Wheel of Time side post: On Women
Nov. 17th, 2010 04:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swan_towerI promised a while ago that I would make a post about the depiction of women in the Wheel of Time, and have had the result sitting around not quite finished for more than a month. Since I'm about to buckle down for the last push on revising With Fate Conspire, I might as well get this out of the way and off my mind.
Before I get to the complaints, though, let me say a few things about what Jordan does right. To begin with, he passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors. Even in the first book, Egwene, Nynaeve, and Moiraine are all significant characters, and once the story moves off to the White Tower in The Great Hunt, the importance of women to the plot is firmly assured. I can think of a distressing number of recent epic fantasies that don't do half so well on that front.
Furthermore, the women aren't there to be damsels in distress. They don't get captured or tortured or raped, or killed off to upset the hero. Rand's angst over the death of women aside, I'd have to go searching to find anyone stuffed into the refrigerator; no significant examples of that leap to mind. Heck, most of them aren't even love interests: Egwene and Nynaeve both have their own romances, rather than being the object of someone else's, and while Elayne may have been introduced in that role, it isn't long before she's doing far more important things.
That stuff is all good. So why do the women of the Wheel of Time get so badly up my nose?
For me, the heart of the problem is encapsulated by the old Aes Sedai symbol. It is, of course, the familiar yin-yang sign -- but without the dots of reversed color. I don't know if this is true, but I heard once that the reason for those dots was to show that the two opposing principles each contained the seed of the other; they aren't matter and anti-matter, annihilating upon contact, but rather a cycle endlessly transforming.
Except in Randland, where there is no such happy crossover.
It's been a long time since I read any interviews with Jordan, so I no longer have precise quotes to back this up, but the things he said there made it abundantly clear that he subscribed to a "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" paradigm. Forget nuance; forget the role of cultural conditioning, and the possibility that there are many different ways to be a woman (or for that matter, a man). Nope, women are all the same in certain fundamental respects -- respects which, when I read them, sounded utterly alien to my feminine self.
Fantasy is prone to essentialism, saying that X group or thing is Fundamentally Like This. I understand why; myths rarely feature complex characterization and subtle motivation. Evil things are evil, good things are good, etc. I've long thought that fantasy as a genre has to grapple with that tension, between archetype and reality. We definitely have to think about what archetypes we use, especially when they get inscribed on the level of cosmology.
As they do here. The One Power is more like two, based on gender. (Or sex, but I seem to recall "Halima" using saidin, so really it seems to depend on some unalterable characteristic of the soul.) The difference itself is gendered: saidar, the female power, must be embraced, and all the metaphorical images used to assist in doing so are things like flowers opening up to the sun. Saidin, on the other hand, must be seized, and using it is a constant battle for control, where any instant of weakness gets you burned. Men don't embrace things, and women don't seize them -- and the two paradigms are so mutually incomprehensible that women cannot teach men anything useful about channeling, nor vice versa.
Furthermore, men and women innately have different strengths when it comes to the elements. Women incline to Water and Air; men incline to Fire and Earth. (They share Spirit equally.) There are good arguments in favor of no element being "stronger" than the others -- but you could still have that, without inscribing the elements onto genders. Of course, if we want to talk about inscribed differences, how about the fact that men are inherently stronger in the Power? Women have their own advantage, of course: they can link, which men can't do without a woman's help. (See, women are good at working together!) The dynamics of who leads are pretty damned complicated, but let me tease out one pattern for you: there is only condition under which a woman must lead, and that's if the participation of men in an expanded circle is at its absolute minimum. One man and one woman? Man leads. Maximized circle? Man leads, again. This isn't a matter of society and conditioning; it's the way Jordan has chosen to design his universe. Period, the end.
Oh, and let's not forget what happened when some old Aes Sedai tried to find a source of power that wouldn't be divided by sex and/or gender: they freed the Dark One. That's right, folks; trying to escape the essentialized gender binary leads straight to evil. Whee!
Let's leave cosmology behind and talk about society. The first one we see is Emond's Field, which likewise subscribes to a "separate but theoretically equal" model of influence: the Village Council and the Women's Circle. The men seem to operate by sitting around drinking and debating what they should do. Women get together -- I think in a more behind-the-scenes fashion, rather than formal meetings held in a "public" building like the inn -- where they cook up their own plans, and then plot how to get the men to think it's their own idea.
