Lolly Willowes: Feminism, Witchcraft, Scones
The latest in a stream of wonderful and undeservedly obscure feminist literature that my mother sends my way (see also The Hearing Trumpet) is a novel from 1926 called Lolly Willowes.
Synopsis
When her father dies, thoughtful, solitary Laura moves from their home in the country to the house of her brother and his family where she spends decades in a pleasant but stultifying routine of needlework, small talk and dull family holidays. Laura settles into being “useful and obliging” Aunt Lolly, but can never escape the feeling that there is something missing from her existence.
While her body sat before the first fires and was cosy with Henry and Caroline, her mind walked by lonely seaboards, in marshes and fens, or came at nightfall to the edge of a wood. She never imagined herself in these places by daylight. She never thought of them as being in any way beautiful. It was not beauty at all that she wanted… Her mind was groping after something that eluded her experience, a something that was shadowy and menacing, and yet in some way congenial.
St Nicholas Church in Idbury, where Sylvia Townsend Warner lived in the 1920s. Photo by Jonathon Billinger
One day, aged 47, the insistent voice within overwhelms her. She claims her rightful income from her brother and moves to a village in the Chilterns where she revels in her newfound independence, solitude and connection with nature. When her freedom is threatened by the arrival in the village of her dear but demanding nephew Titus she does what any of us would do: makes a pact with Satan to send him on his way.
A problem as common as blackberries
There is a feminist thread that runs brightly through this gentle, surprising and occasionally sinister story. Just have a look at the Austen-worthy comment early on, describing Laura as a young woman:
Being without coquetry she did not feel herself bound to feign a degree of entertainment which she had not experienced, and the same deficiency made her insensible to the duty of every marriageable young woman to be charming, whether her charm be directed towards one special object or, in default of that, universally distributed through a disinterested love of humanity.
But I suspect Laura’s plight will strike a chord with anyone who prefers their own company. All she wants is to be left alone. She is forced to take radical steps (going against her family’s wishes, negotiating with her brother for the return of the money she is owed, moving to a place she has never been, living alone and, um, becoming a witch) simply so that she can be left to her own devices. And she sees that countless other women are locked into the same comfortable cage:
I seem to see all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded. If they could be passive and unnoticed, it wouldn’t matter. But they must be active, and still not noticed. Doing, doing, doing, till mere habit scolds at them like a housewife, and rouses them up – when they might sit in their doorways and think – to be doing still!
Although the description of Laura’s first witches’ sabbath and her conversations with Satan are delightful and strikingly original even now, the novel isn’t about witchcraft. A far greater proportion of the book is devoted to Laura’s childhood and time with her brother’s family in London than to her time in the village of Great Mop.
Where else to turn?
Her entry into the service of the dark lord is presented as the only escape for a soul which has for so long been cornered and boxed in by convention. It is the inevitable conclusion of the binding restrictions placed on women’s self-determination by the demands of propriety and duty, most of all to be meek and helpful and always anchored to a man, whether a father, brother or husband. Laura recognises the structures which have created and perpetuated her captivity:
As for her own share in the matter, she felt no shame at all. It had pleased Satan to come to her aid. Considering carefully she could not see who else would have done so. Custom, public opinion, law, church and state – all would have shaken their massive heads against her plea and sent her back to bondage.
The simultaneous sharp departure from the usual of Laura and her narrative gives the end of the novel a quietly bold and subversive mood. And while there’s not a lot of actual witchiness there is plenty of subtly uncanny imagery. For example, on a whim Laura bakes some scones in the shapes of her neighbours, and watches as her guest eats “the strange shapes without comment, quietly splitting open the villagers and buttering them”.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
There is some clever stuff going on here, which is unsurprising given that the author is one of English literature’s great unsung heroes, Sylvia Townsend Warner.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Although she was celebrated in her lifetime as a musicologist as well as an author she is largely unknown today, despite the notoriety one might expect her to have for living more or less openly as a lesbian (with the dashing poet Valentine Ackland) and campaigning on behalf of the Communist Party.
You can find out more about her from the splendid Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, and I recommend you do, and read Lolly Willowes even if you don’t get around to all her fascinating novels.
Way back in the primordial mists of 2007, I was hastily writing a dissertation for my Gender Studies Masters. I didn’t know it then of course, but that same dissertation would later turn out to be actually almost quite useful.
What I was writing about was UK press representation of trafficking for sexual exploitation. Or rather, misrepresentation. There were also some heady cultural studies bits about nations and bodies and identity and stuff, but the heart of the 15,000 word beast was some research showing that the key elements in coverage of so-called ‘white slavery’ in the 19th century were all present and correct in current newspaper coverage of sex trafficking. I summarised some of that in my previous post.
Some recent articles, and an exciting conference on the same subject organised by the Central American Women’s Network (at which I was invited to speak, eek) have put this cheery topic back on my radar. After talking to people studying the same issues today, it seems that nothing much has changed since 2007, and in fact the situation has got worse.
Discourse (yes, I said it, I went there! And in the fourth paragraph too!) around sex trafficking is dominated by a single story which has been repeated so often it has become a cliché, despite its distressing content. You probably know it: virginal 15 year old Albanian blonde is promised a job as a waitress, or maybe even kidnapped, and when she arrives in the UK she is beaten and raped and forced to work as a prostitute.
