Among Others by Jo Walton

There are some awful things in the world, it’s true, but there are also some great books.

Among Others is written in the form of the diary of fifteen-year-old Morwenna Phelps. It’s set in 1979 and 1980, not long after an accident that killed Morwenna’s twin sister Morganna and left her with a disabled leg. Mori grew up in South Wales, but after her sister’s death she moved to England to live with the father she had never met – mostly because that meant she could escape her mother. She ends up being sent to boarding school by her father’s sisters, and spends a year discovering interlibrary loans, book clubs, and the solace that can be found in intellectual community – besides trying to learn how to live with the past, that is. This is only one level of Among Others: in addition to this, there’s the fact that Mori can do magic, that her mother is a witch, and that the accident that forever changed her life was the result of an attempt to put a stop to her plans.

Among Others is not the story of two teenagers trying to defeat a sorceress and save the world by the means of magic; it’s the story of what happens after that. I should start by saying that I don’t like the idea of reading fantasy as a collection of symbols that need to be decoded. I mean, at one level that’s how fantasy works, but as Ursula Le Guin has explained so well, the reason why it’s fantasy is exactly because there is no one-to-one correspondence between these symbols and imagery and meanings that could be expressed in plain language. There are emotional truths in these stories beyond what we know how to articulate. So when I say that the emotional truths in Among Others matter more than the fantasy elements per se, I am by no means dismissing the latter or saying that this distinguishes it from “ordinary” fantasy. The truths we have in this particular story have to do with growing up, with finding somewhere where you belong, with surviving unspeakable grief, and with turning to books not to escape real live, but to learn how to make sense of it.

This is a very quiet and understated novel, and it’s perhaps more about reading than about anything else. It’s about trying to find out about books you’ll love before the age of the Internet (I hadn’t yet been born at the time when the book is set, but I’m still old enough that I can relate to Mori’s appreciation for editions that listed what else the author had written – because really, how else would you find out back then?); it’s about encountering the books that will shape you into the person you are to become for the very first time; it’s about the ideas these books contain – how they find their way into your life and change how you see the world. Cory Doctorow has said it best:

For though Morwenna’s life has much that makes her unhappy, from her family to her pariah status to her gamey leg, these books are not an escape for her. She dives into them, certainly, and goes away from the world, but she find in them a whole cognitive and philosophical toolkit for unpicking the world, making sense of its inexplicable moving parts, from people to institutions. This isn’t escapism, it’s discovery.

Which brings me to my favourite thing about Among Others: the fact that it’s such a completely candid account of a teen girl’s intellectual growth. It’s rare to find a book that captures this process so well, probably due to our tendency to edit our memories as we grow and change and to attempt to harmonise them with the person we later became. These attempts to to gloss over things or rewrite history are not necessarily a result of dishonesty, but rather of the very human tendency to convince ourselves that the things, ideas and principles that matter the most to us have been around for much longer than they actually have. Once something becomes a part of us, it’s easy to lose sight of a time when this wasn’t so.

Among Others, however, does manage to resist this tendency. For example, Mori writes about going to see a production of The Tempest with her school and not being happy with the fact that Prospero was cast as a woman. She says:

I suppose the way it didn’t really work was in Prospero and Miranda’s relationship. It didn’t work as mother and daughter to me, at least, not and keep Prospero sympathetic. I read him as a man who is remote, and good to bother with a toddler, but a woman like that would be too unnatural for sympathy. Which isn’t to say I think women should be stuck with childrearing, but—how interesting that what comes across as doing the best he could in a man looks like neglect in a woman.

This may be a pretty cringe-worthy thing to say, but goodness knows I thought much worse when I was fifteen. And what’s so interesting about this passage is the fact that Mori is starting to notice that there’s a double-standard at work here. She responds the way all of us have been socialised to respond to neglectful mothers versus neglectful fathers, but then she thinks, “Wait a minute”. And she does so in a way that feels entirely realistic. All through the book, her moments of cluelessness, ignorance or naivety are managed just as effectively as this. Her struggles with ideas are never heavy-handed; you don’t feel the author as a puppet master in the background pulling the strings. On the contrary, Mori’s voice feels absolutely genuine. And as a result, readers can smile when they see her refer to James Tiptree Jr. as a he, or when she says she’ll save I Capture the Castle for when she’s in the mood for a good medieval siege – but we smile with real fondness, rather than patronisingly or with the urge to pat her on the head.

There’s a plotline in Among Others I would love to discuss with someone – with someone who’s read the book, as unfortunately there isn’t much that can be said about it without spoilers. It has to do with Wim, a boy Mori meets in her sci-fi book club and feels attracted to. I suppose it’s an illustration of the double edge of the belief that Woman as Victim and Man as Sexual Predator is the “natural” way of things. Until the world changes radically, I’ll always believe that women have a lot more to lose in terms of reputation, and that they’re punished much more harshly for what are perceived as sexual misdemeanours than men will ever be. But inequality, power imbalances, and the world’s refusal to believe that girls can also have sexual agency also have their repercussions for boys. It’s a thorny issue, though, and a difficult one to convey well. The way it has been portrayed here can perhaps be read in a way that makes me quite uncomfortable, which is why I’d love to have someone to talk about it with.

I can’t resist finishing this post with a photo of the dedication page of Among Others, which put a big smile on my librarian-in-training face. At a time when the belief that books and libraries are nonessential is becoming frighteningly widespread, this is a very opportune story indeed.


Favourite bits:

I sat on the bench by the willows and at my honey bun and read Triton. There are some awful things in the world, it’s true, but there are also some great books. When I grow up I would like to write something that someone could read sitting on a bench on a day that isn’t all that warm and they could sit reading it and totally forget where they were or what time it was so that they were more inside the book than inside their own head. I’d like to write like Delany or Heinlein or Le Guin.

Tolkien understood about the things that happen after the end. Because this is after the end, this is all the Scouring of the Shire, this is figuring out how to live in the time that wasn’t supposed to happen after the glorious last stand. I saved the world, or I think I did, and look, the world is still here, with sunsets and interlibrary loans. And it doesn’t care about me any more than the Shire cared about Frodo.

They read it too:
Chasing Ray
Stainless Steel Droppings
Bookworm Blues

(Yours?)

And if you have a few moments to spare, Jo Walton’s post for John Scalzi’s Big Idea feature is well worth reading.

Read More......

Oh Dear

(Click to enlarge.)

Don’t say a word, my friends. I think I’ve got no choice but do what C.B. James suggested: admit that I have a problem, stop worrying about it, and do my best to enjoy it. Also, might be a good idea to stay away from charity shops, used bookshops, and the library’s discard shelves for a while.

In other news, guess who got an internship at one of the coolest libraries around? (Elizabeth Gaskell was a member!) I’ll be working at this place twice a week for the rest of the term, on a project that has to do with Victorian biographies. This is a required part of my MA in Library and Information Management, but I didn’t dare hope for a placement that would fit my passions and interests as well as this. I’ll be starting next week – wish me luck!

Read More......

The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft by Claire Tomalin

As most of you probably know, the Year of Feminist Classics reading group has recently been reading and discussing A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft. As I said when I shared my thoughts on Wollstonecraft’s manifesto, she struck me as a person I would love to read more about; Claire Tomalin’s The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft was therefore the perfect follow up to Vindication, and it only confirmed my sympathy for, and my great interest in, Mary Wollstonecraft the human being.

Claire Tomalin’s biography manages to be sympathetic and stern in equal measure. It’s clear that Tomalin has an interest in her subject (a given for any biographer, I assume, though not all biographies show it as clearly as this) and a lot of respect for her ideals. But she also doesn’t turn a blind eye to the moments when Mary acted with disregard for the feelings of anyone other than herself, or the times when her actions ended up harming those who were close to her. There were occasions – for example, that of her role in the dissolution of her sister Eliza’s marriage – when I would have judged her less harshly than Tomalin seems to, but the fact that I can tell this at all attests to how easy it is to separate fact from opinion in this book. I quite appreciated the honesty of Tomalin’s approach: she inevitably put something of herself into her writing, but readers can very easily see when this is happening and know where to draw the line.

