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Tolkien, GRRM, and women
2020-04-26 22:30Tolkien has memorable women but not very many of them. They don't interact with each other much; in a lifetime of work the number of scenes that *might* pass the Bechdel test can be counted on one hand. Even dropping the "talk not about a man" requirement, just having two women talking at all, leaves us needing only two hands, I'm pretty sure. No woman with a role has a sister.
Also many of the women have a strong pedestal effect, from Idril and Luthien in 1917 to Galadriel in revisions shortly before his death.
GRRM in ASoIaF, despite writing about societies arguably worse for women than anything Tolkien put in the spotlight, has female characters up the wazoo, as POV characters, and interacting: talking, squabbling, plotting, running, using what power and influence they can even in a sexist society. I assume there's plenty of full Bechdel test passing, though I haven't read the books enough to safely assert it, and a lot of things the women would have to talk about would involve a man in some way.
I hate sweeping explanations in general, but have always found "a product of his time" a real copout when it comes to Tolkien. However, I ran into a more interesting version recently: product of his family.
Tolkien's mother died early, he had no sisters, was raised by a Catholic priest, and produced only one daughter. His adult life was dominated by WWI war experience and being a professor in early 1900s British colleges. It would seem that women were genuinely not very present in his life. As for the pedestal, he might have gone straight from "dead mother" to "Edith who will wait for me to be able to marry her despite my guardian's objections."
GRRM has two younger sisters. That's already a huge change in experience: not just one sister, but two of them, to highlight women not being the same. Wikipedia adds that he grew up in a house "belonging to his great-grandmother" which implies she was alive for part of his childhood, probably in addition to his mother, and who knows about grandmothers. His own adult life has been fantasy writing, SF fandom, and screenwriting, all of which have non-vanishing numbers of women. Well, I'm not sure about screenwriting, but film/TV production will have women somewhere in the process, if only as actors.
I would bet that having sisters by no means prevents a man from putting his love interest on a pedestal, but I would bet it at least reduces the chances of "What a Perfect Creature is Woman", what with seeing your sisters fight, annoy you, get sick, suffer cramps, head for the bathroom, get up with bedhead, etc.
So yeah. I wouldn't want to go to town to defend this idea, because people are individuals who make their choices, but the idea that women were in fact quite rare in Tolkien's lived experience, and not in GRRM's, seems worth pondering.
And for people who want to argue that the representation of women in Tolkien isn't a problem, this is undermined by evidence that *Tolkien* eventually thought it was a problem, with him writing a lot more women after LotR, and changing Haleth to a woman (without any romantic or reproductive plot that would require her to be one.)
Relevant links: https://mindstalk.dreamwidth.org/346625.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/g8df1p/hi_lady_tolkein_fans_how_do_you_feel_about_his/fonoqg1/
Also many of the women have a strong pedestal effect, from Idril and Luthien in 1917 to Galadriel in revisions shortly before his death.
GRRM in ASoIaF, despite writing about societies arguably worse for women than anything Tolkien put in the spotlight, has female characters up the wazoo, as POV characters, and interacting: talking, squabbling, plotting, running, using what power and influence they can even in a sexist society. I assume there's plenty of full Bechdel test passing, though I haven't read the books enough to safely assert it, and a lot of things the women would have to talk about would involve a man in some way.
I hate sweeping explanations in general, but have always found "a product of his time" a real copout when it comes to Tolkien. However, I ran into a more interesting version recently: product of his family.
Tolkien's mother died early, he had no sisters, was raised by a Catholic priest, and produced only one daughter. His adult life was dominated by WWI war experience and being a professor in early 1900s British colleges. It would seem that women were genuinely not very present in his life. As for the pedestal, he might have gone straight from "dead mother" to "Edith who will wait for me to be able to marry her despite my guardian's objections."
GRRM has two younger sisters. That's already a huge change in experience: not just one sister, but two of them, to highlight women not being the same. Wikipedia adds that he grew up in a house "belonging to his great-grandmother" which implies she was alive for part of his childhood, probably in addition to his mother, and who knows about grandmothers. His own adult life has been fantasy writing, SF fandom, and screenwriting, all of which have non-vanishing numbers of women. Well, I'm not sure about screenwriting, but film/TV production will have women somewhere in the process, if only as actors.
I would bet that having sisters by no means prevents a man from putting his love interest on a pedestal, but I would bet it at least reduces the chances of "What a Perfect Creature is Woman", what with seeing your sisters fight, annoy you, get sick, suffer cramps, head for the bathroom, get up with bedhead, etc.
So yeah. I wouldn't want to go to town to defend this idea, because people are individuals who make their choices, but the idea that women were in fact quite rare in Tolkien's lived experience, and not in GRRM's, seems worth pondering.
And for people who want to argue that the representation of women in Tolkien isn't a problem, this is undermined by evidence that *Tolkien* eventually thought it was a problem, with him writing a lot more women after LotR, and changing Haleth to a woman (without any romantic or reproductive plot that would require her to be one.)
Relevant links: https://mindstalk.dreamwidth.org/346625.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/g8df1p/hi_lady_tolkein_fans_how_do_you_feel_about_his/fonoqg1/
