NBC’s “The Cape”: He vanishes before your very eyes! And so do the last 20 years in scriptwriting!
We couldn't find a still of Summer from the actual episode, but that might be because she because she's only onscreen for about 20 seconds. Here's an overly-airbrushed stretched perspective shot which doesn't have anything to do with the content of the show instead. Copyright NBC.
The Cape is a new TV series from NBC which tries to recapture the atmosphere of pulp comics and mix it with an exciting modern action show. It could be entertaining… if they changed nearly everything about it. (Spoilers follow, but in this reviewer’s opinion you’re not missing much by finding out early).
I don’t mean to be too negative. There is a lot that The Cape does very well, but each good part is immediately contradicted by the next scene, as though they locked twenty writers in a room with some foam rubber baseball bats. Mostly it’s a conflict of tone: there’s a lot of murder and violence, but it then tries to be a sappy ‘father and son’ show or fun-filled comic-book adventure as well two minutes later.
Vince Faraday (played by David Lyons) is one of the last honest policemen in a city where the entire force is about to be owned openly by a private corporation. He is Rugged, and White, and has a Jaw. In fact, he’s so generic and unmemorable that I have problems recalling his face right now.
There’s a problem with needing to cast an actor who has a physique that only a dedicated bodybuilder could ever achieve, and that is that most of your potential candidates are bodybuilder-actors. There is a small subset of these who are great for action films with zero dialogue but actually a hindrance when your story hinges on the hero’s personality, because they have just… too much… testosterone. It’s obvious to everyone that they’re obsessively driven to work out every day, and not very happy because of it. In short, your leading man is always dangerously close to just being a bug-eyed gym bunny. And there’s a hint of that here; the lead is frequently too aggressive or twitchy to be sympathetic.
Black sidekick man is played by Dorian Missick, and I can’t even remember the character’s name – look, he’s practically silent for most of the episode once we’ve established his dynamic with the hero. He seems to be doing a bad impression of the (rather wonderful) Romany Malco from No Ordinary Family (who despite being an assistant District Attorney is still very much a Black Sidekick but does at least make it clear that he’s fanboy-excited to be so, and has real lines). James Frain is the terribly-English bad guy. He was creepy to the point of terrifying in True Blood, mostly because his dialogue was straight from the “abusive relationship” manual to a triggery level, but here he is simply… English.
Sadly, not only is it yet AGAIN all about two white men and the bit-players around them, but the female parts are terrible. It fails Bechdel straight off the bat, as I don’t recall two women even meeting let alone speaking to each other. If they did, it would be about the male lead because everything, even other people getting killed and his family thinking he’s dead, is about the square-jawed male lead.
Geek favourite Summer Glau is surprisingly good, in the minute or so of screentime that she gets. She is in two scenes, one of which involves exchanging two lines with the hero and the other requiring her to peer at a hi-tech computer screen meaningfully while he goes into town to take down the bad guy. She finally seems visibly older than some of us might remember from series like Firefly (and even Terminator: SCC), and it’s given her much more credibility when she plays emotion or urgency.
Summer does have one last moment as he hurries to depart so that he can punch more people, which is this (not exact wording):
Hero McManly: “Who are you?”
Summer: *Quietly, and he’s already left anyway* “Nobody special.”
As a line it’s enigmatic and mysterious, hinting at a possibly tragic past and heroic motivations. She clearly is special, because she is a uniquely powerful name in the background story by that point. However, in this pilot episode her statement is almost true: she gets maybe four lines of dialogue and is put on a shelf marked “to be explored later when we have time, because this pilot is full already”. I have no doubt AT ALL that this is due to time constraints, so I’ll wait to see how she’s treated in episode 2. They have to establish all the characters, set up the audience’s emotional link with the hero as a Family Man who Loves His Son (much less screentime for the wife, but that might change) and also crowbar in an Incredible Eighties Training Montage!
It really is one of the quickest and cheapest training sequences I’ve seen in a while. He is rescued by circus performers (yes, really) and initially loses to them but – HAHA! – eventually beats the various trained specialists at their own games. All of them. In a few weeks or so. Maybe days, who knows.