The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft covers a lot of events I was already familiar with: I’ve read quite a few books about Mary Shelley and the Romantic circle, and most of them include at least a chapter on her mother’s life. But The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft gives us a lot more than just the dramatic bits, such as her love affairs, extramarital pregnancy, or suicide attempts. It also gives readers a detailed portrait of the intellectual climate in which Mary lived, and of how this climate helped shape her ideas. I appreciated this aspect of the book more than anything else.

Claire Tomalin’s biography also differs from previous accounts of Wollstonecraft’s life I’d read because it tries to show readers her life from the inside. Of course, this can only be achieved to a certain extent, but Tomalin had a lot of material to draw from, and as a result she does psychological insight extremely well. In addition to this, she does a great job of showing that, as Emily pointed out in a comment recently, Wollstonecraft was someone whose ideas were constantly evolving – and this was in no way a bad thing. Her inconsistencies were extensively discussed by the Feminist Classics reading group (myself included), but for example: the writing of Vindication predates her relationship with Imlay, and there’s no reason why she, or indeed any of us, should remain tied to what she once thought and said for the rest of her life.

Tomalin is particularly perceptive when it comes to Mary Wollstonecraft’s attitudes towards female sexuality, both as laid out in Vindication and as later demonstrated by the facts of her life. The social and intellectual context in which she was writing was that of a somewhat puritanical community; later on she lived in France, which had comparatively more relaxed mores, and it was there that she met the father of her eldest daughter. These experiences naturally had an impact on both her ideas and her life. As Tomalin puts it:

It was almost impossible to approach the question of sexual feelings without guilt in England and Scotland, amongst the thinking classes at any rate; even freethinkers were troubled by it. Hume, for instance, had categorized the sexual appetite as obviously the most gross and vulgar of all. From such a perspective, women, who aroused (as a rule) the gross appetite, were all too easily held to blame for it and consigned to the role of temptresses and distractions from the serious business of life. The Dissenting love of domesticity and early marriage was one way of dealing with the problem, since a woman placed in the context of family life was less disturbing than one removed from it, standing alone as a claimant to an individual voice amongst the individual voices of men. The hold of Paradise Lost over the Dissenting imagination was very powerful.

What also seems to me almost impossible is that Mary would fail to absorb some of these ideas, even as she struggled against them. Perhaps her insistence on motherhood as the most important role of a woman’s life also ties in with this. On a related note, I quite liked this passage:

[Mary] adopted the view, shared later by many suffragettes, that sexuality was wrong in itself, redeemed only by parenthood, and largely imposed on women by men. She even went so far as to speak disapprovingly of husbands who ‘seduced’ their wives, and expressed the view that it was better for marriage to exclude passionate love.
Her view may have been based part on ignorance of the sexual nature of women, though it seems unlikely: Fuseli’s conversation alone should have enlightened her. More probably it was something she felt she ought to say, an accepted view among her more innocent and respectable friends. Or again, it may have been what the vast majority of women really felt in an age when there was no effective birth control. After the first excitement and flattery of young love, sex was indeed something imposed by men upon women, which they chiefly wished to avoid because of its likely consequences. The greater sexual enthusiasm of French women and English prostitutes probably rested on their command of a simple birth-control device: the sponge.

Yet later on, in her unfinished novel Maria: Or, The Wrongs of Woman, she made “the outspoken assertion that women had sexual feelings and rights, and that the supposed refinement which tried to obscure this was actually degrading.” More than as an inconsistency, I see this as a sign of a constant evolution in her thinking, and I admire her all the more for it.

In regards to Vindication, Claire Tomalin seems to see it as more of an emotional outpouring than as a cogent piece of work (which doesn’t mean it lacks good arguments, of course), and I can see why she’d say that. It seems that Mary always meant to go back and write a second part of her treatise, but sadly she never got around to it before her untimely death.

In the final chapter of this biography, “Aftermath and debate”, Tomalin analyses how her ideas were picked up by other people. Sadly, after the damage that her husband William Godwin’s memoir did to her reputation, this took the shape of a repudiation far more often than of a natural sequence. For example, Wollstonecraft’s friend Amelia Opie wrote Adeline Mowbray as an illustration of Mary and Godwin’s ideals about marriage and relationships. I hadn’t heard of this novel until Emily reviewed it recently, and if you read her excellent post you’ll see that Opie’s tone is in fact strongly judgemental. According to Tomalin, this was a consequence of not only the social backlash against Wollstonecraft, but also of Opie having a bit of a personal vendetta against her former friend, due to her closeness to her husband the painter John Opie in life. Whatever her motivations, Opie was one of the people who tried to dissociate themselves from Mary in the years that followed her death. On the other hand, there’s the example of Mary Hays (whose work Iris reviewed recently), who remained ideologically aligned with Wollstonecraft for the whole of her life. Unfortunately, she ended up being just as quickly dismissed as Wollstonecraft herself. But despite this backlash, I am sure we’ll be seeing the ripples of Wollstonecraft’s life and work time and again as we move through the Year of Feminist Classics project.

The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft was not only an excellent account of an extraordinary woman’s life, but also a great introduction to a cultural, social and intellectual context that can’t be dissociated from her ideas if we are to make full sense of them. I wish I had read it before Vindication, but I’m glad that I at least read it now.

I’ll leave you with two more interesting passages:

Instead of the perfectible woman, the perfect lady: instead of inaugurating an age of natural rights restored and equal partnership with enlightened men, Mary died just in time to avoid the ludicrous sight of her sex being hoisted on to a new and supremely uncomfortable pedestal (those members of her sex, that is, whose menfolk could afford so to elevate them). Ladies, though intellectual inferior, were henceforth to be morally superior, so that for them it was a privilege to make sacrifices, to submit to authority with good grace, and to deny to themselves what they really wanted, if indeed they ever arrived at the point of knowing what there might be to want.

She was tough – the role of governess came naturally to her; her ideas were enduring and, in practical terms, more successful than Carlyle dreamed. If she was not the perfect heroine, she was at least, like Fanny Burney’s Elinor, an anti-heroine to be reckoned with. She got herself an education as best she could, she wooed her own men, and was sometimes selfish and insensitive, sometimes comical. She endured ridicule and beat it down by sheer force of personality; she faced extreme unhappiness with the outrage of one determined to impose her will on fate; and, while the world busied itself with great concerns, she spoke up, quite loudly, for what had been until then a largely silent section of the human race.

(Have you posted about this book too? Let me know and I’ll be glad to link to you.)

Read More......

So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ

This is the moment dreaded by every Senegalese woman, the moment when she sacrifices her possessions as gifts to her family-in-law; and worse still, beyond her possessions she gives up her personality, her dignity, becoming a thing in the service of the man who has married her, his grandfather, his grandmother, his father, his mother, his brother, his sister, his uncle, his aunt, his male and female cousins, his friends. Her behaviour is conditioned: no sister-in-law will touch the head of any wife who has been stingy, unfaithful or inhospitable.

Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter is an epistolary novella dealing with issues surrounding women’s rights in Senegal, and it’s the second January selection for the Year of Feminist Classics project. The novel is written in the form of a long better from a recently widowed woman, Ramatoulaye, to her best friend, Aîssatou. The two women have had to deal with similar situations in their marriages. I don’t want to give the whole story away, so suffice to say that they have reacted very differently to the tradition of men acquiring a second wife. But this doesn’t mean, of course, that the way they experienced these events intellectually and emotionally was all that different at all.

So Long a Letter is an insightful and subtle novella, and it packs a lot in just under a hundred pages. It moves beyond Ramatoulaye and Aîssatou’s individual stories to analyse the wider social, cultural, political and religious climate that encourages women to be thought of as disposable. I’m sure I would have gotten a lot more out of this aspect of the book if I had more context when it comes to Senegalese culture and political history, but that’s of course my failing rather than Bâ’s.

What spoke to me the most, then, was the way Mariama Bâ subtly compares and contrasts the stories of Ramatoulaye and Aîssatou’s lives. It probably goes without saying that I love feminism, and that I feel nothing but complete gratitude and appreciation for the ongoing work of giving women full human status, not merely in words but also in deeds. And yet there’s sometimes the danger that some person or other’s definition of feminism will become a new mould into which women are expected to fit – which is the last thing we want to happen. It was with relief, then, that I noticed that So Long a Letter did a wonderful job of avoiding this trap by having two characters react to their husbands’ bigamy differently and casting no judgement or accusations on either one of them.