Because that's how women get things done: by manipulating men. Because of this, men have to hide what they're doing if they want any freedom. Women are killjoys, you see, always disapproving of fun things like drinking and gambling, and trying to make men eat their vegetables. No, really: there's a whole running thing in The Fires of Heaven where Nynaeve and Elayne are bitching about how they can't send Thom and Juilin to buy suppllies because the men will just come back with meat, no green things. It's like all the men are nine, and all the women are their mothers.
And the thing is, this doesn't seem to vary by culture. The Aiel have the clan chiefs, and also the Wise Ones, who scheme how to get the clan chiefs to do what they want. Roofmistresses, like housewives back in Emond's Field, rule authoritatively over the domestic sphere. Their physical environments could not be more different, which ought to mean their societies are, too -- and yet the things Aiel men say about Aiel women, and vice versa, could frequently be subbed in for Emond's Fielders without a hitch. (There are exceptions, of course, especially where sexual matters are concerned. But still: the sense of what masculine and feminine gender mean don't seem nearly as different as they could, or should, be.)
The poisonous effect of this pattern shows up in the language used to describe the interactions between the sexes. When a woman gets a man to do what she wants, it's frequently described as "bullying" -- the abusive exercise of force or coercion. Not persuasion, or even simple logic, the woman saying something the man acknowledges as a good point. What's our model for a woman successfully (and non-bullying-ly) influencing a man? Moiraine and Rand, apparently. She doesn't get anywhere with him until she promises to obey, whereupon her obedience elicits the same from him. Apparently Rand is saidar, and she has to submit and open up in order to control. It's a valid method, but it shouldn't be the only one; what I don't remember is whether later books give us a competing model, some other Aes Sedai who successfully changes Rand's mind via rational arguments or whatever.
And then there's the oddity that women never seem to use that model among themselves. The closest example I can think of is Siuan and Leane after their arrival in Salidar, where they put up a pretense of obedience to cover their manipulation. We more frequently get a running motif of "Woman A is so strong and hard! But here's Woman B, who's even stronger and harder, so much so that she can either beat Woman A into submission or verbally whip her until she cries!" Nynaeve gets trumped by Moiraine, Moiraine gets trumped by Siuan, Amys gives them both a run for her money and then gets trumped by Sorilea, and we haven't even gotten to Cadsuane yet. I want to see the woman who isn't intimidating at all, but who is acknowledged to be so brilliant that when she renders an opinion, those hard-ass women listen.
When it comes time to train the women, again, it's all about force. Jordan is way too fond of it for my taste: whether it's the Aes Sedai or the Wise Ones or whoever, shortcoming or disobedience among the students is punished with physical abuse, humiliation, or scut work -- often naked. And the punished individual frequently ends up crying. These are techniques used in many real-life situations, of course, but something about the presentation rubs me the wrong way, maybe because of how often the women are naked and/or crying. Or maybe because the same thing never seems to happen to the men: when Asmodean fails to cooperate, Rand doesn't channel to hurt him until Asmodean bawls for mercy. To the best of my recollection, the Asha'man aren't sent to run naked around the Black Tower in freezing weather. Men don't resort to switching, birching, or beating each other with shoes at the drop of a hat. Partly this is because the male characters are much less often in a training situation than the female ones are -- but that's a choice, too, and tells us something. Mat doesn't have to apprentice himself to Gareth Bryne for months to be a military genius; he gets it magically instead.
All of it, of course, is made more obnoxious by what I can best sum up as "bitchy hypocrisy." This really gets rolling in The Fires of Heaven, which is why I cooked up most of this post after reading that book. Nynaeve goes on endlessly about Elayne's "viperish" tongue, but of course she uses nothing but sweet reason, right? <eyeroll> Leigh Butler over on Tor.com found that sequence funny, but it didn't amuse me in the slightest. In theory, it could have worked; sometimes people really are hypocritical. But Jordan's not good enough at characterization to sell me on it. Instead he clubs me over the head with that motif, over and over again, Nynaeve judging Elayne, Elayne judging Nynaeve, Egwene judging them both, them judging her, until I just wanted to gag them all.
