[Bêthberry]

This has been quite fun. It's been a long time since I've seen a thread move so quickly and inspire so many Downers' responses.

Originally Posted by Formendacil

I think you're right earlier in the thread when you say you suspect that Tolkien had the same objection--virtually every one of his "gated communities" fails spectacularly: Nargothrond, Gondolin, and Doriath rather obviously; and you've mentioned how Tolkien censures Lorien and Rivendell as proceeding from the wrong ambitions--and thus the Elves failed. Likewise, with Gondor: Gandalf criticises Denethor's strategy of remaining behind guarded walls and it is only when Gondor marches out of itself to the Morannon that it can truly be said to contribute positively to the salvation of Middle-earth. Even Valinor, though it never falls in its isolation, fails from it.

thanks for all the other examples! Interesting that he made the immortals so uncomfortable with change. It's actually one of the main reasons I'm personally not so keen on the high elves. For all their love of music and the fine arts, they are rather self-involved.

Also, a brief hiccup of a thought:

Substitute a couple characters and you get:

...they [all good folk] cannot stop Morgoth, only escape from him, which reads rather like the entire Silmarillion in microcosm--though Túrin's story, at least, suggest that the flight is ultimately impossible (and Gandalf says as much about the recurring waves of evil).

lol, perhaps I should have said she does not confront him. But perhaps that's the situation of a woman in her culture.

And this makes me think about the chief contrast between Idril and Lúthien--or is it their point of convergence?--namely that she does the complete opposite of her mother: where Melian guards against Morgoth, she goes on the attack. Not, obviously, in a military manner, but certainly in a proactive one.

I come back again to the point that much of what we know of Idril is reported to us; we have hardly any dialogue between her and other characters. It might be interesting to posit why Tolkien presented her this way and gave more narrative development to others.

Originally Posted by Nerwen

But I think there is a difference between “talking about men” and “talking about a series of events in which men were involved”.

True, and as Agan has pointed out the Bechdel Test is not a standard for feminist depiction but for representation or gender bias and I do find myself falling into looking at the characteristics of the depiction. It is true that Melian uses the conversation--or perhaps I should say Tolkien uses it--to elicit information that is needed for Thingol's motivation.

Originally Posted by Nerwen

It seems to me that, for whatever reason (under-representation, maybe?) female characters, I think particularly in SF, tend to be seen as Woman rather than women, and therefore have a quite different set of demands made of them from that made of male characters. You often get the impression that writers ask themselves not “is this character in any way likeable, interesting or even believable?”, but “can she be passed off as an Ideal Female Role Model (while remaining palatable to the male audience)"?

I think that's a valid generalisation. Not particularly relevant here, but I've always been intrigued by Asimov's Susan Calvin and her role in the creation of the robots, because of the studiously cold manner he gives her and the events of the short story "Liar". Asimov was clearly wanting to show a capable woman in a positive, intellectual light, but fell pray to using romance as a plot device.

Originally Posted by Morthoron

I'm sorry, but creating characters where they don't belong, by a director and scriptwriter who is a notorious failure at deviating from an original story line, is the height of hubris, and stinks to heaven of high-handed Hollywoodish scripting for marketing demographics. Thank the Lord Sir David Lean did not create a female Bedouin love interest for Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia.

Well, we all know why Lean could not create a female Bedouin love interest for Lawrence.

Thomas Leitch's book Film Adaptation and Its Discontents examines the many ways in which a novel can be represented on the screen. Not all of the great films are seamless transpositions. Several theorists posit a range of three or up to six different ways to frame the relationship. So a director is free to interpret his material as he sees fit. I think the great problem with Jackson is that he really isn't sure himself just what kind of adaption he is aiming for: pure transposition, analogy, or any of the other way of transtexual or intertextual relationship. He's got a bunch of other ideas mixed in there with Tolkien too.

It's not like he's Joss Whedon doing Much Ado About Nothing as a modern romance and getting it bang on while maintaining Elizabethan English.

As the responses to this thread have shown, there is also a variety within Tolkien's own work. The Hobbit was bed time story for his sons and as such has no female characters. Is it fair to imagine what it would be if he had included his daughter in his immediate audience? I would argue yes, particularly in the hands of a good artist. But that isn't Jackson's MO.

Lord of the Rings provides more gender variety and The Silmarillion even more (despite my own personal disappointments with many of the characters). An interesting question might be to ask why that difference exists in Tolkien's representation of woman.