The resistance
Dec. 6th, 2012 04:26 pmOne thing guaranteed to make my hackles rise is the argument that because women didn't 'do anything important' or 'didn't contribute much, historically', before modernity, they can be left out of narratives taking place in, or inspired by, pre-modernity. By whose measure are we judging the activities of pre-modern women? Tansy Raynor Roberts expresses exactly what's wrong with such attitudes:
History is not a long series of centuries in which men did all the interesting/important things and women stayed home and twiddled their thumbs in between pushing out babies, making soup and dying in childbirth.
History is actually a long series of centuries of men writing down what they thought was important and interesting, and FORGETTING TO WRITE ABOUT WOMEN. It’s also a long series of centuries of women’s work and women’s writing being actively denigrated by men. Writings were destroyed, contributions were downplayed, and women were actively oppressed against, absolutely.
But the forgetting part is vitally important. Most historians and other writers of what we now consider “primary sources” simply didn’t think about women and their contribution to society. They took it for granted, except when that contribution or its lack directly affected men.
This ties in with something![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kateeliliott was saying about the fact that Cat, the protagonist in her Spiritwalker trilogy, is proficient at both swordplay and sewing, but when she finds herself stranded with nothing more than the clothes on her back, it's the sewing that saves her:
In book two, Cold Fire, Cat is thrown out into the wide world alone and far afield from the place she grew up. Basically, she finds herself with the clothes on her back and her sword as her only possessions. It would have been easy for me at this point to focus on Cat’s sword-craft.
Being confident with a sword is a useful competency for a young woman unexpectedly out on her own in an insecure and often dangerous world. Her ability to use the sword could become the most important and most visible of her skills as she continues her adventures.
But I did not want to imply that the skills most important to her ability to adapt to her new circumstances were solely or chiefly the skills that have long been culturally identified as “masculine,” such as fencing (fighting). I wanted to depict skills identified (in American society but by no means in all societies) as “feminine” as equally important to her survival.
Why? Because as a society we often tend to value the “masculine” over the “feminine.” “Masculine” is public and strong, “feminine” is private and (often) sexual, and frequently “feminine” concerns are defined as trivial and unimportant. Such definitions are cultural constructs, as is the relative value assigned to various skills and experiences.
Elliott tends to emphasise this concept in her writing. In her previous series, Crossroads, the main characters, married couple Anji and Mai, arrive with all their followers in a new land, and wish to settle. They are welcomed in partly because of Anji's military skills and large band of mercenaries (because the new land is at war), but it is Mai's skills, bargaining, barter and diplomacy, learnt at her family's fruit stall in the marketplace, for which they are really valued, and which save them time and time again. Elliott is committed to redressing an imbalance and writing traditionally 'feminine' skills as heroic, and it's one of the reasons she's one of my favourite authors.
This ties in with another interest of mine - the desire for survival, compromise and accommodation to be viewed as powerful and brave, as well as active rebellion and resistance and uncompromising, principled morality. Because sometimes, when you are dispossessed, survival and bargaining are all you've got - and they are powerful. (This is one reason why I was uncomfortable with the way the debate about the recent Lincoln film was being framed - as an either/or distinction between principled, uncompromising resistance and compromised negotiation. Of course the situation being debated was very different to what I'm discussing here - all the characters discussed were powerful, privileged men - but it was too black and white for my liking.)
Which brings me to my current reading material, Signs and Wonders by Marina Warner. And she says, of her novel Indigo (set in the colonial Caribbean and reframing The Tempest to give voice to the female characters),
Serafine (the Sycorax character) teaches my Miranda how to pass, how to survive, how not to attract attention and punishment. On the one hand, a storyteller will mould listeners to conform, but on the other hand she will try to open up possibilities by calling the rules into question. The relationship between Serafine and Miranda operates in this doubled way: Serafine is a captive of the colonial world, and there is no other way she could be - in those times, at the beginning of the twentieth century - but at the same time her stories open up alternatives for Miranda. So Miranda is brought up by Serafine to resist, even though the surface messages of the stories she tells her are conformist; covertly, Miranda learns otherwise.