Especially because of the way it spills over to the interactions between the sexes. In TFoH, Nynaeve literally thinks about how she'll yell at Thom and Juilin if they try to intervene in the situation with Luca . . . and then gets pissed at them because they don't. Likewise, she gets angry at them for doing something useful before she gives them the orders to do so. To be fair, Nynaeve's currently in the stage of trying to circumvent her block by being angry all the time, but it isn't just her; if I had to sum up this feminine dynamic in one word, that word would be "strident." And it gets so very, very tiring.
To close this out, I want to talk about relationships. The TFoH post dealt with the sex half of it already, but there's also romance to consider, and the way in which it fails to be convincing.
The thing is, men and women almost never seem to be friends. If I'd been thinking about this sooner, I would have kept an eye out for whether the books ever use that word for someone of the opposite gender. There are romances, and there are mothering relationships (usually unwelcome); there are hierarchical setups and the occasional bit of armed detente, but very few simple friendships. Moiraine and Lan, sort of, but it's complicated by the Warder bond. Mat and Birgitte. I feel like Rand and Nynaeve achieve something of the sort circa Winter's Heart; hopefully that won't turn out to be wishful reading when I get back to it. Egwene and Rand should be, but the whole "she's Aes Sedai and a Wise One" dynamic warps it.
Of the romances, I randomly like Chiad and Gaul. Why? Because it's mostly offstage, which means my imagination can work without having to get past the actual story first. The rest generally fall too heavily on the "tsun" side of tsundere. What does Aviendha see in Rand? What does he see in her? From another author, it might be physical attraction, but we've already discussed how little that figures into these books. It could work for me if it had to do with Rand's respect for the Aiel, and Aviendha's respect for his determination to learn about them, but that particular narrative exists mostly in my head, not on the page. Elayne and Rand are even worse: they fall in love when they've barely even spoken with one another. It ain't lust, and there isn't much else it could be, either; I'm forced to conclude it's fate. <sigh>
Aside from Chiad and Gaul, I do like Lan and Nynaeve, and for one simple reason: I can see that they respect each other, and I understand why. Nynaeve herself sometimes gets in the way of me liking that relationship (until she gets over her block), and okay Lan's side is pretty thoroughly cliche, but at least I can point to what got them started: Nynaeve's determined and successful pursuit of the Emond's Fielders back in TEotW. It's a foundation I can believe in, more than I do with the others. Contrast them with Faile and Perrin, who almost have a very similar foundation . . . but I can't see the respect there, not on her side. Since there are plenty of reasons to respect Perrin, Faile's shitty treatment of him makes her look all the worse. And unspoken incidents of Perrin apparently spanking Faile when she gets out of order don't do his image any good, either.
Fundamentally, though, the reason why the romances aren't convincing is that the women aren't convincing. Jordan's view of the innate nature of the female creature isn't one I recognize in myself, nor in most of my female friends. So half of the equation has already fallen down, making it hard for the whole to stand up.
Given how important women are to the story, it frustrates me to see them badly handled. If they had more variety, if they interacted differently with the men around them and didn't all have that strident edge, I'd be holding the Wheel of Time up as a fine example of epic fantasy that does gender issues right. Instead Jordan reverses the pattern I see with other authors: instead of a tiny number of interesting characters who don't get enough to do, he has a large number of repetitive clones that carry a lot of the plot. I'm honestly not sure which one annoys me more.
Before I get to the complaints, though, let me say a few things about what Jordan does right. To begin with, he passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors. Even in the first book, Egwene, Nynaeve, and Moiraine are all significant characters, and once the story moves off to the White Tower in The Great Hunt, the importance of women to the plot is firmly assured. I can think of a distressing number of recent epic fantasies that don't do half so well on that front.
Furthermore, the women aren't there to be damsels in distress. They don't get captured or tortured or raped, or killed off to upset the hero. Rand's angst over the death of women aside, I'd have to go searching to find anyone stuffed into the refrigerator; no significant examples of that leap to mind. Heck, most of them aren't even love interests: Egwene and Nynaeve both have their own romances, rather than being the object of someone else's, and while Elayne may have been introduced in that role, it isn't long before she's doing far more important things.
