Writing Real Women

Having just finished reading my first Sister Fidelma I am thinking about what goes into the development of a realistic female character. I suppose it could be argued that every female character in a novel or on the screen is realistic. Women are infinitely individual same as the other guys, but we all know that the vast majority of depictions of women are somehow skewed to images that are cultural more than real. It's inevitable, and I am perfectly aware of my own difficulty with representing female characters.

I don't know if you have heard this but apparently when the first Alien movie was scripted the role of Ripley was written for a man. The wonder of it is that when they recast the character with Sigourney Weaver little or nothing was changed in the script. That is why at least in the original movie the character is so.. well.. real. With Weaver's acting skill the role comes off as genuine, neither butched up nor femmed up. The real person of the character comes out.

A book I read 'way back in the early 70s, The Cook and the Carpenter (author, "The Carpenter") helped me think about how much a novel evinces about what gender is and how much of it is in the cultural soul of the reader. In it the pronouns "he" and "she" etc. were all replaced with "na" (subjective) and "nan" (objective), as in "Na walked into Leslie's kitchen, a bucket of water in each of nan hands." Since the novel came out of a particular genre, I saw every character as female, but I was aware of what hints might make me see a character as one gender or another.

Reading about Sister Fidelma I tried to see if she could have been written as a man with no change in anything but the pronouns. I decided that her femaleness was essential to the story, not because of anything in her character, but in the reaction other characters, both male and female, had towards her. Fidelma, it seems to me, must be discounted to some extent to reveal her independence and strenth. Even portraying her as a man from an underclass or from some other land would not carry the same weight.

I am not really drawing any hard and fast conclusions here. I am musing, that's all. As an author I want to know what is my character and what is my own prejudice. I had a particular challenge with this issue in An Involuntary King as the friend who was "in charge of" Josephine has such a different view of proper female behaviour than do I that it was nearly an impasse to satisfy both of us when I wrote the queen. She is in no way a traditional woman, don't get me wrong, but her use of the term "lady-like" threw me for a long time. It turned out she meant "dignified", thank heavens, but it was still very hard to write Josephine without making her seem stiff and distant. The reactions I have gotten to her show that readers see her as selfish, thoughtless, manipulative, and I wonder what my friend would say about that. Further I wonder whose, if either of ours, influence created that negative interpretation. In the end, I am content with Josephine's character. No one in the book is an idealized character, that is, they all have flaws. Josephine has as one of her less admirable characteristics a tendency to want what she wants and willfilly ignoring its impact on others. She is strong, knows her mind, can fight alongside men, can stand up to threat... but she also maintains an adolescent love of being doted upon. If no one who ever reads the novel likes her, all that will mean is that I drew her well enough to inspire feelings.

Your thoughts?

[Image of Sigourney Weaver above taken from one of the "Alien" films.]