The Absence of Women

[swan_tower]

The other day on Twitter, I commented about the absence of women from a book I was reading. Because Twitter is no place for long explanations or nuanced discussions, and also because I was about to go to karate and didn’t want to start a slapfight with fans of the book that might pick up steam while I was busy, I declined to name it there — but I promised I would make a follow-up post, so here it is.

Before I actually name the book and start talking about it, though, two caveats:

1) If you are a fan of the novel in question, please don’t fly off the handle at the criticism here. This is not meant as an attack on the author (who is, by everything I know of him, a really good guy), nor an attack on you for liking it. In a certain sense, it isn’t even an attack on the novel. I’m dissecting this one in great detail not because it’s The Worst Book Ever (it isn’t), but because it’s a really clear example of a widespread problem, and one that would have been trivially easy to fix.

2) Please don’t answer my points here by saying “well, in the second book . . . .” This thing is 722 pages long in the edition I read. That is more than enough time to do something interesting with female characters. I would be glad to know if the representation of women improves later on — but even if it does, that doesn’t change my experience of this book. It stood alone for four years, until the sequel was published. It can be judged on its own merits, and what comes later does not negate what happened first.

Okay, with all of that out of the way (and maybe the caveats were unnecessary, but) . . . the book in question is The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss.

1. Data

I want to be precise in my points, so I’m going to go through The Name of the Wind and list all of the female characters. I’m being generous in my definition of that term: I will count as a female character any woman who is distinguished from the backdrop by either a name or dialogue. (The bar, it is low.) Generalities like references to “wives” or “a girl” doing something in the background do not count. If I’ve missed anybody, do let me know — but anybody I’ve missed will be quite minor indeed, given that I was keeping notes as I read.

All page numbers are from the mass market paperback edition. There will (inevitably) be some spoilers.

In order of appearance in the text, we have:

Kvothe’s mother. First appearance: p 59. Last appearance: p 126. Gets a moderate amount of dialogue, but no name — though note that Kvothe’s father Arliden has a name. Narrative role: to be part of a loving family and then die along with Arliden and the rest of the troupe, thus propelling Kvothe into his story. (I do not count references to her after she dies as “appearances,” though I will note that they’re vastly outnumbered by posthumous references to Arliden.)

Hetera. First appearance: p 60. Last appearance: p 60. No dialogue. Narrative role: she’s a whore who teaches boy!Kvothe some valuable (though not sexual) lessons. Note that her name is closely related to the Greek word for “whore.”

Lady Lackless. First appearance: p 85. Last appearance: p 87. No dialogue. Narrative role: she features in a bawdy song Kvothe knows.

Lady Perial. First appearance: p 85. Last appearance: p 176. There’s a two-page segment where she’s a character in a play, and also the focus of a bawdy joke; she has no dialogue there. Later, presuming it’s the same character, her story is told on pp 173-176, and she gets dialogue. Narrative role: she is very pious and then gives birth to ~Jesus.

(In here we also have an unnamed brewer’s wife whose narrative purpose is to lure away Kvothe’s tutor Abenthy. I won’t count her in the totals, because she has neither name nor dialogue, but I want to note her existence.)

Lyra. First appearance: p. 89. Last appearance: p 200. She’s a historical figure mentioned in passing a few times before her story (or rather, the story of her lover Lanre) is told in pp 195-200. No dialogue. Narrative role: she’s a powerful sorceress who brings the hero Lanre back from the dead with her arts and her love. Then she dies, and her death causes Lanre to turn into an immortal villain.

Shandi. First appearance: p 117. Last appearance: p 126. Gets a small amount of dialogue. Narrative role: she’s part of the traveling troupe Kvothe belongs to, and dies with all the rest of them. She also shows Abenthy a “special dance” in her tent.

Unnamed Hillside woman. First appearance: p 162. Last appearance: p 163. No name, three words of dialogue (“You poor dear”). Narrative role: gives beggar!Kvothe money.

Holly. First appearance: p 165. Last appearance: p 167. Gets seven lines of dialogue. Narrative role: urges her male companion to leave beggar!Kvothe in the gutter after he’s been beaten, because they’re busy running away from other people.

Unnamed tavern girl #1. First appearance: p 168. Last appearance: p 169. Has one line of dialogue. Narrative role: offers beggar!Kvothe shelter after his beating.

