December 5th, 2007
by
the angry black woman
Diana Wynne Jones’ WFC acceptance speech is now up on her website. She wasn’t able to attend the ceremony, so Sharyn November read it for her. I was indescribably impressed and pleased when I heard it and continue to be so now upon a second read.
I particularly love that she says, “Women, large-minded, formidable women, have played an almost exclusive part in helping my career. I have hardly ever dealt with a man — at least, when it came to publishing…” She then mentions her agent, Laura Cecil, and her editors, Marni Hodgkin, Susan Hirschman, and Sharyn.
Today at Fantasy magazine, I’m stirring up shit based on this section of her speech:
I am really very grateful for this Award. […] When I first started getting work published, I used to have wistful thoughts at the way all important awards were given to men. Women, I used to think, could be as innovative, imaginative and productive as possible — and women were the ones mostly at work in the field of fantasy for children and young adults — but only let a man enter the field, and people instantly regarded what he had to say and what he did as more Important. He got respectful reviews as well as awards, even if what he was doing — which it often was — was imitating the women. But you have changed all that.
Thank you for being so enlightened.
Are all the important awards going to men, still? Looking at the Hugo ballot, it’s easy to say yes. Looking at the Nebulas, the World Fantasy, and the other prominent genre awards, I say it requires a little thought.
Roll on over to Fantasy, if you’re inclined, to argue about it.
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Filed under Awards & Recognition, Cons & Community, Writers & Artists | Comments (23)
Oh, thank you for posting the link to that speech! I love DWJ and the way she makes me laugh. I particularly enjoyed this part:
As for the larger question of gender disparity in awards… yes, I think it still exists, but as you say, it’s complicated. Will have to ponder more before having anything intelligent to say.
I’m going to say this as a lifelong DWJ fan – I don’t think her books are particularly outstanding for their feminism. In fact, I think plenty of them are pretty anti-feminist.
I’m thinking particularly of the female archetype that recurs in her book – The Neglectful (or Outright Evil) Working Mother/Activist (Conrad’s Fate – Conrad’s Mom, Merlin Conspiracy – Grundo’s mom ?Sophie? (sorry I’m missing names here – perhaps indicative of the problem?), Lives of Christopher Chant – Christopher’s mom, Dark Lord of Derkholm – Mara). I notice this as a problem because their counterparts, the dads, are almost always long-suffering silent sorts. And really, there’s often some part of the plot resolutions where the situation is solved by the stepping in of a calm and noble man who fixes shit (most notably Chrestomanci).
Another thing I find really offensive is her creation of utterly throwaway female characters, ones who you really can tell that she thinks are deep down worthless. You see these in her horribly nagging wife of the main male character in A Sudden Wild Magic, or in those giggling potential brides of the main male character in Castle in the Air. Just utterly throwaway females, where the male characters in such adjunct roles are always given some kind of complexity or redemptive personality trait. Well, almost always.
It just seems a bit of an overstatement to consider her a feminist, when she’s kind of demonstrated in her writing that she’s not that fond of women in certain incarnations. It seems almost like a bit of internalized sexism, actually, as she is a working mother herself.
I love her writing style and her imagination and her weird plots and her Britishness – all of it – but I think her gender roles leave alot to be desired.
And of course, people of color are next to nonexistent. And queers? Almost definitely nonexistent.
Katie – I was thinking the same thing. I think you see some level of change in DWJ’s work over time (Millie is initially little more than a dumpy mother, but she later becomes a talented witch who … uh … gets rescued by a male character a lot). Witch Week not only had female characters, but in the end, the solution for their problems wasn’t to make them pretty or give them boyfriends – when the magical problems are fixed for Nan Pilgrim, for example, she’s writing stories and has a (female) best friend. (On the other hand, though I do find the bullying itself very credible, the other girls who bully her are the types of throwaways you point out.)