This is real. It does happen. And amazing but severely under-funded organisations like the Eaves Housing Poppy Project can tell you about it, because they spend every day picking up the pieces.
The trouble is that this single story obscures the complex interrelationship of migration, trafficking, and the national and international sex industry, and the many and various routes of women into exploitation. It has helped to establish a set of criteria for ‘legitimate victimhood’ for women who have been trafficked, which excludes a huge number of serious cases and obscures the wider problems faced by women in the sex trade.
As an example, a 2007 headline in the Sunday Express screams “Influx of sex slaves hits UK”. We are told that the Home Office is “struggling to cope with an influx of women immigrants who are being forced into prostitution”. However, several lines down we find the kernel of news the article has grown from: “Home Office figures about to be published will claim that 4,000 new foreign women join the UK sex trade every year.” The categories of migrant women working in the UK sex trade and victims of sex trafficking are collapsed into one without any word of explanation. In fact it is unknown how many of these women have been forced into prostitution. It is unlikely to be 100%.
Because the media, the police, the government and – sadly – a number of campaigns have focused so narrowly on kidnap and involuntary prostitution, migrant women working in the sex trade can find themselves unable to access services when their human rights have been abused. As an example: consider a woman who willingly enters the UK sex trade, but finds that she is forced to hand over all her earnings to her pimp, has no ability to refuse customers and is prevented from leaving. That is slavery, whether she comes from Thailand, Moldova or Bromley.
By conjuring a moral panic based on a discourse of innocence, border violations and kidnap, the media, government and police fail to engage with the risks and problems surrounding ‘domestic’ prostitution. This means that many women working in prostitution continue to be failed by a State that does not offer them protection.
There is another damaging side effect of the repetition and emphasis on this story at the exclusion of all others. If the measure of whether a woman is a ‘sex slave’ or not excludes many or even most women in that situation, it becomes simple enough for people to say there is no problem.
And it seems that by following the version of sex trafficking peddled by the press too closely the police are at risk of missing countless vulnerable women. I was pleased to see an alternative, more informed narrative in this otherwise dismaying recent article about a report criticising the Met for their hamfisted policing of trafficking for sexual exploitation, which seems to consist mostly of raiding brothels and asking women if they’ve been trafficked. The report (“Silence on Violence”) is worth a read, even though it was produced by GLA Conservatives.
Disappointing then that the next day the same old story was being told in the same paper. It’s a moving account of a terrible experience endured by a courageous woman, and I applaud the Guardian for covering the issue and for closely consulting the excellent Eaves Housing Poppy Project. But we need to tell some of the other stories too, or women will continue to be measured against it and found to be less of a victim than they should be.
- Note: In my dissertation I drew heavily on the work of Jacqueline Berman. It’s also worth checking out her draft paper Trafficking in the Illicit: From Trafficking in East and Central European Women to the Biopolitical Management of Migration.
1910 book from the US about the ‘white slave trade’
While we’re still sloshing around in the journalistic sewage unleashed by the Leveson enquiry, it seems like a good time to revisit some research into media misrepresentation I did back in 2007.
I looked at a sample of 316 articles about the trafficking of women for sexual exploitation drawn from UK national newspapers between September 2005 and September 2007. After speaking to some lucky people studying this topic today, I’m sad to say it hasn’t changed much. In fact it hasn’t changed much since, ooh, 1885.
The Maiden Tribute
The publication of a feature on “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1885 is often credited as the birth of scandal journalism, and the touchpaper for a moral panic over “white slavery” which rocked Victorian Britain. The similarity with today’s newspaper coverage of trafficking for sexual exploitation is striking. And, frankly, depressing.
The famous Pall Mall Gazette feature describes in titillating detail how “five pound virgins” are sold to lecherous aristocratic blackguards, after being “snared, trapped and outraged either when under the influence of drugs or after prolonged struggle in a locked room”. Thanks to the wonders of the web, the full article is available to read online. What is remarkable about it isn’t so much the contents of the article itself, but the reaction it provoked – a massive pile-on of outraged public opinion, political opportunism and rival newspaper bandwagon-jumping. Here’s a good description of the aftermath.
While it is undeniable that prostitution was widespread in Britain of the 19th century (and it wasn’t a nice life) the actual incidence of kidnap and ‘sexual slavery’ of the form described in The Maiden Tribute has since been subject to scrutiny. Historians, in particular Judith Walkowitz, have highlighted the discrepancy between the reformers’ view and the reality of prostitution in the 1880s, observing that:
the evidence of widespread involuntary prostitution of British girls in London and abroad is slim. During the 1870s and 1880s, officials and reformers were able to uncover a small traffic in women between Britain and the continent, although the women enticed into licensed brothels in Antwerp and Brussels were by no means the young innocents depicted in the sensational stories. Similarly, there undoubtedly were some child prostitutes on the streets of London, Liverpool, and elsewhere; most of these young girls were not victims of false entrapment.
