Noli Irritare Leones

Here’s where I pull together some book and movie blogging. Bride and Prejudice is a modern version of Pride and Prejudice – in India. Darcy as an American visiting India, who comes off as condescending toward Indian culture. Lalita, the Eliza Bennett character, as the Indian woman who pulls him up short – and conceives a dislike for him that it will take the rest of the movie to undo. This movie actually gets a lot more of Pride and Prejudice in than The Diary of Bridget Jones did – the whole family is there except for Kitty, the mother’s just as marriage-hungry as Mrs. Bennett, and there’s even an Indian version of Mr. Collins (portrayed in a way that makes understandable both Lalita’s rejection of him and her less romantic friend’s acceptance of his proposal). Good movie all around.

And here’s the place to insert Austenbook – Jane Austen as Facebook updates.

William Collins tagged 7 of your friends in his note I Propose Myself the Satisfaction of Waiting on You and Your Family.

Via Eve.

I finished Foundation and Earth. Not on the main theme of the Foundation series, but it’s interesting to see how the portrayal of sex roles in the novels shifts. The initial trilogy was written in the 1950s, and so it showed 1950s sex roles – 20 thousand years in the future. The first book had essentially no female characters at all – one of the rulers had a wife who was basically a “girl” rather than a full character and that was it. The second two did have female characters – notably Bayta and Arkady Darrell (probably my favorite character in the trilogy) – but they moved in a world which had 50s-ish expectations of women. When Asimov took up the series again decades later with Foundation’s Edge, sex roles had changed, and underwent a parallel change in the far future. So you get, for example, this dialog in Foundation and Earth:

“Councilman Trevize, I speak of sexual morality.”

“In that case, I certainly don’t understand you. We are a thoroughly moral society, sexually speaking. Women are well represented in every facet of social life. Our Mayor is a woman and nearly half the Council consists of – ”

Mzbitca and Ouyang Dan are blogging their way through the teen vampire romance Twilight here, here, here, and here.

What particularly caught my eye in all of this was Anne Onne’s comment on one of Ouyang Dan’s posts:

Oh yeah, and I want to add that I generally feel for the Bella-esque heroines in fiction. I don’t expect every female character to be perfect, super-strong, amazingly intelligent, always do the right thing etc. I find myself empathising with ‘typical girl characters’ and their struggles and weaknesses, depending on how well-written they are, and I find myself willing them on to grow, to show new strengths, to wise up that the bad boy isn’t worth it: to act like a real person and grow. I root for them, that the author may give them bigger parts, help them to learn to help themselves, and show them as capable of great things, despite insecurities or weaknesses. I want them to blossom, to begin to push the boundaries of the role they thought they had. And you’d think this works well in fantastical series, but no. Unfortunately, most authors never get past ‘girl with insecurities who obsesses about boys’. I like my heroines to transcend these normal problems, to learn and grow. I tend to just get girls who are left behind by a plot which wants to put them in the kitchen more than it wants to let them out into the world.

I don’t think characters like Bella let the book down. I feel the book lets characters like Bella down.

I can’t, of course, comment on the portrayal of Bella in Twilight, but I totally agree with Anne Onne about the value of female characters who aren’t “strong female characters. As mlawski of Overthinking It says in
Why Strong Female Characters Are Bad for Women

I think the major problem here is that women were clamoring for “strong female characters,” and male writers misunderstood. They thought the feminists meant [Strong Female] Characters. The feminists meant [Strong Characters], Female.

So the feminists shouldn’t have said “we want more strong female characters.” They should have said “we want more WEAK female characters.” Not “weak” meaning “Damsel in Distress.” “Weak” meaning “flawed.”

Good characters, male or female, have goals, and they have flaws. Any character without flaws will be a cardboard cutout. Perhaps a sexy cardboard cutout, but two-dimensional nonetheless. And no, “Always goes for douchebags instead of the Nice Guy” (the flaw of Megan Fox’s character in Transformers) is not a real flaw. Men think women have that flaw, but most women avoid “Nice Guys” because they just aren’t that nice. So that doesn’t count.

So what flaws can female characters have? Uh, I don’t know. How about the same flaws a male character would have? …

Eliza Bennett’s a “strong” female character in the sense that, confined though her world is, she’s brighter and wittier and more outspoken than the rest of the women there. But gentle, persuadable Anne Elliot isn’t at all “strong” in that sense – and I find both Austen characters appealing. Both are realistic, flawed, more than two dimensional.

Likewise, in the world of TV, for example, some of the female characters I’ve liked could be called “strong” in the obvious sense (e.g. Kay Howard and Terri Stivers, my favorite two female detectives on Homicide), but others aren’t. I’ve read lots of criticism of the Hoshi character in Enterprise, for being a not particularly strong female character, but I like her as a weak female character – a timid but brilliant linguist who has to learn confidence. I see her timidity as part of a character arc, not, “Let’s come up with a helpless woman screamer so we can put her in jeopardy.”

Moving on to “typical teenage girl” characters, there’s the narrator in Lisa, Bright and Dark – thoroughly ordinary, obsessed with boys, movie stars, and how she’d like to be more like the girls in her set who are more glamorous or better supplied with boy friends. And also not directly the subject of her story – the Nick of the story where Lisa as the teenager going insane is the Gatsby. But I think she works as a character.

But I do want a “typical girl character” to act like a real girl and learn and grow.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 at 8:18 am and is filed under Books, Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.