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30 Days of Women: Day 27
Day 27: A female character you have extensive personal canon for
Sunshine (Sunshine, Robin McKinley). It isn’t so much her personally that I have extensive personal canon for, but her entire world as well. Sunshine is a strange novel, world-building wise. So much is left unanswered, or hinted at - the ending is left very open, as are the natures and motivations of many of the characters. We don’t know why the world is now like this, or about the political system, or how magic works, particularly - everything we know links in to the life of Sunshine herself. She’s a baker, from a close-knit family of choice, with magic users on one side and…something else on the other. The knowledge we have revolves around her, but we are told very little of her past. I really wanted know more aboiut her family situtation on both sides, her childhood, her relationships…it’s interesting to work with very little of this information, because it does make you think and try to fill in the blanks yourself, but I would have loved for the novel to have been three times as long.
30 Days of Women: Day 26
Day 26: Favourite classical female character
Clytemnestra (The Oresteia, Aeschylus). She kind of has a point. I’m aware that she’s a villain, or presented as one. Her motives are questionable. I choose to interpret the murder of her husband, Agamemnon, as retaliation for his sacrifice of her daughter during the Trojan War. Agamemnon tricked Clytemnestra into sending Iphigenia to him to be married to Achilles, but killed her in exchange for his fleet being able to chase after Helen. We have no true idea of why, during the war, she began an affair with her brother-in-law. Loneliness? Power? Revenge? Coercion?
When Agamemnon arrives home Clytemnestra invites him in, forcing him first to walk across purple tapestries. When he enters she kills him by trapping him in a net and stabbing him, and then kills Cassandra, his concubine, who can of course fully predict her death and must fulfill her own prophecy. I’ve heard of a performance where, after Agamemnon enters, Clytemnestra’s servants pick up the tapestries to show embroideries telling the tale of Iphigenia’s murder. There is another version where the purple cloth is Iphigenia’s stitched-together dresses.
Clytemnestra announces the murder of Agamemnon using filthy, low Greek, which Tony Harrison’s version interprets as “Shagamemnon”, which is pretty fun. She presents the murder as another kind of sacrifice. Clytemnestra gets all of the best lines. In my basic edition she says:
“If it were possible to pour a libation to the corpse from what is fitting, it would justly be from this blood - no, more than justify: so great a mixing-bowl in his house did this man fill with curse-laden evil, and now on his return he drinks it up himself.” She then justifies her actions by focusing on his careless murder of her daughter. I love that her anger as a mother has led her to take revenge - evem if her children eventually murder her in return, she believes herself to be truly justified and I am given to agree with her, although perhaps not with her murder of Cassandra.
30 Days of Women: Day 25
Day 25: Favourite mother/daughter and/or sister relationship
Tierra de Lobos is a nineteenth-century Spanish Western, sort of. Isabel, Nieves and Almudena are sisters, daughters of Antonio Lobo, who is a figure of fear and repression in their lives. Early on in the series he tries to marry Isabel off to an older man; she tried to hang herself. Saving her, Nieves and Almudena hatched a plan to call off the marriage, which mostly involed Nieves pretending interest in him and claiming he molested her, which is fairly hilarious - especially when, while everyone is looking elsewhere, she takes a moment to shove the sleeve of her dress off her shoulder and look anguished.
Of course, it turns out that the primary reason that Isabel doesn’t want to marry this guy is because she’s super gay. She falls in love with her dad’s favourite prostitute. Cristina - and it’s mutual - but they are eventually discovered and he sends Isabel to a nunnery, and Cristina to be murdered. Cristina is lucky, and Isabel - well, she’s locked in a cell and tortured horribly. Nieves and Almudena, learning of her relationship with Cristina, are shocked and disbelieving but go to visit her in secret. She acts as if she’s content with a life in the nunner while looking gaunt and pale, and hands them a Bible whilst admonishing them to read the psalms. When they look, she’s marked out a message in her own blood: “Get me out of this hell.”
Nieves and Almudena immediately pack up and return to the nunnery, pistol and hip-flask concealed in their fashionable bags. They intimidate the nuns but are foiled, and locked in with Isabel. So, of course, what are they to do? Clearly the answer is to strip down to their underwear and make a rope from their clothes - which they test before using, unlike most. It turns out Cristina has also infiltrated the nunnery while pretending to be a novice, and she helps them get out the gate. Isabel and Cristina reunite, and her sisters are uncomfortable but nevertheless glad to see her back.
