Fiona Kurylowicz: "Dear Bridget Smith: The Trash Belongs in the Trash Can (and No, This Isn't Going Where You Think)"

Dear Bridget Smith: The Trash Belongs in the Trash Can (and No, This Isn’t Going Where You Think)

By

Fiona Kurylowicz

            In the days when I lived at the Park Ridge Library, I wouldn’t touch a book wearing a girl on its cover with a yardstick. There goes half the library, you think with a shake of the head, but for five-foot sixth-grade Fiona, there wasn’t any accompanying sense of loss; half a library was still more than enough library to go through. See, my problem with book-women came down to a matter of habituation. In the corner of that splendid athenaeum where I spent the best part of my time, where the spine of each book was haphazardly labeled with the proud Unicorn Sticker of SFF, for a novel to “wear a girl” on the cover was not a figure of speech. They were everywhere, sprawling over stones or hanging helpless in the arms of men, never clothed in more than three triangles of fabric. And as bad as that sounds, the meat of the books was even worse. Female characters were a ruin. They got caught in traps, plots, or worse, romances, and one way or another sidetracked the main male characters from their quests. In those days, the closest I ever found to a good female role model in fantasy was Egwene al’Vere from Jordan’s Wheel of Time, but she was an anomaly and, to me, mainly a side attraction; I plowed through those books for Matt and his baffling lucky streak, and maybe for Rand too, because what the hell.

Across the board, female characters were annoying. They whined, and for the most part they revolved around boys. What I didn’t find out until just this year was that in classic SFF, the stuff that everyone turns to with those sagely this-is-what-you-should-be-studying-young-Padawan nods, it could be so much worse. Look at Godwin’s “Cold Equations,” you’ll see what I mean. Even Aldiss’ “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long” inadvertently catches a ride on the flat female train. And no, dammit, not flat like that.

            My theory? They’re flat (boring, bland, undercooked) because they’re all daft. In the first example, Marilyn heeds her emotions blind of any sense, running herself to her death. In the second, Monica doesn’t heed any emotions, or acknowledge their existence, not until her husband gets home at least. Well, that’s it. We’ve hit rock bottom. Right?

            Nah. You can have annoying women, you can have flat women... and you can have no women at all. Consider HP Lovecraft’s “The Colour out of Space” or HG Wells’ War of the Worlds, for starters. The further back in literature you go, the more women seem to get steamrolled, first into pancakes, then paper, then flattened flat out of existence.

            I wasn’t the only one to notice this, or the first. Joanna Russ got there well before me, but she took a balloon pump to our flat female characters and filled them with so much feminist outrage that they came close to popping. (And there you have it, a one-sentence summary of “When it Changed.”) It was extremism, it was message-fiction, and it solved my problem with book-women not one bit. Russ was not the only angry feminist to saddle science fiction and ride it to new moral ground; and the more I read of the “classics,” perhaps with the exception of Poul Anderson’s beautiful “Kyrie,” it seemed that female characters could not exist just to be good female characters.

            At this point in time most of us accept that women properly compose one half of society. Our mindsets don’t exactly mirror those of the people who authored the classics so many years ago. Yet, in order to break out of a cage, it is necessary first to acknowledge that the cage exists. I cannot argue that the classics, in what we might now consider to be blunders, have laid an important groundwork for feminism. They prompt us to incorporate it, and show us how best to do so, an idea explained in the graphic below:

Ye Ol’ White Male Approach… runs parallel to our goal, fails to address it entirely. On the other hand, the Feminist Approach beelines it, because hell, these writers are smart, they know the shortest distance between two points is a line. It’s simple, it’s direct… but it’s too jarring. The best approach, then, relies on subtlety, that sneaky angled slide-step towards the goal that gets there before the reader even knows what’s happening. If we want to trash trashy female characters for good, that’s how it has to be done.