Epic Worlds Without Women?
by kateelliott on Sep.16, 2009, under Kate Elliott and Ken Scholes
KATE:
I’m not a big subscriber to the Men are from Mars Women are from Venus school of human nature and gender personality types. This may be because I was a tomboy growing up, before certain cultural changes including the widespread advent of sports for girls made the word “tomboy” mostly obsolete. I write epic fantasy in large part because I love reading it. I love its capacity to contrast the grand canvas, the panoramic vision, with moments of intimacy and quiet reflection. This contrast heightens the sense of both the vast and the intimate because they are set against their opposite.
But I also love epic fantasy for its thrilling adventure, for battles, for pennants whipping in the wind and the grandeur of big emotions and big events played out in wide screen in bold colors. I’m not the only female reader who loves this stuff.
So one thing I do wonder is why in some long epic fantasy novels I find so few female characters. Why are they sometimes so poorly drawn or so limited in function and with personalities that lack the realistic complexity that may be lavished on the male characters? Not all epic fantasy novels suffer from this flaw–George RR Martin is as epic as they come, and he manages to find room for many complex female characters–but for the moment I want to talk about how the sad lack of female characters impoverishes the epic fantasy rather than enriches it. Not only that, but I would argue that the lack of female characters in epic fantasy is not, in fact, “realistic.”
Standard disclaimer: Naturally, any writer can write what he or she wants; I write what I want, so why should I impose different standards on writers who aren’t me? And I’ve read and enjoyed novels that were almost exclusively populated by male characters, just as I’ve read and enjoyed novels that were almost exclusively populated by female characters, in both cases when the background made those choices make sense or the story was just that gripping.
I personally find that big worlds without a fully engaged cast of characters feels lacking to me. It feels unformed, or poorly thought through, or shallow, or if I may say so it can feel rather immature, as if the writer was unable to fully people it because of an inability to see women, or to envision them as part of the plot.
Now, I note that Ken has a wonderful female point of view character in Lamentation (which I’m reading right now), but I must admit that female characters run distinctly in the minority in the novel. I was quite struck, therefore, by the fabulous and evocative cover for Canticle, which features three women and their retainers meeting in a snowy woods.
Ken, I’d be curious to know if you have any thoughts about how female characters fit into epic and high fantasy (however you want to define them), and if your own thinking on this issue has changed over time?
Ken’s answer: tomorrow, with Bonus! brain gender-wiring!
Related posts:
- The Epic Fantasy and Female Characters, Part Two KATE asked yesterday: Ken, I’d be curious to know if you have any thoughts about how female characters fit into epic fantasy, and if your own thinking on this issue has changed over time? KEN answers: I do have some thoughts, but I’m the first to admit that this is...
- Wizardly Women When Lev Grossman visited Babel Clash, we discussed the most powerful wizards in modern fantasy literature. Who would win the great wizard fight? Looking back at that conversation, the names mentioned included: Gandalf, Quentin Coldwater, Harry Potter, Raistlin Majere, Richard Rahl, Bayaz, Dr. Strange, Doctor Fate, Pug, Belgarath and Rand...
- Fantasy and Female Characters, Part Three KEN: So for those of us out there in that learning curve, who are the writers who are giving us the strongest, broadest cast of female characters? Do they tend to be female authors? Which male authors are doing it well and what books, series or authors do you recommend...
- On Writing the Series, Part 1 KATE: Ken, I had a lot of trouble while writing my Crown of Stars series with the story growing longer and longer and turning, eventually, into a seven book trilogy, as I sometimes jokingly call it. There are a lot of good things in that series that I’m really fond...
September 16th, 2009 on 8:57 am
Kate, I’m with ya. As a young teen I never minded the lack of women in say LOTR- I just read and loved the story without giving it too much thought. But as a mother of a preteen, I said…hmmm.
Now, I’m a realist, I know that the plain fact is that a woman is at a disadvatage weilding a sword against a man. Sword play takes incredible strength and most women are just not as strong as men.
That’s why I love the Star Wars saga. Jedi rely on their connection with the force. Tiny Yoda is the most bad ass of all. Women are equal to men.
Yet, my true love is for the classic, sword and archer type fantasy. So that’s what my own manuscript is- but it’s full of women, strong in will, wise, far seeing, suffering through childbirth, and in the case of my protaganist, enough faerie blood to stand up to all the scoffing men in her village.
I look forward to Ken’s answer and Canticle and getting my own work published someday.
September 16th, 2009 on 2:16 pm
It doesn’t actually take great strength to wield a sword. The average sword weighs about three pounds, and you can get a remarkable amount of cutting strength based on how you move your hips before throwing the blow.
That being said, in the cultures where most of these novels are set, just as in our world at the time we had similar cultures, women just weren’t encouraged to put on armor and go fight (or they were too sensible to do it).
September 16th, 2009 on 2:31 pm
There are, of course, many other roles that women played in the sort of low-tech worlds where much epic fantasy is set. Noblewomen could wheel and deal behind the scenes as well as men, much better in many cases. The problems of succession — the question of heirs, the making of marriages that were in reality military alliances — noblewomen had a part in all of that.
Guild women, the wives of craftsmen, did far more than make babies. They ran the shops when the men were off trading or fighting, they kept the accounts, they kept the towns running, generally, when times were bad. Princes and warleaders depended on the guilds for the loans that kept the armies provisioned and paid. Farm women paid in suffering and starvation for the victories of those armies. I don’t see much about these roles in too many epic fantasies.
What we do see, of course, are prostitutes of various kinds.
Could it be that authors just don’t know about all those other women? The lack of research into women’s history may play a part here.
September 16th, 2009 on 3:11 pm
There were some fierce Duchess-generals who defended their city states during the era of the Borgias when they wished to extend the papal states and unite all of Italy under their family, for instance.