The leader of the circus troupe is Keith David, and he is the best part of this first episode by a very, very long way. Most widely known as the Imam in Pitch Black and the Chronicles of Riddick, he has the character and likeability that the hero Vince lacks. It’s a shame he’s dropped straight into the “wise black mentor” role but he takes it on with a twinkle in his eye and a little bit of malevolence, and is the only reason I’d watch episode two. (Me saying this about a series with Summer Glau as the lead female is astonishing.) I did enjoy the performance from Martin Klebba as the tough guy of the circus – who happens to be four-foot tall. He is easily the scariest individual in the room and never doubts his ability to take anyone else in a fight (consequently rarely losing). His endless insults and energy are a delight in a show so otherwise character-starved. (Klebba is amazing in real life too, he runs the 100M in 13.84s and the 40 in 6.0.) Lieutenant bad-guy is played by Vinnie Jones, but again while I think he’s been great in the past, he’s just empty and shouty here.
There are still lots of reasons to give The Cape a second chance. It does successfully capture some of the gleeful action of old-school comics, but this is strangely tempered with a very nasty streak when it comes to the violence. No Ordinary Family did this too, with a really horrific shooting early on which sat at complete odds with the rest of the show.
From a feminist perspective, it’s a total fail. With the exception of Keith David and Martin Klebba, this is never in danger of taking the spotlight off The Hero and His Jaw for one second. Blaming the pulp source material just isn’t good enough, there have been many shows now which managed a big dumb superhero revenge story while still acknowledging that half the human race exist and might be good for more than decoration. I actually found myself wanting to use the phrase “Post-Buffy” in an indignant manner. Depending on which era and genre of pulp comics you’re talking about, some of them were incredibly progressive anyway and gave much more respect to minorities and women than this does.
But I suspect it’s because of the time constraints of a pilot ep. The potential is there for Glau to be interesting and not just exist to help the male hero, and all it needs is for the scripts to improve in the coming weeks. Okay, they’d have to improve a lot. You know, your son will recognise you if you are on his balcony in a hood which doesn’t cover your face and using your own voice, with a slightly huskiness to it. And a note to villains: letting the hero escape after telling him your plan went out with the “unnecessarily slow dipping mechanism!” in Austin Powers.
I don’t know why I’m wanting to say in conclusion “just stick with it and see if it improves” – I think it’s because The Cape has so much potential to be better than it currently is. Possibly because the only way is up in terms of script. If there’s no improvement though, follow No Ordinary Family instead: it’s also flawed, but far more interesting.
Spot the difference
Thanks to Brave Sir Robin for sending this in to us.
There’s a heavily advertised rape prevention campaign in the London Borough of Lambeth at the moment which has some very laudable aims, including to challenge the victim blaming culture around rape, recently criticised by Baroness Stern CBE in her report (downloadable here).
The adverts are aimed at young men who socialise in Lambeth, especially Brixton and Clapham, which have recently seen very disturbing rises in rape and sexual violence.
So, is it Found Feminism? I’m going to give it a two thumbs up for yes, for both reversing gender prejudices and trying a different approach to understanding and dealing with attitudes around rape and rape prevention.
The language and style of both the posters and the website offer a more detailed and mature look at the old “no means no” giving very clear examples of what is and isn’t legal or acceptable. I’m particularly interested in this poster because it pushes back the responsibility of gaining consent, and hence on committing the crime, away from what the woman is wearing or what she has had to drink.
Instead, it choses to unpick standard excuses for poor social behaviour:
Harmless fun is just that – harmless fun. Wolf whistling, jeering and making sexually provocative comments can be threatening and make a woman feel at best irritated but also scared and vulnerable. This could be seen as criminal behaviour and you could be arrested and charged. Sexual assault is any unwanted sexual activity.
I’d be interested to see whether this style of advert has a wider spread than just one particular borough, and what impact it has on the young men who see the posters.
- Found Feminism: an ongoing series of images, videos, photos, comics, posters or excerpts – anything really, which shows feminist ideas at work in the everyday world. Send your finds to [email protected]!
An Alphabet of Feminism #14: N is for Nanny
N
NANNY
Sonic Nurse
After the army of Important Academic Languages, and their Distinguished And Layered Relationship With Modern English, we reach this. Nanny has no real relation to Latin, Greek, French, Middle or even Old English, but derives from ‘a child’s corruption of the word nurse‘, tellingly akin to mamma. Nurse, it must be granted, has slightly more pedigree: it derives from the twelfth-century Old French term norrice, via the Latin nutricius (= ‘that suckles, nourishes’). It first appears in 1530 as a verb ‘to suckle’, and as a noun fifty years later, where it has the meaning we probably use most often: ‘one who takes care of the sick’.
