perspective hurts

[truepenny]

A lot of the time, my mind wanders along thinking about things without my paying any particular attention to it--you know, background noise while I get on with the boring mundanities of life; every once in a while this results in my getting hit with something about like a dead fish upside the face. As for example, this morning in the shower, we were bopping along, everybody minding their own business, and suddenly I listened to what my brain was doing and thought, OH MY GOD THERE'S ONLY TWO WOMEN IN THE TALISMAN AND ONE OF THEM IS DEAD.

Perhaps this requires some context.

The Talisman was the first book by either Peter Straub or Stephen King that I ever read. (Because when I was thirteen, I thought I didn't like horror. Little Did I Know.) I subsequently went on to read everything I could find by either of them, and I came back to The Talisman over and over again. It's not a perfect book, and even as a teenager I knew that, but it fed some craving in my psyche, and I loved it. I love Jack and Wolf and Richard; I love the wonderful melodramatic villains; I love the things they do with doubling; I love the weird twisted semi-mythical America that Jack goes questing through. I think it was also the first book by either King or Straub that I owned.

And, obviously, I had no trouble empathizing and even identifying with the boy heroes. No trouble at all.

Now, I'd noticed before that there was something weird about the women in The Talisman: We know that Morgan of Orris' wife Margaret committed suicide after their son Rushton drowned. We know that Richard (Rushton's Twinner--the premise of The Talisman is that America has a kind of dream-double, the Territories, and many, although not all, Americans have doubles there; these pairs of doubles are called Twinners) didn't drown. But Richard's mother--Morgan Sloat's wife--has no existence. NO ONE EVER REFERS TO HER, if she ever existed at all. It's not just that she doesn't have a name, or that we don't know if she's dead or crazy or if she dumped Morgan Sloat on his skanky manipulative ass and got the hell out of Dodge; it's that she literally has no existence. The only way we know she MUST have existed is that Richard exists. But she's Just. Not. There.

The Talisman is a big complicated book and it was written by two men with very busy writing careers and lives of their own in the days before email. The Absent Mrs. Sloat kind of niggled at me, but I figured she'd just fallen through the cracks of the collaborative process--or she'd been mentioned in a scene that had to be cut and nobody caught the continuity glitch. Stephen King's solo works are notorious for this kind of goof. No big deal. But for some reason, I'd never extrapolated from the Absent Mrs. Sloat to consider the rest of The Talisman--until this morning in the shower when my brain snuck up behind me with its big dead fish.

There is one major female character in The Talisman: Jack's mother, Lily Cavanaugh--and I have to say, Lily is an awesome character. She's an ex-B-movie actress who smokes too much and drinks too much and probably isn't cut out to be a single mother, but she and Jack love each other enough to make up the deficits pretty well. She's far from being the perfect mother, but I also believe absolutely that Jack loves her enough to go on this crazy quest to try to save her life. Lily's Twinner, Laura DeLoessian, is Queen of the Territories. Lily is dying of lung cancer, and doing so pretty realistically and unpleasantly; Laura has a Hollywood illness like Snow White in her glass coffin. Laura spends the entire book in a death-like coma; the last sentence is her only action: she opens her eyes. We get nothing on the subject of Laura DeLoessian; the contrast with April Ransom in Straub's The Throat, which I mentioned the other day in my Little Mermaid post, is really both stark and educational. April's dead, but she's still there; Laura's alive, but she's not there at all.

The only other female character I can think of (and granted it's been a while, but I did pretty much have the book memorized in my teens) is Lori, the waitress at the Oatley Tap who thinks abuse is a sign of affection. Yes, she's a stereotype. Everybody in Oatley is a stereotype, a sort of New England Yoknapatawpha County, only gone even more horribly Gothic and wrong, and Lori wouldn't bother me if there were anyone to balance against her. But I literally cannot think of another female character in the entire damn book. Certainly, there's no one important--not like Richard or Wolf or Morgan or Osmond/Sunlight Gardner or Speedy Parker* or even Captain Farren whom we meet for exactly a chapter, or Ferd Janklow, who we don't see for even that long, but who is a vividly memorable person. (I have occasionally had the itchy desire to rewrite The Talisman with snarky, cynical, effeminate Ferd as its hero instead of the shining all-American Jack Sawyer.) No. No women in this myth of America except for the Virgin Mother. (Lily drinks and smokes and wisecracks, but there's never so much as a ghost of a hint that she has a sex life after Jack's father dies.)

My point here is not that The Talisman is flawed or that it is populated only with white male Americans, but that I've loved this book for twenty years without noticing that--to put it bluntly--I'm not in it. This is a textbook example of the truism for my generation (although I hope and believe that it's changing) that girls learned to read as if they were boys. Because it's quite clear I did.

