Apparently, I miss writing essays.
Yesterday, amaberis, majenglish, and myself sat down for a day-long marathon of all three Lord of the Rings extended editions. It was glorious in so many different ways: the atmosphere of fangirl love, the random outbursts of singing, the jokes, the food... I love marathon days, I really do. (I may or may not be planning a Harry Potter day. Also a Star Trek TOS day. And a Sherlock evening.)
Today, I feel kind of exhausted (saving Middle Earth is tiring, okay?), so I'm not doing much, even though, like the day after all good parties, I need to clean house. I've decided the new strategy for chores is to turn on the Return of the King soundtrack, scream, "FOR FRODO!!", and run at whatever I need to get done. I'll report back on how that goes.
In the middle of indulging my laziness, I trolled Tumblr for some LotR graphics, just because I could. While I reveled in the pretty, I ran across a quote from a professor. Unfortunately, I can't find it a second time to quote in its entirety, but it said something to the effect that it was sad that our cultural concept of love and friendship could not be divorced from sexuality, that Tolkien would be shocked and appalled at the thought of homoeroticism between his characters, and interpreting them in a homoerotic way violated the spirit of the books.
I came away offended, and it took me a bit to understand why.
First of all, I like slash. I didn't always; I grew up in a very conservative, religious home that taught me that sexuality of any kind was dangerous and the homosexuality in particular was disgusting and wrong. I have since grown out of that worldview. A large part of my changing ideas had to do with the fact that I discovered and really liked slash. As I got older and learned to better assess what I was reading, I took a greater interest in real-world sexuality, its implications, its permutations, and formed my own ideas about it personally, ideologically, and intellectually. I've come to realize that sexuality is a complicated thing. The way I approach sex as an activity is completely different from the way I approach sex in a book or movie. My sex life has very little to do with the sex scenes I write or read. And both of those things are different than the way the media approaches sex, or how my region approaches sex culturally, which is different from the way my friends in Italy approach sex culturally, which is different from the way my friends in Australia approach sex culturally. It's very, very complicated.
That said, I think I understand what offended me so much about the quote. If you don't like slash, that's absolutely fine. I know a number of people who don't. And if we were able to revive Tolkien and show him some slash fic, even well-written slash fic, he'd probably expire a second time on the spot. This much is true. And yes, I agree that it is unfortunate that male friendship is so homophobically treated by the vast majority of media. Men can't touch, share feelings, or even stand near each other without being labeled "gay."
Still, I have a real problem with this very restrictive version of literary analysis. First and foremost, the author is never the final word. Never. Trying to understand an author's perspective and intent is a noble goal, and perfectly legitimate as a literary practice, but it is not the only way to study a text. One of the glories of literature of any kind is its durability. I can read texts written eight hundred years ago and still gain something from them without even knowing who the author was. It's always valuable to understand the historical context of a work...case in point, Tolkien's personal experience with the devastation of the World Wars almost certainly influenced how he described Middle Earth's wars. But that is not the only method of literary analysis with value and limiting oneself to "what the author really meant" is fallacious at best. You, the modern reader, can never know precisely what the author intended, not with all the journals and notes and historical context in the world. Furthermore, you shouldn't have to. The author releases his or her creation into the world, and from then on, every reader who brings their own experiences and viewpoints to the table contributes something to the understanding of the work. If they didn't, a text would be useless and dead. Texts are meant to be shared; they're useless if anyone that isn't the author can't identify with them in some way, and the way people relate and identify and understand is always different. What the author thinks is usually pretty irrelevant.
This is especially true when it comes to sex. Thomas Foster's How to Read Literature Like a Professor gives this helpful advice: it's all about sex...unless it's sex. When it comes to academic literary analysis, English lit is rife with all kinds of sexual metaphors, innuendos, and complications. Sex is everywhere, mostly because the British stance on sex for centuries was, "Nobody talk about it, just ignore it, it'll go away," while people shagged like bunnies. Cultural repression turned out to equal a fascination with sex, and lemme give you a clue, that fascination turns up in a lot of literature. You can find sex in the most innocuous of places. Frankly, it can be disturbing. The thing is, if people are actually engaging in intercourse, it usually means something totally different. I hate to bring up Ayn Rand, of all people, but hers was the most heavy-handed of examples: one of her characters actually tells his partner their sex is a political act. The trouble is, characters aren't real people. They're ideas. We can relate to these ideas and have those ideas inform our understanding of sex, but sex in literature is usually about two ideas joining. Sex in literature is about growing up, about bringing two disparate ideologies together, about betraying trust, about changing religious standards, about transition from one era to another, about politics. Only very rarely is it about love, and it's almost never about the physical, animal desire to perform a physical act. Ergo, I would say Sam and Frodo's relationship (to pull an example out of thin air) actually has a lot more to do with sex as it is written than it would if Tolkien had actually included a hobbit make-out scene. Because if he had, it wouldn't have been about sex, but if you the reader can draw some sort of conclusion about sex based on their relationship, you have every right to.