Yes, life goes better for one of these women, and it’s not difficult to venture a guess as to where Mariama Bâ’s sympathies mainly lie. Yet I felt that she was saying, “There’s this, and there’s also this”. The solution isn’t one course of action or the other: life is far too complex for that. Instead, both choices are presented as valid possibilities and taken seriously accordingly. Some women will be able to take previously inconceivable revolutionary steps, while others will follow convention while suffering in silence inside. But both deserve our respect, and we can’t really dismiss the latter as unwilling or unable to contribute to social change.

This is also connected with Bâ’s unflinching exploration of the role women themselves play in perpetuating the social climate in which misogyny thrives. I imagine that it’s very difficult to do this without coming across as believing that women “bring it onto themselves” or any other such silly notion, but again, I think Bâ manages splendidly. As the passage I shared at the beginning of this post says, their behaviour is conditioned, and this is not an easy cycle to break away from.

And yet (spoilers ahead) I absolutely loved that Ramatoulaye did break the cycle in her own way. Her reaction to her daughter’s pregnancy is a first step in this direction. Yes, she still cares about the convention that demands that women be chaste and modest and pay close attention to their reputations, but she’s able to give her child the love and support she needs instead of shaming her. This might not be the kind of action that is usually perceived as a contribution to social change, but it’s certainly no small start.

They read it too: Winstondad’a Weblog, Evening All Afternoon, Amy Reads, Dragonfly419, Rat’s Reading, Rebecca Reads, Baffled Books

And don’t forget to check the Year of Feminist Classics blog for more thoughts and perspectives.

Read More......

Ugh

I had a bit of a health mishap this past week, which would explain why I fell from the face of the earth (don’t worry, I’m okay now). It’ll probably take me a few days longer to get back on my feet, but the bookish chatter will eventually return to this space.

Meanwhile, Google Reader will inevitably get the Mark All as Read treatment, but I’d love it if you told me if I missed anything interesting. I really really mean it. I know people are often shy about leaving links to their own blogs, so feel free to point me towards someone else’s blog too. It will help keep me informed and entertained while I recover. You want to help keep me entertained, right?

Read More......

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

Black Swan Green is set in a fictional small town in Worcestershire of the same name during the early 1980’s. It’s an episodic novel that follows thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor for twelve months, each chapter dealing with the events of a month. Jason’s life is marked by his struggle with a speech impediment he has nicknamed “Hangman”, and he lives in mortal fear of what a wide knowledge of these struggles would do to his already precarious social standing. Over the course of the year, Jason also has to deal with problems in his parents’ marriage, with the Falklands War and its impact on his small community, and with school bullying, no to mention the general business of growing up.

Black Swan Green reminded me quite a bit of Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, even though the two novels have quite different tones. But both are coming-of-age stories whose protagonists deal with some of the same things, and both have far more going on under the surface than it might seem at first glance. But they also have very different narrative structures: like Raych was saying the other day, Black Swan Green is tantalizing. The chapters will often end just when that particular episode has reached its climax, after witch Mitchell will take his sweet time to let us know what actually happened.

I worry that by telling you this I’m making Mitchell’s narrative technique sound both annoying and gratuitous, but the thing is, it really isn’t. Black Swan Green works because it has emotional, if not narrative, continuity. The style reinforces the theme that it’s not so much what happens as it is what a certain experience feels like for an individual that matters. What shapes us, what makes us how we are, aren’t so much the raw events of our lives but how we live them. The interplay between style and themes, then, is quite cleverly done – and it works beautifully.

One of my favourite things about Black Swan Green was how well it captured the cruelty of being young. Middle school was by far my least favourite period of my life to date, and this novel reminded me of why. It’s very easy to underestimate, in retrospect, just how ruthless thirteen-year-olds can be. The other thing I loved about it was Mitchell’s insightful analysis of maleness as a social construct – in this case, the construct is a very narrow little box into which Jason Taylor most definitely doesn’t fit.

I apologise in advance for relating every book I read lately to Delusions of Gender, but yes, that’s going to keep happening for a while. The stereotype of the Man From Mars (or what some people out there are getting very rich saying is the Honest To Goodness Biological Truth) is that of a creature just barely capable to make sense of his own feelings, who finds empathising an insurmountable challenge, and who is completely and utterly unable to properly articulate any emotions.

This does, in fact, correspond to the outward behaviour of many boys in Black Swan Green, but the reasons for this are completely different from what one Dr. Leonard Sax and his ilk would have us believe. Of course, by explaining this in essentialist terms you’re basically telling any boy who doesn’t fit the mould, “You’re a freak of nature”. Jason most certainly doesn’t fit the mould: not only does he have feelings and is perfectly capable of verbalising them, but – shock of shocks! – he writes poetry in his spare time. He publishes his poetry in the parish journal under a different name (of course), and takes every precaution not to be outed as anything other than a “normal” boy.

But eventually Something Happens, something that makes Jason break one of the unwritten rules of boyhood, and as a result he’s made to feel like an outsider (even more so than before, that is) and constantly bullied. David Mitchell’s portray of the culture of traditional masculinity at work is absolutely brilliant. Believing that men still very much have the upper hand in the world when it comes to political, economic and social power does not, of course, equate saying that their lives are always peachy and that masculinity isn’t also full of limits and narrow corners and little dangerous areas that need to be navigated with caution. Black Swan Green is a good reminder of that.

Bits I liked:

Kids who’re really popular get called by their first names, so Nick Yew’s always just ‘Nick’. Kids who’re a bit popular like Gilbert Swinyard have sort of respectful nicknames like ‘Yardy’. Next down are kids like me who call each other by our surnames. Below us are kids with piss-take nicknames like Moran Moron or Nicholas Briar who’s Knickerless Bra. It’s all ranks, being a boy, like the army. If I called Gilbert Swinyard, just ‘Swinyard’, he’d kick my face in. Or if I called Moron ‘Dean’ in front of everyone, it’d damage my own standing. So you’ve got to watch out.

People’re a nestful of needs. Dull needs, sharp needs, bottomless-pit needs, flash-in-the-pan needs, needs for things you can’t hold, needs for things you can. Adverts know this. Shops know this. Specially in arcades, shop’re deafening. I’ve got what you want! I’ve got what you want! I’ve got what you want! But walking down Regent’s Arcade, I noticed a new need that’s normally so close up you never know it’s there. You and your mum need to like each other. Not love, but like.

‘Now. Apologists for gypsies will inevitably drone, “What do you have against these people?” I say, “How much time have you got? Vagrancy. Theft. Sanitation. Tuberculosis…” I missed what he said next, thinking how the villagers wanted the gypsies to be gross, so the grossness of what they’re not acts as a stencil for what the villagers are.

Reviewed at:
books i done read
Leeswamme’s Blog
Reading Matters
Bending Bookshelf
Presenting Lenore

(Have I missed yours?)

Read More......

The Sunday Salon - Books, Books, Books!

We’re only two weeks into the New Year, and already I’ve gone a tiny little bit crazy on the acquisitions department. But before you look at me that way, let me say that to my defence most of these were either birthday gifts or the result of leftover holidays gift cards. Also, I will behave myself in the future (once that last Amazon order I’m waiting for arrives, that is). This will not set the tone for the year, nope nope nope. Without further ado, my loot:

• A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen - Plus..
  
  
• So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ - ...and...
  
  
• The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill [and Harriet Taylor] – ...are all part of the Year of Feminist Classics reading list. If they prove even half as interesting as Vindication has, we’re in for quite a ride. I can’t wait to discuss these with the other participants.
  
  
• How Beautiful the Ordinary: Twelve Stories of Identity edited by Michael Cart – (Hey, this is edited by Michael Cart! I quoted him repeatedly when writing a grad school essay on YA literature recently, because he’s that awesome and quote-worthy). An anthology of glbtq short stories that I won at the awesome Karen Mahoney’s blog (thank you again!). I can’t wait to read it.
  
  
• I Have Waited, And You Have Come by Martine McDonagh – I know nothing about this book! I found it inside a box at university with a sign saying “Free books – help yourself”. Initially I was really excited because I thought the author was Martin McDonagh, an Irish playwright whose work I really love. But nope, it’s Martine. Who knows, maybe I have discovered a real gem. And hey, free book, right?