---
*There's a whole 'nother post about race in The Talisman and why there's only one African-American and where, pray tell, are all the Native Americans hiding out in this mythologizing of (nineteenth-century) America, and how exactly do Wolfs, with their whole Noble Savage schtick, fit into that? I love Wolf--and Wolfs--and more than once as a teenager wished they were real (there's something VERY wish-fulfillment about Jack getting his own pet werewolf, even though the narrative makes it very clear that he's not ready for the responsibility)--but I am more than a little disturbed by the parallels between Wolfs and Native Americans, specifically the role of alcohol in the subverting of Wolfs to Morgan's cause, and oh dear the paradigmatic Good White Man (Phil Sawyer, Jack's dead dad) and Bad White Man (Morgan Sloat/Morgan of Orris) who either treat the Wolfs respectfully (and give them Oshkosh overalls) or debauch them with alcohol and (it is suggested) make them regress into Ignoble Savages, which is to say beasts--and there's a whole register of representation that is way more problematic than I recognized at thirteen.

Comments

[deliasherman.livejournal.com]

Now I want to read this. Even though horror genuinely scares me and I know I'll be annoyed by the Woman Problem. Not to mention the Race Problem. I love the kind of archetypal pattern-making you describe.

Also, werewolves.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I'd call it fantasy-recognizably-written-by-two-horror-writers rather than horror. Which is not to say it isn't scary in parts--and probably your horrorometer is more sensitive than mine.

And, yeah. There are reasons I loved this book madly as a teenager, and still love it, even recognizing that it has Issues.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Oh. I thought it was doing that with lack of female characters deliberately, as a "This is the kind of problem this sort of story tends to have, so let's turn it up to eleven and foreground it" thing. It's been a long time since I read much Straub - he strikes me as a very very good writer who is remarkably focused on things which I find distressing so I have stopped reading his work - but I don't recall what of his I have read as being that extreme on not having female characters in general, but am aware that this may be a blurred recollection.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I like that theory, but I would find it more plausible if the lack of female characters were ever a problem in the book. I mean, Tolkien is infamous for his lack of female characters, but he has Éowyn, and she foregrounds the hell out of that problem, both by articulating it and because "I am no man"--she can kill the Witch King of Angmar exactly because he and the narrative* are so male-focused they forgot about the loophole. There's nothing comparable in The Talisman.

---
*ETA: "the narrative" here meaning not Tolkien, who sets the thing up perfectly, but the conventions he's working in.

[ashkta.livejournal.com]

I've never been hugely concerned with character gender in the novels I read, and I don't think it's because I was trained to read like a boy. I feel like every character reflects something that I connect to as a person. Because I don't think of myself in terms of my gender, only in terms of ME. Frankly, I've found more female characters that lacked qualities that would have allowed me to connect with them than otherwise (not always true, of course, but notably so).

So short form: I really don't care if every character in a book is male as long as the characters manage to connect with me as a person. Is this just less true of other women?

[(Anonymous)]

I think I'm in the same age group as Truepenny (I'm 37), and while I also don't necessarily feel I was trained to "read like a boy," in retrospect it seems obvious there was a huge difference between the types of books girls read and the books boys read. Of my female friends who read a lot, we'd all read books with male and female protagonists without even bothering to distinguish between the two, but I can't remember many boys doing the same. For example, I remember lots of girls reading Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, but I can't remember any boy who would touch Nancy Drew with a ten foot pole (or Little Women, Little House on the Prairie, Anne of Green Gables, etc.). The girls read both Judy Blume and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing - I'd be shocked if too many men my age had read Judy Blume when they were kids.

Don't know if it's the same now - if Harry Potter had been Harriet Potter, I wonder if the books would have been as popular, and what that says about the way boys and girls approach reading today.

[eagle]

Purely data-pointing: as a boy, I read the entirety of Hardy Boys and the entirety of Nancy Drew, and read lots and lots of Judy Blume (Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing is one of the books I've probably read over a dozen times). I preferred Nancy Drew to Hardy Boys; I thought it was better written and more interesting.

I read the entirety of the Little House on the Prairie series too, but it was for a contest and I thought it was boring. And indeed, no Little Women or Anne of Green Gables, but that was more because I thought they were relationship books (boring for me at that age) than because they felt gendered.

As a kid, I can't recall ever thinking of books as particularly gendered.

Not sure if that means anything, though. I'm certainly coming at this from the privileged side of things, since I was in most of the books in some form. I read anything in the children's section of the library that looked tolerable and that I'd not read before and paid little attention to anything else.

ETA: Oh, and forgot to add since generations are relevant: I'm 35.

