Thirty Days (Or Posts) Of Female Characters! Post 18
Yeah, okay, these questions are starting to reach more than a little bit. This one's an awfully broad category, when you think about it, and it's not massively helpful.
Favorite non-warrior female character
Really? Favorite non-warrior female character? That's like asking you to name your favorite fruit that isn't the guava. It's really not narrowing the field all that much.
So I guess the way to approach it is to ask about female characters for whom non-violence is an integral part of their personality. Whether they're active pacifists or whether their character arc is about learning the art of non-violence, being a "non-warrior" is part of who they are as people. That being said, I choose:
Meg Murry, heroine of Madeleine L'Engle's Time Quartet.
I chose her because part of Meg's arc is learning about the skills and talents she has, and learning not just to use them to save the universe, but also to accept them as part of herself. She starts out from an unusual position -- she's the very intelligent daughter of two research scientists, the oldest child and only girl in a family of four children, and her father has been missing for quite some time. In effect, Meg is trying to do what a lot of boys in her position might be asked to do, which is to step up and be "the man of the place." She's making an effort to be a sort of "warrior" character, defending herself and her family from bullies with her fists. The thing is, she isn't really very good at it, because that's not where her talents lie.
It turns out that Meg is somewhat psychic and has a talent, not just for mathematics, but for higher mathematics. She's good at figuring out puzzles, and she has a very strong sense of right and wrong. And she turns out to have a much stronger sense of self than you'd expect upon first meeting her. In fact, much of the lesson of the first book, A Wrinkle In Time, is that Meg (and, by extension, the kind of kid who reads about her) must come to accept that she has value as a person, with her own very particular combination of strengths and weaknesses, and that it's better to do what you can do to the best of your ability than to force yourself to be an inferior version of something you're not. And, as it turns out, Meg is very much Not A Warrior. She's kind of puny, physically, and she's nearsighted (the books are set in the mid-1960s, so she doesn't get contact lenses until she grows up, after the FDA approved soft ones), and she's just not physically coordinated enough to be an effective physical warrior. And her psychic enemies are so strong that no human, not even her little brother, whose psychic powers are much more powerful than hers are, can even hope to defeat them in straight combat. Being a Warrior will do Meg no good.
The story arc of the first three books of the Time Quartet (A Wrinkle In Time, A Wind In The Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet) is heavily invested in non-violence. And, in large part, it's up to Meg to figure this out and act on it. She has to solve puzzles and use her perseverance without force, because force will do her no good. In the first two books, the solutions to the puzzles involve broader themes such as Love Will Conquer Totalitarianism All, and Maturing Joyfully Brings Rewards. In the third book, Meg's role as a Non-Warrior comes into sharper focus.
She's an adult, and pregnant, and she doesn't actually leave the house, although she follows her brother along on a wide-ranging psychic journey. The puzzle to solve is to find a point in time where a choice was made that led to the presence of a mad Soviet South American dictator who wants to blow up the world, and then change something key about that moment in time so that the mad dictator doesn't exist. This time, the theme of the book is pretty explicitly about the value of non-violence. All the scenarios that Charles Wallace visits have the same theme, that of two sides waging war on each other. Charles Wallace is the one who can act, but he has to know what to do, and Meg is the one who figures it out. She's the one who realizes that the key to solving this puzzle is to choose non-violence, and it's her solution, as much as Charles Wallace's actions, that ends up saving the world.
In some ways, this is a more radical setup for the character than one might think. The Time Quartet has aged remarkably well, and I think that a lot of people don't quite realize how specific and how political its setting is. It's true that you can take the storyline of A Wrinkle In Time and make a movie of it that sets it in the present day without anyone really noticing. It is a very timeless story in that regard. But when you step back and consider it in its original setting in the middle of the Cold War, it does take on a wonderful new depth.
It's set in an era in which American military might was still fashionable, and was in fact seen as the only thing standing between the world and Total Destruction By Communists. Being a peaceable, explicitly non-violent person carried with it a certain suspect, un-American tinge, as if you could only be a weird religious freak or a Secret Commie Sympathizer. Even in the 1980s, twenty years after the book was written, I remember getting a publication in grade school called The Weekly Reader, which would regularly print graphics comparing the number of American (good) nuclear missiles to Soviet (bad) nuclear missiles. The idea that the publisher was trying to get across was that, as long as the number of Good Missiles was larger than the number of Bad Missiles, the world was safe for third-graders. They did not print that the Good Missiles and the Bad Missiles were exactly the same weapons, and that either one could destroy the world. Oh, no. Only the Bad Missiles could wreak chaos and destruction. The Good Missiles were for Defense. If we fired them, they would . . . I don't know, form a shield of hearts and rainbows over the United States and Western Europe that would cause the Bad Missiles to bounce harmlessly away. The Weekly Reader wasn't too clear on that. But it was clear on the fact that simply having more powerful weapons than the Soviets made us Good.
In that kind of atmosphere, it does take a fairly radical kind of person to stand up and say that violence is not always the answer. Gandhi did it, as did the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and they were both regarded as weird and not-entirely-trustworthy people at the time. Reverend King came under FBI surveillance because they thought he might be a Communist. So having this story about an otherwise pretty unremarkable girl whose entire story arc is about considered, intentional non-violence was a pretty big deal at the time. It was certainly a much stronger stand then than it is now, after the peace movement has made significant inroads in Western culture and the Cold War is over.