And then there’s the whole theme of the older, well-dressed, powerful man who puts everything right. There’s nothing wrong with this is a character type, but it sure turns up a lot – in addition to Chrestomanci, I’d place Howl and Thomas Lynn in this category). But do we ever see a female character of comparable power? The priestess in Charmed Life, maybe, who gets one or two lines? The evil rat queen?
And these male characters do sometimes distort the books – both Witch Week and Magicians of Caprona are mostly the stories of the main characters and the worlds they live in, but they don’t sort things out on their own – the Chrestomanci ex Machina shows up so we can hear about his beautiful dove-gray suit one more time.
I once read an essay by DWJ (can’t find a link) where she talked about how she hadn’t intended to have so many male lead character, and decided it wasn’t unconscious sexism on her part, but some sort of Jungian embrace of her animus. Now, I’m sure she knows more about what’s going on in her head than I do, but that sure sounds like rationalization.
She really loves a villainess, if you’ll excuse the word. The Witch of the Waste from Howl’s Moving Castle, Aunt Maria, the Duchess from the Magicians of Caprona, etc. – lots of one-dimensional evil. Also, they all rip on men (or the men in their lives) alot.
I don’t buy the “Jungian embrace of her animus” argument, or at least don’t see why I should when the product of her self-exploration still ends up being pretty sexist.
The dove-gray suit! Totally! I get it, already – he’s kempt as fuck!
I found it a little strange reading Charmed Life because the POV character, a young boy, kept stopping to tell me how good-looking and very, very, very well-dressed Chrestomanci was. I alternately felt like I was reading either a run-up to Eric’s coming-out story, or DWJ’s own taste in men bleeding through into the narrative.
I do think DWJ’s younger female characters are very good – I think she’s a talented observer of people, and that gives her some very credible characterization. (Contrast most of the women in DWJ’s work with, oh, Eilonwy in the Prydain books, a ditz who can’t even figure out how her own magic bauble works, advances the plot by sacrificing powers she never used and didn’t even know she had, and ends up sacrificing everything to marry the hero.) But when you step back and look at the larger picture … there just always seems to be a paternal figure at the center of everything.
Although the only character of color I can think of in her work is the Indian boy in Witch Week (I’m afraid I don’t have it handy and can’t check his name) I do want to praise DWJ’s Tough Guide to Fantasyland, in which she skewers the way so many fantasy writers trot out a racial stereotype of China/Japan/Arabia and don’t seen anything wrong with it because they changed the names.
Exactly – I so agree. The “paternal figure at the center of everything” – that’s exactly it.
So there’s the one Indian kid in Witch Week, there are Abdullah and Flower-in-the-Night from Castles in the Air, there’s Hayley of The Game, who’s apparently biracial (though you’d never tell from the cover art), there’s Felim, from Year of the Griffin, and…that’s all I can think of right now.
Really everyone else is coded or explicitly white, as far as I can tell. And as I said before, super, super straight.
I liked the Tough Guide in parts myself, and I appreciate her recognition of the nad stereotyping, but I’d laugh a little less hollowly and feel a little less “though she smiled, her eyes revealed the sadness within”-ish if she didn’t basically do exactly that with Castles in the Air (stereotypical Middle East – despotic kings, bandits, beautiful untouched veiled maidens, etc.) and otherwise almost never have characters of color at all. (Hope that sentence made any sense at all.)
And again, I say this as a fan. But I don’t like having to turn my highly developed ability to compartmentalize up to 11 just to deal with her reality.
Oh wait – just thought of more coded characters of color (CCoC)! Maybe those people in The Merlin Conspiracy who were eking out a living sewing under a radioactive sun and all had horrible boils? The ones who just needed an affirmation from Nick (White Dude) that their work was good in order to Be Free and Escape their Servitude? Them.
I am feeling a bit bitter because another Favorite White Author with Issues just did a dumb thing. Robin McKinley, on her blog on Amazon.com, just used the phrase “Chinese whispers,” which according to the idiom dictionary online means “when a story is told from person to person, especially if it is gossip or scandal, it inevitably gets distorted and exaggerated. This process is called Chinese whispers.” Ugh. I commented on the post, telling her it was “quaintly racist,” but NADA. God, sometimes I just want back all of the money I ever spent on someone’s books.
