Feminist Fiction
I’ve finally realized why discussions of feminist fiction often leave me baffled. There are really two reasons, one more global and one more personal. You see, I hadn’t realized that there are actually three categories (broadly speaking) of feminist fiction: that which inspires, that which enlightens or educates, and that which is all about venting. I also hadn’t taken into account my tendency to interpret things in the darkest possible way.
It’s not surprising that a person who believes that the message of It’s a Wonderful Life is that good people should sacrifice their dreams for the benefit of others finds far fewer works of fiction inspiring than most people. It’s also not surprising that, given my tendency toward gloom, I’m not really into reading fiction to gain more insight into the horrors of the world. And as for venting, well that usually works best if one is in fairly strict agreement with the one venting, and not so well if one disagrees.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with fiction that does any of the above, and no requirement that fiction must be feminist. But it was always disconcerting to have someone tell me that a work of fiction was feminist, then go on to describe something that sounded practically anti-feminist to me. Of course tastes and interpretations vary, but there was also the problem of vocabulary.
Definition time.
Venting is a category that’s fairly self explanatory. In it go the works that complain, and presume you share the complaint. This would, I think, mostly be short fiction, though there might be longer works. It is, I’m afraid, a category I’ve been told about, not one I’ve read, so I’m hard pressed for a concrete example of what I mean. It addresses a problem all people (or, in the case of feminist venting, women) are assumed to have, or at least to commiserate with.
In the enlightening or educating category are works that address either speculative problems (as in The Handmaid’s Tale) or real life problems faced by, in the feminist case, women. They are written to prevent the future in their pages from happening, or to change the present injustices, or to make people aware of the past injustices.
A lot of fiction about women, regardless of genre, at least hovers at the edges of this category because the difficulties women face seem always to be addressed by them. It’s hard, for example, to think of a fantasy novel with a woman protagonist who doesn’t have to overcome being a woman and all that means to her faux-medieval culture. That inability to escape the confines of “womanhood” makes the works seem more educational than inspirational, at least to me.
The works I categorize as inspiring are those in which the protagonist is happy and successful - for certain values of successful. Their protagonists tackle their problems with energy and enthusiasm - you might even say they like their problems (whether they’d admit it or not). Adventure stories are, to me, the penultimate example of this. But adventure stories rarely have female leads, or, worse, when they do, the very thing that makes them inspiring is abandoned. But this, this is what I want when I say I want a feminist work of fiction. I want fiction with a woman protagonist who has fun, fiction that says, no, shouts from the rooftop, “You can do this!” And doesn’t have to add “even though you’re a woman.”
And that really is the problem I find with a lot of fiction intended to be feminist. The protagonist always has womanhood shackled to her ankle as a hindrance. They’re successful despite being a woman, they’re successful after they overcome their gender, they make it in a man’s world. I know that can be inspiring and I know that, to an extent, it’s realistic, but I can’t help feeling like it turns being a woman into, well, an albatross around the protagonist’s neck.
Maybe I’m overlooking how much other women do feel that way. Maybe that’s why it’s such a theme of feminist fiction. Maybe I’m not meant to lump being a woman in with the construct of a woman’s place in society when I read those books. Or maybe the authors lump the two together more than they intend. Maybe the simple fact that women in fiction tend to be women more than the men in fiction are men puts off my own gender fuzziness. I don’t know. I’d love to hear from people who feel differently about the enlightening category, or who find works like Alias, The Deed of Paksenarrion, or The Mists of Avalon to be inspiring. I want to understand the other point of view, even while I long to read something as inspiring as the Vorkosigan saga…but about a woman.