Meg Murry. Non-warrior, solver of puzzles, and political heroine. What's not to love?
Favorite non-warrior female character
Really? Favorite non-warrior female character? That's like asking you to name your favorite fruit that isn't the guava. It's really not narrowing the field all that much.
So I guess the way to approach it is to ask about female characters for whom non-violence is an integral part of their personality. Whether they're active pacifists or whether their character arc is about learning the art of non-violence, being a "non-warrior" is part of who they are as people. That being said, I choose:
Meg Murry, heroine of Madeleine L'Engle's Time Quartet.
I chose her because part of Meg's arc is learning about the skills and talents she has, and learning not just to use them to save the universe, but also to accept them as part of herself. She starts out from an unusual position -- she's the very intelligent daughter of two research scientists, the oldest child and only girl in a family of four children, and her father has been missing for quite some time. In effect, Meg is trying to do what a lot of boys in her position might be asked to do, which is to step up and be "the man of the place." She's making an effort to be a sort of "warrior" character, defending herself and her family from bullies with her fists. The thing is, she isn't really very good at it, because that's not where her talents lie.
It turns out that Meg is somewhat psychic and has a talent, not just for mathematics, but for higher mathematics. She's good at figuring out puzzles, and she has a very strong sense of right and wrong. And she turns out to have a much stronger sense of self than you'd expect upon first meeting her. In fact, much of the lesson of the first book, A Wrinkle In Time, is that Meg (and, by extension, the kind of kid who reads about her) must come to accept that she has value as a person, with her own very particular combination of strengths and weaknesses, and that it's better to do what you can do to the best of your ability than to force yourself to be an inferior version of something you're not. And, as it turns out, Meg is very much Not A Warrior. She's kind of puny, physically, and she's nearsighted (the books are set in the mid-1960s, so she doesn't get contact lenses until she grows up, after the FDA approved soft ones), and she's just not physically coordinated enough to be an effective physical warrior. And her psychic enemies are so strong that no human, not even her little brother, whose psychic powers are much more powerful than hers are, can even hope to defeat them in straight combat. Being a Warrior will do Meg no good.
The story arc of the first three books of the Time Quartet (A Wrinkle In Time, A Wind In The Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet) is heavily invested in non-violence. And, in large part, it's up to Meg to figure this out and act on it. She has to solve puzzles and use her perseverance without force, because force will do her no good. In the first two books, the solutions to the puzzles involve broader themes such as Love Will Conquer Totalitarianism All, and Maturing Joyfully Brings Rewards. In the third book, Meg's role as a Non-Warrior comes into sharper focus.
She's an adult, and pregnant, and she doesn't actually leave the house, although she follows her brother along on a wide-ranging psychic journey. The puzzle to solve is to find a point in time where a choice was made that led to the presence of a mad Soviet South American dictator who wants to blow up the world, and then change something key about that moment in time so that the mad dictator doesn't exist. This time, the theme of the book is pretty explicitly about the value of non-violence. All the scenarios that Charles Wallace visits have the same theme, that of two sides waging war on each other. Charles Wallace is the one who can act, but he has to know what to do, and Meg is the one who figures it out. She's the one who realizes that the key to solving this puzzle is to choose non-violence, and it's her solution, as much as Charles Wallace's actions, that ends up saving the world.
In some ways, this is a more radical setup for the character than one might think. The Time Quartet has aged remarkably well, and I think that a lot of people don't quite realize how specific and how political its setting is. It's true that you can take the storyline of A Wrinkle In Time and make a movie of it that sets it in the present day without anyone really noticing. It is a very timeless story in that regard. But when you step back and consider it in its original setting in the middle of the Cold War, it does take on a wonderful new depth.
It's set in an era in which American military might was still fashionable, and was in fact seen as the only thing standing between the world and Total Destruction By Communists. Being a peaceable, explicitly non-violent person carried with it a certain suspect, un-American tinge, as if you could only be a weird religious freak or a Secret Commie Sympathizer. Even in the 1980s, twenty years after the book was written, I remember getting a publication in grade school called The Weekly Reader, which would regularly print graphics comparing the number of American (good) nuclear missiles to Soviet (bad) nuclear missiles. The idea that the publisher was trying to get across was that, as long as the number of Good Missiles was larger than the number of Bad Missiles, the world was safe for third-graders. They did not print that the Good Missiles and the Bad Missiles were exactly the same weapons, and that either one could destroy the world. Oh, no. Only the Bad Missiles could wreak chaos and destruction. The Good Missiles were for Defense. If we fired them, they would . . . I don't know, form a shield of hearts and rainbows over the United States and Western Europe that would cause the Bad Missiles to bounce harmlessly away. The Weekly Reader wasn't too clear on that. But it was clear on the fact that simply having more powerful weapons than the Soviets made us Good.
In that kind of atmosphere, it does take a fairly radical kind of person to stand up and say that violence is not always the answer. Gandhi did it, as did the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and they were both regarded as weird and not-entirely-trustworthy people at the time. Reverend King came under FBI surveillance because they thought he might be a Communist. So having this story about an otherwise pretty unremarkable girl whose entire story arc is about considered, intentional non-violence was a pretty big deal at the time. It was certainly a much stronger stand then than it is now, after the peace movement has made significant inroads in Western culture and the Cold War is over.
Meg Murry. Non-warrior, solver of puzzles, and political heroine. What's not to love?