I'll even go a step further and say you're not too far off the mark. I don't think Tolkien would have promoted homosexual interpretations of his work at all, because he was a twentieth century Catholic with firm ideas. Fair enough. But he was also a scholar of medieval literature, and medieval literature is nothing if not homoerotic. All those manly bonds in LotR were inspired by the bonds of fellowship between medieval knights, which sometimes shaded into the sexual. Like I said earlier: sex is complicated, and cultural attitudes toward sex change. What we now consider sex wasn't necessarily considered sex then, and what we consider taboo medieval men wouldn't. Gawain and the Green Knight (a poem Tolkien himself translated) includes descriptions of men kissing, and not the chaste kisses of greeting, but full-on romantic kisses. The phallic imagery of medieval literature alone is staggering, and the most common consensus was that women were good for childbearing and necessary to prove a man's virility, but otherwise useless. Men turned to each other for emotional support, comfort, friendship, conversation, amusement, and any other needs they might have had, and the culture valued same-sex relationships far above marriages. In that kind of cultural atmosphere, it doesn't seem too far out of the ordinary for men (and women) to satisfy those biological urges with each other. That doesn't mean homosexual sex was practiced exclusively, obviously, but the potential for those relationships certainly existed. Even in the absence of sexual activity, I can't see a lack of true, genuine love between men. (Women, I'm sorry you get the short stick here, but medieval literature was pretty sexist. There were lots of handmaid sleepovers, though.) If that's what Tolkien was emulating, and the style of writing if nothing else insinuates that he was, then a little homosexual presumption is no presumption at all.
So when it comes to Frodo and Sam or any other member of the Fellowship, I don't think it violates the spirit of the work to imagine a little bit more happened on the road to Mordor than Tolkien described. I don't think I have to be tied to what Tolkien would have approved of, and I don't think that layering the male relationships with sexual overtones detracts from the genuine love Tolkien described. You don't have to like slash, and I for one will not be reading any Legolas/Gimli porn EVER, but I'd appreciate a little bit more analytical flexibility, professor.
In conclusion, sir...
Today, I feel kind of exhausted (saving Middle Earth is tiring, okay?), so I'm not doing much, even though, like the day after all good parties, I need to clean house. I've decided the new strategy for chores is to turn on the Return of the King soundtrack, scream, "FOR FRODO!!", and run at whatever I need to get done. I'll report back on how that goes.
In the middle of indulging my laziness, I trolled Tumblr for some LotR graphics, just because I could. While I reveled in the pretty, I ran across a quote from a professor. Unfortunately, I can't find it a second time to quote in its entirety, but it said something to the effect that it was sad that our cultural concept of love and friendship could not be divorced from sexuality, that Tolkien would be shocked and appalled at the thought of homoeroticism between his characters, and interpreting them in a homoerotic way violated the spirit of the books.
I came away offended, and it took me a bit to understand why.
First of all, I like slash. I didn't always; I grew up in a very conservative, religious home that taught me that sexuality of any kind was dangerous and the homosexuality in particular was disgusting and wrong. I have since grown out of that worldview. A large part of my changing ideas had to do with the fact that I discovered and really liked slash. As I got older and learned to better assess what I was reading, I took a greater interest in real-world sexuality, its implications, its permutations, and formed my own ideas about it personally, ideologically, and intellectually. I've come to realize that sexuality is a complicated thing. The way I approach sex as an activity is completely different from the way I approach sex in a book or movie. My sex life has very little to do with the sex scenes I write or read. And both of those things are different than the way the media approaches sex, or how my region approaches sex culturally, which is different from the way my friends in Italy approach sex culturally, which is different from the way my friends in Australia approach sex culturally. It's very, very complicated.
That said, I think I understand what offended me so much about the quote. If you don't like slash, that's absolutely fine. I know a number of people who don't. And if we were able to revive Tolkien and show him some slash fic, even well-written slash fic, he'd probably expire a second time on the spot. This much is true. And yes, I agree that it is unfortunate that male friendship is so homophobically treated by the vast majority of media. Men can't touch, share feelings, or even stand near each other without being labeled "gay."
