Still Seeking Chloe and Olivia

[truepenny]

[first published on Reflection's Edge, March 2005; thank you to the Wayback Machine for helping me rescue it]

Virginia Woolf, who knew a thing or two about writing female characters, wrote in A Room of One’s Own about the difficulties involved:

It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that; and how little can a man know even of that when he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose. [...] Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers [...] literature would be incredibly impoverished, as indeed literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women.

(Woolf 86-87)

This trope is echoed by Joanna Russ in “What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can’t Write,” and it continues to be almost embarrassingly apropos. Thus, the first obstacle standing in the way of writing strong female characters is that, even now, seventy-seven years after Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own, the great mass of tradition is against it.

The Sexualization of Female Characters

It is still hard for us, as writers and readers, to see women in relation to each other, rather than in relation to men. Think of how few stories there are in which the primary relationship is a friendship between women. And think of how often, in those few stories, the friendship either is or is read as code for a lesbian relationship. Now, as Woolf does, think of how many stories there are in which the primary relationship is a friendship between men.

Although the entire idea of slash fanfiction is to recode those male friendships as romances, slash is not canon. Slash is not read as canon. No one in a sober academic context would make the sort of note which occurs in my second-hand copy of A Room of One’s Own. “Chloe likes Olivia,” writes Woolf (Woolf 86); noted above the text in blue ballpoint is the word “lesbianism.”

That, too, was a large component of how I was taught A Room of One’s Own in my undergraduate Introduction to Gender Studies course, as if the erotic relationship were more transgressive than the platonic. The male homoerotic reading is contested, contentious; the assumption that two women who like each other must be lovers is par for the course.

Women are traditionally put in fiction (as Woolf notes) as the lovers of men; it is much easier for them to be imagined as the lovers of women than as the friends of women – or of men.

One of the things I dislike about When Harry Met Sally, which is in most ways a charming romantic comedy, is that it carefully proves its contention that “Men and women can’t be friends.” One of the things that most disappointed me about the long slow decline of The X-Files is that Chris Carter went back on his promise that Mulder and Scully would never have a romantic relationship.

The romantic reading is the easy reading, and the first question to ask yourself when you’re trying to write a strong female character is: who is she, when she isn’t somebody’s lover?

Male-Centered Narratives

Ursula K. Le Guin, who also knows a thing or two about writing female characters, points out in “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” that some activities – hunting, as opposed to gathering – make more exciting stories than others and lend themselves to certain patterns of narrative:

That story not only has Action, it has a Hero. Heroes are powerful. Before you know it, the men and women in the wild-oat patch and their kids and the skills of the makers and the thoughts of the thoughtful and the songs of the singers are all part of it, have all been pressed into service in the tale of the Hero. But it isn’t their story. It’s his.

(Le Guin 166)

But, as she also says (with a vicious and well-earned sideswipe at 2001: A Space Odyssey), just because those are the stories that get told doesn’t mean those are the only stories worth telling. But other stories – stories that don’t center on a capital-H Hero, stories that aren’t about war or the seizing of power or other traditionally masculine concerns – are harder to tell, and harder to find an audience for.

Studies have been done with children showing that while girls will read stories about girls and/or boys, most boys will only read stories about boys. So if you want your work to appeal to the widest possible range of readers, you’d better write stories that boys (or men) will read.

The unpleasant terms “chick flicks” and “chick lit” reflect and promote the assumption that there is a certain kind of story that only women are interested in, and, on the obverse, that all women are interested in. And the derogatory use of the word “chick” makes it perfectly clear that these are lesser stories, weaker stories: stories that are pandering to the fluffy, over-emotional preoccupations of women. Woolf skewers this prejudice with her customary acumen, some seventy years before it gained a name:

But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are “important”; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes “trivial.” And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

(Woolf 76-77)

Thus, a great many things militate against strong women characters in fiction of any kind. We have been trained to see male-centered stories about masculine concerns as being the stories worth reading, and progress against that paradigm has been slow and difficult.

Options for SF Authors

SF is an inherently reactionary genre. Not in all ways, or even most ways, but SF spends most of its time trying to pretend that Modernism never happened. (There are exceptions, like Samuel R. Delany, but the fact that they are exceptions goes a long way toward proving my point.) In terms of narrative conventions and narrative structure, SF is old-fashioned and proud of it. And these old-fashioned models of narrative are ideally suited to telling male-centered stories; as Le Guin puts it:

So the Hero has decreed through his mouthpieces the Lawgivers, first, that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead); second, that the central concern of narrative, including the novel, is conflict; and third, that the story isn’t any good if he isn’t in it.

(Le Guin 169)

While Modernism allowed realistic fiction writers to write stories in which “nothing happens” (i.e., the action is not what we have been trained to consider meaningful), SF is still heavily plot-oriented. It doesn’t have very much space for stories that aren’t about Saving The World, and has even less space for stories about characters who aren’t Heroes.

Which leaves one with a choice. Either try to make room in SF for women’s stories or make room in SF stories for women. And the easiest way to make room in SF stories for women is to make the women into men. It is also an easy (and cheap) way, in this the beginning of the twenty-first century, to lay claim to being a feminist writer. But it isn’t feminist to write about men with breasts. It’s a reinforcement of the patriarchal idea (most notably expressed by Freud) that all women are simply defective men.

The question, then, is how to resist this facile and meretricious method of writing about “women.” First and most obvious: don’t make a character female just because you think you ought to, or because you want to be able to say you’ve done it. If the character needs to be female, that’s a different matter, but making artificial choices about gender is just as detrimental to a story as making artificial choices about anything else.

Secondly, think about the story you’re telling. Is it a traditionally male-centered narrative? If it isn’t, you have a whole host of new problems about structure and pacing which are outside the scope of this article. If it is – and there’s nothing wrong with telling that sort of story – then you need to think carefully and thoroughly about what it means to a female character to be in that sort of story. What possibilities does it open up for her? Conversely, what limits does it place on her behavior?

Ultimately, the answer to the question of writing strong women characters lies in another realization, something our heteronormative society isn’t very comfortable with: gender isn’t binary. Neither is sex. Not all human beings are unambiguously manly men or womanly women. Most of us aren’t. There are all sorts of points along the continuum where real human beings can end up, and therefore the same is, or ought to be, true of the characters we invent.

Rather than inventing “women” and “men,” let us strive to invent people, people whose gender inflects their behavior just as their race and class do. And when we tell stories about them, let us consider possibilities that the Hero habitually ignores.

Works Cited

Le GuiLeGuin, Ursula K. “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York: Grove Press, 1989. 165-70.

Russ, Joanna. “What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can’t Write.” To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. 79-93.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. New York: Harvest/HBJ-Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, n.d.