D’oh – that’s “recognition of the bad stereotyping.”
Robin McKinley, on her blog on Amazon.com, just used the phrase “Chinese whispers,”
It is the term in current use in the UK for the game Americans call “Telephone”. I doubt that it’s consciously racist: just the first term that came to mind.
I commented on the post, telling her it was “quaintly racist,” but NADA.
The blog is rss’d to Amazon from elsewhere: I doubt she saw your comment.
It is the term in current use in the UK for the game Americans call “Telephone”. I doubt that it’s consciously racist: just the first term that came to mind.
There’s a comparable situation in the US with the children’s game “Chinese Jump Rope.” On the one hand, it’s a term that genuinely gets on people’s nerves – it’s part of a whole set of schoolyard slang in which “Chinese” means “the opposite of normal.” (Or it was when I was on the schoolyard. There were “Chinese cuts,” for example, when you let someone in line in front of you on the condition that they immediately let you in front of them.) So there really is a racial underpinning to the terms over here – it’s not as though they’re games that came from China or were believed to.
On the other … “Chinese jump rope” is the only name that game goes by in the US, and it seems a little silly for a non-student, non-player to rename it. Since there’s nothing negative about the game itself (unlike “Chinese cuts,” which were more selfish than the base practice of letting someone in front of you,) it really picks up the unpleasant connotation from being part of a larger set of idioms. As the genuinely derogatory terms drop out, I think expressions like “Chinese jump rope” become more neutral – it comes to designate a simple variation from the usual form, like the difference between “Spanish rice” and “rice.”
I was sort of in two minds about defending the use of “Chinese whispers”. I mean, it is in origin racist, referencing the “incomprehensibility” of Chinese. And many written collections of children’s games don’t use the name – because if you think about it for more than two or three minutes (if you’re not writing something on the fly and posting it unedited, as Robin McKinley’s blog post certainly appeared to be) you realise it is racist/aggravating. (Like “Chinese gooseberry” for kiwi fruit, which I haven’t seen used for over twenty years.)
But children’s games are passed down not via books but via oral tradition. And you cannot wipe a name out of oral tradition as easily as you can change the name of a fruit in a greengrocer’s shop. (I remember once sitting on a bus next to two kids – I was in my twenties, one child was about fifteen years younger than me, the other two or three years younger than her – and listening as the older girl told the other a rhymed joke I’d learned when I was the younger girl’s age: and the older girl giving identical emphasis, pacing, and rhythm that I remembered.)
I hope “Chinese whispers” will cease to be, eventually, even as a name. But I don’t think that using it on the fly is a sign of intrinsic racism, or even of being particularly dumb.
DWJ as anti-feminist? I don’t think so.
There’s no question that there are plenty of domineering, rather evil, older women in her books, but it’s hardly ALL or even MOST of them. How does that make her anti-feminist? Are no evil women allowed in fiction because it reflects badly on the rest of us?
And as for “the paternal figure at the center of everything”, I once again disagree. In the Chrestomanci books, I can see the point, although the titular character is often NOT the central, powerful figure implied by that phrase. But even granting that series as an example, that’s 5 books out of over 40 that she’s written; it’s hardly an overall pattern.
It’s much more common for her books to feature adults of both sexes who wield power in the family or the community according to what they think is right, and which is often revealed to be quite out of touch with reality. This can be damaging to the protagonists, but is hardly ever consciously evil. It’s one thing I love about her fiction: you can see how bad things are done by self-centered, arrogant, lazy, or just plain clueless characters who are a lot like the ones you see around you every day.
The challenge for all her characters is to question what they see, think about it, and act in accordance with their own convictions. A lot of them don’t manage it and end up as members of what E.M. Forster called “the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words.” In this moral struggle — which runs throughout all her books — I don’t see that she makes any distinction between male and female chances of making it.
