Lesley Hall wrote:
>I remember reading an essay (? some years ago in, I think, SF
>Eye) in which the (female) author was arguing that we had to get away from the
>goody-goody heroine archetype: however, she seemed to be arguing that we
>should just go for its reverse, as it were Kali instead of the Virgin Mary.
>Which to me was just buying into a sets of stereotypes with a long long
>history, not particularly liberatory/empowering to women, and not as
>creatively productive as depicting women as interesting human beings with both
>strengths and flaws.
You're probably right about the reversal.
Is Brite a misogynist or is she using misogynist images for a particular
reason? For example, the whole horrific descriptions of vampire births in
_Lost Souls_ could be read as a comment on the violent exploitation of
women's bodies by men. Vampire men, in other words, are just as guilty of
exploiting (and destroying) the females of their species for the sole
purpose of reproduction as human men are. Destruction is mean here in both
a literal and a figural sense. Think of how many human women are left to
fend for themselves by a boyfriend, or husband who doesn't want to deal
with the responsibility of a child.
Erik
Erik Tsao
Graduate Student
Department of English
Wayne State University
Detroit, MI
"The naked Senses sometimes see too little -- but then _always_ they see
too much."
--Edgar Allan Poe
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:28 PDT