lirazel | (no subject)

This weekend I read City of Illusions, one of Ursula K Le Guin's early Hainish novels.

Here's my review:

This is the strongest of the 3 early Hainish books but goodness gracious, young Le Guin couldn’t write a woman to save her life, could she?

That’s horrifying for what it says about the culture she grew up in but heartening because it reminds us that we can grow: this is the same woman who, decades later, was able to write Tehanu. May we all be so lucky as to become better versions of ourselves.

And I was just thinking about female writers who are extremely good writers, but could not or did not write women with any real agency or interiority.

Obviously this made me think of Rosemary Sutcliff, and how deeply and tenderly she explores male characters and their relationships to each other...and how women are only ever ciphers in her work.

I've never been able to decide which explanation is worse: that she was incapable of believing that women (besides her) had any real depth or whether she thought they could, but she was just completely uninterested in it.

The difference between Le Guin and Sutcliff is that Le Guin grew. She saw where she was weak or had failed and she worked hard to become better. I admire that tremendously.

(Btw, I've heard she and Joanna Russ were correspondents, which makes so much sense, and I would commit murder to be able to read the letters between them.)

What's striking about Le Guin's internalized misogyny is that she was so smart and also she lived in the 20th century. Female writers of the past had written wonderful and nuanced female characters, so it was clearly possible. Le Guin's mother was an interesting, thoughtful, intelligent woman with a talent for writing. So why did Le Guin have such a hard time discovering(?) that it was possible to write interesting female characters? I speculate that it had something to do with the world of anthropology that she grew up in because of her father, but there were significant female anthropologists during Le Guin's formative years and surely she came into contact with them? I just don't know.

I guess we all just have major blind spots and the question is whether we are open to having those pointed out to us and working to learn to see.

Threaded | Flat

With Sutcliff, there could be several reasons beyond internalised misogyny for the prevalence of male protagonists in her work. One is that she was a soldier's daughter, and her interest in the military and military history/fiction is pronounced. Another is the homoerotic appeal of men bonding with each other on adventures, as legions of slash fans regularly demonstrate.

And, not sure if this is IM or not, but around the time Sutcliff was growing up, I don't think the move to put women back into history in different roles had anywhere near as much influence as it does today. Of her few books with female protagonists, Lady Fairfax in The Rider of the White Horse spends a lot of her time suffering patiently and waiting. I haven't read The Armourer's House, but a review on Goodreads comments on its lack of plot and the Wikipedia summary backs that up.

Sutcliff in interviews strikes me as the kind of person who, had she been born some decades later, might have been setting records as a mountain climber or piloting an apache. Still's Disease certainly didn't stop her from being active and productive, but if she hadn't been so strong, it could have been easy to be condemned to a life of passivity, of objecthood.

To write historical adventure books about people going to hazardous places and getting into dangerous situations may have been rather a pleasant escape from a sometimes trying everyday life, and that would to Sutcliff perhaps have meant writing primarily about men. Of the women famous for going against gender stereotypes that Sutcliff would likely have been familiar with, there's Joan of Arc (burned at the stake), Mary Read (died in prison), Ann Bonny (pregnant in prison; disappeared from the historical record), Gwenllian ferch Gruffudd (beheaded), Boadicea (poisoned herself). Not necessarily easy models for the kind of book that lets the protagonist survive and have a happily ever after.

That said, one of the odd things about Rider of the White Horse is that, from what I remember twenty plus years after reading it, the book stops before the thing that Lady Fairfax is actually famous for happens. i.e. crying out that her husband 'had more wit than to be here!' at the trial of Charles I.

Le Guin was born nine years after Sutcliff. (I've just looked that up and it blew my mind a little at there wasn't a bigger age gap – I'd mentally positioned them much further apart). Anyway, not hugely different in age, but certainly their background separated them. Military families aren't known for their radicalism and free-thinking, and the attachment of Sutcliff to Kipling would certainly have been nourished in that environment; I think it may have strengthened and limited her. In contrast, Le Guin was born into an academic family, so was in a sense primed to ask awkward questions of herself of others.

Sorry, rambling reply that I hadn't especially intended to write. Putting off coding homework can do strange things to a person.

Oh my god, I too would commit murder to read The Collected Letters of Le Guin and Russ! I was just talking with Nyctanthes about collections of literary letters, and I would add these to my personal pantheon in a heartbeat. I bet there would be such a mix of the truly profound and the truly egregious, not to mention the musings on craft and the doings of the day…

And you're so right about UKLG! The Dispossessed/TLHOD double bill always strikes me in this way: The Dispossessed is such a mess on this point (I will really never forgive it for the handling of the sexual assault Shevet commits), and then TLHOD has this very nuanced argument about how sexism poisons Genly's mission on Gethen -- but of course, there aren't any women qua women around. And then you get to her later career, just as you say, and it's worlds apart. I feel that reading the Earthsea series is like fast-forwarding through this development of hers, from Wizard, which contains moments of really egregious sexism, to Tehanu, which reads to me like someone who has just fully grasped the full horrible weight of patriarchy and is enraged, through The Other Wind, which has its blind spots (the veil…) and paints an interesting picture of a particular segment of American feminism in the 2000s.

Edited 2023-08-21 17:39 (UTC)

Dear Book Santa, Please please please may I have the LeGuin/Russ letters please.

I feel this! Whenever I encounter a female writer that writes men and their relationships in the exact way I love, I wish she'd given the same time to female characters! Like D. K. Broster! She has some excellent female characters, but I'd have loved MORE!

I think that internalised misogyny could have played a part in this lack of agency or depth. Or, even if these writers believed that women had depth or interest as characters, a big part of society didn't--so they wrote about men, which I guess makes more sense for writers who focussed on historical novels. So I don't think it's related to being smart or not--it's the world they lived in, and it was impossible to not be affected by it and its sexism. In Le Guin's case, I think that's how we got a book like "The Dispossessed", which goes light years ahead in some ways, and completely backwards in others.

Also: using male characters might be a deliberate, conscious decision, as a way to create distance, or give the writer more freedom to have her character do things "impossible" for a woman to do. I definitely agree with a commenter above and their escapism explanation! And, back to the whole society thing, criticism might have been kinder/less harsh towards a male character than a female one (I feel this still happens today!), so it makes sense that writers did this. And that distance might have even let them write about themselves more freely. I was just re-reading a historical novel by Violet Jacob, where her main character is a man--and an artist, like she was. So she gave him a gender that would let him move more freely in society, like a woman perhaps couldn't, but still kept the personality traits she wanted to show--as a writer, maybe doing what she could within the limits of society? A solution that's not ideal, but realistic? It's impossible to know for sure, but it feels deliberate. (And also, I find it delightful, because it makes me think that self-inserts have always been a thing!)

Anyway, these are just random thoughts! I really appreciated this post--it's definitely worth thinking about these things, because misogyny and sexism still affect us, and it's important to try to unpack it. Thank you for sharing!

I haven't read enough Le Guin (yet!) to be able to comment on her journey through internalized misogyny, but gosh, yeah, Sutcliff...... I love her and yet. She never really grew on that front. Even on the rare occasion a female character is the supposed protagonist of a Sutcliff book, she still manages to be a cipher!

There's a comment from Diana Wynne Jones about how difficult it always was for her to write a female protagonist (iirc) because it was too close, that she felt like it was safer to write from the distance of a male POV -- I can't find the quote right now but I think about it all the time.