[alex51324.livejournal.com]

Nothing really relevant to add here except that your comment reminded me of this Stargate Atlantis fanfic I read where Ronon (the noble savage character--SGA is one of those series that deploys tropes in a way that a committed viewer can believe is subversive, but probably was intended to be straight)...anyway, Ronon who is this big alien guy with dreadlocks, from a Warrior Culture Planet, and after he learns to read English one of the things he reads (in the fic) is "Anne of Green Gables," and the Earth military guys are sort of dumbfounded, because that's a *girls' book*.

Which is to say, definitely, women and girls tend to read books with male protagonists without really noticing gender, but it's comparatively rare for men and boys to read books with female protagonists. School and youth librarians take it almost as an article of faith that boys will not check out a book with a girl on the cover. (That changes at puberty, but only if the girl or woman pictured is half-naked.)

To unpack the "reading like a boy" metaphor, I'd say that it's just another iteration of the "boys and men are Default Humans, girls and women are a special case" meme. It's double consciousness, in other words. Girl readers experience themselves as Default Humans, rather than as the Other, so they can identify with characters of either sex, but it's more of a leap for a boy to identify with a female character.


/blather.

[darksybarite.livejournal.com]

My first reaction this post was... "... wait, who was the other one?"

*headdesk*

It's almost scary the way that lack of representation just sidles past your conscious mind and settles in. Make a list of your 10 favorite books/movies/etc, and then apply the Bechdel test. You may be appalled.

This actually reminds me of something Harvey Fierstein said in The Celluloid Closet. He was talking about how straight people would gush about the characters in his play, how they "weren't gay, they were universal." His response was something along the lines of:

"Screw you, they ARE gay! I'm glad that you've found something in them that you relate to, that you can translate into your own life, but for a change YOU can do the translating, not me." (nowhere close to quoting, but you get the idea)

Good characters are good characters, and good writers are adept at finding and explicating the essential humanity within each character, but it's never the same as seeing a *reflection* of yourself on the page.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Color me intrigued, since tomorrow I will start running an RPG set in nineteenth-century America, which (since the game system is designed for playing the half-mortal children of gods) will be all about the mythologizing. Can you give me any kind of one-sentence idea of what sort of mythologizing this book does, or what issues it wrestles with? (Clearly not race or gender, but surely there's something.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, they're very clearly influenced by Mark Twain: both epigraphs and the epilogue are quotes from him (2 Huckleberry Finn to 1 Tom Sawyer); Jack Sawyer's surname is clearly a tribute; and the Territories are called that because (if I'm remembering an interview with King correctly) of the very end of Huck Finn: "But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before." It's very much about America-as-pastoral: the Territories aren't as big as the United States, but they're much emptier and either bucolic or rural. No urbanization. ETA: and they make a big deal about how much clearer the air is in the Territories. Everything tastes better; everything smells better; and you can see for miles. Wolfs (the werewolves, who are very wolfy in human form--and pretty dim-witted) are shepherds. There's no technology except for a railroad that the villains have built--and it is a Bad Thing, this railroad. Very Bad. Oh, and Trinity and the other nuclear tests have fucked everything in the western Territories right the hell up with mutants and radiation sickness and the whole nine yards. There's also a strand of B-movie Westerns (the kind Lily Cavanaugh starred in), and that vision of the Old West and particularly its good guys and bad guys--that part is much more self-aware than some of the rest of it--and another strand about Hollywood in general and California vs. the rest of America (the paperback is 770 pages long: this is a big sprawling book, and the quest structure means it doesn't have to worry too much about hanging together otherwise). Also towards the end there's some very weird Jesus imagery, as we learn that Jack's dead Twinner Jason is revered as (at least) a demi-god in the Territories.

Okay, that was way more than a sentence. Sorry.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Oh, I only said "one-sentence" because I didn't want to ask you to write up a bunch if you didn't feel like it. Since you obviously did feel so inclined, though -- awesome, and thanks! Sounds like it isn't quite what I'm after, since my game's time period predates both Hollywood and Trinity, and I'm much more concerned with the American people than the American landscape, but it was a lot easier to find that out from your paragraph than a 770-page book.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

[My brain does the same thing, with much the same result. Including people asking me "where do you come *up* with this stuff?" in shock and confusion.]

I don't think I was trained to read like a boy either, mostly because I was such a voracious reader that I read anything and everything I could get my hands on. I read a bunch of the Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary books, but because they were there rather than a specific interest in them--I don't think I ever deliberately checked them out from the library, for instance. I also remember being very frustrated with Heinlein that all his female characters wanted to be barefoot and pregnant as their lifetime achievement goal. For that matter I remember being very frustrated with many male SF&F authors because of their female characters.

I don't honestly know what the other kids were reading, because I didn't really have many friends. I had books. I remember being in the school library in fifth grade, during "go pick out a book for the week" time, and I have no recollection of any other kids being anywhere near me which suggests that they were in a different section than I was. That was the day my teacher pointed me at The Tombs of Atuan.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes.