This discussion recalled that in Matanzas de Cuba, one of the most African locations you can be in outside of Africa herself, oranges are called, in español, chinas.
In Cuba many things have a china label or description, including people. A guy with a slant to his eyes, likely due to some Chinese ancestry, is called a “Chino.” That is his affectionate, nickname in the family, and his distinguishing name in the public sphere. The same for a woman — “China.”
In Cuba, at least, this is not perceived as racist. Cuba does have a strong official recognition of racism, let me haste to add.
On the whole “Chinese whispers” thing, I am of the opinion that any time
“Chinese” is in the name of something to make it negative, then it is racist. I feel a little queasy when it is in the name of something that is not immediately idetifiable as Chinese, but isn’t necessarily negative – the “Chinese gooseberry” example – but I suppose I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt.
I’m going to do some picking apart of my DWJ shelf now.
Katie: when it is in the name of something that is not immediately idetifiable as Chinese, but isn’t necessarily negative – the “Chinese gooseberry” example
A kiwi fruit looks like a gooseberry if a gooseberry had gone weird. “Chinese gooseberry” is connecting “Chinese” with “weird”. The name is no longer in current usage in the UK: the last time I heard it was when my great-aunt, born 1908, sent me to do some grocery shopping and told me if I saw some “Chinese gooseberries” to get a couple.
I don’t disagree with you that “Chinese whispers” is racist in origin: But I also think that people who use it because it is the familiar name for a children’s game are not using it with racist intent.
I’m going to do some picking apart of my DWJ shelf now.
Excellent! let’s get back on topic.
I’ve been thinking about your assertion that DWJ is anti-feminist all weekend, and I’ve got some picking apart of my own to do.
Just wanted to say kudos to Katie for commenting on the horrid Orientalism of _Castle in the Air_. In addition to trotting out a lot of tired stereotypes of the Middle East, the characters of color are ultimately revealed to be secondary to the white characters of _Howl’s Moving Castle_.
And what kind of a name is Flower-in-the-Night, anyway? It sure as hell doesn’t sound Arabic to me.
Yonmei, I do not believe that the intent has alot to do with racist actions. That is to say, I do not think intent has value as an indicator of whether something perpetuates racism. Lots of media is racist, lots of people say racist things, but most of the people responsible would say that they had NO intent to be racist.
I recently heard another way of putting it; if intent mattered, drunk drivers would never be prosecuted.
And I see what you mean about “Chinese gooseberry.”
Ok, ok, no more derailing.
Re: Castle in the Air, it’s certainly true that it mines a vein of story that may seem tapped out to people today, but there are two things to keep in mind here: 1) this book is a sequel to Howl’s Moving Castle, which makes similar use of the European fairy tale tradition, with tongue firmly in cheek; 2) basing a story on material from “1,001 Nights” is not automatically Orientalism, even if Richard Burton’s version of the collection is often cited as an example of the problem. There have been many versions of these tales, which originated in the 800s in the Middle East.
Zahra, I’m curious why you say that the characters of color in this book are “revealed to be secondary to the white characters”? I didn’t find that to be the case. Rather, as a big fan of Howl’s Moving Castle, I was disappointed that its characters had such a small part in the book.
Therem –
1) Use of the European fairy tale tradition is not intimately connected to the practice of colonialism and imperialism. It’s not a one-to-one comparison because Orientalist fantasies have been used as part of that colonialist, imperialist project – the propaganda branch of it, basically. There’s no parallel oppression that was masked by the European fairy tale tradition.
2) Using the stories of the 1001 Nights certainly isn’t automatically Orientalist. What is, however, is using tropes from the Orientalist fantasy of the Exotic East – the bloodthirsty bandits, despotic rulers, lissome veiled virgins, oppressive marriage customs – uncritically in the manner that DWJ does. It reminds me (though with better writing, of course) alot of Disney’s Aladdin. Sure, the characters act in ways that are not necessarily stereotypical – Jasmine/Flower-in-the-Night is spunky, Abdullah/Aladdin is slapstick, but the set pieces are used in ways that I think don’t scrutinize their origins at all.
