Pizza Diavola

I’m working on a post on the portrayal of female characters in the fiction I’ve read this year, and I’m having difficulty setting the parameters of the discussion. Namely, how do I talk about this subject in a way that’s thoughtful, rigorous, and consistent? I think the problem is that first, I have to figure out what exactly it is that I want to talk about. The post was spurred by two things:

1. Sexist portrayals of women in TV and film. For instance, women being written as stereotypes rather than as fleshed-out, three-dimensional characters; sexist tropes (I can’t think of a better way to explain it, but for example, in The Devil Wears Prada, the Andy and Nate reconciliation scene reads to me as Andy crawling back to Nate, admitting that he was right all along and she was wrong, that she sold out for nothing but feminine fripperies, that she’s going to give up this job that made him unhappy–only to find out that he’s going to move to Boston, anyway); ridiculous standards of beauty and weight for female actors, while male actors are allowed to be short, fat, pimply, and otherwise conventionally unattractive; sexist themes (the normalization of rape in Superbad). This topic disturbs me a lot, but I don’t watch much TV, I see one or two new movies a year, and in short, I don’t have enough exposure to TV and films to talk about patterns and systemic sexism. TV and film aren’t my areas of interest, either, so I don’t have much interest in blogging about them, although I think the issues mentioned are important. Quite frankly, the awful treatment of female characters is one of the reasons that I haven’t picked up Heroes again this season, which leads to lacking the background necessary for writing about the show. A circular situation.

2. The realization that Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels are fantastically feminist. They are very well-written, aside from the first novel, which was had potential but was shaky, and the primary character is a woman. A capable, intelligent woman, who first interested me not because she was a woman, but because she was very well-written: complex, intelligent, morally upright, fallible, and devoted to literature. Thursday Next has her fair share of personal and professional troubles in a way that makes her real (Fforde shows her juggling the work/life balance, dealing with her overdraft, and putting up with car troubles at the same time that he shows her tackling vampires, solving literary crimes, and saving the world), and although I didn’t notice until very recently that she’s a strong female character, now that I have, I can’t stop noticing it and all the wonderful ways, small and large, in which Fforde lambasts gender stereotypes and addresses current gendered issues such as the working mom/stay-at-home mom debate (he also lambasts modern American politics, ignorance, and conventionality and is an all around wonderful writer). More than noticing it, it makes me really, really happy every time Fforde does not fall back on a stereotype when writing his female characters and that makes me wonder about the argument that strong female role models (in books, in TV, in film, in the real world) are important (as I mentioned in an earlier post, I never thought much about that argument because I’d always had strong female models and thus thought it was normal).

The combination of realizing that I didn’t want to write about TV and film, because I lack both the background and the interest, and mostly it would make me angry, and realizing that I do like books and have read books recently that have well-written female characters, led me to the conclusion that I should substitute books for TV and film and write about feminism in books instead.

That in turn led to a new set of questions:

What defines a strong female character? What makes her a strong female character? What makes her interesting to me?

Do I like well-written characters or strong female characters? They are not always the same. Have I come across a poorly-written strong female character in the books I’ve read this year? Does a well-written strong female character interest me because she’s well-written or because she’s a strong female? Is it possible to separate out those two things?

When female characters are poorly written and based on gender stereotypes, are the male characters poorly written and based on gender stereotypes? Have I read anything recently with poorly written female or male characters? Have I read anything recently where the female characters were well-written and the male characters were poorly written and based on gender stereotypes?

I think that out of everything I’ve encountered recently, including the real world, Jasper Fforde comes the closest to achieving gender equality, in his books. In his books, he writes all the characters as people: interesting characters with personalities of their own, and their interests, jobs, roles in the books’ themes and plots, and other characteristics form coherent wholes that don’t rely on their sex. I’m not sure how to explain it clearly, which is frustrating. I mean, I think of people as people: obviously, I notice whether people are female or male, but that doesn’t define how I think of them. If asked to describe Friend A, I would say, “Friend A is a Literature student. He’s an amazing cook, he enjoys Classical music, and he’s sweet and wicked funny.” If asked to describe Friend B, I would say, “Friend B is a daredevil. She goes surfing every weekend in the summer and she used to be an accountant before becoming a surfer bum.” I see their likes and dislikes, their interests, and their professions as being related to their personalities rather than related to their sexes. Obviously, some interests can be informed by sex, but I tend to think of interests as outgrowths of personality (I think Friend B is a surfer because she likes surfing, not because she’s female and therefore can’t handle the math necessary for accounting; I think Friend C is a pro-choice activist because she is a socially liberal, sensible person, not because she’s a woman–although that might influence her opinions regarding abortion). When reading his books, I get the feeling that Fforde sees his characters as people, too, as people with reactions, interests, and thoughts that are the logical outgrowths of their individual personalities. In The Eyre Affair, Thursday doesn’t pursue Landen because she’s a sad, lonely woman who needs a man to make her life complete, she pursues him because they were in love once and she’s found out that he’s been tending her brother’s grave. Fforde treats all his characters as individual people, without falling back on sex, race, class, sexual orientation, or age as the causes of their personalities. It’s the most egalitarian text I’ve come across in a long time.

Fforde raises another question, though: how is it that a male writer has managed to write what I think is a feminist text? Does the sex of the author matter? This question isn’t one that interests me much, as it goes into an area of debate that I detest (authorial intent), and it doesn’t fall within the same scope as the other questions. It’s food for thought, though.

A more pertinent question that the Thursday Next series raises, though, is the constraints of period and earlier literature on strong female characters. Fforde is free to write about a woman that is a former cop, a former soldier, and a detective-cum-literary FBI agent because the world of the series is clearly a modern society in a borderline fantasy setting. What makes a strong female character in period writing, such as Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond and Niccolo series, or in earlier literature, such as Austen, Fitzgerald, or, for kicks, Homer? What makes for feminism within those works? Is there a yardstick for feminism that can be applied to Homer as well as to Dunnett and to Fforde? Is it inevitable or necessary that period or earlier lit contain period-appropriate sexism for historical veracity? What was feminist in Jane Austen’s time is different from what’s feminist now, so how does that influence whether or not I read Sense and Sensibility as feminist?

Which brings me back to this: What constitutes a feminist book?

I think that my conclusion is that a feminist book is one in which the female characters are well-written without resort to gender stereotypes; one in which the female characters are as well-written as the male characters, without resort to gender stereotypes. A feminist book is one that treats the female characters as people as much as it does the male characters. This definition should work for period fiction, earlier lit, and contemporary fiction. What do you think of this definition? Is it meaningful? Is it too broad? Will it lead to productive discussion? It’s diverged from the question of strong female leads; should that be part of the discussion or should that be the topic of a separate discussion? I’d like to include the position of primary and secondary female characters vis-a-vis primary male characters (thinking mostly of Philippa in the Lymond Chronicles), too.

P.S. Sahiya, AYIJ (I feel uncomfortable calling you by your real name in cyberspace, nevermind that it’s in the comments [and IN YOUR BLOG URL OMG, I just noticed that]. It’s a weird twitch–I respond on blogs as pizzadiavola, even for people I know in real life, except for yours which for some reason doesn’t taken openID.), I’ll respond to your comments soon. They’re thoughtful and thought-provoking and I want to make sure that I’ve thought them through before responding. Also, I’m only good for limited doses of thoughtfulness at a time, and I think I’ve exceeded the limit for this week and last.

P.P.S. New readers who trekked through here recently, HI! *waves*