Uh oh! It seems that some woman is offering some opinions about Tolkien!
Over on Time.com, Ruth Davis Konigsberg has a brief personal essay reflecting on the almost complete lack of female characters in the new Hobbit film, and in Tolkien’s ouvre generally. As she notes, it’s not until about two hours in to the nearly three-hour movie that “we finally meet someone without a Y chromosome,” namely Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel — and she was added into the originally all-male story by the screenwriters. Blanchette’s is the only female name out of 37 named in the cast list – though there are a couple of unnamed female characters who make brief appearances.
“I did not read The Hobbit or the The Lord of the Rings trilogy as a child, and I have always felt a bit alienated from the fandom surrounding them,” Konigsberg observes.
Now I think I know why: Tolkien seems to have wiped women off the face of Middle-earth. I suppose it’s understandable that a story in which the primary activity seems to be chopping off each other’s body parts for no particular reason might be a little heavy on male characters — although it’s not as though Tolkien had to hew to historical accuracy when he created his fantastical world. The problem is one of biological accuracy. Tolkien’s characters defy the basics of reproduction: dwarf fathers beget dwarf sons, hobbit uncles pass rings down to hobbit nephews. If there are any mothers or daughters, aunts or nieces, they make no appearances. Trolls and orcs especially seem to rely on asexual reproduction, breeding whole male populations, which of course come in handy when amassing an army to attack the dwarves and elves.
Yes, yes, as she admits, Tolkien’s few female characters tend to be powerful. But that hardly changes the basic fact that the Hobbit, and Tolkien generally, is overloaded with dudes.
These fairly commonplace observations have, naturally, sent the orcs and the elf princesses of the Men’s Rights subreddit into an uproar. Naturally, none of them seem to have bothered to read any of Konigsberg’s brief piece before setting forth their opinions, which sometimes accuse her of ignoring things she specifically acknowledged (like that whole powerful-female-character thing), and completely miss that the bit about reproduction is, you know, a joke on Konigsberg’s part.
Here are some of my favorite idiotic comments from the “discussion.” (Click on the yellow comments to see the originals on Reddit.)
Uh, Jane Austen’s books are filled with dudes. Especially Pride and Prejudice 2: Mr. Darcy’s Revenge, which was later adapted into a buddy cop movie starring Robin Williams and Danny Glover.
EDITED TO ADD: Somehow forgot to include two of my favorite comments:
Oh, and if you were unable to find a woman in the picture above, try this one instead:
*women haters. They seem to hate more than one woman.
@timetravelingfool
I have no problem whatsoever imagining that.
The whole thing is so disgusting – you have “men’s righters” on Reddit who are into child porn, or rape, or harassment in general, and scream about their rights when such sites are closed. You have Elam, who says he would vote “not guilty” in any rape trial, even if he thought the man was guilty. You have the whole RegiserHer and doxxing business, which is out to get women stalked, raped or probably killed. You have men who want women denied the vote, forced out of the workplace – who want baby girls’ voiceboxes removed.
This is a mob identified as a hate movement by the SPLC. It’s as worthwhile trying to engage with them as with neoNazis or the KKK. The only good thing to be said about them is that they’re lazy, stupid internet warriors who couldn’t organise a fart in a beanbag.
What is John Travolta from Battlefield Earth doing in the center of that last picture?
Kitteh
Holy shit they ARE nuts! At least nobody takes them seriously…
@ mordsith: Contrary to popular belief orcs made little orcs like humans. Mr. Jackson is responsible for the orcs-being-made-of-sludge myth. Elves also made babies the human way (Tolkien wrote an entire essay dedicated to eleven marriage customs and sexuality) and he also confirmed by letter that dwarves make little dwarves by way of the horizontal Mumba. As for female characterisation? Tolkien believed all women want marriage and babies and every female character in Tolkien inevitably wish to win the favour of a man; women who did not obey the will and whim of men or who where victims of rape or incest die goodly and pure. Oh, the implications!
I remember getting so upset when I read the bit about removing baby girl’s voiceboxes. I mean, I hate all the rest of their vitriol as well, but that really shook me to my core. For me, to literally take away someone’s voice is almost the worst thing you can do to them. It really proves that all they want is a slave. I wish these guys glowed in the dark, so we could spot them.
@catnuck
Don’t worry, so much hate never stays secret for too long. The best we can hope for is that it doesnt explode into something tragic.
As for mensrightsers and Tolkien? Basically anything critiquing Tolkien gets this sort of bullshit. It’s such a shame that my no. 1 fandom is a haven for neck beards outside ff.net and henneth annun. D: However, it * is* funny how these dudebros pretend to be fans but can’t point out here Peter changed elements in the story. And they say we look for things to bitch about?
Because extreme gender disparities for no reason at all should be noticed, and too often, they are not.