• Chasing Redbird by Sharon Creech – Back with I read Ruby Holler, several of you recommended this and Walk Two Moons as the places where Sharon Creech’s true brilliance was to be found. I have recently finished Walk Two Moons and it was indeed as brilliant as advertised, so I couldn’t resist this one when I found it at a charity shop.
  
  
• The Very Thought of You by Rosie Alison – I probably don’t need to say much about this, as it made the rounds when the Orange Prize shortlist was announced last year. I remember it got mixed reviews, but considering how much I adored books like Saplings and Doreen, I think it will work for me.
  
  
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark – My very first Muriel Spark! All Claire’s fault, of course.
  
  
• Kissing the Witch by Emma Donogue – A collection of glbtq fairy tale retellings. I’ll be very surprised indeed if I don’t love it.
  
  
• Uglies by Scott Westerfeld – Finally! Found this for only 10p at the library. Oh libraries, I love you so.
  
  
• Enchanted Glass by Diana Wynne Jones – Another library discard *clutches book to chest*. It actually makes me sad that it’s not being kept forever and ever and ever.
  
  
• The 10PM Question by Kate de Goldi – I got this mostly because Margo Lanagan praised it. It will also come in handy for Maree’s Kiwi YA Challenge, which I appear to have joined because of my complete and utter inability to say no to Maree.
  
  
• Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins – Another Book I Got Because An Author I Love Recommended It: this time John Green. I’ve actually started it already and it’s charming so far. I can’t resist a good boarding school story.
  

• Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword by Barry Deutsch
  
  
• Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse
  
  
• Local by Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly – Wheeee, new comics! Dear lovely people who get me comics for my birthday: I love you.

What about you? Have you acquired any good books lately, or are you using the new year as an excuse to finally get the stacks under control? And have you read any of these? What should I read first?

Read More......

Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine

In the brilliant Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences, Cordelia Fine draws from neuroscience, social psychology and sociology to provide one of the most satisfying rebuttals of gender essentialism I have ever come across. Gender essentialism – the idea that men and women are so different as to be almost members of different species, and that these differences are hardwired – is as alive and thriving today as it was in the time of our Victorian ancestors. Cordelia Fine doesn’t dispute that hormones, brain chemistry and other bodily processes and characteristics affect our personality and behaviour. Her point is rather that differences among individuals are much, much larger than differences across entire groups like males and females; and thus that in the end, organising the whole of society around these categories is no less arbitrary than to do so around left-handed versus right-handed people.

If I were rich, I would purchase a couple of hundred copies of Delusions of Gender and then stand in a street corner handing them out to random passer-bys: that’s how much I loved this book, and how important I believe it to be. As Fine herself acknowledges in the afterword, Delusions of Gender doesn’t really present any new ideas, but it provides a critical overview of what is (or isn’t) known about gender and the brain. This is actually what I think makes it such an important book: it’s a brilliantly condensed and lucid version of issues that continue to impassion both the scientific community and the popular press – and that continue to affect real lives to a degree that we tend to underestimate.

Fine is herself a neuroscientist, and she approaches every piece of research she analyses seriously. She carefully considers every hypothesis, even the ones that go against her instincts. So when she critiques ideas that some take to be “scientific truths”, she’s certainly not coming at it from an anti-intellectual or anti-scientific perspective. What she does is both take a close look at the methodology of several studies and provide counterpoints to their conclusions. When it comes to gender and the brain, there’s a lot we still don’t know. But it turns out there’s also a whole lot that people are claiming has been “scientifically proved” based on a small handful of studies with serious methodological flaws, or even on simple anecdotal evidence. This happens both in popular books of the Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus variety and in serious scientific publications that ought to know better. Fine also comes down hard on what she calls neurosexism: the recent tendency to wrap up age-old prejudices in pretty, shiny, pseudoscientific language and thus make them sound like The Latest Discovery.

Furthermore, Fine takes issue with the concept of Equality 2.0: the idea that men and women are equal but different. One gender isn’t better than the other, but we want different things: men want to lead public lives and have careers, and women want to stay home and look after their families and make everyone in their lives happy because that’s what makes them happy. Of course, there will be some men and some women who want exactly that, which is fine. But the idea that this is the Way of the World is nothing but a return to the Victorian ideology of the separate spheres. And it’s also a way of justifying the status quo; of reinforcing the dangerous myth that we’re equal now and feminism’s work is done. Whatever hasn’t changed really can’t change, because of hardwired limitations (oh wait, differences) in our brains.

Equality 2.0 books often portray men as logic and public-life oriented, but emotionally dim and incapable of the most basic acts of sympathy; and women as irrational, passive, unambitious, and a hundred percent relationship-oriented. Where have we seen this before, I wonder? Such portrays are of course deeply insulting to both sexes: the passages Fine cites from actual books had me blinking in horrified disbelief. The scariest thing of all is that these ideas have an actual impact of education: there’s a whole association of people out there whose aim in life is to put an end to co-ed education, because they believe that boys and girls are entirely different sorts of creatures and thus the idea that they could ever learn in the same environment is simply absurd.

You’d think nobody would take this seriously, but Fine gives the chilling example of a school that decided that the only way to teach literature to boys was to have them draw a map of the island in Lord of the Flies, for example, instead of expecting them to do silly girly things such as empathise with the characters or discuss their inner lives. And in another school, girls were put in special maths classes where every exercise used examples relating to the domestic sphere or interpersonal relationships – because surely you can’t expect girls to learn maths on an abstract, conceptual level like boys do? Not only would they not be interested, but you apparently need a penis to be able to do that.

Infuriatingly enough, these people often present themselves as courageous innovators, as the Brave Voices of Dissent. As Fine puts it in the introduction:

Writers who argue that there are hardwired differences between the sexes that account for the gender status quo often like to position themselves as courageous knights of truth, who brave the stifling ideology of political correctness. Yet claims of ‘essential differences’ between the two sexes simply reflect – and give scientific authority to – what I suspect is really a majority opinion. If history tells us anything, it is to take a second, closer look at our society and our science.

Another frequent problem with research that confirms the biological basis of gender stereotypical behaviour is the fact that, as Fine points out, even scientists who ought to know better are very quick to assume that any differences found in the brain equal innate or genetic differences. And yet, where else but in the brain will socialisation manifest itself? Our brains constantly interact with our environment, and from a very early age our culture is part of what helps map our neural circuits. This isn’t really a nurture versus nature debate, because that’s almost too simplistic a way to put it. The two are not at all easy to separate. What we should be thinking of instead is malleable versus fixed, immutable categories. Gender is the former rather than the latter. And on a relate note, it’s dangerous to assume that physical differences in the brain will necessarily correspond to differences in how the mind operates. As several studies have shown, sometimes the brain will use very different pathways to arrive to the exact same process or function.

One of my favourite sections of Delusions of Gender was the one about the interaction between gender stereotypes, social expectations, and performance in several tasks. Fine summarises several studies that show that in environments that make gender salient (and I would argue that there are very few real-life environments that don’t), expectations of how well girls will do in a certain tasks can very easily affect their performance. For example, girls who are told before a maths test that scientific research has shown that they are less likely to achieve excellence than boys will actually do worse than girls who are told no such thing. The implications of this for career choices, for example, are huge. Not only can stereotypical threats affect performance, but they can lead girls and women to “choose” not to follow certain careers where they will likely feel incompetent, threatened, and like they don’t belong:

What psychological processes lie behind turning away from masculine interests? One possibility is that, as we learned in an earlier chapter, when stereotypes of women become salient women tend to incorporate those stereotypical traits into their current self-perception. They may then find it harder to imagine themselves as, say, a mechanical engineer. The belief that one will be able to fit in, to belong, may be more important than we realise – and may help to explain why some traditionally male occupations have been more readily entered by women than others. After all, the stereotype of a vet is not the same as that of an orthopaedic surgeon or a computer scientist, and these are different again from the stereotype of a builder or a lawyer. These different stereotypes may be more or less easily reconciled with female identity.

I’ve gone on for a long while here, but the bottom line is: READ THIS BOOK. I seriously wish the whole world would, and there are very few books I’d be this evangelical about. Cordelia Fine is not only incredibly smart, but she’s great at explaining all the science in a way that makes it perfectly accessible to a layperson. She’s also funny and often deliciously sarcastic to boot. If you’re a fan of Natalie Angier, I think you’d love Cordelia Fine. And if you’re not, well, read her anyway.