Arguably the popularity of the ‘white slavery’ myth was partly because it offered an easy option of blaming a few evil, anonymous, male individuals for the hardships experienced by women and girls working in prostitution. Confronting the sexual double standard, crushing poverty and ignorance and the vast power imbalance between men and women would probably have landed the blame a little close to home for most readers.
Legitimate victims
Jo Doezema compares the explosion of media coverage of sex trafficking since 2000 (linked to the EU expansion and attendant mass immigration freakout) to the white slavery panic of the 1880s, identifying a number of similar themes – in particular the emphasis on the victim’s ‘innocence’, which she interprets as a device to make a distinction between legitimate victims and ‘guilty victims’: prostitutes. Doezema writes:
Only by removing all responsibility for her own condition from the prostitute could she be constructed as a victim… As with white slavery, ‘innocence’ is established in a number of ways: through stressing the ‘victims’ lack of knowledge of or unwillingness to accede to her fate; her youth — equated with sexual unawareness and thus purity; and/or her poverty.
My content analysis of newspaper articles about trafficking for sexual exploitation absolutely bore this out. Below I’ll do a quick trot through all the different elements identified by Doezema and give you some examples of the way they are played out in the press today.
Youth
The most obviously emphasised characteristic of the victims in the sample of newspapers I studied was youth. In virtually all the coverage the age of the woman was stated, and case studies of teenagers placed the age right at the start of the article. The few cases in which the woman was over 21 (the oldest was 36) stated the age in later paragraphs.
From my sample of 316 articles (which excluded those focused on trafficking in children) showed that 68% used the word “girl” to describe the trafficked women, and 59% described the women as “young”.
This 2006 example from the Sunday Express opens the article with the age of the victim: “Dana was just 15 when she was brought to Britain on the promise of a summer job selling ice creams in London’s Hyde Park, but she ended up becoming a sex slave, forced to have sex with 50 men a week.” Dana’s youth is emphasised by the childlike associations of ‘ice cream’ and her ‘summer job’, strongly evocative of school. Even ‘London’s Hyde Park’ has a suggestion of a summer holiday. The journalist gleefully sets up a shocking contrast with her following enslavement.
Innocence
Part of the importance of emphasising the youth of the victims is the implication of their innocence. Plenty of articles in the sample described the women explicitly as innocent: “innocent women like Maria”; “innocents… abducted into slavery” (both The Sun in 2006). However, many others conjure the idea of innocence through stressing vulnerability, naivety and terror, in combination with youth. One of the most visually striking is a description of two “girls” like “frightened rabbits” (Detective Constable Andy Justice, quoted in The Mirror, October 2005).
Other articles make very direct reference to their victims’ sexual inexperience as a way to hammer home their moral purity and by implication their ‘deserving’ status: “Until then I’d never even seen stockings before… I was being told I would have to do things with strangers that I had never done with anyone but my husband” (The Sun again, in 2005). Similarly, before “pretty Erica”, a “20 year-old brunette”, fell into the hands of “evil Albanian pimps”, we are informed by The News of the World in 2006 that she had “slept with only two men.” In the Star the preceding year, a “16 year-old… virgin was forced to service dozens of punters a week.”
There is also a clear narrative pattern of kidnap and deception, which hides the complex and varied experiences and situations of trafficked women, many of whom are not simply snatched from their hometown. 59% of the articles in the sample featured one or more of: kidnap(ped), abduct(ed), lure(d), trick(ed), dupe(d).
Virtually all describe violent forms of coercion, and women are uniformly said to have been brought to Britain, with no admission of agency in their migration. The examples are endless: “They have been kidnapped, raped and abused before being exported” (campaigner Geraldine Rowley quoted in the Daily Mail in 2007), “the tide of eastern European women being brought into Britain” (the Sunday Telegraph, 2005), “duped into coming to Britain on the false promise of jobs as nannies or waitresses only to be forced into sex and brutality” (the Independent on Sunday, 2005).
Whiteness
Although a significant proportion of women are trafficked to the UK from Africa and South Asia, all but a tiny fraction of case studies and examples are Eastern European. Of the articles studied in the sample, 42% mentioned “Eastern Europe(an)”.
The endless list of Marias, Ericas, Natashas, and Francescas are also a way to create a titillating image of suffering in which virginal white women are left thrillingly at the mercy of swarthy foreigners. A “tiny terrified blonde” (People magazine, 2007) in the hands of an Albanian pimp.
Another journalist writes:
Back then the women for sale were mostly South Asian, Filipinas and Thai… But these new girls were blonde… And very young. Clearly export models from Eastern Europe had flooded the market, forcing up the quality.
– Janice Turner, The Times, December 3, 2005
Nice. Way to put presumably lower ‘quality’ Asian women in their place.
One of my favourite quotes (read: quotes that make me want to punch things) was from Denis MacShane, who wrote:
We are facing a new slave trade, whose victims are tortured, terrified East European girls rather than Africans.
– Daily Telegraph, January 3, 2006
In fact the “new slave trade” includes large numbers of African women, but they are conveniently erased from the narrative.
In the second part of this post I’ll look at the significance and danger of the return of ‘white slavery’ narratives to the pages of the UK press.