Zahra – I hear you on the White characters taking over. It’s kind of weird how it happens – when they enter the book towards the end, it’s as if Abdullah and FITN become a bit one-dimensional. Therem, what I’m seeing is a book that’s supposed to be mainly about these two characters, but Howl and Sophie get on the scene and eat up page space like most secondary characters introduced in the final quarter of the book wouldn’t DARE do. And when the writing for the supposedly main characters gets sort of shoddy, I begin to feel like DWJ’s heart isn’t in it for them.
OK – so here’s my breakdown of my DWJ shelf:
- 27 books total
- Male (or vast majority male) narrator or protagonist: 13 books
- Female (or vast majority female) narrator or protagonist: 4 books
- Both – 8 books
Slightly less scientific…
- Books with male arch-villains – 7
- Books with female arch-villains – 8
- Books with both male and female arch-villains – 3
- Books with non-sex-determined villains or no real arch-villain – 7
- Other – 2
Because I got tired…
Proportion of male main characters to female main characters in a random sampling of 5 books: 22:12 (books: Spellcoats, Fire & Hemlock, Aunt Maria, Mixed Magics, Lives of Christopher Chant)
So….maybe she has a pretty even division of male to female villains. At least, it seems that way now. But her characters lean heavily to male, especially her main characters. Stay tuned for more tomorrow.
I just want to second Katie’s comments. I certainly wouldn’t argue that using the stories of the Layla wa Layla is automatic Orientialism; I’ve done it myself. But I would argue that that’s not what DWJ is doing in that book; there’s nothing in Castle in the Air that seems connected to real Arabic- and Persian-speaking and traditions of fantasy, Nights included.
For instance, the genie doesn’t seem remotely like the jinn that appear in any of the actual Nights or elsewhere in Arabic literature (including the Qu’ran)–who are associated with poetic inspiration, invisible, come in multiple flavors (male and female, Muslim and pagan), etc.– even though the idea of a jinn trapped in a bottle comes ultimately from the Nights (specifically, from the Tale of the Fisherman and the Demon, I think–the one with the singing fish).
But there’s actually a reason for that written into the text, and that’s because the genie isn’t a genie, he’s (SPOILER) a white character from the first book in disguise. (Doesn’t the text comment on his blue eyes a couple of times?) In fact, I think that fact that it’s couched as a sequel is part of the problem; we find out that the story of the characters of color have all along been a disguise for the *real* story, which is about the beloved white characters of the first book. The “Exotic East” locale turns out to be merely a cardboard scenery DWJ has erected to distract our attention and block our view from the machinations of the main plot; once it’s knocked down, the characters from the first book take over.
That those characters are more interesting, better developed, and easier to care about is a symptom of the problem, I think–and I totally agreed with you that Howl’s Moving Castle is a much better book, which deserves a far better sequel.
The question reminds me a bit of the difference between Kij Johnson’s fantasy novels _The Fox Woman_ and _Fudoki_, which are set in Heian-era Japan, and recognizably drawing on Japanese cultural traditions (most noticeably with the tales of fox women) and working with in them, as opposed to, oh, Lian Hearn’s Tales of the Otori series, which has always felt to me like a white Westerner’s comic book in Japanese costume.
And I can’t let the Nights come up in conversation without plugging Husain Haddawy’s translation, taken from the 13th-century manuscript. The originals are worth reading on many counts: They are a great work of world literature with a lot to offer, and while they contain a great deal of racism against black Africans, the show more clearly than most texts I know how that racism is intertwined with sexism and vice versa.
So I dropped the ball a little on doing a more in-depth look into DWJ’s books. But I wanted to say that I’m still thinking about it and will hopefully get to it soon!!
Also, Zahra – brilliant! You are so on point here. I forgot about (SPOILER) the genie being that dude from Howl’s Moving Castle, too.
And I’m going to look out for the Haddawy translation in my local used bookstore.