I’ll leave you with a few more interesting bits:

When women display the necessary confidence in the skills and comfort with power, they run the risk of being regarded as ‘competent but cold’: the bitch, the ice queen, the iron maiden, the ballbuster, the battle axe, the dragon lady… The sheer number of synonyms is telling. Put bluntly, we don’t like the look of self-promotion and power on a woman. In experimental studies, women who behave on an agentic fashion experience backlash: they are rated as less socially skilled, and thus less hireable for jobs that require people skills as well as competence than are men who behave in an identical fashion.

As Hines has explained, sex is ‘easily assessed, routinely evaluated, and not always reported.’ Because it is more interesting to find a difference than to find no difference, the 19 failures to observe a difference go unreported, whereas the 1 in 20 finding of a difference is likely to be published. This contributes to the so-called file-drawer phenomenon, whereby studies that do find sex differenced get published, but those that don’t languish unpublished and unseen in a researcher’s file drawer.

I also understand that speculation is an important part of the scientific process. Nor is the topic of gender differences by any means the only area in which overinterpretation can occur. And I certainly don’t think that research into sex differences in the brain is wrong or pointless. There are sex differences in the brain (although, as we’ve seen, agreeing on what these are is harder than you might think); there are sex differences in vulnerabilities to certain psychological disorders, and hopefully a greater understanding of the former might help to illuminate the latter. My point is simply this: that neither structural nor functional imagining can currently tell us much about differences between male and female minds. [My emphasis.]

Reviewed at:
The F-Word

(Have you posted about this book? Let me know and I’ll be glad to link to you.)

Read More......

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

Originally published in 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is, as Miriam Brody put it, “the first sustained argument for female emancipation based on a cogent ethical system”. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is also one of the January choices for The Year of Feminist Classics. There have already been several interesting (and very diverse) responses to the book by many participants: Amy at our group blog, Iris, Emily, Violet or Jillian, just to give you a few examples. To my delight, these posts have instigated plenty of lively and intelligent comments. What I’m about to do here, then, is not so much review Wollstonecraft’s book as it is attempt to join the conversation. What other readers have been saying on their blogs, on Twitter, in comments, in e-mails to me, and so on has shaped my own reading of the book. This, by the way, is exactly the kind of communal reading experience I was hoping The Year of Feminist Classics would be all about – so thank you all.

It’s probably difficult for a modern feminist to read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman without experiencing some frustration. With the benefit of hindsight, Wollstonecraft’s inconsistencies, failings and limitations absolutely jump at us, while her radical arguments are ones we can mostly afford to take for granted. The problematic aspects of the book are many: there is, first of all, the fact that she says from the very beginning that she’ll focus only on middle-class women, and thus glosses over the whole issue of class (Miriam Brody’s introduction, however, draws from her other writings to paint a picture far more nuanced than mere indifference). Then there are the frequent depreciating references to Atheism or to Islam; her harshness when it comes to other women, which sometimes borders on contempt; her emphasis on motherhood as a woman’s main calling; the fact that at times she doesn’t seem to be moving far away enough from gender essentialism, etc.

All of these are things that occasionally grated on me, and they’re valid reasons to feel frustrated with the book. But as I read on, I kept reminding myself not to throw away the baby with the bathwater, so to speak. I don’t want to be dismissive of either Wollstonecraft herself or of the ways in which her work is problematic in a contemporary context. But as obvious as her limitations seem now, it sincerely amazes me that she went as far as she did. Can you imagine a world in which the mere idea that women might not be intellectually inferior had hardly been articulated before? A world in which the simple suggestion that women might, in fact, be human beings was new, daring, and radical?

I suppose this is what they call taking the context into account, but I want to pause for a moment to examine what this means, exactly. I don’t like it when this phrase or an equivalent is used to silence discussions on problematic issues surrounding race, class, gender or sexual orientation in older books. To me, having these conversations is what taking the context into account is all about. I find it fascinating to attempt to use literature to make sense of how these issues were felt, dealt with, or omitted in a particular historical and social context. To explore these things is rewarding, enlightening, and just plain fun.

In the case of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, taking the context into account means noting and discussing Wollstonecraft’s apparent contempt of other women, her omission of class, her ideas on rationality versus “instinct”, and so on. But it also means that I’m not as disappointed by her limitations as I would be if I were reading a modern book. What’s obvious now might not have been so then, and breaking away from dominant modes of thinking (even if one small step at a time) always seems much easier in retrospect. It’s only natural to wish that Wollstonecraft had gone further than she does, but I have to wonder if in her place I would have gone that far at all.

The last thing I want to do is sound like I’m attempting to silence other reader’s responses, even if they’re anger, frustration and disappointment. I find them both perfectly valid and very interesting to read. What I’m trying to do here is to say what my personal response to Wollstonecraft was, rather than prescribe How the Book Ought to Be Read. Personally I felt a lot of sympathy for Wollstonecraft: she came across as a highly intelligent woman stuck in a world that barely acknowledged her right to exist; a passionate (yes), angry, occasionally sarcastic woman who was simply suggesting that women might be human beings too rather than living dolls, and trying her best to ensure she would be heard. Her limitations or inconsistencies may have sometimes frustrated me, but they didn’t make me like or respect her any less.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman might not be an example of modern feminism, but it’s one of the places where it began. To quote from Brody’s excellent introduction again:

Before Wollstonecraft, there were works suggesting the reform of female manners, but there was no single-minded criticism of the social and economic system which created a double standard of excellence for male and female and relegated women to an inferior status.

LifetimeReader said in a comment, “It is almost easier to read her as a historical source.” I agree with this, in the sense that in some ways this is more of a book on the history of feminism than a feminist book as we understand the term today. But at the same time, I see a lot here that is still relevant nowadays. Women are still expected to behave as decorative objects to a large extent, for example. And there are many ways in which prevailing expectations of helplessness and incompetence lead to exactly that (more on that when I review Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender, and no, I won’t be able to shut up about that book for a while).

Furthermore, I found Wollstonecraft’s belief that romantic love shouldn’t be a woman’s main preoccupation in life very interesting. She says this in the context of a problematic dichotomy between reason and passion (on which more soon), and of an even more problematic emphasis on motherhood as a woman’s True Calling. But in our day and age, I still find value in the idea that to expect romantic love to be the one thing at the centre of our lives is to invite unhappiness and disappointment. The idea that the best relationships are the ones in which both partners lead social, intellectual and emotional lives of their own is by no means new today, but the extent to which it has leaked into pop culture still seems to me to be limited at best.

Then there’s the issue of gender essentialism, which is a big preoccupation of mine. It’s true that Mary Wollstonecraft wanders away from essentialism but doesn’t seem to break free from it completely – and yet, as Clare so well put it:

The idea of feminine as inferior being so socialized into these women that a progressive woman had to be like a man—a conception of conflated sex and gender without absolutely no middle ground at all. (God, gender binaries are frightening!)

Or, to quote Jillian, “Every little bit helps, I reckon.” I don’t think Wollstonecraft believes that what she calls “masculine virtues” are masculine by definition, for example, even if she does use that term. Her conviction is that women can share these virtues, which are human rather than male, if only they’re educated to the same standards as men. She gives several examples, including the one of soldiers, whose education she thought was lacking in the same way as women’s. Taking that into account she asks, “Where is then the sexual difference, when the education has been the same? All the difference that I can discern arises from the superior advantage of liberty, which enables the former to see more of life.”

Or to put it differently, “It cannot be demonstrated that woman is essentially inferior to man because she has always been subjugated.” I cannot find it in me to resent Wollstonecraft for seemingly taking the possibility of inferiority seriously when I consider everything she’s breaking away from. To be honest, she actually sounds far less tentative in her suggestions that I would have expected anyone to sound at this time.

Returning to the fact that she often sounds contemptuous of other women, I think it’s the social construct of Woman that she resents rather than other women themselves: Woman as a sweet, gentle, and above all beautiful creature in need of protection. But of course, as the women who were socialised into this construct and thus came to embody it were real living breathing human beings, the two are not always so easy to separate. So yes, her hostility remains somewhat problematic. But I think it’s only because she believed these women to be capable of much more – because she did in fact reject essentialism and believe them to be fully human – than she sounds so harsh and frustrated.