[Gamer Diary] What I’ve been playing… June 2012
This June just gone, I’ve been having fun on a variety of games – but that also means I haven’t finished any of them just yet. Plus I’ve only had three weeks of the month to play before writing this as I’m moving home, so I expect some disruption. Nevertheless, I can finally bring you comments on Assassin’s Creed: Revelations (over 6 months after release – soz), alongside Bastion from the Humble Bundle V, which, by the way, ended up with over $5,000,000 raised. Also: Torchlight and some watching-over-my-partner’s-shoulder of Max Payne 3 (for PC).
I’ve also had a bit of a TF2 revival this month, and that’s been fun, but what more can be said about TF2? There are no female characters (yet), although there are plenty of female gamers. I personally haven’t seen much SexistFail in chat but I know it does happen on some servers (you do, however, get a lot of childish insults and obscene ‘sprays’ on some servers). It’s a fun, team-based game that’s F2P (Free2Play), and Valve just hired an economist to help with the ever expanding Mannconomy and the inter-game economies as they grow further still. That’s interesting, right? Plus PYROMANIA has landed.
Bastion’s protag, “the Kid”, looking a bit moody.
To Bastion! This is a very curious indie title that offers a considerable amount of play-time compared to other indie offerings. It’s described as “…an action role-playing experience that redefines storytelling in games, with a reactive narrator who marks your every move”. I’ve heard similar claims before and ended up disappointed, but Bastion really delivers on this concept. Admittedly, the narrator’s voice does get on my nerves but it really does react to what you do. I’m sure there’s an inventory of quips and comments that are selected according to specific trigger events in the game but it’s still pretty cool.
The art is lovely and it isn’t just the simple damsel-in-distress format that I have encountered in a lot of other indie titles (LIMBO, Braid, for example), which is a nice change of pace. Although the main active characters are all male and the one female (so far) has been pretty passive, there’s still a good bit of joy to be taken from this game. It’s simple enough to grasp and you can make it harder in a variety of ways, so for gameplay and originality it gets a thumbs-up from me. Unfortunately, if you didn’t get lucky and snap up the Humble Bundle, Bastion as a standalone is £11.49 on Steam but is currently going for under £9 on Green Man Gaming (sort of an alternative to Steam).
The one last thing that I will mention about Bastion is the soundtrack, which is beautiful, and I bring this up because I also want to make a special note of Torchlight’s soundtrack. While playing Torchlight I am constantly finding myself with the urge to go and watch Sunshine again. This is because the generic background twinkling of Torchlight often hits some of the same chords or sequences that the piece ‘Sunshine (Adagio in D Minor)’ features. Now, that piece (composed by John Murphy) makes me all soft and wibbly on the inside every time I hear it. As does watching Sunshine. But, alas, ’tis presently packed in a box somewhere.
Torchlight only features 3 classes and only one gender and set appearance for each… HEY LOOK more boobs that don’t require proper armour; that really is magic.
Music aside, Torchlight (yes, it’s 3 years old, sorry!) is a great little RPG offering. I have it because I pre-ordered Torchlight II via Steam and got Torchlight to play with in the meantime. Torchlight II is making some people in RPG land a bit excited after the numerous issues people have had with Diablo III. The first game is charming, easy to use and offers some features bigger RPGs haven’t, such as sending your pet to town to sell items from your backpack – meaning you’ll end up with a huge surplus of Town Portal Scrolls as you never need to use them! It does, regrettably, fall foul of the tediously standard female-armour-fail… do all these women seriously have bullet/arrow/sword/magic proof tits and navels? That’s the only negative so far, but this looks like it might be halfway rectified, at least, in Torchlight II: go and check out the character classes on their site (only one of the 4 female figures has cleavage showing!).
Now for something released in 2012; I know, incredible, right? Max Payne 3 has amazing visuals, even on low-spec PCs, and great mechanisms for exciting gameplay. It showcases the new Rockstar engine that will be used in next year’s Grand Theft Auto V; not a franchise I’m fond of, but with this engine, it’ll look stunning and run spectacularly. Max Payne 3 has kept fairly faithful to the originals and the basic ‘essence’ of Max, which is a relief for the old fans, but offers plenty for those new to the series.
Max Payne 3 has refined and capitalised on the Shootdodge mechanic of previous games
As an observer (not the sinister Fringe kind) to Max Payne it’s a little different to discuss than if I’d been the player. I was hoping to get my partner to contribute something here, but the house-moving saga has put paid to that plan. Max Payne does play with some damsel-in-distress themes and always has, but it also manages to twist them around. Originally, Max becomes an avenging angel, fallen-from-grace figure after his wife and infant daughter are murdered. He tears up NYC seeking revenge, but finds conspiracies abound, and then his moral compass takes over and he kills all the baddies.
In MP3, he’s given up being a cop and is playing the private security game. Although the game starts out with the feel that Max is off saving, and I quote, “fallen women” all over again, it swiftly changes tack in the brutal underworld of Brazil and Max, in the middle of an identity crisis, isn’t sure whether he’s a good guy, a bad guy, or a magical pixie putting the world to rights. I’m not sure if he ever really ‘finds himself’, but he shoots all the baddies and conquers another conspiracy in typical grim, noir style. The combat mechanics set this game apart and offer a truly varied way of kickin’ ass. As, I say, the graphics are gorgeous, the engine is shiny and the music is atmospheric (not to mention nostalgic) the whole way through.