30 Days of Women: Day 24
Day 24: Favourite female romantic relationship
Sue and Maud (Fingersmith). I honestly can’t say much without giving the plot away! Suffice to say that it is very twisty indeed (to quote my housemate’s reaction at the ending of the first episode of the television series: “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH OH MY GOD WHAT JUST HAPPENED.”) Maud is the orphaned niece of a rich gentleman, forced to assist him in his profession of shady book dealing. Sue is the thief contracted to convince her to marry a conman, help him put her in the asylum and walk away with a share of the profits. And one night, as they prepare for bed, Maud asks Sue: “What does one do, on one’s wedding night?” And of course it all spirals from there. The marvellous thing about Fingersmith is that everyone is lying: it’s about what that you have to figure out. They are both fantastic and complex characters in their own right, and as their motivations unfold you long for everything to work out for them.
30 Days of Women: Day 23
Day 23: Favourite female platonic relationship
Cimorene and Kazul (Enchanted Forest Chronicles). Dragonsbane was the book of my childhood. Cimorene is a princess being stifled by the life she is expected to live: she is only educated in dancing, embroidery, drawing and ettiquette, but keeps persuading people to teach her magic, Latin, swordfighting, cooking, economics and juggling. She’s bored. So when she is sixteen, and finds out that she is engaged, she runs away and asks to be taken captive by a dragon. She ends up with Kazul, who is educated, sarcastic and looking for someone competent to get her library and treasury in order. Cimorene spends a lot of her time persuading knights who have come to rescue her to go away, while trying to perfect a fireproofing spell and discover the conspiracy at the heart of the court of the dragons.
“I did hear something about fencing lessons,” the knight said doubtfully, “but knights aren’t supposed to pay attention to that kind of thing. We’re supposed to be above rumours and gossip.”
“The fencing lessons were just the beginning,” Cimorene assured him. “So you see why I’m perfectly happy being a dragon’s princess.”
“Um, yes,” said the knight, but he did not look convinced. “Speaking of dragons, where’s yours?”
“Kazul’s not my dragon,” Cimorene said sharply. “I’m her princess. You’ll never have any luck dealing with dragons if you don’t get these things straight. She’s gone to the Enchanted Forest on the other side of the mountains to borrow a crepe pan from a witch she knows.”
“She’s what?” said the knight.
Kazul lets Cimorene get away with almost anything, and goes out of her way to get her the items that she needs in order to explore her talents further. They solve mysteries together, eat dinner together and always, always trust each other. And when Kazul becomes King of the Dragons she asks Cimorene to become her Royal Librarian, and she gladly accepts. Although Kazul makes a pretense of only keeping her around because she’s useful, there is geniune respect and affection between these two independent women.
30 Days of Women: Day 22
Day 22: Favourite female character you love but everyone else hates
Narcissa (Harry Potter). She’s ruthless. Born into a family of blood supremacists, consorting with the most terrifying and evil people in Britain, Narcissa still chooses not to become a Death Eater herelf. This may not have been motivated by compassion or fear, but by strategy and self-preservation. After her husband is sent to Azkaban she forces Severus Snape into an Unbreakable Vow in order to keep her son Draco safe from harm. When Harry takes Draco’s wand she gives him her own, leaving herself without any defence but her wits. When Voldemort uses the killing curse on Harry she volunteers to ascertain his condition. She realises that he is alive and asks him, very quietly, about the fate of her son. If he answers no, she will tell Voldemort he is alive, and he knows it. When he tells her that Draco lives, she calls out: “He is dead!”
Narcissa doesn’t care about sides. She follows the allegiances of her family, but they are in name only. She truly cares about herself, her son, and her husband. She will do anything to make sure that they all remain alive, and betrays Voldemort with three words. I love this. I love that she is sneaky and cruel and entirely focused on her own goals. She isn’t a nice person - she’s pretty horrible - but I have to respect a person who is willing to go against the most powerful man in the world in order to fulfill her own agenda.
