"There Was a Time Once, Remember, When We Were Not Slaves"

“There was a time once, remember, when we were not slaves…”

"Or if not, invent..." That is, at least as I remember it, a quote from author Monique Wittig that really reached into my gut and twisted them up for good. I ran across it when I was doing the research for my first book, a nonfiction work about women, sexuality, and body image called Loving the Goddess Within: Sex Magick for Women (1991.) I wanted to look at how sex in general and women's part in it became a taboo. However it did, it has had a devastating impact on all our lives who live in patriarchal cultures, and that's just about everyone.

One thing we lack, as both women and men, is a culture and in particular a literature that offers the widest possible range of ways to look at who we are as people with both gender and sexuality. Just the other day one of the news programs did a story about how men in films have far more lines than women. In 2011, this is still true. That saddens me, if it does not exactly surprise me. One reason I wrote Beloved Pilgrim was to write as real a woman as I could portray based on my own sense of myself. It is not a perfect portrayal.. there is no perfect woman or man. But after a life of writing men characters I admired, it was time I wrote a woman. I have as much trouble finding examples as the rest of the world.

The burden laid on all our shoulders by this paucity of well rounded characters hurts women, of course, but it hurts men, particularly straight men, as well. Reading Anel Viz's P'tit Cadeau I was struck by a scene where one man breaks down and sobs on the chest of another. That is not a scene you will find very often with straight men. You will find it with two women, a woman sobbing on a man's chest, and a gay man on another gay man's or perhaps his father's. You will rarely if ever see a straight man sobbing on the chest of a woman. It offends our sensibilities. What a terrible thing to dump on a gender of real, breathing, feeling human beings. I realized with that scene I had one more clue to why I so enjoy novels about gay men. Straight men are just too repressed.

Now I am reading Catherine M. Wilson's The Warrior's Path which is Book I from her "When Women Were Warriors" series. It strikes me that a book as well done as this helps provide an opportunity for both men and women to see a world that presents another paradigm about gender and sexuality. We all need new stories about us and our pasts, our heritage, our identities. Books like Wilson's are a start, and of course there are others. But how much better if we can do something better? For one, stories from a perhaps speculative place and time when the "archy" is neither matri- nor patri-. Better yet, if we can write actual historical fiction, not just speculative, where men and women are drawn as they really must have been at heart, clinging not to our notions of male and female but as they coped everyday with the need to survive in often dangerous situations.

I am going to give this more thought, wonder how I might take a character like my Elisabeth and make her even more a person, neither male nor female in her approach to her life and others in it. It is so tragic that women, who make up more than half the world, just do not find mirrors in our culture and literature. yes, we are there. Lots and lots of us... but is that really who we are? Ay, there's the rub.

In a Class By Themselves

I've shared my rants, talked about presumptions about sexuality and separately but in particular sexual preference. Now I will talk about the issue that encompasses most of the inaccurate criticism of how people in the Middle Ages are portrayed in fiction: classism.

Classism is defined as a biased or discriminatory attitude based on distinctions made between social or economic classes. I am specifically referring to a preference or assumption of one class over others. This came up recently when someone told me the entire point of the Society for Creative Anachronism was to create a version of the Middle Ages where "everyone is a noble." What?! Forget it then. I'll drag out my old persona, Var the Insurgent. The same is generally true in novels about the era. I remark on how star-struck and classist most historical novelists are. OUt of a score of novels I would guess that at least eighteen are about royalty or nobility. Yes, yes, mine too.. though at least mine are purely fictional and my aim in the crafting of the book is self-admittedly adolescent. In the vast majority of cases, the celebrities are historical as well as fictionalized and decidedly upper crust.

When someone who is an editor on a blog I contribute to complained that too many novels give their medieval females modern sensibilities, the first words out of my mouth after "So what?" are "That's a classist position." I personally believe that every time has individuals of every sort, including tough, independent , sexually liberated women. People who say "women didn't act like that" are forgetting Eleanor of Aquitaine for a start. More than that they are forgetting the vastly different culture of peasant women. Handfastings were commonplace without benefit of clergy for one simple reason.. priests did not grow on local trees.

Authentic or not, realistic or not, it is the job of the novelist to make whatever characters s/he portrays believable. Any character you have read that you simply cannot accept as fitting an era is probably not so much inauthentic as badly written. If the author had believed in the integrity of the character, s/he would have made you believe. That's what we do.

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.]