That stuff is all good. So why do the women of the Wheel of Time get so badly up my nose?
For me, the heart of the problem is encapsulated by the old Aes Sedai symbol. It is, of course, the familiar yin-yang sign -- but without the dots of reversed color. I don't know if this is true, but I heard once that the reason for those dots was to show that the two opposing principles each contained the seed of the other; they aren't matter and anti-matter, annihilating upon contact, but rather a cycle endlessly transforming.
Except in Randland, where there is no such happy crossover.
It's been a long time since I read any interviews with Jordan, so I no longer have precise quotes to back this up, but the things he said there made it abundantly clear that he subscribed to a "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" paradigm. Forget nuance; forget the role of cultural conditioning, and the possibility that there are many different ways to be a woman (or for that matter, a man). Nope, women are all the same in certain fundamental respects -- respects which, when I read them, sounded utterly alien to my feminine self.
Fantasy is prone to essentialism, saying that X group or thing is Fundamentally Like This. I understand why; myths rarely feature complex characterization and subtle motivation. Evil things are evil, good things are good, etc. I've long thought that fantasy as a genre has to grapple with that tension, between archetype and reality. We definitely have to think about what archetypes we use, especially when they get inscribed on the level of cosmology.
As they do here. The One Power is more like two, based on gender. (Or sex, but I seem to recall "Halima" using saidin, so really it seems to depend on some unalterable characteristic of the soul.) The difference itself is gendered: saidar, the female power, must be embraced, and all the metaphorical images used to assist in doing so are things like flowers opening up to the sun. Saidin, on the other hand, must be seized, and using it is a constant battle for control, where any instant of weakness gets you burned. Men don't embrace things, and women don't seize them -- and the two paradigms are so mutually incomprehensible that women cannot teach men anything useful about channeling, nor vice versa.
Furthermore, men and women innately have different strengths when it comes to the elements. Women incline to Water and Air; men incline to Fire and Earth. (They share Spirit equally.) There are good arguments in favor of no element being "stronger" than the others -- but you could still have that, without inscribing the elements onto genders. Of course, if we want to talk about inscribed differences, how about the fact that men are inherently stronger in the Power? Women have their own advantage, of course: they can link, which men can't do without a woman's help. (See, women are good at working together!) The dynamics of who leads are pretty damned complicated, but let me tease out one pattern for you: there is only condition under which a woman must lead, and that's if the participation of men in an expanded circle is at its absolute minimum. One man and one woman? Man leads. Maximized circle? Man leads, again. This isn't a matter of society and conditioning; it's the way Jordan has chosen to design his universe. Period, the end.
Oh, and let's not forget what happened when some old Aes Sedai tried to find a source of power that wouldn't be divided by sex and/or gender: they freed the Dark One. That's right, folks; trying to escape the essentialized gender binary leads straight to evil. Whee!
Let's leave cosmology behind and talk about society. The first one we see is Emond's Field, which likewise subscribes to a "separate but theoretically equal" model of influence: the Village Council and the Women's Circle. The men seem to operate by sitting around drinking and debating what they should do. Women get together -- I think in a more behind-the-scenes fashion, rather than formal meetings held in a "public" building like the inn -- where they cook up their own plans, and then plot how to get the men to think it's their own idea.
Because that's how women get things done: by manipulating men. Because of this, men have to hide what they're doing if they want any freedom. Women are killjoys, you see, always disapproving of fun things like drinking and gambling, and trying to make men eat their vegetables. No, really: there's a whole running thing in The Fires of Heaven where Nynaeve and Elayne are bitching about how they can't send Thom and Juilin to buy suppllies because the men will just come back with meat, no green things. It's like all the men are nine, and all the women are their mothers.
And the thing is, this doesn't seem to vary by culture. The Aiel have the clan chiefs, and also the Wise Ones, who scheme how to get the clan chiefs to do what they want. Roofmistresses, like housewives back in Emond's Field, rule authoritatively over the domestic sphere. Their physical environments could not be more different, which ought to mean their societies are, too -- and yet the things Aiel men say about Aiel women, and vice versa, could frequently be subbed in for Emond's Fielders without a hitch. (There are exceptions, of course, especially where sexual matters are concerned. But still: the sense of what masculine and feminine gender mean don't seem nearly as different as they could, or should, be.)
