November 30th, 2008
by
Yonmei
I met a friend this weekend whom I’d never met before, though we had been reading each other’s stories for years.
It was interesting to meet her, and towards the end of the meeting – when we were both too tired (at least, I was) for this to go anywhere interesting, I was thinking about privilege and the history of cities: we were in London, which is a stranger city to both of us.
When I take the Underground in London, especially the Northern Line, which is one of the deepest lines, I think of the Londoners who sheltered in the Underground during the Blitz. When the bombs were falling, wealthy Londoners could leave the city to live elsewhere: the children had, in theory at least, been sent out of London in a planned mass evacuation that itself generated a multitude of stories: the middle-class Londoners could get bomb shelters for their gardens or at worst for their kitchen tables: but for the working classes, the people who lived in row houses and tenements, there was the Underground or there was nothing. It’s not something that the management of the Underground care to remember, but the first response to this mass of unwashed people huddling on the platforms was “How dare they?” George Orwell mentions this in one of his descriptions of London in the Blitz: that the Underground’s staff had tried to have these people turned out, to stop them from using the deep tunnels for shelter: and the response of the Londoners was to buy the cheapest ticket, to the next station, because then they had legitimate status as passengers and could not be turned out, however long they spent on the platform. Now, of course, the use of the Underground to shelter Londoners is part of the history of London’s survival at war – but not then: class privilege was part of that story. an essential part to understand how the Underground staff could even think of doing it.
We were talking, my friend and I, about Regency romances: about how for the class stratum in which these characters live, the Upper Ten Thousand, there are limited adventures that boys can have (join the army, pretend to be a highwayman, gamble, drink) but there is only one adventure a girl can have: to get married. Georgette Heyer’s early heroines get married to end the novel: her later heroines are usually trying to have adventures other than marriage (and usually failing: in Sylvester the heroine wants to be a novelist, in The Convenient Marriage she wants to be a gambler, in The Grand Sophy she simply wants to run other people’s lives (for their own good, of course, and with tremendous success – and in Frederica she wants to get someone else married… but they all end up married in the end). I had thought (I told her) of a Regency romance with the gender privilege taken out, with all the structure and manners and language of Regency left in – but it never worked, and another writer we both know had told me she didn’t think it would because the whole point of a Regency romance, which Georgette Heyer wrote with such panache, is the complex relationship between gender and class – if you try to write a story without either one, it won’t be a Regency romance.
I got into writing science-fiction, or sometimes fantasy, primarily because if I wrote a story set in another when or where, I could subtract from the story entirely all the issues of male privilege and of heterosexual privilege that were then – I was fourteen, still at school, still living with my parents – making my life such a mess and misery. I didn’t think of it in those terms, of course. I just knew I wanted to write stories where I could tell the story I wanted without having to consider all the issues that gender and sexual orientation would bring up. I wanted to write stories where I could have a woman find another woman attractive and have this be either a passing moment of appreciation or a love story that broke apart their lives and joined them till their death, without having to deal with all the issues that every lesbian or gay person I know has to deal with. I write stories – still do, for preference – in worlds and times where bisexuality is presumed the norm. (Not that “everyone’s bisexual”, but that it is just assumed it is normal for people to find both genders attractive, and what your sexual orientation is, is never an issue…)
And I wanted to tell stories about women which were not sexual stories. We talked about this too, my friend and I, about how it’s always assumed that if you want a motivator for women to be or do something, you can always write in a rape (with reference to Was, in which Geoff Ryman has Dorothy raped: or The Door Into Shadow, in which Diane Duane has Segnbora’s inability to focus her magic turns out to be an unresolved reaction to having been raped as a child) just as, in romances, the adventure for women always turns out to be marriage. I wanted to tell stories about women in which women did things without reference to sex. Not only women who were heroes, but women who were cowards, traitors, fools, fighters, thieves, villains, vipers – who had motivations and visions and actions that were not sexual.
A lot of that is why, as Joanna Russ wrote in her essay on Pornography By Women For Women With Love, I feel so comfortable writing slash: in m/m slash, the sexualisation of the plot is carried by men. It is men who are vulnerable to and motivated by rape. It is men who are perceived as sexual objects. In slash stories, the women characters may be secondary, but they carry the story forward in ways that are not sexual.