Hattie McDaniel as Mammy, in Gone WIth The Wind. Image from http://www.gonemovies.com/
Nanny is first cited as an independent word meaning ‘a child’s nurse-maid’ in 1795, whence it proves itself as fluid as you would expect, also encompassing a quasi-proper name, Nana (Cf. Katy Nana in Mary Poppins, and the Newfoundland dog in Peter Pan). In 1830s America, we meet another deviant form of the same idea: mammy, a dialect corruption of mamma referring to ‘a black woman who looks after white children’. In extended form, mammy refers to a racial stereotype: ‘the loud, overweight and good natured black woman’, epitomised (in proper name form) in Gone With The Wind, and controversially brought to life in an Oscar-winning performance by Hattie McDaniel (above, right). And it’s not all the Americans: this phenomenon has certain similarities to the British use of native women as nursemaids in colonial India, ayahs, so named in reference to the Hindi word meaning ‘nurse’.
Dude Ranch Nurse
All this leads back to one place: the whistleblowing potential of an infant’s cries, in this instance naming the truly maternal figure in their formative years. But then, of course, until the late eighteenth century (the nineteenth, in France), no fashionable woman would even consider nursing her own child: on the contrary, wet nursing (sending your kid out to be suckled by a hired breast) was so common as to be automatic. Newborns were generally sent away for up to two years to be nourished, at a rate of anything from a few shillings a week to between £25 – 50 a year.
The reasons were as varied as the price, spanning the apparently trivial (social custom, and the desire to return to public life ASAP); the medical (fears for the mother’s health after the strain of lying in sans twenty-first century advantages), and the ‘medical’ (the widespread notion that sex with a nursing woman would damage her milk and therefore the child, and the belief that conception was impossible during this time anyway). It also seems possible that rampant infant mortality may have contributed: parents would send their children away until they had survived their most dangerous years, rather than invest emotional energy in a little’un who might well leave you before their first birthday.
That said, the enduring influence of the nanny qua mother-figure lasted long into the twentieth century, albeit mostly among the mega-aristocracy: The King’s Speech (2011) imagines the future George VI to have been closer to his nannies than his family; one of these, Charlotte Bill, was famously also an effective mother to his autistic and epileptic younger brother, Johnny (re-created in the 2003 BBC serial The Lost Prince).
Maggie’s Farm
Louis XIV of France painted with his wet-nurse, by Charles Beaubrun (c.1640)
The women who actually did all this nursing were inevitably of a lower social class than their clients – if not a different race – although they could earn good money (and possibly a nice pension) in the process. Here we tumble into a parallel nanny universe: the word in its more formal sense originating from another proper name. Through a bit of shuffling, good old Ann became first Nan and then Nanny, in which incarnation, around 1788, the word came to simply connote femininity, as in Nanny-goat (= ‘a female goat’, on which see also ‘Jenny Wren’ and ‘jenny-ass’). Like Doll, Nan’s trajectory suggests commonness, generic feminine identity, and while the dictionary is specific on the two nannies‘ separation, its stated origin in an infant’s mouth is by definition uncertain, language development fluid, and the connections between milking and the farmyard in need of little exposition – compare the nineteenth-century term baby farmer, a lower-class wet nurse happy to let her charges die because her one-off fee encouraged little else. The term was always pejorative, and synonymous with the dangerous, non-nurturing female.
In contrast, we have the nannies who stayed with one family for generations (like the mammy and the ayah abroad): these last are inevitably conventionally ‘older’ than their baby-farming colleagues, and presumably played a more extended mothering role. It is these strange insider-outsiders who appear in literature as bawdy and decrepit old women, inevitably depicted as their job title suggests: firmly on the side of the children they raise, to the extent that they will happily aid their improper sexual dalliances. It is thus that the Nurse appears in Romeo and Juliet, and in Keats’ The Eve of St. Agnes. The suspicion inevitably directed at these figures is certainly class-based: wet nursing’s detractors had been arguing for years that by withholding mothers’ milk parents risked their children absorbing working-class mannerisms – and criminal tendencies – from their surrogate teats.
Na na na na na.
