In my Internet trawling yesterday, I came across this Hathor Legacy post (background: The Hathor Legacy is a blog about female characters in media, including comics and the like) on the Neverwhere TV series.
The blogger, Jennifer Kesler, critiqued the female characters (Door and Hunter), noting that Gaiman as scriptwriter avoided all of the predictable pitfalls for writers of women, and many of the less predictable one. Her main complaint was that the female characters were othered–were portrayed as distant and unreadable. She made excellent points about the difference between the way male and female emotions are shown in literature, and noted that after all, men and women aren’t so different, and the best way to write the opposite gender is simply to write them as humans.
The comment thread, for once, is as good as the post. Neil Gaiman himself showed up to comment, and the author and several commenters discussed the pitfalls of extrapolating a critique of one of the author’s works to his entire oeuvre, especially when one hasn’t read every one of those works.
Go ahead and read it. All of it. I’ll wait.
OK. I’ve got to defend Gaiman a bit here, since one of his female characters, Death (of course) is quite simply the reason I read comics. Having interviewed the man himself and specifically discussed female characters, I can say that Gaiman is far better at writing women and at getting into their heads than most other male writers, comic or otherwise. Kesler didn’t seem as familiar with his comics work, or the stories that actually do have female protagonists, and noted herself that she might be overreaching in comments.
Other than Death, whom I love, other infinitely real, screwed-up, believable Gaiman women include Rose Walker (one of my absolute favorites), Foxglove and Hazel, Delirium (the Brief Lives story being my favorite Sandman arc), Lyta Hall, and Coraline.
Gaiman has a wonderful essay up at his site titled “All Books Have Genders,” and in it he himself points out that the female characters in Neverwhere are stock characters.
So my question really is, what are you obligated to do when telling a story? Female comics readers like myself often complain of the lack of solid female lead characters. And as Kesler at the Hathor Legacy pointed out, we don’t mean “strong” female characters. We mean real female characters. And we mean that those characters should be the lead in their own book at least some of the time.
That doesn’t, contrary to popular belief, mean that we’re going to complain every time a book doesn’t star a woman. Particularly when those books are coming from authors that do a damn good job writing women and spend a large chunk of their time doing so. Gaiman gets a pass from me on Neverwhere both because the nature of the female characters serves the story–Richard Mayhew does see women as sort of alien creatures–and because he’s the man who created the characters I listed above.
Similarly, I don’t pick on the lack of female leads in Northlanders because Brian Wood is also the man who wrote Local, a story about a woman so real that the most common complaint about the book is that Megan “screws up.” Of course she screws up. If she were perfect, there’d be no story. Yet comic readers all too often seem uncomfortable with the idea of a woman that doesn’t fit into a box.
So while I don’t think every author owes us a top woman character all the time, there are plenty of them who could do better. And I think the best point to be taken from Kesler’s piece is that “strong” women aren’t enough. We need them to be real, to have feelings, to make mistakes, get in trouble, and get themselves out of trouble.
January 1st, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Thanks for the mention! I’m currently reading Coraline and will soon re-watch Neverwhere so I can see if my opinion shifts – or, if not, get a better grip on what’s bugging me and write a better review.
The argument you’re making interests me because it’s related to one I came to in comments, too. In an equal world, there would be stories in which women were othered to show that the male protagonist is insecure with women, and there would be stories in which men were othered to show the same about a female protagonist, and we’d recognize this as a literary device rather than a trope. The problem is that, right now, in our imbalanced world, othering women IS a trope. It’s something writers do because they’re not interested in women characters, or because they’ve followed the lead of other writers, and have no use for women characters unless a vagina is required for the story. But naturally, it’s difficult to recognize when a trope is being used as a literary device, while nearly everyone else is using it as a trope. We’ll see what I get out of re-watching Neverwhere.