Still pretty spry for an old guy: Ezio takes in the view of Constantinople.
Here I am, talking so much about music and mechanics, you thought I’d forgotten AC:Rev, didn’t you? Well, let me squeeze it in now. I have yet to complete the game because I’ve been purposefully dawdling in order to enjoy sandboxing in such a magnificent environment. Constantinople looks great, and you get to train up your Assassins right from the get-go, as well as the usual bits and pieces around the city with added stalkers who occasionally try to stab you right when you’re supposed to be tailing someone. The main storyline, so far, hasn’t been too riveting, which is a shame. I’m sure – after I’ve finished unpacking – that I’ll charge through the story and update you all next month.
What else can you expect in July’s end-of-month post? I’ve got a couple of new games to play with (actually new, i.e. newly released!) and I’m always keeping an eye out for things to play, but summer tends to be time for the blockbuster films until autumn brings gaming back into focus again…
Five Feminist Cartoonists You Should Know About
Following on from Miranda’s illustrator-themed posts a while back (here and here) I thought I’d send a few more graphical delights your way.
I say ‘feminist’ up there, I’m not sure that’s how all these artists would define themselves, but if you are a feminist or even have an interest in gender I think you may find a lot to love in their work. To be honest I’m not even sure they’d all call themselves cartoonists either… You may well have heard of them before, but if not, you’re in for a treat.
Planned Parenthood Superhero by Ellen Forney
1) Ellen Forney
I picked up I Love Led Zeppelin after Forney was mentioned in Trina Robbins’ fantastic book From Girls to Grrrlz. It would have been worth it just for the fantastic ‘how to’ series, which include: how to re-attach an amputated finger, how to dominate someone, how to talk to your kids about drugs. But there’s lots of good stuff here (especially if you like your stuff on the queer side) and I love Forney’s warm, clear lines.
The Plantagenets by Kate Beaton
2) Kate Beaton
Creator of the sublime Hark! A Vagrant. Lovely sketchy style and irreverent, affectionate, feminist comics about famous figures from literature and history including personal favourites Queen Elizabeth I and the Brontes.
This Shit Gets Me Down by Kate Leth
3) Kate Leth
Works in a comic book shop, is awesome. Cartoonifies episodes from her life and renders them adorable. Bonus points for feminism, geekery, queer themes and excellent tattoos. The Ultimate Kate or Die book is available from Etsy.
Mermaid and pirate embrace, by Dame Darcy
4) Dame Darcy
Artist, doll-maker, banjo-player, part-time mermaid… Dame Darcy is morbid and fabulous just like her comic Meat Cake, which largely defies description. A bizarre and chaotic mix of Victoriana, fairytales, gothic and goth, Meat Cake has a cast of equally strange characters which include a smooth-talking wolf, a superbitch mermaid, and the tragic undead Strega Pez who can communicate only through messages delivered on Pez-like tablets from her slashed throat. Makes Gloom Cookie look like The Archers.
Lovelace with cogs, by Sydney Padua
5) Sydney Padua
Sydney Padua is responsible for taking the already badass Ada Lovelace, putting her in breeches, giving her a raygun and setting her off on a series of steampunk adventures where she can use MATHS to fight crime, solve mysteries, battle vampire poets etc… There’s a book on the way it seems, but in the meantime you can buy 2D Goggles merch.
[Guest Post] Clothes-horse of the Apocalypse: Katniss’ Dress Size and the Book of Revelation
Here’s a post from Jem Bloomfield. If you have an idea for a guest post brewing in your brain, email us: [email protected].
She’s just a hungry girl,
In a post-apocalyptic wooooorld…
When The Hunger Games came out, we were faced with possibly the most ludicrous and yet most predictable controversy in recent film history: was Katniss Everdeen too fat? More specifically, was Jennifer Lawrence the wrong body-shape to play the protagonist of these phenomenally successful novels, as a number of critics and fans said? One quotation from the New York Times can stand in for a lot of others:
A few years ago Ms. Lawrence might have looked hungry enough to play Katniss, but now, at 21, her seductive, womanly figure makes a bad fit for a dystopian fantasy about a people starved into submission.
I’m not going to answer the question, because, y’know. But I do want to talk about why the question matters, because it’s not something so ludicrous we can dismiss it.1
Cover design for an early UK release of the Hunger Games, by Jason Chan
Essentially, these readers were arguing the case for realism. Katniss has access to limited calories (though more than some other people, due to her own skills) – this is part of the plot, theme and indeed title of the novel – so an actor of a certain body type might be less able to inhabit the role convincingly onscreen. Just as Renee Zellweger visibly put on some weight to play Bridget Jones2, Jennifer Lawrence was expected to appear strikingly underweight to embody the theme of the narrative. It’s a simple biological fact.