The poisonous effect of this pattern shows up in the language used to describe the interactions between the sexes. When a woman gets a man to do what she wants, it's frequently described as "bullying" -- the abusive exercise of force or coercion. Not persuasion, or even simple logic, the woman saying something the man acknowledges as a good point. What's our model for a woman successfully (and non-bullying-ly) influencing a man? Moiraine and Rand, apparently. She doesn't get anywhere with him until she promises to obey, whereupon her obedience elicits the same from him. Apparently Rand is saidar, and she has to submit and open up in order to control. It's a valid method, but it shouldn't be the only one; what I don't remember is whether later books give us a competing model, some other Aes Sedai who successfully changes Rand's mind via rational arguments or whatever.
And then there's the oddity that women never seem to use that model among themselves. The closest example I can think of is Siuan and Leane after their arrival in Salidar, where they put up a pretense of obedience to cover their manipulation. We more frequently get a running motif of "Woman A is so strong and hard! But here's Woman B, who's even stronger and harder, so much so that she can either beat Woman A into submission or verbally whip her until she cries!" Nynaeve gets trumped by Moiraine, Moiraine gets trumped by Siuan, Amys gives them both a run for her money and then gets trumped by Sorilea, and we haven't even gotten to Cadsuane yet. I want to see the woman who isn't intimidating at all, but who is acknowledged to be so brilliant that when she renders an opinion, those hard-ass women listen.
When it comes time to train the women, again, it's all about force. Jordan is way too fond of it for my taste: whether it's the Aes Sedai or the Wise Ones or whoever, shortcoming or disobedience among the students is punished with physical abuse, humiliation, or scut work -- often naked. And the punished individual frequently ends up crying. These are techniques used in many real-life situations, of course, but something about the presentation rubs me the wrong way, maybe because of how often the women are naked and/or crying. Or maybe because the same thing never seems to happen to the men: when Asmodean fails to cooperate, Rand doesn't channel to hurt him until Asmodean bawls for mercy. To the best of my recollection, the Asha'man aren't sent to run naked around the Black Tower in freezing weather. Men don't resort to switching, birching, or beating each other with shoes at the drop of a hat. Partly this is because the male characters are much less often in a training situation than the female ones are -- but that's a choice, too, and tells us something. Mat doesn't have to apprentice himself to Gareth Bryne for months to be a military genius; he gets it magically instead.
All of it, of course, is made more obnoxious by what I can best sum up as "bitchy hypocrisy." This really gets rolling in The Fires of Heaven, which is why I cooked up most of this post after reading that book. Nynaeve goes on endlessly about Elayne's "viperish" tongue, but of course she uses nothing but sweet reason, right? <eyeroll> Leigh Butler over on Tor.com found that sequence funny, but it didn't amuse me in the slightest. In theory, it could have worked; sometimes people really are hypocritical. But Jordan's not good enough at characterization to sell me on it. Instead he clubs me over the head with that motif, over and over again, Nynaeve judging Elayne, Elayne judging Nynaeve, Egwene judging them both, them judging her, until I just wanted to gag them all.
Especially because of the way it spills over to the interactions between the sexes. In TFoH, Nynaeve literally thinks about how she'll yell at Thom and Juilin if they try to intervene in the situation with Luca . . . and then gets pissed at them because they don't. Likewise, she gets angry at them for doing something useful before she gives them the orders to do so. To be fair, Nynaeve's currently in the stage of trying to circumvent her block by being angry all the time, but it isn't just her; if I had to sum up this feminine dynamic in one word, that word would be "strident." And it gets so very, very tiring.
To close this out, I want to talk about relationships. The TFoH post dealt with the sex half of it already, but there's also romance to consider, and the way in which it fails to be convincing.