Tolkien’s books are great, and the movies are fine. I don’t think that we need to go back and change everyone in them to women. But, we are living in a society that still struggles with sexism and racism, so when there are movies that have no women, or no people of color in them at all, and there’s no good story reason for it, then we need to point that out and acknowledge that it exists, so that people stop accepting it as normal and expected. It should be normal that there are men and women in all sorts of roles. It should be normal that there are people of color in all sorts of roles. But right now, its not. Part of the work we need to do to make that be normal is to make it so that all male casts and all white casts are NOT considered the default. And in order to do that, we need to start by pointing it out whenever it happens.
@ Kitteh- what. the. fuck. about voiceboxes?!?!?! Can you link me up?
ttf – no, sorry, I can’t. It’s something that was in a comment thread (with upvotes) I’ve seen mentioned in passing many times here, but I haven’t the foggiest what article or even what site. Someone else might remember.
@Canuck WTF Someone actually SAID that? Wha…how can…
Then again, they are a hate movement, so should I really be surprised?
@ timetravellingfool It can be found at the Something Awful website
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/weekend-web/spearhead-forum-misandry.php?page=7
@CarleyBlue: Thanks! I was going to link it up, but my internet is no good, and I’m trying to download an episode of Golden Girls…I think I’m fighting a losing battle.
Also, I guess I should sort of introduce myself. I’m the Canuck_with_Pluck. I’ve been lurking around this blog for about a year and a half, just recently started commenting. I love this blog. You guys are awesome.
NP, Kitteh. Carley, thank you. My god who is that royal shithead? Does he still comment?
I’m still reading the comments section- they all seem to think the author wrote that in a mouth frothing rage- I didn’t read that tone at all.
Merry New Year, everybody (in my time zone, I guess)!
happy new year, tulgey!!
Happy New Year to all you slackers who’ve only just got there! 😉
Caunuck_with_Pluck, welcome! Now I may be about to do a crappy-short-term-memory embarrassing myself thing, but have you seen Katz’s wonderful Pierre cartoons?
Happy New Year, peeps!
Welcome, Canuck_with_Pluck!
I need to second everything kitteh said about Eowyn. I hate hate HATE when she’s held up as a feminist character. She basically decides to kill herself in battle because the guy she likes doesn’t like her back. And as soon as a guy does show interest, she decides to settle down and have lots of babies. Sorry, “plant a garden”. Ick.
“Lipstick and invitations”. Ick. I was an unfemme, gawkish eight-year-old and already very aware that I was not one of the Pretty Girls, but I still thought that it was shitty.
I think I was put off by the racism in Narnia before the sexism really started getting to me, but there was more than one instance of femme stuff being shallow and unacceptable and only girls who wear trousers and have swords being acceptable, especially if they renounce their ghastly backward arranged marriages and move somewhere less swarthy, because we can combine the racism and the sexism in one big giant disaster. I didn’t get very many Arab or generally-middle-eastern characters in my books as a child, so it wasn’t much fun when what there was involved pretty much every orientalist stereotype available. The whole mess could only have been worse if the White/Green Witch-harlot-badawfulfemalething had been wearing kohl in every scene.
I always read Eowyn as discontented and not in love with Aragorn so much as the anti-stagnation he represented, but I was a small child with a slight crush on her and not much interest in marrying lost kings when I could be smiting witchkings, so possibly I am a tiny tiny bit biased.
@Morgan
I don’t see why you would lump Tolkien and G.R.R. Martin together in that regard; the latter is certainly more progressive about gender issues (which is to be expected, since he started his series in the 1990’s rather than the 1940’s).
*waves at hellkell*
Just back from my eighth viewing of the HOBBIT (I saw FELLOWSHIP 45 times before it left the theatres, but then I read LOTR 100 times between the ages of 10 and 17, documenting it in my reading journal). I quite reading Tolkien for a while (during my angry young feminist phase), but came back years later (because of Jackson’s film).
The issues of gender AND race in Tolkien’s work are well worth discussing–though one would hope people would have read them (and yes, as a number of people have said, the role of Arwen was expanded in Jackson’s film–and let’s not forget Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh were screenwriters and worked on various aspects of the film–the “auteur” theory of film all too often washes out all the multiple people who work on a film). Catbeast is right that Tolkien believed women naturally craved marriage and children. (He also thought men were inherently more prone to sin than women.)
BUT, and this seems worth mentioning: when Oxford University finally admitted women as students post WWI, the tutors (meaning professors) were told they didn’t have to work with the women if they didn’t want to–and Tolkien chose to. His field (philology, focusing on Anglo Saxon and Germanic languages) was unpopular (the “real” status was in the Classics) (and as a Catholic, he was also part of a marginalized religious group in England at the time), and he had a number of women students he taught, several he published with; the HOBBIT was published because one of his women students told one of the graduated women students who worked for a publisher about it, and she got the manuscript to Unwin and Alleyn. Some of the women who worked with him wrote glowing tributes about him for the Centennial editions of Tolkien journals (Centennial of his birth) a few years back.