Except, of course, that fact assumes that the Hunger Games trilogy, beloved of teenage girls in particular, is taking place in a cultural vacuum. That it just happens to involve a young woman with a fraught relationship to food, who is contrasted to the decadence and self-indulgence of the inhabits of the Capitol and other characters. I’m absolutely not arguing that these are harmful books, or that they’re written thoughtlessly. Nor is it my place to tell young women how they should interact with art. But I am pointing out that novels don’t become popular for no reason, particularly YA novels with strong female leads.
The cultural factors which bear on the novels increase drastically when it comes to putting Katniss on screen. Again, there is an argument that the fictional situation happens to involve a character who would have a particular physical appearance. But that discourse of realism and “accuracy” totally ignores the hundreds of images which young women are bombarded with every day. It assumes that young women are never told they’re too fat or too skinny, that they lack self control or a sense of proportion, that their success in life is directly related to their dress size. It assumes that when actors like Jennifer Lawrence relax in between film-shoots, there aren’t packs of photographers with zoom-lenses feeding the websites which police their bodies and point out how they’ve “let themselves go”. Talk about “accuracy” is deeply naive because it ignores the way actors’ public personas are constructed, how their lifestyle is carefully confused with the roles they choose and how their bodies are used in advertising. It also ignores the power of performance to draw us into a fictional world and convince us of its reality, surely one of the main reasons anyone films a book in the first place.
So much for the hungry girl, but I don’t think we can ignore the post-apocalyptic world and its relevance to this controversy. Katniss isn’t just a young woman who finds herself short on nosh after the shops have shut, she’s the central figure in a futuristic wasteland. “Post-apocalyptic” has also come in for a bit of controversy recently, with Mark Kermode demanding with typically entertaining zeal that if the apocalypse is the end of the world, then how can a film be post-apocalyptic? If the apocalypse has happened, and there’s anything left to have a film about, then that my friend is a shoddy apocalypse and you want to demand another one, that works like it says on the packet. Highly pleasing as this is, and far be it from me to out-pedant the worshipful Doctor, but apocalypse does not mean the end of the world.
Apocalypse means “revelation” or the “lifting of the veil”. The book we get most of our apocalyptic imagery from – four horsemen, 666, Whore of Babylon riding on a seven-headed beast, you know the drill – is referred to as both the Apocalypse of St. John and the Book of Revelation. The fact that the most famous one is most frequently framed as a vision of the end of the world means that we tend to assume that they’re the same thing (if we’re not massive pedants and unhealthily obsessed with etymology – oh no, wait…). But the crucial aspect is the “lifting of the veil”, the revealing of a deeper reality which is obscured by the world around us.3
I’m not bringing this up for the sake of sheer quibble (though that would be reason enough), but because I think a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction still has this original meaning embedded in it. So many post-apocalyptic films and novels have this sense of being not only “after the disaster” but also “after the revelation”, trying to strip back the complexities and confusions of modern life to get to what is basic and essential about us. In The Road, that’s the emotional bond between father and son, in Mad Max the depravity of humans as pack animals, in Escape From New York it’s a macho code of integrity.4
And in The Hunger Games it’s a famished young woman. If a deeper reality is being revealed in this apocalypse, a profound truth about humanity which lies beneath the surface of modern life, then it’s one which looks very similar to the line peddled by fashion magazines, diet books and vast swathes of Hollywood’s output. That young women should look as if they’re slightly undernourished. The tendencies of post-apocalyptic fiction mean that this film risks holding that image up as not only an ideal to aspire to, but as the most “natural” and “essential” state for them to be in.
Again, this doesn’t make The Hunger Games a bad book or a bad film, but it means that the way Katniss Everdeen is portrayed onscreen cannot be reduced to a question of “accuracy” to a description in the book. A film which presents a teenage girl as the prototypical member of humanity is a wonderful idea – not least because she’s active, intelligent and fighting on behalf of her people – but this one sits at the intersection of some very powerful cultural influences which we can’t ignore.
- Jem Bloomfield is an academic who works on theatre and performance. A longtime BadRep reader, he’s very excited to be on the other side of the line, and the references to gin and tea in the other team bios make him feel very at home. Four years working on The Duchess of Malfi has given him a taste for writing about other things, so he blogs on culture, politics and gender at Quite Irregular.
- Though it is ludicrous. Let no doubt be left about that. [↩]
- No, I know. It’s not like I don’t have a problem with that too, but it’s awful in a slightly different way… [↩]
- The titles of The Vision of Ezra and the Sibylline Oracles – both around during the first centuries of Christianity though neither made it into the Bible(s) – underline this point. [↩]
- And with more time we could read right back from Snake Plissken’s tattoo to the Man With No Name, and wonder how much the classic Western is also driven by a desire to get its characters out into the oddly moonscapey deserts, to strip away the civilization. Or look at the fistfight between two astronauts which starts Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, suggesting that getting to the moon called earth morality into question… [↩]
[Guest Post] In Defence of… Fanfiction
Here’s a post from Nat Guest. If you have an idea for a guest post brewing in your brain, email us: [email protected].
A confession: I write fanfiction.
I’ll let that sink in for a moment, whilst you judge me and leap to all the usual conclusions. At least half of them will be reasonably correct.