I remember reading books with no girls/women in them. If there were any, the females were mostly annoying and weird unrealistic creatures. They didn't have much personality, no qualities I could respect.

The interesting things happened to the males, the females did boring stuff. Male heroes had long lists of good qualities; the most important one women could have seemed to be devotion to their men.

I remember loving some of those books.
I can't blame boys learning to believe women are boring weird creatures no one can understand - I almost believed it, and I am one.

I didn't read like a boy - I read all kinds of books, when boys rarely touched 'girl books'. But I did read the 'boy books' as if I were a boy myself. I inevitably identified with the male characters. I played the roles they had, I dreamed of them. I remember fighting with my brother about it - playing Tarzan, I never wanted to be Jane. (We made a compromise and I got to be the chimpanzee, which I thought was a step up from Jane.)

It kind of horrifies me now, and all the more horrifying is how little this has changed in time. No matter how well I really like being a woman, how unrealistic I know this to be, my subconscious is still well-trained to believe women are boring and weird.

I enjoy my vivid dreams, where everything I have read and seen comes together and forms adventures for me. But in these dreams, I'm usually male if my gender is specified at all. My subconscious is so certain women Can't have adventures, it puts me through a genderchange to make adventuring possible for me.

(I realized this when I had a Criminal Minds dream where I didn't have to be male to be me - omg there is a show where I can find a female with characteristics I can dream of having! omg why is this an exception to the rule?)

Anu, 35.

[adelev.livejournal.com]

I find this post fascinating. I adore Stephen King, but for the longest time I was sure I didn't. The first King books I read were the Bachman books and I did not know they were King. In fact, when I was told, I was quite sure the person telling me had to be mistaken because I loved The Long Walk and I did not like King books. LOL

Have you read The Long Walk? The entire setup explicitly excludes women. It is 100 boys in a boys-only contest with all females quite literally on the sidelines. However, I don't think I learned to read "like a boy". I read books with predominantly male characters, sought them out in fact, and yes I identified with the male characters, but not with their gender. I learned to read as a straight female who was attracted to, and therefore interested in, males. Unlike a previous commentator, I am always female in my dreams, but I tend to be surrounded by males.

As a side note, Stephen King is one of only a few favorite authors of mine who is male. My ideal book is written by a woman and focused on men. When I was in Junior High, my favorite author was S. E. Hinton. I learned she used her initials so as not to turn off male readers, which supports the idea mentioned a few times above that girls will read "boy" books, but boys won't read "girl" books. However, after reading just one of Hinton's books I knew immediately she was a woman. The books are a female perspective on male characters - in other words, a perspective I can relate to and a topic of abundant interest to me. ;-)

The Talisman rules. :)

[(Anonymous)]

Oh yeah, I know what you mean about the "women problem". There are too few women in the book. But as for me (also a woman), this was not a problem... it's better to have a totally guy-book, than a female character which I abhor. Also, there is practically no romance, ever... at most only in hints or past flashbacks etc. But you know what, usually a book without any romance is dead boring, but The Talisman is brilliant.
Surely, as I am an eternal fan of the bad-guy-side, I wondered about Margaret. Especially that this one flashback where Morgan makes love to Margaret and later they fall asleep, and Rushton perishes despite Morgan diving in the water to save him, is one of the very few scenes where Morgan actually appears human. In the most, he's very cliched, in both worlds. Oh, and I CAN'T believe him willing to kill Richard. :P
What I thought maybe... you know, not all characters have Twinners. Wolfs don't. Maybe Margaret existed in the Territories, and just went over to the regular world sometimes, like Wolfs or Elroy. And her son got a Twinner. And then she killed herself. But I don't know, in my Talisman-inspired-fantasies Margaret had a Twinner, and died as she killed herself in the Territories.
Ohh there was another woman, or at least female creature :), that HAD to be there, somewhere, and that mysteriously disappeared from the books' view. Maestros King & Straub so really intrigued me, giving the caps question "WHO WAS REUEL'S MOTHER?????!!!" I was disappointed so very much when this question was left unanswered! :P Being totally in love with Osmond / Sunlight, I find quite interesting the idea of him seducing some tentacled Territories creature who became the mother of Reuel Gardener. :D
Also, one last thought about relationships in the book. Please don't throw stones at me, it's just my half-formed opinion! :D I got the impression that maybe Osmond / Sunlight was Morgan's lover... it's never stated directly, but sort of hinted at... Morgan forgives him such mistakes that usually "Dark Lords" cut their accopmlices' heads for... he calls him "baby" and "beautiful", puts his hands gently on Sunlight's shoulders, when Sunlight's close to breakdown, and the book says he feels to Sunlight "a twisted kind of love". So maybe Margaret in the regular world found out about her husband's affair with his best friend and decided to leave. Or kill herself. :)))