The thing is, men and women almost never seem to be friends. If I'd been thinking about this sooner, I would have kept an eye out for whether the books ever use that word for someone of the opposite gender. There are romances, and there are mothering relationships (usually unwelcome); there are hierarchical setups and the occasional bit of armed detente, but very few simple friendships. Moiraine and Lan, sort of, but it's complicated by the Warder bond. Mat and Birgitte. I feel like Rand and Nynaeve achieve something of the sort circa Winter's Heart; hopefully that won't turn out to be wishful reading when I get back to it. Egwene and Rand should be, but the whole "she's Aes Sedai and a Wise One" dynamic warps it.
Of the romances, I randomly like Chiad and Gaul. Why? Because it's mostly offstage, which means my imagination can work without having to get past the actual story first. The rest generally fall too heavily on the "tsun" side of tsundere. What does Aviendha see in Rand? What does he see in her? From another author, it might be physical attraction, but we've already discussed how little that figures into these books. It could work for me if it had to do with Rand's respect for the Aiel, and Aviendha's respect for his determination to learn about them, but that particular narrative exists mostly in my head, not on the page. Elayne and Rand are even worse: they fall in love when they've barely even spoken with one another. It ain't lust, and there isn't much else it could be, either; I'm forced to conclude it's fate. <sigh>
Aside from Chiad and Gaul, I do like Lan and Nynaeve, and for one simple reason: I can see that they respect each other, and I understand why. Nynaeve herself sometimes gets in the way of me liking that relationship (until she gets over her block), and okay Lan's side is pretty thoroughly cliche, but at least I can point to what got them started: Nynaeve's determined and successful pursuit of the Emond's Fielders back in TEotW. It's a foundation I can believe in, more than I do with the others. Contrast them with Faile and Perrin, who almost have a very similar foundation . . . but I can't see the respect there, not on her side. Since there are plenty of reasons to respect Perrin, Faile's shitty treatment of him makes her look all the worse. And unspoken incidents of Perrin apparently spanking Faile when she gets out of order don't do his image any good, either.
Fundamentally, though, the reason why the romances aren't convincing is that the women aren't convincing. Jordan's view of the innate nature of the female creature isn't one I recognize in myself, nor in most of my female friends. So half of the equation has already fallen down, making it hard for the whole to stand up.
Given how important women are to the story, it frustrates me to see them badly handled. If they had more variety, if they interacted differently with the men around them and didn't all have that strident edge, I'd be holding the Wheel of Time up as a fine example of epic fantasy that does gender issues right. Instead Jordan reverses the pattern I see with other authors: instead of a tiny number of interesting characters who don't get enough to do, he has a large number of repetitive clones that carry a lot of the plot. I'm honestly not sure which one annoys me more.
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no subject
Date: 2010-11-18 01:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-18 01:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-18 01:35 am (UTC)THIS. And not just the women. The men, too. The women aren't women. They're caricatures of women. They're every scolding devious manipulating woman who has ever walked the face of the planet, all rolled up, then cut into slices like a sushi roll. At one point in the series, I couldn't tell the difference between Elayne and Egwene, and the only reason I knew it was Nynaeve was that she was pulling her damn braid.
No gratitude. No manners! Good gods, my mother and my grandmothers on both sides of the family would have kicked my ass if I'd been as rude as these women are to men. And they'd have kicked the guys' asses just the same. Manners. Seriously! It's like all of them choked on acknowledging any sort of assistance. It's mindboggling the amount of rudeness that goes on in this serious. I want to cosh them all up side the head and dump them into the well to seal the breech with their own pettiness. Oh, but men aren't allowed to be rude without having the proverbial ten tons of bricks dropped on them. Women are allowed. *boggle*
At least Rand gets over it in book 13. Kinda wish the rest of the cast would catch up.
Rant rant rant rant rant rant rant.
At least Sanderson has done some smoothing out of these issues, but he's hampered by what has gone before. In his own writing, he does just fine.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-18 01:43 am (UTC)I firmly reject your stance that there are any women in these books. They're all strange automatons who seem to be women but have nothing resembling human thoughts, fears or emotions. The wheel of time books slide under the Bechdel Test door in much the same way that the GOR books, do.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-18 01:45 am (UTC)This sentence wins. <g>
I think the men get away with a shocking amount of rudeness, too -- witness how both Rand and Mat behave at certain points -- but in general, you're dead right; the default state between the sexes seems to be not far shy of open hostility. God forbid they ever cooperate with each other without first dragging their heels for six chapters.