For starters, let’s clear up some myths. Fanfiction isn’t about porn. Or, at least, it isn’t all about porn. There are as many different genres out there as there are genres of fiction, as many reasons for reading and writing it as there are readers and writers of it. And it isn’t exactly an obscure pastime; on fanfiction.net (the largest, if most mainstream and therefore frowned-upon collection of fanfic) there are 593,713 fics listed under the Harry Potter category alone.
Image: Jose Carlos Norte, Flickr (jcarlosn)
Here’s one of my favourite quotes about it, used by Sheenagh Pugh in her book The Democratic Genre: Fanfiction in a Literary Context:
It’s always been high praise in Fannish circles to be told that you wrote a story so good it should be published, but sometimes, the highest praise is that it can’t be. Its very uniqueness, what creates it, makes it impossible to be anything else. Lots of people can write stories that fall into readable (more than you think, actually, but I’m flexible on the idea of readable), and many can write stories I’d pay to read, and even some write stories that could be published and be great. But there’s this small, fascinating group that write a story that belongs only to the fandom that created it. It’s like having a treasure you never have to share. It wraps itself in the canon and fanon and the author’s own mind that created it and takes it as its own so perfectly that you are so damn glad you went into that fandom, just grateful, just absolutely thrilled, because you get to read this.
Every fic, without exception, is a product of its fandom. Reading a fic is not just reading a simple story: what you’re actually reading is an intertwining of fanlore, mixing in-jokes and terminology from one particular fandom, as well as from the broader history and narrative of fandom. That’s why they can appear so incoherent and ridiculous to the outside world at times. Fanfiction authors are less writing a story than weaving together a cultural tapestry.
Fanfiction has a proud and noble tradition, as anyone entrenched within the community will tell you. Every student of fanlore knows where the term “ship” arose (X Files fandom), and where the term “slash” arose (Star Trek fandom). We have our own history; from the pre-internet fanzines, to early Usenet groups, right through to the great shipping wars of Harry Potter and the arguments over whether RPF (Real Person Fic; fanfiction about “real” people) is morally acceptable (the earliest known concrete example of RPF comes from the Bronte sisters, who used to write reams of stuff about the fictional country of Gondal. It can be easily argued that there was a huge amount of RPF within the oral tradition, as people passed down stories about folkloric legends such as Robin Hood, King Arthur, and – yeah, I’m going to go there – Jesus). We know our lore and our mythology and our terminology, and we study it as arduously as disciples of any other body of text.
Whilst I do stress that a lot of fanfiction out there is non-sexual and non-romantic in content (it’s called gen fic, yo, look it up), there’s an inarguable trend towards sexytimes. I’m all down with that; I like a bit of story with my porn, and I’m not a very visual person, so fanfiction is where I discovered a lot about myself and my own sexuality. I think I started reading fanfiction when I was about 13 or 14, and nowhere near, ahem, “active”. My first ever ship was Rupert Giles/Jenny Calendar. It was a while after that until I discovered slash, although that discovery was, frankly, inevitable – I had a bit of a sweet-tooth for Harry/Draco (Drarry, if you will). Fanfiction was (and still is!) a safe space to explore my own sexuality, and discover the kaleidoscope of sexualities, genders and identities that are out there. It was many years before I’d hear the name Judith Butler, or even hear the slightest mention of ‘queer theory’, but when I did, none of the ideas seemed particularly new to me.
Whilst there are plenty of male writers of fanfiction (especially within the gaming community – shout out to my little bro!) authorship is overwhelmingly female, and I don’t think that that’s a coincidence. Out in the real world, it’s difficult to own our own sexuality; there’s simply no room for shades of grey. You’re either frigid or a slut; you’re either straight or gay; your sexuality and identity is whatever people perceive when they look at you. But within the fanfiction community, away from the patriarchal mainstream, we can discover and explore how we feel about our own sexual and gender and personal identity. That’s something that I think has had more effect on my life than anything else. Through the medium of fandom, we can find out who we are, and what we like, and how we feel, all through just reading stories together. And then hopefully – eventually – we get to write our own story.
This is people writing because they love it, for no purpose other than writing for themselves and for other people who they vaguely know on the internet. It’s done purely for the joy of the thing. And it isn’t just about the fic itself; the fandom community is the most genre-savvy, theory-aware, innovative group of people I’ve ever had the pleasure to tangle with. This is a community alive with discussion about narrative, metanarrative, referentialism & self referentialism, literary theory, gender and sexuality, social justice, morality, pop culture and in-jokes. I’d also argue that it’s an innately queer community; it not only exists between the cracks, but thrives on the cracks. And in a world where deconstruction and theory are often frowned upon as “thinking about things too much”, fandom is where I found a home.
- Nat Guest is a girl who writes some things for some people some of the time; usually about pop culture, feminism and current affairs. She tweets over-excessively at @unfortunatalie and can play the spoons.
[Gamer Diary] Rollercoaster June: an addendum
No sooner had I finished writing the 1,200 word post featuring the ups and downs of the gamingverse in recent weeks than Crystal Dynamics – the studio behind the upcoming Tomb Raider prequel game – put their foot in it.
Their executive producer was discussing the challenges this young Lara has to face, which includes violent beatings and an attempted rape, and how this would make players want “to protect her”.
