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Originally Posted by Fordim Hedgethistle
Fea: I simply adore your way of expressing it -- The story shouldn't be seen as "it doesn't have girls", it should be seen as "it has boys" -- I am going to say precisely that to my group the next time we meet!
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My thanks. I recycled that response from a 20-page research paper I just wrote about literary theory and how it applies to
The Odyssey. Substitute
The Hobbit for
The Odyssey and the same point can be made about feminism in literature:
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Originally Posted by Fea for a comp class
In any case, no matter how women are or are not portrayed by Homer, I don’t see how it makes any difference to his story. He composed an epic about Odysseus… not about Odysseus’ wife, or about Odysseus’ divine lovers. The women of the story, be they human or goddess, are supporting characters. If a story depicting the adventures and homecoming of a woman included equal amounts of detail about the men who helped her, the audience would be left wondering who the protagonist actually is, and any self-respecting feminist would be outraged that the main character was being overshadowed by a man who is only in the story for the purpose of propelling the heroine forward. I see little reason for there to be much insistence on equality of gender in a story of a man who went to war with a bunch of men, who returned from war with a bunch of men, and who ended up on a number of adventures while traveling home, still with these faithful men. If a person wants more attention paid to Circe, he or she should write about her, but to take a story and fragment it into gender specific pieces does an injustice to the creator and to the story itself.
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I'm not saying that feminist theory, if that is what your lasses are practicing, doesn't have an important place in literary criticism, but to discount a book entirely doesn't seem at all fair. If all "boy books" were considered "bad" to girls, then surely a large portion of Shakespeare should be struck off the reading list. Look at Hamlet: the women are Ophelia (insane) and Gertrude (married her brother-in-law two months after he killed her husband). The rest of the play deals pretty much exclusively with boys and their issues. Macbeth: Lady Macbeth is not precisely a good example, now is she? The Tempest: Miranda has zilch control over her own life and ends up married, though she doesn't know it, for the good of her father. Othello: Desdemona is certainly not the main character. She is more of a plot device to highlight Othello himself.
Look at other novels by other authors such as Silence by Shusaku Endo: it deals with Christian missionaries in Japan. The only women at all dealt with are Japanese Christians, all portrayed as somewhat "lesser", and half of them end up dead anyway. Or from a less serious book, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Sure Becky Thatcher is in it, but she is not portrayed as supremely important, and nor should she be.
These books are not about girls. Hamlet is about a young prince and his issues. Macbeth deals with power-struggle. The Tempest works with revenge and regain, Othello with jealousy. Silence is about the plight of Christian missionaries, Tom Sawyer is the adventures of a boy.
The Hobbit catalogues the adventures of a hobbit.
Stories about girls can be written without being perceived as discrimination against boys, or as being seen as "girl's books", though admittedly they often are, I suppose. After all, I rarely find a guy that actually read (and even more rarely, enjoyed) Jane Eyre. Why can't a book be written about a bunch of boys without being perceived as something politically incorrect (oh how I love the day that that was sent to Mordor) and "bad"? Why can't gender barriers be more easily crossed? Is it something about society, perhaps, where even from birth, the difference is accentuated? When a baby is born, what is often the first question? "Boy or girl?".
I suppose I agree with you, Fordim. It is much easier to identify with cultures that are incredibly different than it is to identify across the gender barrier. Can't for the life of me figure out why though... One would think that I'd find more in common with guys similar to those that I've grown up with than I find in regards to an animalistic shamanist culture from Laos.
Another thought begs the question "Is this an all-girls class?" What sort of class is it, a lit class? Any specific variety of lit?
It's easier to get a hold over what thoughts are going through their heads if we know what sort of lasses they are and what sort of class they are expecting.