I was hoping Sanderson might file some of the worst edges off. He's stuck with what Jordan set up, but isn't working from the same underlying assumptions, which helps.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-18 01:54 am (UTC)The thing that drives me crazy is, I actually liked a number of the female characters . . . when they first showed up in the story. I liked Nynaeve. And Aviendha. And Min. But he wasn't good enough at characterization to keep them distinct, so over time his biases took control, and they all slid into being the same thing -- which was more or less a watered-down version of Lanfear.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-18 02:38 am (UTC)My hate for the WoT is very, very strong. It's one of the few works of fiction I'm willing to allow myself to utterly despise.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-18 03:15 am (UTC)I hated the series and gave up after book 2.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-18 03:52 am (UTC)But then, I did like the Xanth books, so uh, no room to talk.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-18 04:07 am (UTC)*strikes this series firmly off the list of things to even consider reading in this lifetime*
no subject
Date: 2010-11-18 04:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-18 06:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-18 06:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-18 06:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-18 06:18 am (UTC)These days, I'm re-reading it for reasons of craft, to see what Jordan did right and what he did wrong in constructing a multi-volume epic. It's been very enlightening so far.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-18 06:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-18 06:47 am (UTC)Bah, I say. Bah.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-18 09:13 am (UTC)(But, yeah. I still have no idea why I read Xanth books for as long as I did...)
no subject
Date: 2010-11-18 09:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-18 12:02 pm (UTC)what I don't remember is whether later books give us a competing model, some other Aes Sedai who successfully changes Rand's mind via rational arguments or whatever.
...because I think Cadsuane manages it, but I never remember the later books very well. And Min, in general, has been able to accomplish things without getting accused of bullying (not always, but sometimes).
Woman A is so strong and hard! But here's Woman B, who's even stronger and harder, so much so that she can either beat Woman A into submission or verbally whip her until she cries!"
And more than than, that often a side effect of this is that Woman B will be better with saidar than Woman A - not always, I can think of exceptions - which leads to the funny question of who is embracing what, exactly? If being more of a hard ass means you can draw more of the power, wouldn't that fit the male paradigm better?
but who is acknowledged to be so brilliant that when she renders an opinion, those hard-ass women listen.
Verin. Sort of. (it's bothering me how many of my side comments have to have wavering vocabulary with them, because ultimately, you're right, his stereotypes always hold - underneath, Verin's the most manipulative of all...)
Egwene and Rand should be, but the whole "she's Aes Sedai and a Wise One" dynamic warps it.
Also I'd say the visions that people keep having of her condemning him to death probably don't help either. :)
The thing is, men and women almost never seem to be friends.
I can think of one or two, which doesn't really help. The first that comes to mind is Tam and...er...Marin (Egwene's mom, whose name I might have wrong). Actually, all of the "good" men of Emonds Field seem to get along with her. A few of the men (Perrin comes to mind) seem to be on friendly terms with Min. Lan and Moiraine's relationship is very complicated, but I'd be prepared to go to bat to say that they are friends. ...I can't think of any others (though I do agree with the late arrival of a Nynaeve/Rand friendship). And that's pathetic in a book with this many characters.
I'm forced to conclude it's fate.
It's fate. That's the only explanation for those two. But with Rand and Mat and Perrin, he at least has it make sense that it's fate. The relationship I've always liked is Min and Rand, probably because I've always felt that Min is the only sane female in the entire series (and I'm absolutely positive this is because she's a "tomboy" - Jordan was writing her to be "more like a man" in his mind) but I actually think he pulls off the best friend/sister/girl next door kind of romance there (in as much as he's capable of writing romance at all). I also think, despite it's many highly irritating moments, that Nynaeve/Lan's "romance" comes together fairly well. And in Jordan's defense on romance, there is one thing he does well more than once: he frequently convinces me that couples who have been married for a long time (ie Rhuarc and his wives) actually do love each other and care for each other. Maybe even too much so - I remember there's a random side character in the Great Hunt who runs a tavern by herself, and she tells her backstory as having been with a husband with whom she argued every day, yet when he died she realized he was the one. He clings so much to this dichotomy of mutual exclusive spheres that I don't know if we ever encounter a relationship that doesn't somewhere underneath it all have a kernel of actual love and devotion, no matter how messed up it appears on the inside. (I'd make the case that my sweeping generalization even applies to folks like Lanfear - the way Jordan wrote it, it's the kernel of love for Lews Therin that drives Mierin to what she does........)