The next stop for the nanny is in the inter-war years, with representatives including P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins, the poems of A. A. Milne, and Noel Streatfeild‘s legion of sexless ‘cottage loaf’ Nanas. Streatfeild’s children are almost invariably orphaned, and their Nana-figure keeps them nourished through ‘nursery ways’, a stubborn lack of sentimentality, and a feeling of permanence sadly lacking in the increasingly fragmented world of war-torn Britain. A similar idea is repeated in the 1964 Disney film of Travers’ novel, which makes the significant decision to backdate events to 1910, when the focus is on ‘moulding the breed’ for future colonial greatness:
A British nanny must be a general!
The future empire lies within her hands.
And so the person that we need
To mould the breed
Is a nanny who can give commands!Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964)
In so doing, Disney’s film situates the nanny as part of ‘tradition, discipline and rules’, nurturing Britain’s future rather than its children, and flying in the face of its very etymology.
Mr Banks’ song does, however, lead us to the final stop on nanny’s childishly simple word-journey: its modern incarnation as the Dreaded Nanny State (first appearing some time between the fifties and sixties). Always an opprobrious term (attempts to re-appropriate it have met with derision) critics of government intervention ranging from the welfare state to the smoking ban hark back to the nanny to point up ‘mollycoddling’, the infantalisation of the people (who are presumably thus reduced to the baby-talk of the nursery) returning to childhood with a fussy female at the helm. Wash your face, dearie.
NEXT WEEK: O is for Ovary
The Hearing Trumpet: Surrealism, Feminism and Old Lady Revolt
Regular readers will know I grew up in Cornwall, the land of old ladies. You have probably noticed that elderly women in popular culture are issued with just two personalities to share between them: the dear old biddy and the evil crone. This hasn’t been my experience of actual old women – though I have met biddies and crones both – on the whole I have met people, with all the complexity and variety that entails.
However one common characteristic did emerge, although this may be more to do with Cornwall than with old age: eccentricity. Some of the most bizarre and wonderful people I have ever met have been women in their 70s. Cornwall is full of them. And I can tell you they make ‘quirky’ young women look like amateurs. I aspire to join their ranks. Don’t want to put too many teddy bears in your cat’s room in case he feels crowded? Written a play about an easter egg’s journey to self-understanding? Eat raw onions like apples? Genuinely believe you have a telepathic connection with that robin? JOIN US.
So imagine my delight on receiving a novel almost entirely populated by said ladies. You may already know about Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington (if not, here’s a quick primer on The F Word and some decent-sized images of her work) but you may not know that she was also a writer. One of her books is The Hearing Trumpet, which features 92-year-old Marian Leatherby as its polite, sensible and intrepid heroine.
Marian’s adventures begin when she is given a hearing trumpet as a gift. She overhears her son and daughter-in-law’s plans to install her in a medieval Spanish castle that has been converted into a home for old ladies. There a mystery begins, involving a decidedly witchy 18thC Abbess, the Holy Grail, and a plate of poisoned brownies. Trying to describe the plot doesn’t really do it justice, just go and read it. If you mixed a bit of Angela Carter, Spike Milligan, Agatha Christie and Roald Dahl together you might get something close. It’s enchanting and funny, and makes for a refreshing encounter with Surrealism sans machismo.
In a cast of old women there are no crones and just one biddy: kind, timid Maude. Although even she is not what she appears to be. Instead the reader is introduced to glamorous and cynical Georgina, Veronica, who is blind, painting endless watercolours, dignified and enigmatic Christabel, religious visionary Natacha, graceful French Marquise Claude, frantic Anna, and Natacha’s devoted spiritual disciple Vera.
In her 2005 introduction to The Hearing Trumpet author Ali Smith wonders if the decision to write a story with such an elderly narrator and characters was “a reaction against Carrington’s Surrealist objectification as astonishingly gifted child-woman”. The idea of the femme-enfant was very important to the Surrealist movement, as her spontaneity and innocence (supposedly untainted by logic or rational thought) were felt to bring her closer to the unconscious. Though of course equating female creativity with youth left little room for the women associated with the movement to mature and develop as artists.
Exploration of the Sources of the Orinoco River, by Remedios Varo 1959
While the book is very definitely concerned with feminine experience, creativity and spirituality, there is no trace of an oppressive female essentialism. This is partly because old age has rendered most of the characters a little androgynous: Marian explains that she has “a short grey beard which conventional people would find repulsive. Personally I find it rather gallant.” But also because the book seems largely uninterested in restricting the feminine to the female.