January 1st, 2009 at 10:13 pm
Another way to say “not strong women, real women” is to say “women with agency” – women who act in the story, who have their own goals and motivations, and are not merely a reward, a nemesis, or a pretty toy. Hunter, in Neverwhere, lacks agency, but I would think that most of the characters in that novel (with the exceptions of Richard and Door) lack agency – it’s not gendered, though we are used to seeing this in a gendered way. I’ve noticed that most of the writers who write good female characters (in comics, Greg Rucka, Warren Ellis, Gail Simone and Brian K Vaughan, for example) also write good villains, good men, good gay characters, and good characters of colour. They almost never create or deform a character to make their storytelling easier and lazier. Of course, when they do, the disappointment is correspondingly larger.
SPOILERS FOR Y: THE LAST MAN
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The murder at the end of this book was a particular slap in the face because the woman killed was suddenly reduced – both openly in the text and less directly for the reader – to the status of a prize that Yorick couldn’t have. For such a terrific character, this was a terrible end. It was shocking, but only because it was so disappointing. I’m only glad that it was the end of the series so we didn’t have to watch grief fetishising.
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January 2nd, 2009 at 9:41 am
@lilacsigil-
I’m going to have to disagree with your assessment of her death. (Spoilers ahoy!) I understand what you mean, but that’s just not what I got out of it.
For me, 355′s death was ultimately a tragedy for her, because here was a character whose humanity had been so long submerged by “duty”– She doesn’t even have a real name, she’s just a number. At the end of YtLM, she gives up her gun (a symbol of both her non-identity and masculinity), buys a dress (a symbol of femininity), and tells Yorick her real name (and by doing so, reclaiming it as her own identity)–and then is shot dead before she can really enjoy the life she wants.
But that’s just my 2 cents.
January 2nd, 2009 at 12:04 pm
I’m with Lilacsigil on the Y ending–I felt like it just jerked the rug out from under the character. That’s an essay in itself, though.
Jennifer, thanks for checking in! Have you read Sandman at all? Because I’d be interested in your take on Gaiman’s female characters in Sandman. I love your blog!
January 2nd, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Sarah, I did actually read some Sandman years ago, and I liked it, but that was before I really started paying attention to gender issues. I’d have to give it another look now. BTW, it looks like it’s been retooled into a number of volumes on Amazon – which one(s) should I try to get hold of?
January 2nd, 2009 at 7:18 pm
As I’ve written on Jennifer’s blog, I think a lot of male writers are paralysed by the thought of appearing mysoginist, and so write “strong” female characters who never make mistakes and have no flaws or weaknesses, and so are not interesting or believable characters. Male characters, even heroic characters, are allowed, even expected, to make mistakes and have weaknesses to try and overcome. As you point out, when Brian Wood writes a woman who “screws up”, some readers react against it – but if Megan was male, they probably wouldn’t.
My least favourite kind of male-written female character is the Woman Who Is Always Right. Hero acts, heroine tells him whether he did the right thing of not. And it’s usually not, loudly, and sometimes violently.
When I started my last webcomic serial, “Ness”, I felt somehow transgressive because I was writing a female protagonist who ultimately gets it completely wrong, and has flaws she fails to overcome. My current comic, “The Cattle Raid of Cooley”, also features a prominent female character who drives a large part of the story but (spoilers!) ultimately doesn’t get what she wants. Both the endings were given to me by the ancient stories I’ve adapted them from, but I hope I’ve managed to make their journeys believable.
But that’s enough blowing my own trumpet. I agree with you – Gaiman is very good at writing women as people with flaws and agency, and also very good at writing from the point of view of male eejits who just don’t understand women at all.
January 8th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
On the subject of that scene in “Y” (again, SPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILER):
Moments before Alter pulls the trigger, Yorick is comparing 355 and himself to the main characters of “Moonlighting” (“You worried I’m gonna confuse you with Bruce Willis?” “**** that, Three-Fifty. I’m Cybill, *you’re* Bruce.”) That’s what convinces her to stay with him – and then she dies. For me, that was the really tragic part: just about every time a story dangles the possibility of a male-female relationship with the roles reversed, one party dies (“Strangers in Paradise”, arguably “Firefly”) or else they see the error of their ways and return to the traditional model (“W Juliet”).
Humble apologies if I hijacked the thread for too long…