Some of them actually rode and fought in battle as well as directed it.
Love, C.
September 16th, 2009 on 4:22 pm
Foxessa, wasn’t Catherine di Sforza one of those women generals? H. was reading a bio of her recently and just read me bits aloud, hence my unsureness. There was a wonderful anecdote about her, though, when one of her sons was being held prisoner by the enemy in an attempt to make her quit the field. She pulled up her skirts (no undies in those days) and announced that “it” still worked fine and she could get more sons if she had to. The enemy was stymied.
September 16th, 2009 on 5:02 pm
Coincidentally, Marie Brennan blogs about this same issue today over at SFNovelists:
http://www.sfnovelists.com/2009/09/16/the-value-of-the-bechdel-test/
September 16th, 2009 on 5:16 pm
an inability to see women, or to envision them as part of the plot.
I really think it comes down to this. The former is a matter of defaults: the writer’s brain, when reaching for a new character, grabs a man without thinking about it. (Same thing happens with race a lot of the time, the author defaulting to white out of habit.) The latter is a shallowness of vision, and it particularly bugs me in epic fantasy; one of the things I want out of my epic is a sense that it involves the whole world, and I don’t just mean geographically. If the author sees only a small class of people as actors in that drama, and everyone else as passive bystanders (or victims), then their imagination is sadly limited.
September 16th, 2009 on 5:28 pm
Yeah, to all of the above.
There can be a constricted view, rather like a horse with blinders, about what kinds of stories are “worth telling” when in fact there are many stories that can work within epic fantasy.
Kit, in the third post I will mention a very few titles of books that deal with women’s history. There is so much out there, but a person has to know that it exists, work out where to look for it (and sort out the strong scholarship from the wishful thinking), and believe that it matters enough to seek out.
September 16th, 2009 on 5:29 pm
I should note, btw, that Ken is dealing with infant twins (been there; done that) which is why I have been taking the lead in posting (I’m going to do all the actual physical posting even when it’s something he’s written). So if he doesn’t comment much here, that’s why.
September 16th, 2009 on 5:34 pm
Hmmmm, Ken’s at home with the babies while Kate’s off having debates in the public sphere. Would you like some irony to go with your tasty post?
September 16th, 2009 on 7:41 pm
It’s the “believing that it matters” which appears to be the hard part for some men.
September 16th, 2009 on 10:28 pm
I have been researching the Vikings, who had a very strong women’s culture. Women could own property and sue for divorce, for example, unlike women in most of the rest of Europe. And as long as I’m posting here–if anyone can point me to some good scholarship on the role of women in Viking culture, I’d be very appreciative! As a man and a beginning writer, trying to write from a woman’s point of view, especially in a different culture from my own, has its challenges.
September 16th, 2009 on 10:43 pm
One of our recent Babel Clash guests, Joe Abercrombie, features a tough-as-nails female protagonist, Monza Murcatto, in new novel Best Served Cold. There may not be many of them, but there are some male writers out there representing strong female leads.
Robert Jordan created a diverse cast that includes many dynamic, dangerous and intriguingly mysterious women. Many of the world’s most powerful wizards are women. The treacherous Lanfear was a villain to rival Morgan Le Fey. It seems that Jordan’s work deserves some consideration (for better or worse) in any conversation about women or the relationships between men & women in epic fantasy.
September 16th, 2009 on 10:43 pm
Ben, I don’t myself have any books specifically about Viking women or women in medieval Scandinavia, but a quick google found “Women in Old Norse Society” by Jenny Jochens and “Women in the Viking Age” by Judith Jesch. These both seem to be published by academic presses and from a quick glance seem to fall on the scholarly end of the scale (as opposed to the wish fulfillment end of the scale). They’re older (early to mid-90s) and I would bet there is more recent stuff out there.
September 16th, 2009 on 11:11 pm
Ben — look for articles by Carol Clover, who’s written some very interesting material on gender in Viking Age Scandinavia. (I wrote my senior thesis on the social significance of weapons in that period, as seen through archaeology and the sagas, and made pretty substantial use of her work.)
Morgan — Jordan deserves credit for having a large female presence in his series, but I wouldn’t hold him up as a model of female characterization. I found it intensely frustrating to watch his women all slowly turn into more or less the same woman with different names, and his depiction of all-female or female-dominant societies (the Aes Sedai, the Wise Ones, the Kin, etc) always rang very hollow for me. The interviews I read made it very clear he viewed women as being fundamentally Different From Men, in ways that I just don’t agree with.
September 16th, 2009 on 11:18 pm
I haven’t read Jordan, so can’t comment.
September 17th, 2009 on 6:37 am
Great comments here. And big thanks to Kate for driving. Even now, I’m typing one handed with one of my two new strong female characters sleeping in my other arm….
September 17th, 2009 on 10:10 am
On the topic of women wielding swords, I found this article about strong women in movies not too long ago and I think it pertinent to the discussion.
To sum up a part of the article with a quote, “I think the major problem here is that women were clamoring for “strong female characters,” and male writers misunderstood. They thought the feminists meant [Strong Female] Characters. The feminists meant [Strong Characters], Female.”
http://www.overthinkingit.com/2008/08/18/why-strong-female-characters-are-bad-for-women/
Anyway, aside from some of the novelists listed above such as Kate Elliott, Katherine Kerr, and some not listed like Jacqueline Carey and David/Leigh Eddings, I have found the problem of well-rounded female characters a much larger issue than “strong” female characters. Aside form novels, I would recommend the TV series “Avatar: the Last Airbender” for being to date one of the best casts of female characters I’ve seen in any medium.
September 17th, 2009 on 8:53 pm
Thanks for the suggestions, Kate and Marie.
January 25th, 2012 on 10:52 am
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