I want – I always wanted – to write stories that simply did not reference male privilege or heterosexual privilege: and I tried (badly, I make no doubt) to remove white privilege from my other worlds: I had noticed that aside from a handful of exceptions like Asimov, writers tended to assume that in their future worlds racial divisions either still existed or else virtually everyone was white. (Isaac Asimov’s clear statement in a number of novels was that in his future Empire/Foundation worlds, race as such did not exist – that the human species was in that future so racially intermixed that the concepts of race didn’t have a vocabulary any more.) This was in 1983, when my science-fiction reading consisted entirely of what was available to me at my local library or the local mainstream bookshop. These were the elements of privilege most visible to me at that time – and I still feel more comfortable constructing a society without them than I do with them.
Samuel Delany wrote in an essay about writing stories that the basic element that every story had to have was to make the protagonist’s economic status at the start of the story clear, to have the protagonist’s economic status change to a different level by the end of the story, and to have the story tell how it changed. (My copy is elsewhere. I’m quoting from memory.) It was the kind of statement that, when I read it, made me want to go away and re-read lots of my favourite novels to see if I thought it was true in relation to them. It is not universally true, I don’t think, but it is one of the gears of telling a story that I would not want to have taken away. I’ve never tried to construct a world without the privilege of wealth/class. (In Britain at least, the two are not identical.)
Part of the story of the Underground in London is the story of those working-class Londoners who every night walked down the deep stairs to the only shelter they had, and bought penny tickets to get access, and slept on the platforms, and every morning climbed those steep stairs to get out and went back to work and kept the city running. A story I read recently, published on Remembrance Day: a survivor of WWII, a fire warden, describes going down the stairs to the station where her mother slept, to tell her that the house where they lived had been bombed, everything they owned destroyed; and how her mother asked if anyone had been killed and the fire warden was able to tell her no, not in that hit, and then her mother nearly broke her heart by saying simply “Well, that’s all right then”… even though they both knew from now on this meant they would be one of the families with no home but the Underground at night.
It’s not a sexual story. It’s not a romance. It’s not a nice story. But it’s true. And it’s the kind of story about women that I always wanted to tell: and that could only be told in science-fiction.
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- More blogging by
Yonmei at
http://yonmei.insanejournal.com
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Filed under Sexuality & queerness, Theory, female characters, feminism | Comments (11)
Lots of good and interesting stuff to think about here (sorry I can’t think of anything more coherent than that at the moment).
One small correction, however: the novel by Geoff Ryman is Was, not Oz.
Whoops! Thank you.
[...] Yonmei at Feminist SF-The Blog! has insightful things to say about why she writes science-fiction and fantasy and why the genre is especially conducive to subverting and resisting gender roles but at the same time finds itself caught in the bind of privilege, power and oppression. At least that is what I take away from it. And I love it. Take what you will from it here. [...]
“Write in a rape”??
Uh…
You know, the experience transmitted through the book in question might possibly have been, you know… personal. And not just written in as a plot gimmick or virtual McGuffin. I hesitate to use the word “therapeutic”, so overused these days, especially by those who’ve never been anywhere near therapy, either as practitioner or recipient. (I’ve done it both ways.)
Of course it’s good for women’s stories not to necessarily have to do with sex.
But sometimes it is necessary. Just as it sometimes is in (gasp) fiction written by males.
It’d be nice to live in a world where literal and physical experience never needed to work themselves out to completion through the literary. But yea verily, sometimes it turns out that way. Do leave those of us who have to resort to that occasionally a little room to stretch out in that direction.
–DD
Diane – thanks for your comment, and my initial reaction is that maybe your book is not the best example to pick, out of all the myriad books that have characters who are rape survivors. On the other hand it’s Yonmei’s experience reading it in the context of whatever else she was reading, that went into forming her reaction to The Door Into Shadow.
I have really appreciated the threads and discussions in recent years on feminist blogs about comics – and that people point out the overuse of rape as the (main or only) motivating factor in the formation of a female character. When it is shallowly done or as you say a sort of rape McGuffin, it’s pretty annoying. When it’s done well and with insight then it can be great.