As well as the ladies of Lightsome Hall there is Marian’s best friend Carmella, who writes letters to strangers, smokes cigars, brings port in a hot water bottle to evade confiscation, and devises audacious plans to spring Marian from the home. Their friendship is one of the loveliest aspects of the book, and was inspired by Leonora Carrington’s close friendship with fellow painter Remedios Varo.
Varo is less well known in the UK than Carrington, despite the success she found in her adopted home of Mexico – here are a few of her paintings. Their work shares some common themes and motifs, with both exploring mysticism and the significance of ritual, as well as drawing heavily on the natural world. In her biography of Varo, Unexpected Journeys, Janet Kaplan writes:
Traveling together into what the poet Adrienne Rich has called ‘the cratered night of female memory,’ they undertook a shared process of self-discovery, working together to probe the possibility of woman’s creative power. Through their exploration of hermetic and magical paths, they developed a common pictorial language, derived from the realms of domestic life, the fairy tale and the dream.
Their shared and similar experiences built a strong sense of mutual trust between them, not least the fact they had both recently been in detention – Carrington was incarcerated in a Spanish asylum following a mental breakdown, and Varo was interned in France for several months at the start of the Second World War. Carrington’s mistrust of institutions, family and doctors is very clear in The Hearing Trumpet, which ends with a joyful, absurd, anarchic revolution in society and in nature.
While they regularly spoofed their friendship in stories and letters to each other, its affectionate portrayal in The Hearing Trumpet is the best known, and particularly poignant now as Leonora Carrington is still alive and older than Marian Leatherby, but Remedios Varo died in 1963 in her early 50s.
It’s a strange and wonderful book, which I would heartily recommend to anyone with a taste for the peculiar and a playful sense of humour. Go on, it’ll brighten your January, trust me.
Found Feminism: Joop perfume advert
Real men wear pink, and not much else...
Whilst Christmas shopping I came across this little gem. Part of me isn’t sure how well this sits with the “found feminism” concept. Certainly it isn’t doing much to push back the frontiers of heteronormative dominance within advertising, and additionally the shift in focus from the traditional feminine body beautiful to the masculine version does not challenge expectations of what is sexually attractive, nor the link between money, sex and power.
On the other hand, it does stand out from the usual fare in at least being funny as well as easy on the eye. There’s also a nice knowing nod both away from the standard of “pink perfume is for girls”, and perhaps even towards the idea that being a “real man” could mean more than just having a wider range of colour choices.
If real men can wear pink and perfume and still be real men, then maybe they can do other things formally excluded from them by dint of socially conditioned gender boundaries.
That said, he does have the compensatory pretty lady and amazing abs, so perhaps those things excuse and allow for his momentary lapse into scent and cerise.
What do we think?
- Found Feminism: an ongoing series of images, videos, photos, comics, posters or excerpts – anything really, which shows feminist ideas at work in the everyday world. Send your finds to [email protected]!
Avatar – no, the other one.
Just trawling for images to use had me wanting to watch the whole series again! (Image and characters Copyright Nickelodeon productions.)
I’ve had a few people ask me about one of the presents I mentioned in my suggestions for Team BadRep’s Christmas list: the cartoon series Avatar – the last Airbender. Unlike some of the gift suggestions it’s not a specifically feminist item, but I recommended it because I think it’s awesome on many levels and feminist-friendly as well. (Some spoilers ahead!)
First of all, there’s a rough gender balance. The core group is made up of two boys and two girls. They are as important as each other on average – one of the boys is the title character, but the other is something of a clown figure who doesn’t have any of the powers that the two girls do. It’s not that clear-cut because everyone has a lot of growth over the series, but there is no “male hero and some sidekicks” dynamic going on here. They are all important, and talented in different ways.
The enemies are initially men (especially a teenage boy and his grandfather), but his sister and her female friends take even more of the villain roles later on (and are frankly better at them). When the core group gains another man, a woman who was previously a side character gets more screentime too.
What’s more interesting to me than strict number balance is that the roles for women are very, very good. The show is set in a fantasy world in which combat is a critical part of cultural identity and power, but if anything the women are more precise and technically proficient at fighting than the men. There is even an early scene where a blustering male fighter spars with an expert female warrior, assuming he’ll have to go easy on her, and she deliberately and calmly takes him apart. In the ‘enemy’ family, the sister has a greater knowledge and tighter focus of their family’s technique than anyone else.