Unnamed tavern girl #2. First appearance: p 168. Last appearance: p 169. Has one line of dialogue. Narrative role: offers beggar!Kvothe shelter after his beating.

Unnamed girl in audience. First appearance: p 193. Last appearance: p 193. Has one paragraph of dialogue (before somebody hits her and makes her shut up). Narrative role: she wants the storyteller Sharpi to tell a different tale than the one Kvothe asked for.

Deah. First appearance: p 208. Last appearance: p. 208. No dialogue. Narrative role: character mentioned in one of Skarpi’s tales, who turned into an angel. Known for having two dead husbands.

Geisa. First appearance: p 208. Last appearance: p. 208. No dialogue. Narrative role: character mentioned in one of Skarpi’s tales, who turned into an angel. Known for having a hundred suitors, and may have been the first woman ever raped. (Not sure what else to make of “the first woman to know the unasked-for touch of man.”)

Aleph. First appearance: p 208. Last appearance: p. 208. No dialogue. Narrative role: character mentioned in one of Skarpi’s tales, who turned into an angel. Known for having pretty hair.

Reta. First appearance: p 230. Last appearance: p 244. Gets two lines of dialogue. Narrative role: she’s the wife of the guy who gives Kvothe a ride to Imre; she refunds part of the money he paid for the ride.

Denna. First appearance: p 230. Last appearance: p 711. Gets dialogue. Narrative role: we’ll get back to that.

Ria. First appearance: p 273. Last appearance: p 274. Gets dialogue. Narrative role: student who is late to class. One of the University Masters publicly humiliates her by referring to the space between her legs as “the gates of hell.”

Fela. First appearance: p 274. Last appearance: p 708. Gets dialogue. Narrative role: she tells Kvothe how to use the library. Later, a different male character hits on her in an unwelcome fashion, and Kvothe saves her from his attentions while she sits there helplessly. Later still, Kvothe saves her from a fire while she stands around helplessly. Eventually she helps Kvothe learn his way around the Archives.

Mola. First appearance: p 307. Last appearance: p 698. Gets dialogue. Narrative role: she gives Kvothe medical treatment on several occasions. She also meets Auri, in what I think is the novel’s sole Bechdel pass.

Tabetha. First appearance: p 322. Last appearance: p 322. No dialogue. Narrative role: she’s described as having claimed that Kvothe’s nemesis was going to marry her; then she vanished. Implication is that the nemesis got rid of her.

Unnamed serving girl. First appearance: p 329. Last appearance: p 329. Gets dialogue. Narrative role: she serves drinks, and complains that one of Kvothe’s friends groped her.

Emmie. First appearance: p 337. Last appearance: p 337. Gets dialogue. Narrative role: receptionist at the insane asylum.

Devi. First appearance: p 357. Last appearance: p 653. Gets dialogue. Narrative role: she’s the loan shark who provides Kvothe with money on a few occasions.

Auri. First appearance: p 385. Last appearance: p 701. Gets dialogue. Narrative role: mentally unstable semi-wild girl who shows Kvothe around the Underthing, which allows him to sneak into the Archives.

Aloine. First appearance: p 394. Last appearance: p 404 (there are brief references to her after that, but I’m not counting them because they’re actually references to Denna in the role of Aloine). Dialogue insofar as she exists as a speaker in a song. Narrative role: character in a song Kvothe sings; performed by Denna.

Marea. First appearance: p 398. Last appearance: p 413. No dialogue. Narrative role: she fails in the same musical competition Kvothe succeeds in, and unsuccessfully hits on him afterward.

Unnamed woman at Anker’s. First appearance: p 453. Last appearance: p 453. Gets three sentences of dialogue. Narrative role: yells at Anker to get back inside and work.

Nell. First appearance: p 642. Last appearance: p 642. Gets dialogue. Narrative role: abused serving girl in Trebon.

Verainia Greyflock/Nina. First appearance: p 648. Last appearance: p 650. Narrative role: she saw what was dug up at Mauthen’s, and is the catalyst for “the first time [Kvothe] felt like any sort of hero,” because he gave her a fake charm that made her feel safe from demons.

