Before I got on my graphic novel kick, I was reading a lot of classic works of literature. The majority of it was stuff from the European canon (so things like Don Quixote, Hamlet, the Divine Comedy, the Illiad, Life Is a Dream, Medea, and so forth) although I also read a good portion of works from India, China, and Japan with a few Native American and traditional African pieces thrown in for good measure. Some of it was good, some of it bad, some of it entirely incomprehensible because of vast cultural differences between myself and the author or authors. A lot of it, though, pissed me off.
One thing that has always bothered me–even when I still thought that the free market could solve everything and that white, male Protestants were an oppressed minority–is the way that some people view women as being fundamentally different from and less than men. This was something I thought was abundantly obvious to everyone capable of stringing thoughts together into comprehension: all people, regardless of race, gender, belief, or sexual orientation are equally capable and should be afforded equal respect and treatment in all situations. Unfortunately, this isn’t obvious to everyone else (as I discovered one year at church camp when I got into a shouting match with the youth minister who was leading my group in a devotional about what women’s roles should be in life, particularly in relation to their husbands, and ended up causing a scandal; most of the authority figures, a fair number of the males, and an unexpected number of the females at the camp sided with the minister). Unfortunately, it also wasn’t obvious to many of the writers whose work I was reading.
So I found myself in a curious position. While I recognize that Shakespeare is one of the best writers who has ever lived with any language in any culture, I have a hard time reading his plays for all the references to womanly tears, female weaknesses, and girlish fantasies. When Laertes says that he must stay the weeping woman inside of him until he can take his revenge on Hamlet for the death of Polonius and Ophelia I don’t think, “wow, that was an impassioned speech,” I think, “well, fuck you, too.”
This isn’t something peculiar to Shakespeare, though. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight contains numerous repetitions of the line that is part of this post’s title: “And I, like a woman…” Like a woman he wept; like a woman he felt fear; like a woman he was picky; like a woman he was this or that. Greek mythology is filled with fickle, fawning females; The Tale of Genji is the story of a man who runs around marrying on a whim and screwing anything that moves while the women are supposed to be polite and constrained. And don’t even get me started on the goddamn cat in the rain…
I have a problem, though: these are good stories and they are well-written (um, well, except for a few). They’re also the foundation for not only my culture, which makes them of debatable value because it’s already obvious to me that many aspects of the culture need an overhaul, but of my chosen profession. As a writer, I feel that it is necessary for me to not only know how to construct a story in theory but also how it has been done in practice over the course of the history of the written word. But by reading these works and by commenting on them as being fine examples of writing, am I not also condoning the views held therein? Do I need to preface every conversation I have about stories with the clause, “well, the writer was a misogynist pig, but…”
Some have reconciled this debate within themselves by saying that those writers of classic literature were writing from the point of view of another, less enlightened culture, and so while a speech about holding back the weeping woman inside wouldn’t be acceptable today (unless you write three hundred issues of a comic, then it’s okay) it’s acceptable for the same speech to have been written five hundred years ago. That doesn’t sit well with me; that’s not acceptable. I mean, let’s be frank for a moment: viewing feminism as some sort of modern invention akin to the internal combustion engine that couldn’t have occurred to cultures of the past is ridiculous. Human rights is not engineering; it is not math or chemistry or biology. I can understand a person thinking that the world is flat, but I don’t see how it could have occurred to someone, anyone, in any age, that one human being was less than themselves because of a difference in complexion or sexual organs. Is it so difficult to think that a man could stir a pot of beans and look after the kids while their mother went out to discuss philosophy?
Now, I know all about how in prehistoric times women stayed behind to watch the kids and gather grain and berries while the menfolk went to hunt (or at least that’s the current theory; take a quick browse through ancient history books from the last twenty years and you’ll see how this theory shifts and mutates as new evidence is found and old evidence is reexamined with women having sometimes more and sometimes less to do in prehistoric times) and how this prehistoric division of labor was accepted as normal when civilizations started sprouting up, but I still don’t see how someone wouldn’t get the idea that that might not be the best way of doing things. It occurred to our ancient counterparts that staying in one place and farming might be a better idea than wandering around hoping to find some berries.
Can I even say that? I just argued that human rights wasn’t a science to be discovered and yet agriculture is just that. I guess I find the issue of human rights to be so obvious, so basic, so completely fucking simple that I don’t understand how great minds like Valmiki and Homer could have not gotten it. Homer could write sympathetic characters from two sides of a war, but he and his culture couldn’t view people with different genitalia with empathy?
… I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know how to solve this dilemma except to, as I said, be careful with my praise and quick to acknowledge that there are things in the classics that aren’t worth absorbing.
The only other way I can think to counter this glut of misogynistic and racist literature is to produce great works of my own that value all people equally. Even there, though, I have a problem: at what point does an individual character cease to be an individual and instead becomes a symbol for a group? Or, to put it in the way that I’m thinking it, at what point in time does a female character of mine become representative of all women? At what point does an African-American character of mine become a symbol for black men and women around the world? If I write a character who is weak-willed and this character happens to be female, am I perpetuating a stereotype or am I not white-washing human nature by creating a balanced character?
I’m working on a story right now that has a lesbian as one of the main characters. She is the only lead character who is a homosexual; the only other homosexuals in the story are a gay male couple who don’t play a very large role in what happens. By having a lesbian main character and by not having a gay male as a main character am I continuing that grand tradition of male authors everywhere of having women who like to have sex with and fall in love with other women while not giving attention to, or ignoring entirely, men who like to have sex with and fall in love with other men? Or, on the other hand, am I doing the right thing by having a homosexual character in the first place and not sticking to safe territory by having all straight characters?
Elsewhere in the story is a female character who thinks about sex a lot. Am I striking a blow for women’s right to claim their own sexuality by being frank about a woman and the ways in which she thinks about sex? Or am I continuing to force women to be sexualized? Does this change if she’s not pretty? Will a conventionally unattractive woman who thinks about sex be viewed and analyzed in a different light than a woman who thinks about sex who is conventionally attractive? Am I doing something bold or am I just picking up where Sex and the City left off? Will the character be viewed in a different light if she likes to use sex toys than if she doesn’t? Do I have to create a story, as in The Hours, where women aren’t allowed to enjoy sexual contact unless it’s with another woman? (In which case, see the previous paragraph.)
I’ve noticed that some authors attempt to circumvent this problem by simply inverting the stereotypes. I think that this has mixed results. In the hands of a good writer, an intelligent and articulate woman can be a deep, nuanced character; unfortunately, too many writers create implausibly perfect female characters in an effort to make up for Shakespeare’s crap. Let me be clear, though: I don’t think that most writers are engaging in a sort of self-censorship in order to avoid some platoon of PC Police. I think that writers who try to create strong characters who are women and/or minorities are trying to create a new type of art that escapes the rampant stereotypes present in older works (and, alas, too many modern ones). I just feel that a number of these writers in turn create caricatures instead of characters. Not to pick on the movie, having not read the book, but I feel that The Hours is a good example of this type of fuck-up. I don’t doubt that the author/screenwriter was trying to create women that were nuanced and interesting but I feel that he instead created a collection of flat, boring characters whose only emotion was despair. I do not doubt that women feel despair just as keenly as men do, but The Hours seemed to me to be doing to women what all those old stories did in a different way: allowing women to only have one dimension, one emotion. If not loving devotion, then depressive disconnect. Why can’t we have both contained in a single character in a single story?
So what can be done to step out of the tradition of the writers of the past? Do we have to keep lauding their flawed works? How far does their shadow reach?.
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