Here’s a somewhat different take on the question of gender and Tolkien’s work:
http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2005/smiesel_ladiesring_jan05.asp
Tolkien’s mother (who converted to Catholicism) died when he was twelve (he believed that her family refusing to support her after her conversion contributed to her death); he and his younger brother were made wards of her priest, and (as was NOT uncommon then) attended an all boy’s school (going on to all male university), and the all male army. He was apparently quite close to an aunt of his, but yes, he lived in an all male world. HIs view of women was also heavily influenced by his religion (Galadriel is strongly influenced by the iconography of the Virgin Mary).
Women have been pointing out the lack of women characters in Tolkien for a long time–and I’m not going to deny it (though I’ll agree with those who point out the power of the women who exist–including Varda, consort of Manwe, the top pair of the Valar–Varda is in some ways more powerful than Manwe)–Tolkien’s world is also heternormative/heterosexist–the most powerful and the best (and power is sometimes more spiritual than physical) are couples–Feanor, unrestrained by any feminine partner, sinks all his love into the Silmarils which are stolen (by Morgoth and Ungoliant working together–though not for long), and the events afterwards (Kinslaying, the Oath) are tragic.
But, as one of my favorite feminist scholars, Edith Crowe notes, when you look at when the books were published (HOBBIT in 1937, FELLOWSHIP in 1955, it wasn’t as if there were lots of feminist books around–one of the books published the same year as FoTR was Nabakov’s LOLITA). So those of us reading back in the day (I was 10 in 1965) were used to reading through that lens. (And at the time, “girls” weren’t supposed to read sf or fantasy, so I consider my love of those “boys only” genres to be proto-feminist!). Crowe also points out that some of the values Tolkien explores in his work are not dissimilar to some of the values in feminism (he is NOT a feminist of course)–i.e. the environmentalism, and the pacifism Frodo comes to, and the critique of some forms of what we now call hegemonic masculinity (Boromir’s warrior ethos that is somewhat criticized by Faramir–in the book that is).
A lot of women write in Tolkien Studies (there are a lot more women in English/literary studies than a lot of other academic fields, but there are pockets that are still pretty male-dominated). So there’s some interesting issues going on there as well–two of the three biggest names in TOlkien studies are women (Verlyn Flieger and Jane Chance), and I’m not sure there are many canonical literary studies sub-fields you can say that about (it’s mostly because Tolkien’s work, like the genre of fantasy and sf, is not considered “true” literature, of course, so presumably it doesn’t matter if the girls play in it).
The lack of graphic or overt sex in Tolkien’s world (compared to oh say Robert Heinlein’s world) stands out as well (it was criticized by contemporaries of him who thougth the lack of sex meant the work wasn’t for adults)–as does the lack of rape (there is I think one forced marriage/rape in the SILM, and the man who forces the marriage does not end well).
Now, of course, there are more women working in sf/fantasy (and quite a few of them got their start because of their love of Tolkien!), and there are more choices for all readers. I’m a huge reader of women authors myself–but I taught myself, starting in 1983 or so when I became a feminist, and spent the next five years reading nothing but women authors because all I’d been taught in school and my first two university degrees were male authors! Amazing how much shit I got from some of the men in fandom when I was doing that (when I pointed out I’d read nothing but male authors during a lot of college years, however, that was normal).
I was actually pretty pissed with what happened to Eowyn in the book back in the day (after the movie, I began to see the point of marrying Faramir, heh, though in my slash fiction, I pair Frodo with Faramir–and usually save Boromir from dying, and get him together with Eowyn….and Aragorn….in fact, I have a WIP that’s all about the foursome going on there)–but then I realized a long while ago I not only wanted to be Eowyn, I was hot for Eowyn (queering her happily for many many years before realizing it)–which is an example of what literary studies call a resistant reader–a reader who reads against the ‘grain’ of the text or the intentions of the author. I could identify (from age 10 to my early 20s) with Frodo (who is technically a male character, but who stands out, as do the rest of the hobbits, as NOT fitting hegemonic masculine gender roles, not being the warrior, not achieving the victory he did through strength of arms or having a Big Sword) and with Eowyn, and did so happily.
And yes, while TOlkien never settled on a single authoritative version of the orcs/goblins, the basic philosophy of his storyverse is that evil can corrupt, but never create–so Morgoth takes prisoners of war (elves and in some versions men as well) and corrupts them and tortures them and brainwashes them to create orcs and goblins — there was a whole shitload of wars in Middle-earth during the First and Second Age related in the Silmarillion. He also wrote a lot of philosophy/theology in later life over the issue of free will and evil and the orcs/goblins.
The Entwives pretty much left the Ents as well!
Tolkien was an orphan (his father died when Tolkien was very young–three or four?–and his mother when he was 12 as I said above). Tolkien’s stories are full of orphans (as are the folktales and other medieval texts that he was an expert in). I don’t think it’s because he hated women–but because his experience of the world is that parents die, and then, in WWI, two of his three best friends were killed.
I shall now forcibly shut myself up! I’ve taught the HOBBIT twice the past year(75th anniversary), and am now teaching a class on the film, and working on scholarship on Tolkien–and, well, it’s a big thing for me.