30 Days of Women: Day 21
Day 21: Favourite female character screwed over by canon
Padme Amidala. She had so much potential! The deleted scenes in The Revenge of the Sith presented her as a senator caught in a power struggle, not just the tragic love interest of the protagonist. In The Phantom Menace she takes part in ending the trade blockade and saving her planet. People constantly try to assassinate her! She is dealing with growing conflict in an increasingly dangerous political sphere! By deleting the majority of her scenes in the final film she becomes highly passive and before where she fought, she gives in. As I said before, in Revenge of the Sith, she is cut in her roles as a dissenter in Palpatine’s government an early constituting member of the Rebel Alliance. That is a film that I would have cared about. She has always shown skill in combat, great intelligence, a dedication to her job and an eye for beauty. By the end of the final film she is forced into the role of a flat character, whose role revolves solely around her lover and her refusal to believe anything bad of him.
30 Days of Women: Day 20
Day 20: Favourite female antagonist
Marisa Coulter (His Dark Materials). She’s power-hungry and calculating and highly intelligent. An academic, amongst other things, she recognises that in the smaller patriarchal society of the university she will be dismissed and ignored unless she harnesses her sexuality and her beauty: no one can overlook her, no one will leave her out of a conversation and she essentially manages to keep every man in the room hanging on to her every word. I love that. She emphasises her differences in a way that allows her to control people.
The Metatron describes her being composed of “…corruption and envy and lust for power. Cruelty and coldness. A vicious probing curiosity. Pure, poisonous, toxic malice. You have never from your earliest years shown a shred of compassion or sympathy or kindness without calculating how it would return to your advantage.” What he doesn’t know is that within this true picture of her darkest self, someone with no redeeming qualities, she is hiding the only compassionate part of herself: her love for her daughter. She knows she is a terrible person, but she will not let gods or angels stop her from protecting what is hers. Her final act, with Asriel, is to drag Metatron down into nothingness and cease to exist along with him: he will never, ever be able to get anywhere near her daughter ever again.
30 Days of Women: Day 19
Day 19: Favourite non-human female character
Laura (American Gods). She isn’t a nice person. She pulls her husband into her schemes, gets him put in jail, cheats on him while he’s in jail…and gets killed while attempting to give the person that she’s cheating with a blowjob in a moving car. She’s deeply flawed, often selfish, but despite all of her actions she loves her husband. She’s essentially a deconstruction of the manic pixie dream girl archetype. So when her husband brings her back from the dead she is actually in a place where she needs to confront and atone for her actions. And how does she do this? By killing his enemies, of course!
Laura is essentially a zombie - she’s rotting, she doesn’t sleep, and she can always find Shadow. She rescues him from Mr World’s henchmen and rips them apart, she follows him across the country and watches out for him, and makes sure that no one will harm him. She and Shadow still love each other, and even as her body rots away he still holds her hand as they walk together through the snow. And when Loki has spent years manipulating her husband, and sending people to hurt him, and leading him to his death, she tricks him and stabs him through the gut. She pays out her debt and Shadow helps her into the afterlife, for the final time.
30 Days of Women: Day 18
Day 18: Favourite non-warrior female character
Rose (Titanic). I read a really interesting essay a while back about how Titanic is one of James Cameron’s most feminist films. I think Rose is certainly a very positive portrayal of a traditionally feminine woman, whereas his other women have generally been soldiers and fighters. Rose is neither of these things: she’s sheltered and pampered, festering in the life that she has been born to. She has the potential to be someone amazing, but it takes someone pulling her away from her social circle to trigger that change within her. It might have taken many more years than it did, otherwise.
I love Rose because she breaks away from the life that she hates and refuses to go back - her romance is the catalyst for her escape, rather than something that creates the idea for it. Jack gives her a helping hand, but she goes the rest of the way herself. She refuses to leave the ship without him, she saves him as it fills with water, they work together to survive as it sinks and he ultimately sacrifices himself to give her a chance. She is the one who goes back into the icy water, who swims through it and grabs a whistle and is the only survivor because, in the end, she refuses to give up.
And her love affair is not the be-all and end-all of her romantic self. She goes on to fall in love again, have children, fly planes and explore the world. She has a long and fulfilling life, and does everything that she never dreamt that she could do.
30 Days of Women: Day 17
Day 17: Favourite warrior female character
George (Feed, by Mira Grant). She’s trained to use firearms. She’s also a journalist investigating the reason for the zombie apocalypse. Feed is set nearly thirty years after zombies decimated most of the globe. Unlike the usual fare, in which people live in small villages, bake bread, go to church and run through the woods trying to escape from the zombie menace, Feed takes place in a highly technological future in which people work around the issue. They take continual blood tests, they travel and interact in small groups, they have high fences, armoured vehicles and long-range weapons. They don’t eat meat, the internet is the dominant form of communication and news, and if you get infected you don’t hide it like a moron: you take a blood test and if it tests positive, you or someone else will shoot you in the head and call the Centre for Disease Control.
