How the absence of Bran's father and mother both opens him up to alternative family figures and closes him off from the solid background that Will and the Drew kids have. How your family parcels itself out into the accustomed roles: leader, communicator, visionary. Or, in Will's family: idol, musician, hedonist, shrew, caretaker, non-entity, non-entity, non-entity, outsider. (All those non-entities! Perhaps not.)
At any rate, I think that Cooper hints at her dissatisfaction with the roles of (good/positive) women, mostly in Greenwitch but also in that encounter between Jane and the Lady on the mountain. But I almost get the feeling that she not so much chose to neglect those aspects, but that the story wouldn't let her tell it any other way. Perhaps it's just me projecting my own characters' tendencies to run away with the plot onto other people's work...
Though it's not part of this series, I think an analysis of Seaward could well be worthwhile; in many ways it seems to me to an apologia for many of the things missing from TDIR books. It's obviously very much imbued with Celtic mythology still, but I think women are much stronger overall and can occupy a wider range of roles: heroine, villain, prisoner, advisor...it's more complex in its characterisation. Though I haven't read it in a while so it may just be my memory compensating.
Just my $0.05, which works out to be about $0.02 in US currency anyway...
no subject
Date: 2003-03-27 02:30 am (UTC)I'm bloody sure that book was published a draft too soon.
no subject
Date: 2003-03-27 03:19 am (UTC)Re: Limitations of the story
Date: 2003-03-27 07:18 am (UTC)I know what it is to have the shape of the direction the pattern of story wants to go be opposed to what you actually want to say, I've had that happen, and I think it may well be what happened to Cooper -- or as PD Cawley said, maybe it needed another draft.
Re: Limitations of the story
Date: 2003-03-27 07:47 am (UTC)Cooper reworks the Arthur story freely as it suits her: Merriman Lyon is Merlin basically because she tells us he is. No mention of intriguing with Uther to arrange Arthur's conception; no indication of what part he may or may not have played in Arthur's upbringing. No sign of Nimue/Ninian/Vivian. Bran himself is a unmistakable indicator that Cooper wasn't feeling bound by the canon. And really, women play so LITTLE part in Arthurian stories that there's all kinds of space to imagine what they might be doing. Another character who doesn't show up at all is Morgan, an image of female power if ever there was one.
Also, I don't think Jane fits in with
I agree, though, that the conventions of Cooper's story may have gotten the upper hand; the heroic quest is very much a masculine model of storytelling ... (I'm now imagining what might have happened if Cooper had given Arthur a DAUGHTER) ... and her storytelling never quite frees itself from the givens and restrictions of her model. I think she may have fallen prey to the idea that "things happening" in a story means PHYSICAL ACTION: finding grails and harps and swords, fighting monsters (the Afanc, the Mari Llwyd), bringing the head to the Hunter, etc. She subverts that in Greenwitch, but perhaps the effort was too much to sustain?
Re: Limitations of the story
Date: 2003-03-27 12:30 pm (UTC)And, as PD Cawley points out below, if Jane is a proto-Guinevere for Bran, that all fits in rather nicely, doesn't it?
Re: Limitations of the story
Date: 2003-03-27 12:45 pm (UTC)And we seem to be agreed that the generic conventions of the kind of story she was writing may have imposed constraints on the kind of story she was able to tell; we're just locating the restrictiveness in slightly different places. Which is cool.
no subject
Date: 2003-03-27 12:46 pm (UTC)Re: Limitations of the story
Date: 2003-03-27 01:01 pm (UTC)And the fact that Jane has a larger and more positive role is one of the things that makes me think that this time it'll work. I tend to think of Uther->Arthur->Bran as three iterations, moving towards getting it right. Jane's independence, strength and compassion fit well with that trend. If we follow this through a bit further by placing Will as Bran's Merlin then I'd argue that Will is a far more integrated and humane character than Merriman, which again fits in with the trend. Now I'm wondering where/if we can fit Simon and Barney.
Re: Limitations of the story
Date: 2003-03-28 07:19 am (UTC)But yes.
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_.
Speculation on The Lady
Date: 2003-06-02 03:37 am (UTC)I, too, have always been unsure of who exactly The Lady was intended to be, and picking up on the recent discussion of Guinevere's role would be interested in your thoughts of Guinevere being The Lady?
Several people have already touched upon the links between Jane and Guinevere, with the strong suggestion that Jane is Bran's Guinevere.
There are also close ties between Jane and The Lady, whose messenger Jane is. The Lady herself acknowledges this in a comment about their names "Jane, Jenny, Juno". (books at home of course so forgive the lack of direct quote).
Juno was Queen of Heaven, as is the Virgin Mary. The hunting of the wren in Medieval times was a rite to honour Mary; there are surviving carols that reference the rite. Its earlier history is less clear. So The Lady is linked with both the pagan, and the Christian Queens of Heaven, but is it queenship itself that is the key?
Flimsy, I know, but I continue to be disatisfied with The Lady's purpose and identity.
No one, I think, has yet touched on the triple aspect of the Goddess that Jane, Guinevere and The Lady portray.
Re: Speculation on The Lady
Date: 2003-06-02 06:45 am (UTC)But the Maiden-Mother-Crone thing is interesting, if only because the Mother is so consistently absent. Jane for the Maiden, the Lady for the Crone, and then for mother-figures we've got Guinevere (absent), Blodwen Rowlands (betraying), and a variety of ordinary women who never have the least idea what's going on with the children (Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Drew, Will's Aunt Jen).
That's also very pointed, come to think of it, in The Dark Is Rising, when Will's awakening as an Old One leaves him with a craving for parental figures. A father-figure he gets, in the most uncomplicated way possible, but the mother-figure, while loving and supportive and so on, is taken away almost as soon as he meets her (and through Will's own rashness, just to twist the knife). And she spends most of the series being venerated and "dead," returning to Will only when (a.) he arguably no longer needs her in that same childlike way and (b.) both parental figures are about to leave for good.
Real-world mothers you can have, but a mother in the mystical sense is apparently much harder to come by.
Re: Speculation on The Lady
Date: 2003-06-02 01:42 pm (UTC)The father figures, whilst present or accessible, are strongly flawed. Arthur, Merriman, Owen Davies all fit the stern patriarchal model and through that inflexibility drive away the ones they love:
Arthur by giving Guinevere cause to fear he would not accept Bran (Arthur must carry some blame here surely?),
Merry in his sacrifice of Hawkin for the Light,
Owen Davies' dedication to chapel as a way of life that is alienating Bran, although their relationship is saved in time. Again, it's the new generation that suggests a break to the pattern and the chance for successful parent/child relationship.
Well, with the exception of Roger Stanton.
Ah well, the Lady will continue to puzzle, but thanks for some thought-provoking critiques.
Re: Speculation on The Lady
Date: 2003-06-05 03:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-17 02:26 pm (UTC)I don't have a particularly wide readership and rather doubt anybody'd necessarily follow back, but I thought I'd ask first. I'm also not exploring the idea I'm writing about in any depth because I'm not sure it goes anywhere. I'm hoping for discussion (but not holding my breath as I'm not sure how many of my friends have actually both seen Babylon 5 and read The Dark Is Rising).
no subject
Date: 2009-01-17 03:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-17 05:23 pm (UTC)