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Date: 2010-11-18 12:02 pm (UTC)One of the things that really surprised me when I last re-read Jordan (2007) was that the women actually bothered me LESS than they had in previous readings. When I used to read the series, it had literally gotten to the point that the only female character I didn't cringe to see their name on the page was Min (and to a lesser extent I liked some of the side character, like Verin, and at times I liked Moiraine). This most recent time around, I was reading with newish eyes, being much older and having not read the series in about 8 years, and it did reflect on the women to their benefit. I even grew slightly tolerant of Faile, who I've always loathed more than the others. But I'm convinced that this acceptance came despite everything you've discussed - it wasn't because, with more maturity and fresh views, I thought the women were better written, it was because with more maturity, I could forgive it more, suspend at least a little bit of my disbelief (screaming with rage in the corner) and just read. To put THAT statement in perspective, the first time I read Fires of Heaven (which was the newest book when I started, and therefore my original "stopping point" back when I first read them) I LITERALLY skipped the chapters about the girls. Even now I'm often surprised by what the girls do and when, because the first few times I read the books I didn't read what they did - I skimmed it, waiting for a chapter where the names on the first page would indicate that Rand was involved. I would usually read Mat, also, but once Perrin left Two Rivers I skipped him to (because it meant reading Faile, too). So it wasn't too hard to recover from that particular extreme.
I think you hit the nail on the head with the women - the only woman in the series who I feel I can identify with is Min. I do believe that there are some women like the ones that Jordan writes about. Perhaps (warning: about to go full blown stereotypical) the kind of guy who would go to the Citadel doesn't end up meeting any other kind of girl, maybe they're all the catty Mean Girls model of hot popular bitch. If that were somehow possible, then maybe, somehow, his characterization would work...oh wait, no it wouldn't, because underneath it all those kinds of girls AREN'T noble, or brave, or strong - they're not secretly heroines. (/stereotyping).
Just to end this, I think what I always found most frustrating was that almost without exception many of the female characters would "start out okay" and then turn into the heinous flaming nutjob. Aviendha starts out okay. Egwene starts out okay. (then again, Nynaeve starts out nutjob, and actually gets steadily better, by the last book I read I was actually starting to like her). Yet somewhere along, their character development takes a left turn, and I think it relates to the lunacy of the training and the One Power - Egwene "has to be that way" in order to be successful as an Aes Sedai. Ya know, when Rand goes through the same kind of crazy personality transformation, they spend an entire book trying to fix him to get him more like how he used to be...but with Egwene, it's just assumed it's growth. And that's scary.
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Date: 2010-11-18 12:45 pm (UTC)Have you ever read Jordan's non-WoT stuff? When I was in high school, I saw a couple of his historical fiction novels in Powell's and picked them up out of curiosity. His women are exactly the same. They don't suffer as much from the clone issue, because there are fewer of them, but you can see the same types. That was probably when I realised that Jordan just flat out didn't understand women.
What always kept me reading Jordan was the world-building. All of the things that bugged me about WoT - hating the characters, hating the direction the plots were going into, hating the way he lost control of it, seriously bothered by all those sad naked women (THANK YOU for mentioning that) - got worse and worse with each book, but I'm a sucker for world-building and no one did it as well as he did, except possibly Michelle West.
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Date: 2010-11-18 04:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-18 05:37 pm (UTC)I think I'd despise the Gor books if I actually had friends who held them up as Awesome Fantasy the way people adore the WoT books.
(Which is not to say I haven't read horrible loathsome crap on its own merits - I read all 12 books of the Mission Earth series in elementary school.)
But MAN I hate the WoT books.
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Date: 2010-11-18 05:40 pm (UTC)