One final problem I wanted to address is the whole issue of passion versus reason. To quote Brody yet again,

In requiring that reason and passion could not inhabit the same conceptual space, Wollstonecraft bequeathed to her intellectual descendants a troubling dichotomy, and not one the readers of her passionate letters to Gilbert Imlay would ever have imagined that she herself believed in.

There are two issues at stake here: one is the fact that I believe the dichotomy to be false; the second is that, to put it simply, Wollstonecraft herself did not practice what she preached. The latter is one that several readers have been reacting to quite strongly, and understandably so. Even if you happen to believe, as I do, that a work should be separated from its author and that biographical approaches are fraught with dangers, it’s hard to simply disregard any inconsistencies of which we know once we do know about them. But as an occasionally inconsistent person myself, I’m having trouble casting the first stone. I love how Emily put it: “It seems to me that if we waited for a 100% consistent person before we respected them as a philosopher, the philosophy shelves would be mighty empty.”

Yet as much as I try not to judge her harshly, the fact remains that Wollstonecraft herself often sounds quite judgemental of women who were carried away by passion or who failed to live up to what she believed was their potential. I wonder, though, about the extent to which this relates to early feminism’s long history of desexualising women – Victorian feminists in particular were almost obsessively concerned with Respectability, because they knew that to deviate from established sexual norms would draw attention away from all their other arguments and undermine their efforts. When sexuality was at all involved, it apparently became the only thing anyone could think about.

Brody suggests that Wollstonecraft was writing in a context in which “a woman who wrote and wanted to be taken seriously, therefore, must disguise this monstrosity [femaleness itself] as much as possible by blurring the seams of her sexual difference”. She therefore “…has not quite rejected passion to reclaim reason, but has repressed it.” I find that Wollstonecraft shies away from sexuality far less than the Victorians did – she does confront the double standards of her time, after all – but even so, there are many reasons why I still find this argument compelling.

The whole issue of respectability, of having to struggle to be taken seriously as a writer or an intellectual being at all, was no small concern; nor was it something that an eighteenth-century woman could easily choose to shrug off. The best example I can think of is actually what Amy brought up at the group blog: the fact that the way A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was read changed as more details of Wolstonecraft’s private life became widely known, and that it took until the twentieth century for her reputation to recover. Considering this, I don’t find it all that surprising that she would play down the role of passion in women’s lives in her writing, even if not in her personal life.

I apologise for the length of this post, but there’s one last thing I wanted to say: Violet mentioned that Vindication was frustrating to read because it often felt that we were only getting one side of a conversation. Wollstonecraft wrote in response to several philosophers and pamphlet writers of her time, and not being familiar with them can sometimes mean we can’t fully follow her arguments. I felt the same myself, and I think I’d have benefited immensely from a deeper knowledge of eighteen-century politics and philosophy in general, and of the American and French evolutions in particular. But the detailed Miriam Brody introduction I kept quoting from helped me a lot in this regard, so if you have the chance to get a hold of it, it’s definitely worth it. It’s more of a historical introduction than one that tells you how the book ought to be read, which I appreciated.

I’m not going to link to other reviews as I normally do - instead I’ll point you again towards the Year of Feminist Classics blog, where Amy will be doing link round-ups and posting further discussion question. But of course, I’d still love to hear what you all have to say. And if anyone wants to argue with me about any of these points, please feel absolutely free to.

Read More......

V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd

V for Vendetta is set in a post-apocalyptic near future (or what was the near future at the time of its publication). The year is 1997, and the world has suffered through a nuclear disaster which resulted in starvations, perpetual winter, and the complete obliteration of Africa and continental Europe. Great Britain was spared, but it has turned into a fascist police state that includes concentration camps for glbtq, black, Jewish and Muslim people, as well as for anyone else deemed undesirable by the leaders. This fascist state also includes constant surveillance, of course – The Eye and The Ear watch its citizens every move, while The Mouth disseminates official propaganda.

The story opens with a man in a Guy Fawkes mask saving sixteen-year-old Evey from a group of policemen who intended to rape and murder her. This man, who goes by the name of V, is an anarchist bomber, and like the original Guy Fawkes, he intends to blow up the Houses of Parliament – and succeeds. This is just the beginning of a campaign that some see as terrorism, others as liberation. But who exactly is V, and what does he intend? These are some of the questions that Evey, who is taken by V to his secret headquarters, repeatedly asks herself. However, the meaning of these questions changes as events progress.

As customary with Alan Moore’ work, V for Vendetta is a clever and dense book: it’s full of literary allusions (Moore really seems to have fun with those); it deals with complex political, social and historical ideas without ever trying to oversimplify them; and it offers no clear or easy answers at the end.Moore himself says in this quite interesting interview that he “didn’t want to stick to just moral blacks and whites.” I always appreciate that about his work, and in this case I particularly appreciate his willingness to set up anarchism against fascism without prettifying it as an alternative (and this regardless of where his own political sympathies lie). Likewise, and regardless of how much fascism horrifies me, I appreciate his inclusion of characters who are not mere cartoonish villains, but rather human beings who do terrible things.


There was, however, one aspect of V for Vendetta that made me hugely uncomfortable (I wonder if it’s the same one Emily meant). I can’t tell you what it is exactly, as it would be a major spoiler, but it has to do with one character being deceived and manipulated, supposedly for their own good. It’s a difficult plot element, and it raises all sorts of questions about the extent to which it is ever legitimate to sacrifice personal relationships and the trust of others for the sake of principles or ideals. I feel like I’m about to channel E.M. Forster or Elizabeth Gaskell here, but my own allegiance will always be with the individual, and the personal will always be my primary orientation. As Forster so well put it, “I if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” Still, I realise that there are countless situations in which these decisions aren’t at all easy to make.

The more I think about this problematic aspect of the story, the more I begin to think that it’s very likely meant to be problematic. Moore has never been a comfortable or comforting writer. To return to the aforementioned interview, he says:

The central question is, is this guy right? Or is he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this? Which struck me as a properly anarchist solution. I didn’t want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements, which nevertheless do recur fairly regularly throughout human history.

I did finish the book without being able to make up my mind about V, which seems to be exactly what Moore was hoping for.


Another thing I liked about the story was its exploration of why we need symbols and myths – or, as V puts it, “romance, always romance.” His tactics are dramatic and very theatrical, but deliberately so. He intends to become the embodiment of a symbol; of an idea who is larger than a single individual could ever be. Symbols and ideas have staying power, and they have a considerable ability to move and inspire people. But of course, this has its dangerous side too: when does an idea become so big that it’s permissible to sacrifice individuals in its name? When we reach that stage, have the opposites met? As always, Moore has left me with plenty to think about.

Before anyone asks, no, I haven’t seen the film. Alan Moore’s wish to have his name removed from it and his belief that his ideas had been completely defanged have put me off somewhat – as did the fact that I read a plot summary on Wikipedia and found the changes to the story staggering. I’m not saying this because I believe a movie has to be absolutely faithful to its source material, but because of what these changes implied thematically and ideologically. Anyway, you’re more than welcome to try to convince me that it’s worth a try regardless.

They read it too:
Good Books & Good Wine
Casual Dread
Stella Matutina
S. Krishna’s Books

(Have I missed yours?)

Read More......

Conundrum by Jan Morris

I was tree or perhaps four years old when I realized I had been born into the wrong body, and I should really be a girl. I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.

First published in 1974, Jan Morris’ Conundrum is a pioneer among transgender memoirs. Morris tells the story of her journey from man to woman: despite having known she wasn’t comfortable with the body she’d been born with from a very young age, it wasn’t until the age of 35 that she was able to begin hormonal treatment. And it was only at 45 that she finally underwent the surgery that matched her physical sex and her gender identity. By then, Morris was married and had children, but fortunately her family remained supportive all through her transformation. Reactions among her friends and acquaintances varied, but Morris was too happy to finally be able to be herself to pay the naysayers much mind.