The internet exploded with rage, and I got sucked up in it a bit too – it came after I’d spent hours reading and listening to accounts of female gamers being threatened with rape just because they dared to play socially.
A day later, Crystal Dynamics retracted the “attempted rape” comment and said it had been misunderstood. Largely, I am inclined to agree, but not with the use of ‘attempted rape’; that bit wasn’t misunderstood. Having seen the footage, that’s exactly what it is, although it is nowhere near as gruesome as much of the internet’s collective imagination has fathomed it to be.
The scene in question is part of their E3 trailer “Crossroads” (you need to be signed in to YouTube to view it as it has a content warning on it). Naturally, I will say that it will be triggering for some – as could the paragraph after next (& other parts of the rest of this post) when I briefly describe what happens – the specific scene occurs at 2:15 on the vid.
This Tomb Raider is going to be set before the others, and is aiming to develop Lara’s character into the strong, kickass woman she is in those core, original games. She is stranded on an island with her crew but there’s also an all-male gang who have been stranded on said island for much longer and have turned extremely savage. They kill Lara’s friends as she watches/hears without being able to help them. She tries to sneak away, but is found.
The guy who finds her runs his hand down her body; she knees him in the groin and tries to run; he grabs her and tries kissing her neck; she bites his ear and possibly rips some of it off; runs, gets her hands free, gets his gun; they wrestle over the gun… she shoots him in the face.
Doubtless the full scene in the game will be much longer than what we’ve seen here, but it is, at least, nothing so crass as hammering the X button on the controller to push him out from between her legs. All clothes remain on, which doesn’t make it any less atrocious of course – but it could be much more graphic for the player.
I think where Crystal Dynamics have been misunderstood is with their intention, and perhaps they’ve misunderstood their audience when talking about this assault.
Discussing why it’s difficult to develop a female lead, Rosenberg said: “When people play Lara, they don’t really project themselves into the character… They’re more like. ‘I want to protect her’. There’s this sort of dynamic of, ‘I’m going to this adventure with her and trying to protect her’. She’s definitely the hero but – you’re kind of like her helper. When you see her have to face these challenges, you start to root for her in a way that you might not root for a male character.”
-from DigitalSpy
What I find most concerning/irksome/interesting is this idea that the player wants to protect Lara as opposed to be her. Having watched that trailer, I don’t want to be her helper and protect her, I want to jump into her skin and kick the daylights out of that guy. Perhaps that’s just me. What I think was ill-advised of Mr Rosenburg (the exec producer) was his move to discuss this damsel-in-distress notion at the same time as discussing the attempted rape. It kinda oozes the idea that Lara is just an object for men: to abuse or to protect.
I suspect above all that Crystal Dynamics probably need to educate themselves on better phraseology and improve the content of their press interactions. They don’t seem to mean that the assault and the assault alone turn her into the Lara we’re all familiar with: it’s the whole ordeal on this island. I’m sure shooting a guy in the face not 5 inches from your own is going to be life changing, and on the flipside, for once a studio is at least trying to show the psychological effect of killing (as opposed to all the other games where you’re expected to believe the protag is completely unfazed by murder, despite being an office worker or somesuch beforehand).
But what about the inclusion of the attempted rape in the first place?
Good point. After the initial furore, I wondered whether it could be a useful educational tool: to show the audience that rape is horrific, abhorrent and should never be permitted. Depressingly, this is a message that doesn’t seem to have sunk in with some people in society.
Then I saw an interesting theory in a comment thread, in which one chap theorised that we could see this attempted rape symbolically. Perhaps this potential rapist represents all the slavering, masturbatory porn-ifying by (mostly) male gamers of Lara in previous games; her escape could represent the escape from this pin-up mentality the franchise has been plagued with. I thought that was an intriguing hypothesis at the very least.
I think their move to include this assault is bold and their intention – presumably to explore the psychological transformation of such a famous female lead – is sorely needed, because we don’t have many fully developed standalone female characters (i.e. that aren’t just an option opposite a male version). Above all, however, they probably need to be able to express themselves in a much clearer fashion and, preferably, drop this ‘the player just wants to protect her’ nonsense.
If, when it is released, we discover this attempted rape has just been used to crush her identity as a strong, independent female character, to put her back in her place as a subjugated product of patriarchal desires, then I will stand corrected. For now, I think we should step back and see where this goes.
Overall, however, I fear Lara will never be free of the patriarchy that created her – in both her story and her creation as a game character. At least they seem to have designed her wearing a bra this time around.
Wider Reading:
- ‘Lara Croft and rape stories: breaking down the bitch’ – Laurie Penny, New Statesman
- ‘Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman. Especially when you’re made out of pixels’ – Charlie Brooker, The Guardian
- ‘Tomb Raider: why play up to the Madonna/whore dichotomy?’ – Tom Mendelsohn, The Independent (blogs)
- ‘Tomb Raider creators say “rape” is not a word in their vocabulary’ – Kotaku Australia
- ‘Ultraviolence in videogames: a defence’ – Oliver Cragg, The Independent (blogs)
- ‘Video games and the Male Gaze – are we men or boys?’ – Brandon Sheffield, Gamasutra