This is exactly what I've been trying to get at. Heroism has many faces, and power is expressed in many different ways. We would do well to make room for this multiplicity.
History is not a long series of centuries in which men did all the interesting/important things and women stayed home and twiddled their thumbs in between pushing out babies, making soup and dying in childbirth.
History is actually a long series of centuries of men writing down what they thought was important and interesting, and FORGETTING TO WRITE ABOUT WOMEN. It’s also a long series of centuries of women’s work and women’s writing being actively denigrated by men. Writings were destroyed, contributions were downplayed, and women were actively oppressed against, absolutely.
But the forgetting part is vitally important. Most historians and other writers of what we now consider “primary sources” simply didn’t think about women and their contribution to society. They took it for granted, except when that contribution or its lack directly affected men.
This ties in with something
kateeliliott was saying about the fact that Cat, the protagonist in her Spiritwalker trilogy, is proficient at both swordplay and sewing, but when she finds herself stranded with nothing more than the clothes on her back, it's the sewing that saves her:In book two, Cold Fire, Cat is thrown out into the wide world alone and far afield from the place she grew up. Basically, she finds herself with the clothes on her back and her sword as her only possessions. It would have been easy for me at this point to focus on Cat’s sword-craft.
Being confident with a sword is a useful competency for a young woman unexpectedly out on her own in an insecure and often dangerous world. Her ability to use the sword could become the most important and most visible of her skills as she continues her adventures.
But I did not want to imply that the skills most important to her ability to adapt to her new circumstances were solely or chiefly the skills that have long been culturally identified as “masculine,” such as fencing (fighting). I wanted to depict skills identified (in American society but by no means in all societies) as “feminine” as equally important to her survival.
Why? Because as a society we often tend to value the “masculine” over the “feminine.” “Masculine” is public and strong, “feminine” is private and (often) sexual, and frequently “feminine” concerns are defined as trivial and unimportant. Such definitions are cultural constructs, as is the relative value assigned to various skills and experiences.
Elliott tends to emphasise this concept in her writing. In her previous series, Crossroads, the main characters, married couple Anji and Mai, arrive with all their followers in a new land, and wish to settle. They are welcomed in partly because of Anji's military skills and large band of mercenaries (because the new land is at war), but it is Mai's skills, bargaining, barter and diplomacy, learnt at her family's fruit stall in the marketplace, for which they are really valued, and which save them time and time again. Elliott is committed to redressing an imbalance and writing traditionally 'feminine' skills as heroic, and it's one of the reasons she's one of my favourite authors.
This ties in with another interest of mine - the desire for survival, compromise and accommodation to be viewed as powerful and brave, as well as active rebellion and resistance and uncompromising, principled morality. Because sometimes, when you are dispossessed, survival and bargaining are all you've got - and they are powerful. (This is one reason why I was uncomfortable with the way the debate about the recent Lincoln film was being framed - as an either/or distinction between principled, uncompromising resistance and compromised negotiation. Of course the situation being debated was very different to what I'm discussing here - all the characters discussed were powerful, privileged men - but it was too black and white for my liking.)
Which brings me to my current reading material, Signs and Wonders by Marina Warner. And she says, of her novel Indigo (set in the colonial Caribbean and reframing The Tempest to give voice to the female characters),
Serafine (the Sycorax character) teaches my Miranda how to pass, how to survive, how not to attract attention and punishment. On the one hand, a storyteller will mould listeners to conform, but on the other hand she will try to open up possibilities by calling the rules into question. The relationship between Serafine and Miranda operates in this doubled way: Serafine is a captive of the colonial world, and there is no other way she could be - in those times, at the beginning of the twentieth century - but at the same time her stories open up alternatives for Miranda. So Miranda is brought up by Serafine to resist, even though the surface messages of the stories she tells her are conformist; covertly, Miranda learns otherwise.
This is exactly what I've been trying to get at. Heroism has many faces, and power is expressed in many different ways. We would do well to make room for this multiplicity.
