Marina said:
>
>I just finished reading the last part of The Lord of the Rings. I read
>Hobbit and the first two parts several years ago, and was absolutely
>fascinated. This time it was a little different. I still liked it a lot,
>but I think the author had really ambivalent feelings towards women.
>became a king, and she's got the guy in the end.
When I was in sixth, seventh, grade thereabouts, I loved it. I remember a
librarian handing me the hobbit when I was in fourth grade or so since I was
famed around the library for reading all the OZ books again and again and
again and again. She said that since I liked OZ, I'd like this. I hated
it. (Tolkien himself admitted in later years that he had written down
patronizingly to children in that one---I rather liked the HOBBIT years
after when I could laugh at it). But whenI found TOLR as I was in sixth
grade and so forth, I loved it. Spent all summer vacation reading the three
books in the series as they came out in paperback or something like that. I
read it and read it and read it--lost track of how many times I was
rereading it at about sixty. It was a total escape for me, and I entered
that world gladly.
But I haven't read it all in years, and would probably feel some discomfort
if I did, around the same issues you mention. And yet JRR isn't half as bad
as some fantasists when it comes to presentation of females--Eowyn and
Galadriel were larger than many.
I've tried to reread it and just sort of stopped without analyzing why.
This attitude may be a generational thing, but when I was growing up in
Idaho in the fifties and sixties,with a father who was a MAD sf fan, there
wasn't that much out there written by and about women: I read all the big
boys (Asimov Clarke Heinlein Bradbury and so forth). Andre Norton was one
of my favorites--really stood out though I didn't find out for some time
that the writer was a she. Elizabeth Goudge also remains a bright shining
star in my memory for having some GIRLS, as did some of the British
children's writers (Nesbit, Lewis) in their fantasies. But a lot of stuff
was by and for and about boys/adolescent males.
There is scholarship on how girls/women read this stuff: we had to read
putting ourself into the masculine position. This does not mean we thought
we were men, just that we entered into the perspective without questioning
it. Many of us did so quite successfully maybe because it represented as
escape from the feminine position. I remember Marion Zimmer Bradley writing
an essay (she's a generation or so older than I) about women reading SF in
her generation--that only a few did and they wanted to identify with the
masculine world because all the stuff for females was on the order of "be a
housewife and love it." I experienced some of that same attitude: I was a
voracious reader in a small town where reading was looked on with some
suspiscion (it's probably considered to be Communist--Idaho in the sixties
spent a lot of time worrying about communists). The anti-intellectualism
was STRONG. So reading was for me many things: a way to distance myself
from the culture I was raised in, escape (I was a total Anglophile, England
being almost like another planet), a way to avoid being typed as a future
housewife (yuch--and this is not an attack on women who marry, but an
indictment of the gender roles the culture of this time held out to me--get
married, have lots of kids, stay home and do housework period and never
thinkg about anything else). Reading SF was being dangerous and radical and
hard and I could defiantly occupy a minority position as "totally
weird"--and I loved it.
Occupying the masculine position was easiser with some writers than others:
Clarke's work, for example, is so much about the human love for exploration
and learning that it hardly mattered to me his characters were male. I
reread all his work recently for a book I was writing and found this still
held mostly true. In contrast, some of Heinlein's stuff (ESPECIALLY HIS
FEMALE PROTAGONISTS) just grates on my nerves, though I read it anyway.
Tolkien's world is so asexual that I could enter into it in various ways,
though I probably mostly saw myself as a hobbit more than a hero. There
were a lot worse fantasists publishing stuff.
This process of submerging oneself in the perspective of the book was also
easier BEFORE puberty hit when everybody started demanding that girls wear
makeup, shave things, and BECOME women. At that point, it's hard to find a
position in stories that put women in those secondary sexualized roles.
It's fairly easy to be androgynous before that stage, or it was when I was
growing up. I'm not sure it is anymore with what i see around me.
A side note: one of my favorite British writers Barbara Pym has an entry in
her journal about seeing Tolkien lecture when she was student at
Oxford--this was before LOTR was published and he became famous. She didn't
think too much of him as I recall!
Robin
Robin_Reid@tamu-commerce.edu
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:52 PDT