Of course, none of this is to deny the very real and often life-threatening hostility that trans people throughout the world have to face. But as a comfortably off writer with a supportive family, and as someone who was socially privileged in many ways, Morris was insulated from much of that. Which brings me to something else: the fact that Morris was raised as a privileged white male in the first half of the twentieth century shows in many different ways in this memoir (as she eventually acknowledges herself). She’s someone who’ll dismiss ecology and conservationism as a fad and a denial of man’s mastery over nature (to paraphrase); who’ll say things like “Black Africa seemed everything I wanted not to be”, but then acknowledges that this is a result of her being “a child of Imperial Times”; or who’ll label the life of a gay couple as empty and futile because they couldn’t have children (I don’t mean to dismiss the plight of those who want children but aren’t allowed to adopt because of stupid, bigoted laws, of course. It’s just the assumption that children are absolutely necessary for anyone to lead a fulfilled life that gets on my nerves.)

A lot of what Morris says in Conundrum took me aback – but then again literature is important exactly because it invites us to empathise with people who are very different from us. And even as some of her views made me shudder, I appreciated her honesty, her candour, and her bravery in speaking of transgender issues at a time when this was even more of a silenced subject than it is now.

One of the most interesting aspects of Conundrum was the fact that Morris compared her experiences as a male and as a female in the second half of the twentieth century. There are several brilliant passages about how her sex change equalled a loss of social status. For example, she says:

We are told that the social gap between the sexes is narrowing, but I can only report that having, in the second half of the 20th century, experienced life in both roles, there seems to me no aspect of existence, no moment of the day, no contact, no arrangement, no response, which is not different for men and for women. The very tone of voice in which I was now addressed, the very posture of the person next in the queue, the very feel in the air, constantly emphasized my change of status.
And if others’ responses shifted, so did my own. The more I was treated as a woman, the more woman I became. I adapted willy-nilly. If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself. If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself.

But to my disappointment, Morris often shifts from acknowledging the powerful effects of gender stereotyping and the psychological consequences of being regularly patronised to a retreat into good old fashioned essentialism. Even more disappointingly, she also seems to genuinely believe that sexual attention of any kind, even aggressive and unwelcome, is flattering to women.

When all is said and done, Morris still idealises maleness; the “close knit societies of male traditionalism” that she was brought up to fit into. She says of her negative experience working for The Guardian: “I have a disconcerting feeling now that I disliked it because it was like working for a woman rather than a man.” And towards the end of the book, I’m afraid she crosses the line into magical penis territory with the following comment:

A neurotic condition common among women is called penis envy, its victims supposing that there is inherent to the very fact of the male organs some potent energy of the spirit. There is something to this fancy. It is not merely the loss of androgens that has made me more retiring, more ready to be led, more passive: the removal of the organs themselves has contributed, for there was to the presence of the penis something positive and stimulating. My body then was made to push and initiate, it is now made to yield and accept, and the outside change has had its inner consequences.

Um. Right.

There is of course something to the idea that people change their behaviour according to how they’re treated; that expectations can change not only how we act in front of others, but even how we perceive ourselves. But I’m afraid this (to quote Wollestonecraft a few centuries ago) is just plain nonsense. Gender essentialism isn’t really something I see as a matter of opinion so much as a matter of facts versus misconceptions (speaking of which, I can’t wait to tell you all how awesome Delusions of Gender is). I very much resent the idea that the lack of a penis makes me more passive, but at the same time, I don’t want this resentment to blind me to the fact that someone like Morris might know something I don’t.

Conundrum made me wonder whether my frequent rants against essentialism ever come across as a dismissal of the entire concept of gender identity, and consequentially of the experiences of trans people. I hope not. I believe that gender is a continuum and not a binary, and that there are as many possible and valid identities as there are individuals. But I also know that as a cisgendered female, there’s a lot that I take for granted. And although I’ll never be convinced that there are insurmountable and innate psychological differences between men and women, I’ll readily acknowledge that I know nothing of the pain and discomfort of living in a body that doesn’t match who you feel yourself to be.

In the end, this book made me think about different ways of experiencing gender, which is exactly what I was hoping it would do. And although I might have sounded harsh when it comes to Morris herself, I want to clarify that I didn’t dislike her or look down on her. She came across as someone who was trying to wrap her mind around ideas radically different from the ones she had been brought up with, be it about race, about gender, or about her place in the world. The attempt may not be everything, but it’s certainly worth something.

(Have you posted about this book too? Leave me your link and I’ll be glad to add it here.)

Read More......

A Literature of Their Own by Elaine Showalter

Contrary to what it may appear, the title of Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own is not a reference to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of Their Own – it’s rather a response to the following passage from John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women:

If we turn from pure speculation to literature in the narrow sense of the term, and the fine arts, there is a very obvious reason why women’s literature is, in its general conception and in its main features, an imitation of men’s. Why is the Roman literature, as critics proclaim to satiety, not original, but an imitation of the Greek? Simply because the Greeks came first. If women lived in a different country from men, and had never read any of their writings, they would have had a literature of their own. As it is, they have not created one, because they found a highly advanced literature already created.

I have a lot to say about this passage, but I’ll leave it for when I host the discussion on Mill for the Year of Feminist Classics in February. In this history of British Women Writers “from Charlotte Brontë to Doris Lessing”, Elaine Showalter responds to Mill by suggesting that if women’s literature differs from men’s, it’s because for much of its existence it has been the literature of a subculture; of a group that existed apart from mainstream social and intellectual circles and as such could not help but respond to its own marginalisation. My fear that this book was going to be about bogus essentialist notions such as “feminine aesthetics” was thus eased as early as page 12:

I am also uncomfortable with the notion of ‘female imagination’. The theory of a female sensibility revealing itself in an imagery and form specific to women always runs dangerously close to reiterating the familiar stereotypes. It also suggests permanence, a deep, basic, and inevitable difference between male and female ways of perceiving the world. I think that, instead, the female literary tradition comes from the still-evolving relationship between women writers and their society. (…) In this investigation of the English novel I am intentionally looking, not at an innate sexual attitude, but at the ways in which the self-awareness of the woman writer has translated itself into a literary form in a specific place and time-span, how this self-awareness has changed and developed, and where it might lead.

THANK YOU, Elaine Showalter. A Literature of Their Own is, as I was saying, a chronological history of British women writers from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Showalter divides British women’s literature into three phases: the feminine phase, lasting until the 1880’s, when women had mostly internalised sexist assumptions about themselves and tried to emulate mainstream (male) culture; the feminist phase (1880’s-1920’s), when women mostly wrote against patriarchal values; and the female phase, from the 1920’s to the present day, when women write autonomously instead of restricting themselves to either imitation or protest.

This classification is of course arguable, but as it’s not the main point of the book you don’t have to agree with it to enjoy what Showalter does here. A Literature of Their Own was, to me, an unexpected joy: I approached it with some trepidation, both because I was worried it was going to be essentialist, and because I wasn’t sure if it was going to be too academic. There isn’t anything wrong with academic, of course, but I might not get much out of a strictly textual analysis of authors and works I haven’t read yet, and as such this might not be the kind of book I could read on my own for fun.

Fortunately, I had nothing to fear. Showalter’s approach is very much cultural and social, and the result is a book that is accessible and fun to read even if you haven’t read all, or even most, of the authors and texts it discusses. A Literature of Their Own is every bit as concerned with the context in which women were writing as it is with the works themselves, and as such I think anyone interested in feminism and social history (not to mention literature, but if you’re reading this blog I assume that’s a given) will get something out of it.

My favourite chapter was probably “Subverting the Feminine Novel: Sensationalism and Feminine Protest”. Showalter pays especial attention to Victorian sensation authors like Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and I found myself nodding in agreement nearly the whole time. My least favourite chapter, on the other hand, was probably the one on Virginia Woolf. It had some very interesting ideas in it, namely a discussion of Woolf’s concept of androgyny (which I look forward to revisiting for the Year of Feminist Classics, with Emily’s help). But on the other hand – and this might sound ironic, considering my recent complaints about the Wilkie Collins biography I read – I found it too speculative; too concerned with Woolf’s psychological profile. This is not necessarily my favourite way of assessing her role as a novelist, so it was a bit frustrating at times. Then again, it just might be than I don’t yet know enough about Woolf’s life to be able to follow along. In any case, the chapter was a good reminder that balance is everything. And I did like this bit:

Yet to see Woolf’s suicide as a beautiful act of faith, or a philosophical gesture towards androgyny, is to betray the human pain and rage that she felt; to see the suicide as proof of her feminine neurosis is to condemn her in death to the stereotypes that imprisoned her in life.