I am a survivor myself like so many others and appreciate stories whose characters are too. But also find that sometimes I sigh in relief when I come across female heroes who haven’t been raped or abused in childhood and who aren’t even threatened with it — because it is so rare for a female character in any book not to be. And sometimes I’ll be reading along in a book or a comic book and then go “OH NO not YOU TOO” and despair a little that even in imagination and in my escapism all the women have been raped or are automatically threatened with rape or everyone expects them to be steered around by that threat. So I definitely see your point, but I also share Yonmei’s wish for *more* stories where women (and girls) get to have complicated stories without having to deal with that whole load of our unfortunate reality.
I haven’t read The Door Into Shadow, so can’t tell what struck Yonmei about it, but I’ll put it on my list so I can see for myself. It makes me super happy that you would jump in and fiercely defend your book and your intent (rather than ignoring any negative comments as so many authors think it politic to do.)
Any time you would like to guest post here, just let us know!
Diane, thanks for reading and commenting.
I read both novels for the first time more than 20 years ago, and like them both very much, and have re-read them more than once since: they come up as an example of the kind of thing Afrai and I were talking about that Sunday because I like them – for Afrai it was the same with Was, it wouldn’t have mattered as much if she’d not liked it so much.
The issues brought up for me by The Door Into Fire/The Door Into Shadow are (spoilers for both books follow):
Both novels have as one plot-strand a person with Fire (Herewiss in the first novel, Segnbora in the second) who cannot “focus” – cannot make full, adult use of the Fire – and in both books, this turns out to be because of some deeply traumatic incident in their past.
For Herewiss, the deeply tramatic incident turns out to be that he was fooling around with his sword in a dark room in early adolescence and killed his brother: his brother speaks to him on the Shore where the dead walk and forgives him. For Segnbora, the deeply traumatic incident turns out to be having been raped in childhood by a farm worker employed by her parents: she meets him at the Door into Starlight and forgives him.
And at the time, I think it was the first “this woman is the way she is because she was raped as a child” plot I’d ever read: it did not register on me for some years (it was a conversation with another friend pointing out that “the rape scene” is a standard one for female characters) that made me re-examine the two parallel plot strands and think about the difference between how Herewiss is treated and how Segnbora is treated.
I joke when looking at plots for the Highlander TV series that swords are penises – a friend has a similar kick that whenever in an opera two men have a swordfight, you can assume this is operatic convention for “and they had sex”. I’m not completely serious about this analysis, but the magic Fire in the Door series is controlled by women who use the Rod symbol from the Tarot, explicitly stated in the novels to be a female symbol, while Herewiss, the only man with Fire, must learn to use the Sword symbol from the tarot, explicitly stated to be a male symbol.
Looked at from this angle, Herewiss can’t learn to focus his Flame in his sword because symbolically he raped his brother (they were “fooling around in a dark room”). What if the novel had been of the hero is a rapist who has to be forgiven by his victim before he can make use of his male symbol focus? (Granted it’s much faster and easier to explain it was “accidental murder” than to have “accidental rape”, but I can think of several slash stories in which, in painstaking detail, it’s outlined how it can happen). Or you could (and I wonder still if this could have happened either) have had Herewiss raped as a child, and that’s why – just as with Segnbora – he can’t focus his sexual/magical powers.
But instead – predictably, normally, acceptably: the man gets to have violence in his past as his motivator, violence for which he must be forgiven: the woman gets to have been raped as her motivator, a rape which she must forgive.
In both cases, though both murder victim and rapist show up – the rapist in inverted commas – it was clear to me even on first reading that both Herewiss and Segnbora had been carrying around a load of self-blame and had to learn to forgive themselves. Which was the first serious flaw I’d found in the sexual openness of the culture described in these books, if little girls who are raped still learn that it was their fault for being raped.
All of this speaks of my readerly reactions to the Door books, over 20+ years as a feminist sf fan. None of this speaks to your motivations for writing-in the murder Herewiss committed or the rape committed on Segnbora. But then, your motivations for writing these are not my business as a reader – with all due respect, you cannot as a writer justify including a scene in a book because it was therapeutic for you to write it.
