Subject: RE: BS: Warning LOTR return of the king
From:
Penny S.
Date: 19 Jan 03 - 06:10 AM
Hollowfox, I disagree with you about the women. I did my large epic narrative training on the Odyssey, for obvious reasons, and in that, there are a good number of female characters, given the nature of the story, and they make good contributions to the plot, and not by emulating men. Even the opposing females have depth, and are complex personalities with understandable behaviour. By comparison, Tolkein fails.
In reading the Odyssey, I identified with most of the central characters at some time or another, regardless of gender, and I believe this is common with girls. (As an aside, I am wondering if the presence of strong females in children's books may limit this wide-ranging empathy with characters - girls in my class seem to be being Hermione rather than Harry, but I may be underestimating them.)
In my early reading of Tolkein, I did the same - though many of the characters prove difficult to get into - how can one imagine oneself the equal of Aragorn?
Then I fixed on Eowyn - who I saw as a much stronger looking woman than the girl in the film - she doesn't look like a sword maiden, and has a very soft range of expressions. (Aside again - she says that all their women need to be sword women, but the rest of them look a bit wimpy in Helm's Deep.) On about the fourth re-reading, I found her unsatisfactory - she had to do man stuff to do anything. I wanted characters who were strong and effective without going to battle. The nurses and women working in Flanders would have been like that, and they don't appear in Tolkein. Edith Cavell? Absent.
The way she has to act fits with the other subtle prejudices in the books, which I only noticed in the film. It is not exactly racism, which has been mentioned. The good characters are all warriors. Non-warriors, such as Grima (how could the Riders have been taken in by such an obvious bad guy?) are dangerous. The bad fighters, like the stormtroopers in Star Wars, are not individuals, but parts of massed phalanxes - but see below, on orcs. Warriors may be tempted, like Boromir, but they come out good in the end. If the only way to be good is to be a warrior, then that is the way a woman has to be good. So Eowyn is a battlemaiden.
The other prejudice is about class. It's OK to be lower class, but you've got to be lower class under a master, in a rural way, such as Sam, not independent lower class as in towns. Orcs, obviously not warriors, are lower class, and probably from Sarf Lunnon, by their speech. Their blackness may be debateable, but their class origins are not. Oddly, lower class women are OK. Iorweth, who talks too much, but knows what Aragorn is on about is the only woman who acts realistically - but who would identify with her through the books? Possibly she is based on a college servant.
Obviously Tolkein is limited by his own experience, and the literature he read himself - women are notably not obvious in Beowulf, for example. But that doesn't alter the situation in the books - there are not enough active women. It is hard to see how they could be fitted into the Fellowship, but there could have been others around on route.
Penny
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sj
