'practice your beauty, blue girls'
I've just read a dreadful poem by John Crowe Ransom, entitled "Blue Girls." It's not that it's badly written--it's exceptionally well written, in fact. It's the message....
Twirling you blue skirts, travelling the sward
Under the towers of your seminary,
Go listen to your teachers old and contrary
Without believing a word.
Tie the white fillets then ( Read more... )
Rusty's women make me ill--whining, self-absorbed, desperate to cling to a man. The only one who rises above this is Donna...and--not a surprise!--she gets punished for it: every bit of development for her character is, literally, wiped away, and she must revert to what she was originally. It doesn't really surprise me that Rusty writes women this way: he writes stereotypes, according to stereotypical TV tropes. Soap opera, pretty much. Easily recognized, identifiable "types" that require no further thought and so never become realistic.
Buffy easily could've become just another male fantasy female "hero"; instead, she was given dimension, traits that made up a coherent, believable personality....One that, above all, remained internally consistent. Here, I'm thinking of Big!Gun!Rose! in "The Stolen Earth" or Alien!Chaser!Martha! in "End of Time"--silly, overdone depictions that evoked laughter, not admiration.
More musings....I'll throw it in here; it crossed my mind this morning, before I read The Very Bad Poem, and it does connect....
In HP, I think I finally pinpointed what really disturbs me about Hermione: she has no background. Of course, we learn all about Harry--even as he learns about his own family. We're inundated with Ron's background: it rivals the quantity of information we garner about Harry. But Hermione, the third member of the Trio? No. Her parents are Muggles--the end; 'bye. She has no foundation, no sense of an actual existence. No wonder it seems so hollow when she marries Ron--what in God's name does she see in him? We don't know, because we don't actually know Hermione.
JKR actually does the same thing with Lily: "The Prince's Tale" gives us some sense of character, but not enough....Lily's story comes to a screeching halt. What did she really see in James? How did someone who demonstrated some perception fall so easily for his lies and deception? Why did she seem to lose all contact with others once she married? Where were her friends? What did she think of the harebrained Secret Keeper switch proposed by James' friend? Women in HP: not really real.
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Hermione, like Lily, Molly, Tonks, Minerva, Sprout and Petunia is a type - she's the sassy side-kick, the wisecracking best friend of yore, only here she's become the smart one who figures things out, and tries to point Harry in the right direction. But she and Ron are polar opposites. For the life of me, I can't see the attraction either way except that she loves his family life, and since her own family is only mentioned in passing, it's a mystery what her background and tastes are. And here's something that always niggled at me - her mother's a dentist or orthodontist and Hermione fixes her own teeth after the tooth growing episode? That doesn't sound like any dentist I've ever known.
Lily's character came to a screeching halt when she met James. Prior to that, she has character - she's intelligent, ready for new experiences and kind to young Sev, but something happens to Lily that is never fully explained just as young Severus's offenses are never fully detailed, and so SWM shows her changing because of her attraction to James, and then leaving Snape alone in the hall, which was cruel, and I don't care what he said in the heat of the moment. I think he could be forgive.
She's young, but she seems to have handed over her identity, her sense of self and her intelligence when she took up with and married James, so that by the time she dies, she's a huge question mark - what was Lily really like? Did she smile indulgently when James took off with his cloak, leaving her and the baby, or did she begin to understand him better. In fact, did she have any say in her future at all, or did she hand over her decision making abilities to the Marauders when she marries? Lily is the most frustrating female character in the series, for me at least, but her character is the one that most cogently illustrates the difficulty JKR had in making her females three dimensional.
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The line that really gets me is:
And think no more of what will come to pass
Than bluebirds that go walking on the grass
Ugh - clearly his stereotypes are showing, and it's also part of that generation's view that women need to be taken care of because they "don't have a thought in their pretty little heads."
I had a professor (a poet) who liked John Crowe Ransom and he had that same attitude that women couldn't be real grown-ups in the same way that men were. I hate to say it, but it's also an ingrained Southern attitude, patriarchal nonsense.
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That stanza is just appalling--not only is it the 'don't worry that pretty little head of yours, sweetie' attitude, but the dismissal of female conversation as "chattering."
I can't wait to use this poem in my AP classes: I can't wait to see the expressions on the faces of the first students to realize what Ransom is saying.
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But what's telling is that she fails to develop her leading female characters. Hermione is most egregious, as she, in theory, should be equal to Harry and Ron....and she's not. Instead, she is best defined as Harry and Ron's friend.
Lily's the next failure, as you pointed out. She becomes Harry's mother...She's not even defined as much as James' wife as she is as Harry's mother. Those two roles, though, are all she is, once she drops Snape from her life and we can't get a sense of her actual character--since it's Snape's memories that give the most and clearest views of a person behind the label of Harry's mother.
And then there's Ginny--who is little more in the books than Harry's-wife-in-waiting. She makes me think of some medieval lady of nobility, just being raised to be traded off in an arranged marriage--there's about as much of a developed relationship between her and Harry, too.
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