Another thing it does well is to show real martial arts, and how women can be just as effective at them without falling into the typical trap of only being given the soft and gentle styles. In this story the arts are learned by tribe, and if either men or women show talent then they can perform them. So the main young woman in the group does Tai Chi (thought of as soft by anyone who hasn’t had to go up against it, seriously, bloody hell) but all the men of her tribe do too. In fact, she encounters prejudice from a teacher who won’t train her because he doesn’t see it as a woman’s role – so the show certainly didn’t assign her the style because it sees it as soft and feminine.
The other girl in the main group (and I mean girl, I don’t think she’s a teen yet?) knows the style which is the heaviest and most unmovable, based on rock. When you have a mixed group like this the female roles often just happen to result in “Invisible Woman with passive/protective powers”. Healer girlfriend, in other words. Not here – these female characters are determined, immensely capable in attack, and in some cases the most ruthless people in the show. The camera doesn’t cut away from the effects of their rage or violence either, as we’ve seen a trend recently where women aren’t shown equally during violent scenes. The fighting is an extension of their character, even their soul, so is shown in great detail because it is relevant and part of the storytelling.
The series is also very good on race. The “Tribes” are roughly based on Asian countries, with Japan, China and Tibet being obviously represented. The Water Tribe live at the poles (on the ice), and are darker skinned than everyone else. This is never once commented on: they are the Water tribe, of course they’re the colour they are. While there’s plenty of tension between the groups, there’s absolutely no racial hatred. Characters acknowledge that one of the tribes is being warlike right now, but they know that all four make up the world and never treat anyone as lesser based on skin colour. Those planning the long-term subjugation of other tribes are shown to be dangerously out of control and out of balance.
(This became a sore point when M Night Shyamalan made a Hollywood movie of the series and cast predominantly white actors as the all-Asian characters. And a British-Indian actor as the baddie, who ironically is the palest person in the cartoon series).
Most of all I recommend Avatar: The Last Airbender to everyone because it’s just so full of joy. The comedy is genuinely funny and never gets old; the sentiments are exactly what I want kids to be learning from TV. The characters are deep, flawed, and have development arcs, the women are not sidelined even though the cultural and fantasy setting could have made that easy and even likely. It celebrates establishing yourself but doesn’t glorify violence. It’s just superb, frequently beautiful and very admirable.
I’ve seen quite a lot of the anime series and movies which are popular in the West. I’d put this up as one of the best children’s shows I’ve seen in any format, an anime which holds its own alongside more famous adult fare such as Akira, Ghost in the Shell and Neon Genesis Evangelion etc.
It’s critical that we teach equality to our children from an early age and TV is still the best medium to reach the most people. I think this is a series you can choose without hesitation. Look for it in the post-Christmas sales!
There’s more good news too: a sequel series, The Legend of Korra is underway. The Avatar is reincarnated (and can contact their past incarnations, who are men and women of all the tribes). This sequel stars the next Avatar to be born – who is Korra, a teenage girl of the Water tribe.
Promo Image for The Legend of Korra, copyright Nickelodeon productions.
Despite running for several seasons and finishing a few years ago, Avatar: The last Airbender is still surprisingly unknown in the UK compared to the US. Have you seen it? Did you like it, from a feminist perspective? Share your thoughts with us!
Universal Tales
In American writing, there are three perfect books, which seem to speak to every reader and condition: “Huckleberry Finn,” “The Great Gatsby,” and “The Catcher in the Rye.”
That’s from the New Yorker obituary for JD Salinger. Reading it, I had much the same reaction as Cat Valente, who said:
“Jim and the Ghost” from ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ (public domain image from Wikipedia).
“Really? Every reader? Every condition? Even though none of those books are about, by, or can manage to conceal for long their contempt for women, and the extent to which one is about non-whites is at best left wincingly unexamined? … The defining characteristic for writing about spoiled rich white people is that it WILL NEVER speak to every reader in every condition. And Huck Finn may have been poor on paper but he exhibits the snotty certainty of his own awesomeness and freedom to do whatever he likes without significant punishment that surely speaks to the spoiled rich white bro demographic.”
She wonders what the flaw was in Slaughterhouse Five or Little Women that Huckleberry Finn didn’t also contain.
And her comments coincide with a furore over a new edition of Huckleberry Finn in which the publishers have decided that Twain’s many hundreds of uses of ‘the N word’ are too hot to print in the modern market. So they’re taking them out, replacing it with ‘Slave’ and deleting all uses of the term ‘Injun’ as well.
