Eccentric Flower:199810/Heroines

nine october ninety eight eleven a m

Heroines

I'm stealing from Al again. I can't help it. He often writes entries where he lists things he likes, thinks he doesn't like, things he believes ... and I'm a sucker for those, I'm afraid. They make me jump up and down and say "Oooh! My turn!"

Besides, Al is one of the Thinking Aloud people who doesn't read my pages regularly, so - heh - he'll never know.

The dovetail on this is that mouth organ is also having a little discussion about strong female role models, and/or the lack thereof. I had the audacity to suggest that TV is a wasteland for good female characters - an idea that some readers back up strongly and others dispute strongly, and the funny thing is that both sides seem to have a plausible case!

But I am not a TV watcher, so please excuse me if I confine myself to printed matter here. Movies are good too, but I didn't start seeing movies on a regular basis until college; before that, they were a very occasional treat, and usually pretty fluffy. My taste in fluffy, eye-candy movies persists to this day; whereas I'll give books some mental effort, I only rarely want to make that climb for a film.

[At this point, I began to write about how I had started with books at a tender age, but when I stopped to rest my fingers, I had written nearly two thousand words about my childhood in libraries, which is quite a digression! So I expanded it and put it in a rather frank Circular Cruise instead.]

Al mentioned Susan Calvin, Asimov's irascible and inscrutable robot psychologist. I think his response to her was "grudging admiration." She was one of my role models. The Asimov robot stories are some of the first SF I remember reading. Some people envy that character's control, the way she hardly ever displayed any emotion or sentiment. I don't consider that an admirable quality. I valued Calvin for her analytical skills, for her mind. Asimov was at his best when writing tales of pure reason; as I've commented elsewhere, emotionally his characters are often cardboard.

But I digress.

[And since one digression has already spun off several thousand words, we can't have that.]

I have two kinds of favorite heroines; the kind I want to be, and the kind who act as mother/goddess/influence figures.

Calvin belongs in the latter category, as does Morgaine (any rendition of her, but LeGuin's especially) and Lady Sally from Spider Robinson's books (even if you don't like them - I know they make some readers very unhappy, and that's a discussion for another day - you have to admit that Lady Sally is a goddess).

There are a lot more of those, but I don't have my bookshelf here. When working on The Novel I realized that I had built a goddess-mother figure into it, who pretty much stands as my ultimate example of the archetype. In fact, in later revisions I had to tone her down, give her some flaws - she was supposed to be a real human, after all, and was originally too good to be true.

The former category is more interesting, because there's a very strong pattern here: I like ugly-duckling female characters who are actually very powerful, very worthwhile, but don't or won't realize it until some event comes along that helps bring them out of their shells. (Actually, this is possibly my favorite storyline of all time, male or female. No speculation permitted on what that says about my psychology.)

Robin McKinley is very very good at this. I have wanted for several years to be Angharad (Harry, or Hari) from The Blue Sword, and also the heroine from The Hero and The Crown, whose name escapes me. In recent years she has written Deerskin and I want to be that heroine even more so, although her tribulations are much more painful than the other two.

The ultimate example of having to walk through hell to find yourself is the heroine in James Morrow's Only Begotten Daughter. This is a painful book to read - by which I mean there are scenes which will have you reeling in sympathetic pain for the heroine. But she triumphs.

Charles De Lint's Jack of Kinrowan novels are good too - Jack, or Jacky, is a girl, the stories are sly reworkings of old folktales, and the two novels have been collected in a volume with the title above.

Robert Heinlein's Friday isn't really an ugly duckling - she's not rejected by anyone, she just doesn't realize what she has. This too is a novel some people have objections to, but that's a fight for another day.

That reminds me that Lazarus's mother - what's her name? I want to say Maureen, but I may be thinking of the Maureen in the first Lady Sally novel, who is an example of the former type of heroine - is an example of the latter type of heroine.

Ooh. If you can plow through that sentence, you get an award.

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