On 19 July, 1997, Lesley Hall wrote:
>I think this is a topic we could all be interested in! My immediate guess
>(though I'd hesitate to back it up with examples (since it is past midnight
>here)) is that female quests are less in the mode of hero setting out to make
>his fortune and more 'accidental' in the way they come about. Also maybe more
>'anti-heroic': not exactly feminist perhaps but a series I fell in love with
>many years ago, Jane Gaskell's 'Atlan' sequence, has the protagonist Cija
>ending up in all sorts of grotty situations (kitchen maid in a low-class inn,
>holed up in tatty garretts, etc quite apart from being incarcerated by her
>husband Zerd in an extremely gothic tower for about a third of the second
>volume) in fact could be read as proceeding from enclosure to enclosure.
Sorry it's taken me so long to respond--I've been out of town for a while!
I would definitely agree that female quests in fairy tales are very
'accidental' in the way they come about. I'm not so sure about fantasy
stories though. It's not a pattern I've noticed with them, but I'll look.
I'm interested in your description of Gaskell and her protagonist
proceeding from enclosure to enclosure. Annis Pratt wrote a book called
Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction (I think) where she describes this
as one of many patterns found in fiction by women. Put simply, the various
patterns represent the authors' own oppression as women. I find her book
intriguing and I highly recommend it, though what fantasy and SF she
discusses she sees as very liberating while I tend to see it as still
displaying the patterns of oppression she describes.
Elizabeth
-- Elizabeth L. Pandolfo/Briggs pandolfo@macbsd.com http://www.macbsd.com/~pandolfo/index.html"Whatever happens, believe that the journey is worth taking..." --Pesh, "Seaward"
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