Mixed reactions to this online; even quite liberal commenters find that seeing the N-word written down is Not Okay today (to the point that I’m not going to put it here because I don’t want to bring that to this site.) Others are outraged, such as Emma Caulfield (who played ‘Anya’ in Buffy), who says on her twitter:
“UNDERSTAND this. Mark Twain wrote HF to show the absurdity of racism. He was one of the most profound forward thinkers of any time.”
Language is important, and in the same way that we try to be deliberately inclusive in the feminist arena by rejecting language which is sexist, ableist or casually tolerant of any kind of bigotry, seeing prejudices treated as acceptable on a page can influence people. This isn’t the first time the work has been censored – CBS made a tv version in 1955 which cut out all mention of slavery and cast a white actor as Jim. Niiiice try, but no.
I’m with Emma on this though: if you’re too young to realise that Huck (or Tom Sawyer) parroting the local prejudices was done deliberately to reflect badly on the society they were in, and their poor and uneducated backgrounds, then the story itself should be enough to demonstrate the inhumanity of racism.
…which isn’t to say that Twain doesn’t also play unacceptably on stereotypes of coloured people in the book for what seems like cheap comedy value at times, because he certainly does.
I think there’s a bigger opportunity here. Those three books most assuredly don’t speak to “every reader and condition” – so let’s find some that do!
Your suggestions please, for books which spoke to you directly, which touched your heart, or which you think have genuine near-universal appeal. Let’s make a new top three: the authors can be any nationality, the books originally in any language. Answers in the comment thread, go!
An Alphabet of Feminism #13: M is for Marriage
M
MARRIAGE
Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh.
Genesis 2.24
So begins marriage. In this day and age, most people think of such ‘cleaving’ as kinda cute, an emotional commitment “’til death do us part”; and indeed the union matrimony represents (‘bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh’) begins with the word’s Latin ancestor, the double-gendered maritus / marita (= ‘husband / wife’). Ever-efficient, the Romans join husband and wife in one word, giving us, in miniature, marriage’s first definition: ‘the relation between married persons; wedlock’.
Ooh little darlin’…
I do... Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride. Image from http://www.halloweenweb.co.uk/
But before all our newfangled post-Romantic notions of individualism, marriage was much less dewy-eyed. It required nothing more than parental consent, and its functions were social, religious and legal. Firstly, it acknowledged a sexual relationship and those children born within it, thus easing the financial burden of bastard upkeep on society and oiling the cogs of inheritance. Secondly, it was a Holy Sacrament, an institution to prevent sin, though it did not sanction guilt-free sex – too much fun with your wife, and it became adultery (= ‘pollution of the marriage bed’).
Finally – then as now – marriage linked families, dynasties, and countries together ‘in-law’, in a way that could be personal, symbolic, or world-changing: new money meeting impoverished aristocracy; the Venetian Doge annually ‘marrying’ the sea; Catherine of Braganza bringing England £300,000, Bombay and Tangier as her dowry. In extension, it helped negotiate the legal exchange of worldly goods, including a dower for the bride should she survive her groom, inheritance for the children, and the resolution of all money matters under the auspices of the pater familias. So it was impossible for a wife to run up debt, to own property, or, in any sense, to exist independently of her husband. In consequence, marriage became the Holy Grail for 99.9% of young women, who dreaded remaining financially dependent on rich relations or married sisters should the marriage-market reject them (as it did, if you were the wrong side of one in three aristocratic women).
…if U ain’t busy for the next 7 years…
Phew. In its second definition marriage takes up the legal challenge, becoming ‘the action, or act, of marrying; the ceremony by which two persons are made husband and wife’.
Dearly Beloved... Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin.
The non-specifics here are no accident: to the irritation of the early modern church, ‘contract marriages’ and Dodgy Marriage more generally (Scotch Marriages or Fleet Marriages) endured for centuries before the Marriage Act of 1753 put paid to such shenanigans and demanded a public service or none at all. Previously, ‘the ceremony by which two persons are made husband and wife’ could be an exchange of bent or halved coins, the presentation of a ring, or a declaration (‘I make you my wife’). There were certain caveats to this last, of course – you had to use the present tense (no conditionals), unless you used the future and then tumbled into bed: present consummation is present consent.
All very neat, in theory, although such marriages generally took place on the hoof between impetuous couples and only became of real significance once the bride fell pregnant or one or both of the parties got into difficulties. Then you get into semantics: what does ‘will’ mean, exactly? It’s an uncooperative word, conflating what you ‘want’ and what you ‘will do’. Church courts agreed, and many of those marriages that were challenged were dissolved, with an inevitably skewed impact on the would-be wife.