Just jumping in to note that as Yonmei said, I admire Geoff Ryman as a writer and ‘Was’ as a book tremendously. The fact that the rape by her uncle was the event that made the rest of the story happen for Dorothy didn’t mean I thought the book sucked, and I don’t even particularly blame Ryman for using that old cliche. It just gets tiresome when so *many* books and comics and films and TV shows feature rape as the main motivating factor for women.
Do leave those of us who have to resort to that occasionally a little room to stretch out in that direction.
I don’t think Yonmei was saying that writers shouldn’t or aren’t allowed to work out their experiences into fiction. But she and I were both speaking as readers — and as readers, we are bloody tired of the rape cliche, even done well. In a way, especially done well, because then you say to yourself wistfully, “If only they hadn’t dug up that old trope. How much more I would have enjoyed this book if they’d made it the tragic killing of her father instead, or the genocide of her village, or the selling of her brother into slavery!”
It isn’t a problem with any individual book that writes in rape as a motivating factor for women. But each book contributes to an overall pattern, an overwhelming body of work that effectively says: the most important thing about a woman is that you can have sex with her, so the worst thing that could ever happen to a woman is rape. The most traumatic, the most significant thing that could ever happen to a woman is rape.
Which is a message you could get bored of hearing, even if you agreed with it.
I don’t think either of us are asking anything of writers but that they stop to consider this for a moment before they next write about rape as the main motivating factor in a female character’s character arc.
Yonmei:
Furthermore, even though the accidental killing of the brother could be read as coded rape – well, it clearly doesn’t have to be, it doesn’t have to be sexual at all. Which is one more example of how stories about boys can be about all kinds of things and stories about girls are overwhelmingly sexual, because that, as you say, is the only adventure that we are supposed to have. It really brings home how nice it would be to be able to have more stories like the London Underground one. Thanks for this whole post.
(Incidentally, that Delany thing? Is so not true. I’m sitting in my living room and without getting up I can just start reeling off stories I can see that are not about changing economic status. The Little Prince, His Majesty’s Dragon, Interview With the Vampire, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Revolutionary Girl Utena, That Kind of Girl, Tea From an Empty Cup… I mean, it’s a fine story, but it’s not the only story.)
(Delany thing: Actually, His Majesty’s Dragon is sort of about changing class: He went from a naval officer to the more rakish & disreputable dragon service.)
I can interpret Diane Duane’s argument ad misericordiam as a response to the personal attack she thought Yonmei was directing at her; Diane trying to explain the direction of the causality for the plot, choosing rape as a plot point based on personal reasons rather than, say, sexist presumptions about female characters, based on the casual rhetorical phrasing, “if you want a motivator for women to be or do something, you can always write in a rape”. And it’s unassailable, as personal reasons go, because to begrudge the motive when the motive is being a victim is victim-blaming. (It works both as an appeal to emotions *and* an appeal to feminist politics.) But then Diane’s special pleading that “sometimes it is necessary” extends beyond her own case, to the general statement that “literal and physical experience [need] to work themselves out to completion through the literary”, which brings things into the social, political sphere that Yonmei was discussing, where stories subsequently have an impact on readers.
As often in discussions of literature, I notice that the only intermediary between writer and reader under discussion is the story itself. The act of publication, of sharing the story, isn’t addressed. It can be implied, or assumed, or disowned. Of course the publishing industry introduces other agents (in more than one sense) into it besides the writer, but this intermediate action is something to consider if it can help untangle the relationship between writer and reader, and it definitely bears remembering in a discussion with politics involved.
If it’s necessary to write something, to let experiences “work themselves out to completion through the literary”, and that process involves readers, and isn’t just by and for the writer as her own audience, then the argument cannot be that the writer’s reasons are all that matters, precisely because the “literary” process now involves other people. Who may not be able to fault the writer for her reasons, but who may not find the writer’s reasons sufficient for themselves.
And hence, Yomnei and afrai’s dialogue about being tired, as readers, of the prevalence of rape being used as motivation for female characters.
Laura:
Perfectly true, but does his economic status change? It’s an interesting question. He certainly doesn’t have any less money than he did before, and doesn’t lose certain of his class privileges, as becomes very relevant in Book 2. On the other hand, he has lost the ability to spend that money in certain ways: he will probably never marry and have a family, for example. It points out the slippery fit between economic status and class.