The Girl Who Can’t Grow Up

[osprey_archer]

I’ve been thinking more about Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child, specifically about the ending. What makes the first two-thirds of the book so interesting is Ivey’s ability to hold possibilities in suspension. Is Faina a snow child, magically born out of the snowgirl Mabel and her husband Jack made? Or is she just a normal girl, living alone in the

Comments

[asakiyume]

I've thought about this a whole lot. There are so many issues here, but I find myself thinking about it in terms of the craft of storytelling, and this is what I come up with: that if you create a character (or a place) whose main identifying feature is their strangeness or illusiveness or mystery, then that's a character that you can--so far as I can see--*never* get close to without sacrificing the key trait. How (sincere, not rhetorical question) can you become intimate with the alien and otherworldly without having it lose its alien otherworldliness? The Moorchild did it pretty well--though, interestingly, I thought it did better with Saaski in our world than with Moql in faery. And I think it did it by making not her strangeness, but her fierce efforts to cope, to love in her own manner of loving, the main trait. Then that's a struggle we can understand, because even if we're not changelings (though, as Ivy says in The Changeling, more of us are changelings than know it), lots and lots of us deal with incorporating our differences into a world that doesn't easily accommodate us.

Pragmatically speaking, I suspect that Mongomery didn't think of Anne as becoming lesser (though I don't know--maybe she did?) And I'm pretty sure that child-Barbara Follett was writing pure wish fulfillment, and wasn't concerned with how more human-world-oriented readers might feel about Eepersip's outcome.

What sort of outcome would you like to see for magical girls in stories? (Imagine that question being asked in a tone of interested support and not belligerent antagonism.)

[osprey_archer]

I think your first paragraph is spot on: if a character's appeal is defined by mysteriousness, then the reader can't get too close. To try to empathize with the character is to completely miss the point.

(The sequel to Stargirl actually illustrates this point well. Stargirl becomes the narrator, and she suddenly seems like a very normal girl - strangely obsessed with her boyfriend from the previous book, but still, pretty normal. It's hard to connect her narration with the kind of Manic Pixie Dreamgirl way that Leo presented her in the first book.)

It occurs to me that this may be the core criticism of the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl character trope: the problem is not that any of the MPD's traits are bad, but that, in a sense, not just their body but their personality has been objectified. The viewer admires their quirkiness like a jewel, but doesn't and in a sense can't empathize, because the character construction puts empathy off-limits. Does that make sense?

I've always found the intensity of criticism directed at the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl type rather puzzling, because the character type seems so close to characters I really love - Saaski and Ivy both bear similarities to it - but, as you say, their mysteriousness is not central to their appeal.

It occurs to me also - sorry, I'm afraid you're getting a stream of consciousness comment as my thoughts develop - that Faina is a different character type than Anne or Eepersip. All three of them are rather unusual and intense people, but Anne and Eepersip are both point of view characters - we know how their thought processes work - while Faina is always presented through someone else's eyes, and her mysteriousness is always central to her appeal.

This didn't bother me until the narration switched from her parent-figures to her boyfriend, but maybe it should have...

(As a side note: from what I've read, Montgomery got very tired of writing Anne books by the end, but she couldn't stop because everyone wanted more and she needed money. I suspect Anne got flatter because Montgomery churned out many of the later books as fast as she could in order to get to what she really wanted to write.)

[asakiyume]

Yes, I think this is exactly it! (What you say about MPD) As a kid (and even now), I loved these fay, beautiful characters, I wanted to be like them--but when I would play imaginary games, I found that I was imagining about them rather than in them: "she flitted lightly over the grass" rather than "I flitted lightly over the grass." I was objectifying the character I wanted to be. Kinda sad.

There's nothing wrong with ethereal beauty of course, nothing wrong even with unknowable, inaccessible wondrous characters--I guess what makes the MPD type so hateful to people is that,she ends up being a mere device, a foil for other characters, a route to others' improvement. And while it might be all right for a bit-part angel or fairy to play those roles, it seems kind of a copout to create a human character who is actually not fully human at all.

When I realized that some of the characters I yearned after and admired were mere objects, it really got me started thinking about what it would mean to be in their heads. What would it mean to be them, for real? And then I realized that it's like a parade: a parade is so beautiful to watch, but that is not at all what it's like to be *in* a parade--being *in* a parade is an interesting experience, but the aching feet, the seeing nothing but the people right in front of you and beside you, barely even noticing the onlookers, unless you're on an edge of the column--very different from watching a parade.

… I feel a major tangent coming on here; I'd better save it for my journal.

And yeah, that's one thing that is very cool about Saaski and Eepersip (haven't read the Anne of Green Gables books, but I'm sure you're right about them, too): that we're in their heads. Ivy, less so, though I think she comes through in her letters and in her behavior.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, I think Ivy is a fairly good midpoint between this enchanting, fay, unknowable character - because she's trying to project that persona, to distance herself from her home life - but having hints of this real person underneath, too.

It's probably a difficult balance to pull off.

[osprey_archer]

Oh, and of course I got so distracted that I forgot to answer your final question. It depends a bit on the age group. I think for a children's book, something like Saaski's ending is fine, where she rides off into the sunset to (presumably) a better life.

Actually! Actually! Another reason to watch Frances Ha: I think the movie does a very good job portraying, not exactly a magical girl, but someone strange and a little out of sync with the world, who is an adult but continues to struggle with questions of how to accommodate herself to a world that is somewhat alien to her.

Perhaps the continued struggle is the key? It seems to me that characters who, as part of growing up, cease struggling with that question, almost inevitably have to give up or at least tone down whatever it is about them that made them feel out of place in the world.

[asakiyume]

I have Frances Ha marked to watch on instant streaming!

And yeah, struggle a major way we define ourselves--test our limits, discover if we're who we think we are--so yeah, I'm in huge agreement with yo on that as a key.