So marriage is as much about speech and silence as ‘cleaving’: moreover, much of its value depends on the weight society gives how you live (today, you can lose your state benefits if you ‘live with another person as if you are married‘). It also creates interesting problems if you are physically silenced before you can assert your consent (as happens in Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed), or if your marriage is explosively interrupted, as in Fassbinder’s film The Marriage of Maria Braun. Conversely, Renaissance actors wondered what God thought about marriages carried out on stage as part of a performance: valid or not? Why not? This whole idea is, in essence, the premise of Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride (2004), where nobody questions the legality of Victor’s (clearly accidental) declaration to the bride of the title, despite trying every other conceivable method to get him out of it.
…Let’s pretend we’re married and go all night.
The word marriage reflects this in a now-obsolete sense, as ‘intimate union’, antonymic to virginity. And here I nearly tripped up on another little tradition: breach of promise, a common law tort allowing a partner to sue their long-fled lover for damages based on the impact of such ‘intimate union’ but also on the value of language – ‘Does she know how you told me you’d hold me until you die? Well you’re still alive…’
This tort was overwhelmingly used by women, although originally payable to the father of a seduced girl, who had lost ‘services’ (make me a cuppa, love) because of her pregnancy. Later on, it became a means of quantifying waste of time, reputation and trousseau-money in a marriage market competitive enough that such things mattered. Although the tort was abolished in the UK in 1970, a version is still in use elsewhere: a jilted woman in Chicago is currently suing her fiance for the costs of her cancelled wedding, and ’emotional distress’. Whether or not she will succeed is unclear, but her early-modern precursors inevitably triumphed:
See my interesting client
Victim of a heartless wile!
See the traitor all defiant ,
Wears a supercilious smile!
Sweetly smiled my client on him
Coyly wooed and gently won him….W.S. Gilbert, Trial By Jury (1875)
Trial By Jury explains why the tort was so useful to jilted women, but also why it declined: by 1875 female financial options were expanding enough to change the public perception of such cases from ‘poor innocent maid vs. base seducer’ to ‘I ain’t sayin’ she’s a gold digger…’ So what began as a way to compensate gender inequality itself ended as a vehicle for misogyny, with stories of pretty girls luring men in and then threatening to do the legal equivalent of ‘thcreaming and thcreaming until i’m thick‘. What God has joined, let no man put asunder.
Further Reading:
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Check out Lawrence Stone’s The Road To Divorce: England 1530-1987, which tells you everything you need to know about everything.
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Sadly finished now, but keep an eye out for Amanda Vickery’s At Home With The Georgians, should it ever return to TV.
NEXT WEEK: N is for Nanny
A little note from BR Towers
Hey people,
I’d say “what a year”, but we’re not old enough, so … what a quarter.
Thank you to the sites that have plugged us, to the twitter users who’ve RT’d and Follow Friday’d us, to the people who met us at Ladyfest and emailed their support, and to our guest bloggers.
We’re turning out the lights for what we reckon’s a much-earned Christmas break now, but never fear, we’ll be back in 2011.
A tea break in the snow. We're just that hardcore.
In the three months since our launch in October:
- we’ve gone from a team of six permanent writers to nine – please welcome our newest permanent member Rhian Jones, of Velvet Coalmine fame, as seen recently in Marie Claire magazine!
- we’ve overshot the little goal we set ourselves of “200 twitter followers by Christmas!” by some way – woo!
This is all thanks to you guys, so like we said: THANK YOU, and don’t stop now! We’ve just gotten started.
What you can look forward to next year:
- We’re working out a way to make the artwork from The Alphabet of Feminism available for sale as a selection of prints, so if you dig Hodge’s artwork for this feature, watch this space! We’re also considering releasing the full Alphabet as a little hard copy book – let us know if that’s something you’d be interested in buying, perhaps as a springtime gift for friends of a bibliophilic bent.
- Found Feminism is set to continue – help us out and send us your snapshots of things you’ve seen that made you feel just that little bit better about life as a feminist today.
- We, er, carry on soapboxing, blurting with violent enthusiasm about things we like, and general tomfoolery ensues, or whatever. Yeah!
Merry Christmas! Have a great new year, too.
Rock on,
Team BadRep