George and her brother are the first bloggers to get a place on a presidential candidate’s entourage. They follow the Senator across the country in his armed motorcade, recording his speeches, his motivations and his policies. Things start going wrong, but at no point does George give in to fear: she sticks around until the end. George also has a disability. She has a dormant form of the virus affecting her eyes, which means she gets horrible headaches, she must permanently wear dark glasses and she can’t cry. She deals with this even knowing that one day without warning the virus could go live and convert her into a zombie within minutes. She is a fantastically strong, intelligent character and watching her try to uncover the dark secrets surrounding the campaign, euthanising her infected colleagues, shooting zombies and intimidating the hell out of people was an absolute pleasure.
There are two books in the Newsflesh Trilogy currently available: Feed and Deadline. Blackout comes out in May. There is also a novella, Countdown.
30 Days of Women: Day 16
Day 16: Favourite mother character
The Bride/ Beatrix Kiddo AKA Black Mamba (Kill Bill). In 2003/2004 she was a very new portrayal of a mother figure on the big screen. She is a revenger - believing her daughter dead and her lover the murderer she sets out on a quest to kill him and every one of his henchpeople. She is probably the most accomplished fighter of the group that she was a part of; she has fought toith and nail to be the best and master all the techniques that are available to her. She punches herself out of a coffin and digs her way to the surface, she kills probably every member of the Crazy 88s, she earns the respect of every opponent that she faces. When she eventually finds her daughter alive she cries and puts her to bed - and then kills Bill dead in the most elegant and poignant way possible, gets her daughter and drives off into the unknown.
30 Days of Women: Day 15
Day 15: Favourite female character growth arc
Mai (Avatar). She’s a gloomy girl who sighs a lot. She’s sarcastic, lounges around in the background and occasionally takes the time to throw a few weapons and, you know, help save the day. I love that she has reasons for being quiet and dismissive, and it was one of the crowning moments of the series when she finally got up to defend someone she cared about and finally acknowledged that the life she was living wasn’t something that was good for her, or emotionally fulfilling.
30 Days of Women: Day 14
Day 14: Favourite older female character
Granny Weatherwax (Discworld). Known by the trolls as Aaoograha hoa (“She Who Must Be Avoided”) and the dwarves as K’ez’rek d’b’duz (“Go Around the Other Side of the Mountain”). She does what people need, not what they want, is feared and respected by everyone that knows her name, and her best friend is a foul-mouthed grandmother who makes obscene puddings. Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg are a fabulous duo, but Granny stands out as being the darker kind of hero: she’s always battling with the evil within herself. She was born to be a bad witch and fights against it every day. She can tame unicorns, make vampires crave tea, teach preachers what belief truly is, play cards with Death and win…she has a flair for the dramatic and never fails to steal the spotlight. She also does the worst jobs. She convicts murderes and sits with the dead, and deals with the stigma that these necessary tasks lay upon her. She must always stand apart from the masses…which is why she has Nanny Ogg to keep her grounded, bring the whisky and wind her up.
Mightily Oats: “It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of grey.”
Granny Weatherwax: “Nope.”
Mightily Oats: “Pardon?”
Granny Weatherwax: “There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
Mightily Oats: “It’s a lot more complicated than that—”
Granny Weatherwax: “No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
30 Days of Women: Day 13
Day 13: Favourite female character in a book
October Daye. She’s sort of the anti Merry Gentry, I suppose? She’s a very real woman, one who has married and had a daughter, is estranged from her family, faces her problems maturely and treasures her independence. She is a competent investigator, decent with a sword, clever and crafty and dedicated to her job. This doesn’t mean that she doesn’t have time for romance, only that she keeps it in the background.
I really love the world that Seanan McGuire has built for her. McGuire also writes under the name Mire Grant, author of Feed and Deadline, which are excellent explorations of life after the zombie apocalypse and are filled with strong and complex women. The October Daye novels are identical in this aspect; it’s not very often you ger a cast of diverse female characters who all have an interesting story to tell, and nearly always hold a great deal of power.
I absolutely recommend these novels - especially One Salt Sea, where Toby has to solve a kidnapping in the undersea and starts off her investigation by riding a mermaid queen in a wheelchair off the pier while avoiding bullets and/or arrows.