A Literature of Their Own was originally published in 1978, but this more recent edition contains an extra chapter (which mostly discusses the work of Angela Carter) and a new preface with an overview of the book’s critical reception and impact. The preface gave me an interesting glimpse into the history of feminist literary criticism: some of the criticism aimed at Showalter seems fair (she was criticised for not having gone further back than the 1840’s, for example, and “you have to draw the line somewhere” would have convinced me more than “women didn’t see themselves as professional writers until then”); some, like the accusations that she herself is guilty of essentialism, not so much. A Literature of Their Own may not be the be-all and end-all of the history of British female writers, but it was thought-provoking and a joy to read.

As with all books about books, I came away from A Literature of Their Own with a large list of authors I think I want to try. Here it is, for the curious among you and for my own future reference:

• George Sand (reminder)
  
• Elizabeth Robins
  
• Florence Wilford
  
• Sarah Grand
  
• Olive Schreiner (The Story of an African Farm, From Man to Man)
  
• George Egerton
  
• Amelia B. Edwards (I already own one of her books; now I just need to read it.)
  
• Harriet Martineu
  
• Dorothy Richardson
  
• Mary Augusta Ward
  
• Joan Smith
• Fay Weldon (Big Water)

If you’ve read any of these, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Some interesting passages:

The same complaints [about hordes of women taking over the literary scene and crowding out the men] had been made since 1771; it is important to realise that “female dominance” was always in the eye of the male beholder. The Victorian illusion of enormous numbers came from the overreaction of male competitors, the exaggerated visibility of the woman writer, the overwhelming success of a few novels in the 1840’s, the conjunction of feminist themes in fiction with feminist activism in England, and the availability of biographical information about the novelists, which made them living heroines, rather than sets of cold and inky initials.

This kind of put me in mind of the somewhat recent hullabaloo about how the reason why boys don’t read is because there are far too many women writing YA. As they say: so much changes, so much remains the same.

With the relaxation of taboos on the open discussion of female sexual experience, and with women’s increased interest in themes of menstruation, masturbation, abortion and childbirth, there has developed a critical backlash that insists that freedom for the woman writer means a masculine range of experience and subject. There has been a revival of the Victorian idea that female experience is narrow and insignificant, and that in deliberately opting to portray it the novelist diminishes her own potential and restricts herself to a cultural ghetto.

Again, then as now. ‘Women’s fiction’, anyone?

(Have you posted about this book too? Leave me your link and I’ll be glad to add it here.)

Read More......

For the Win by Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow’s For the Win is a YA novel about the practice of gold farming – acquiring multiplayer online role playing game currency, and then selling it for real money to other players. Gold farming employs an estimated 150,000 people worldwide full time, mostly in developing countries, while the buyers of this virtual gold are mostly located in the developed world. What this means is that the virtual economies of all these online games are in fact very much real: they have measurable consequences for thousands of human beings all over the world. What it also means is that they have become a new arena for age-old power relations between the developed and the developing world to play out.

Gold farming may sound like an unusual topic for a novel, but this is Cory Doctorow we’re talking about here: he can pull off pretty much anything. Plus like with any other topic, if you look under the surface it’s really about people. For the Win is a novel about two girls from Mumbai, Mala and Yasmin, and what they’re willing to do for the sake of their poor families and their friends; it’s about Wei-Dong, a misfit teenager from LA who smuggles himself to China to help his friends; it’s about Jie, a young woman in China who risks her life every day as the hostess of an underground radio show religiously followed by millions of factory girls; it’s about a woman who calls herself Big Sister Nor, a trade union leader who turns her attention to what’s happening online. It’s a novel about power, about the rights of labourers who work and live in subhuman conditions, about idealism and its costs, about economics, and about the effects of all these things on people who may be spread all over the world, but are united for a common cause.

I’m not sure how I’d classify For the Win genre-rise: it’s published by Tor, but (much like its predecessor Little Brother) its premises are almost too real for it to fall comfortably under the speculative fiction umbrella (then again, there is probably a lot of science fiction you could say the same about). Another thing it has in common with Little Brother is the fact that it unapologetically and seamlessly works complex theoretical concepts into a story aimed at teenagers. Doctorow clearly doesn’t underestimate his audience’s intelligence, and I love him for it. While his previous novel was concerned with civil liberties, privacy, and freedom of information, For the Win detailedly explores macroeconomics, inflation and deflation, virtual economies, speculation, social justice, the rights of workers, trade unions, totalitarianism, and so on. The expository passages may occasionally straddle the line between theoretical and lecture-ish, but they never fall on the wrong side of it. Possibly it’s the fact that all the stuff Doctorow is explaining is so vital for the story – and for the world at large, really – that makes it all work. There’s also his writing, which is smart, accessible, and absolutely never tedious – and I say this as someone with no particular predisposition to find economics interesting to read about.

The world of For the Win is not too different from the world of Gaskell’s North and South, for example, despite the centuries and the continents that separate the characters. The economic exploitation of labourers that predominated in nineteenth-century Europe is still happening all over the world, away from the sight of most of those who benefit from it. And this includes gamers. The solution these characters come up with is not boycotting gold farming altogether and leaving thousands of people out of a job; it’s to unite workers online and offline and demand acknowledgement, legitimacy, and fair conditions for all. There’s power in numbers, especially in a world where borders mean increasingly less than they used to.

For the Win is about a group of smart teenagers trying to save the world. They don’t always succeed, but they also don’t give up. The book is quite dark in many ways, and it shows that very bad things often happen to very good people. But at the same time, it’s the opposite of cynical: it shows the real cost of idealism, but it also shows why we can’t give up. I loved it all the more for this ultimate hopefulness: a world in which we give up on the idea of change before we even begin to fight for it is a world that will never move forward at all.

The only reason why I didn’t love For the Win quite as much as Little Brother was because the balance between ideas and storytelling wasn’t quite as perfect here. For the Win feels a little more disjointed, especially for the first half or so. But it’s still an excellent novel, and one I’d recommend to teenagers and adults alike. As is customary with Cory Doctorow’s work, For the Win is available for free download at his website.

Favourite bits:

What was it that made the big and the strong take such sport in terrorizing the weak? Whole groups of boys would do this to girls and even grown women sometimes -- follow them, calling after them, touching them, sometimes it even led to rape. They called it “Eve-teasing” and they treated it like a game. It wasn’t a game, not if you were the victim.
(…)
That was the biggest injustice of all, the injustice that had driven her to kick and kick and kick -- this oaf of a boy knew that he could get away with his grabbing and intimidation because she couldn’t afford to stop him. But she had stopped him and she could not -- would not -- be sorry.
“I can talk with Mr Banerjee,” she said. “I have his phone number. He knows that I’m a good worker – he’ll make it all better. You’ll see, Ammaji, don’t worry.”
“Why, Mala, why? Couldn’t you have just run away? Why did you have to hurt this boy?”
Mala felt some of the anger flood back into her. Her mother, her own mother --
But she understood. Her mother wanted to protect her, but her mother wasn’t a general. She was just a girl from the village, all grown up. She had been beaten down by too many boys and men, too much hurt and poverty and fear.

The world’s economy is a runaway train, the driver dead at the switch, the passengers clinging on for dear life as their possessions go flying off the freight-cars and out the windows, and each curve in the tracks threatens to take it off the rails altogether.
There is a small number of people in the back of the train who fiercely argue about when it will go off the rails, and whether the driver is really dead, and whether the train can be slowed down by everyone just calming down and acting as though everything was all right. These people are the economists, and some of the first-class passengers pay them very well for their predictions about whether the train is doing all right and which side of the car they should lean into to prevent their hats from falling off on the next corner.
Everyone else ignores them.

"But people like us get hurt every single day. We get caught in machines, we inhale poison vapors, we are beaten or drugged or raped. Don’t forget that. Don’t forget what we go through, what we’ve been through. We’re going to fight this battle with everything we have, and we will probably lose. But then we will fight it again, and we will lose a little less, for this battle will win us many supporters. And then we’ll lose again. And again. And we will fight on. Because as hard as it is to win by fighting, it’s impossible to win by doing nothing."

They read it too:
Necromancy Never Pays
Presenting Lenore

(Have I missed yours?)

Read More......