Still, I have a real problem with this very restrictive version of literary analysis. First and foremost, the author is never the final word. Never. Trying to understand an author's perspective and intent is a noble goal, and perfectly legitimate as a literary practice, but it is not the only way to study a text. One of the glories of literature of any kind is its durability. I can read texts written eight hundred years ago and still gain something from them without even knowing who the author was. It's always valuable to understand the historical context of a work...case in point, Tolkien's personal experience with the devastation of the World Wars almost certainly influenced how he described Middle Earth's wars. But that is not the only method of literary analysis with value and limiting oneself to "what the author really meant" is fallacious at best. You, the modern reader, can never know precisely what the author intended, not with all the journals and notes and historical context in the world. Furthermore, you shouldn't have to. The author releases his or her creation into the world, and from then on, every reader who brings their own experiences and viewpoints to the table contributes something to the understanding of the work. If they didn't, a text would be useless and dead. Texts are meant to be shared; they're useless if anyone that isn't the author can't identify with them in some way, and the way people relate and identify and understand is always different. What the author thinks is usually pretty irrelevant.
This is especially true when it comes to sex. Thomas Foster's How to Read Literature Like a Professor gives this helpful advice: it's all about sex...unless it's sex. When it comes to academic literary analysis, English lit is rife with all kinds of sexual metaphors, innuendos, and complications. Sex is everywhere, mostly because the British stance on sex for centuries was, "Nobody talk about it, just ignore it, it'll go away," while people shagged like bunnies. Cultural repression turned out to equal a fascination with sex, and lemme give you a clue, that fascination turns up in a lot of literature. You can find sex in the most innocuous of places. Frankly, it can be disturbing. The thing is, if people are actually engaging in intercourse, it usually means something totally different. I hate to bring up Ayn Rand, of all people, but hers was the most heavy-handed of examples: one of her characters actually tells his partner their sex is a political act. The trouble is, characters aren't real people. They're ideas. We can relate to these ideas and have those ideas inform our understanding of sex, but sex in literature is usually about two ideas joining. Sex in literature is about growing up, about bringing two disparate ideologies together, about betraying trust, about changing religious standards, about transition from one era to another, about politics. Only very rarely is it about love, and it's almost never about the physical, animal desire to perform a physical act. Ergo, I would say Sam and Frodo's relationship (to pull an example out of thin air) actually has a lot more to do with sex as it is written than it would if Tolkien had actually included a hobbit make-out scene. Because if he had, it wouldn't have been about sex, but if you the reader can draw some sort of conclusion about sex based on their relationship, you have every right to.
I'll even go a step further and say you're not too far off the mark. I don't think Tolkien would have promoted homosexual interpretations of his work at all, because he was a twentieth century Catholic with firm ideas. Fair enough. But he was also a scholar of medieval literature, and medieval literature is nothing if not homoerotic. All those manly bonds in LotR were inspired by the bonds of fellowship between medieval knights, which sometimes shaded into the sexual. Like I said earlier: sex is complicated, and cultural attitudes toward sex change. What we now consider sex wasn't necessarily considered sex then, and what we consider taboo medieval men wouldn't. Gawain and the Green Knight (a poem Tolkien himself translated) includes descriptions of men kissing, and not the chaste kisses of greeting, but full-on romantic kisses. The phallic imagery of medieval literature alone is staggering, and the most common consensus was that women were good for childbearing and necessary to prove a man's virility, but otherwise useless. Men turned to each other for emotional support, comfort, friendship, conversation, amusement, and any other needs they might have had, and the culture valued same-sex relationships far above marriages. In that kind of cultural atmosphere, it doesn't seem too far out of the ordinary for men (and women) to satisfy those biological urges with each other. That doesn't mean homosexual sex was practiced exclusively, obviously, but the potential for those relationships certainly existed. Even in the absence of sexual activity, I can't see a lack of true, genuine love between men. (Women, I'm sorry you get the short stick here, but medieval literature was pretty sexist. There were lots of handmaid sleepovers, though.) If that's what Tolkien was emulating, and the style of writing if nothing else insinuates that he was, then a little homosexual presumption is no presumption at all.
So when it comes to Frodo and Sam or any other member of the Fellowship, I don't think it violates the spirit of the work to imagine a little bit more happened on the road to Mordor than Tolkien described. I don't think I have to be tied to what Tolkien would have approved of, and I don't think that layering the male relationships with sexual overtones detracts from the genuine love Tolkien described. You don't have to like slash, and I for one will not be reading any Legolas/Gimli porn EVER, but I'd appreciate a little bit more analytical flexibility, professor.
In conclusion, sir...