Total: 29 female characters in 722 pages. 22 get names; 21 get dialogue. 17 appear in the text for fewer than five pages. Only 7 of the remaining 12 are actual characters in Kvothe’s story, in the sense of having any kind of ongoing role in his life: Denna, Devi, Fela, Mola, Auri, Shandi, and Kvothe’s mother.

Against these, we may lay . . . two hundred? three hundred? more? male characters with equal or greater presence in the story: Taborlin, Old Cob, Graham, Jake, Shep, the smith’s apprentice Aaron, Carter, Bast, Chronicler, the commander of the soldiers who rob Chronicler, Jannis, Witkins, the tinker, Crazy Martin, the guy who recognizes Kvothe, Caleb, Skarpi, the Earl of Baedn-Bryt, Oren Velciter — and those are just the ones that show up before Kvothe’s mother does. Nineteen men, before we get a single woman. 19 men in 58 pages; 29 women in 722.

2. Questions

Those are the statistics. Here’s the point.

When the topic of including women comes up, or people of color, or gay people, or whoever, there are a great many authors who say they are happy to include such characters when there’s a reason for them to be there. I look at this book and wonder: what’s the reason for all these characters to be men?

Chronicler could have been a woman. Bast could have been a woman. Abenthy could have been a woman. Kvothe’s mother is said to have “a way with words;” why is the Important Plot Song a composition Kvothe’s father is working on, with his wife reduced to the role of behind the scenes muse and assistant? (Why doesn’t she get a name?) Why are none of Kvothe’s friends among the University students female? (Fela gets there eventually, sort of. She could have been a friend from the start.) Why isn’t Trapis a woman? There’s a passing suggestion that he used to be a priest, and so far as I can tell the priesthood is exclusively male — but a) there’s no reason the priesthood had to be exclusively male, and b) the only visible reason for connecting Trapis to the priesthood is that it gives a not-very-necessary justification for why he tells the story of the Virgin Mary Perial and her much more important divine son. We’re told that men outnumber women at the University by about ten to one; this is both a choice Rothfuss made (rather than some immutable historical fact he had no choice but to accurately represent), and still not a reason why we see so few women there. With nine Masters and a Chancellor, the odds that none of them would be a woman is thirty-nine percent. Sure, institutional bias would affect that; if women are that small of a minority, it’s not going to be equal-opportunity selection for the top roles. The fact remains: time and time again, whether consciously or unconsciously, Rothfuss made choices that resulted in him writing about very few women, most of them only fleetingly, many of them in sexualized or objectified ways.

I do not understand this. This is not the kind of story that involves a limited number of characters, or a historical context where the demographics are out of the author’s control. It doesn’t even confine itself to the kind of social environment that has historically been exclusively male, which you might therefore expect the author to represent in that fashion. Kvothe travels all over the place and meets all kinds of people: most of them are men. There are women at the University: none of them really matter. When I ask myself what valuable things Kvothe learned from a woman, the best I can do is to say that Auri showed him around the Underthing. They don’t teach him sympathy or sygaldry or artificing or the name of the wind. They are not his enemies, earning the reader’s respect by the threat they pose. They’re just . . . insignificant. Mola stitches Kvothe up when he needs it, Kvothe’s mother is loving and then dies, Shandi is an irrelevant background detail. Auri is a helpful manic pixie dream girl. Fela is an object for Kvothe to rescue. Devi is the best of the lot, pretty much the only one with anything resembling power and agency in the narrative.

2. Denna

Ah, you say — but what about Denna?

What about her, indeed. Let’s quote from p 351:

“Think now. What does our story need? What vital element is it lacking?”

“Women, Reshi,” Bast said immediately. “There’s a real paucity of women.”

Kvothe smiled. “Not women, Bast. A woman. The woman.”

And then just after that, on p 352:

As with all truly wild things, care is necessary in appraching them. Stealth is useless. Wild things recognize stealth for what it is, a lie and a trap. While wild things play games of stealth, and in doing so may even occasionally fall prey to stealth, they are never truly caught by it.

So. With slow care rather than stealth we must approach the subject of a certain woman. Her wildness is of such degree, I fear approaching her too quickly even in a story. Should I move recklessly, I might startle even the idea of her into sudden flight.

Note that at this point we have been given no hint that the woman in question is Denna, from earlier in the book. She’s just some unknown mystery woman being compared to “wild things.” Returning to the topic again, thirty pages later, on p 382:

The Eolian is where our long-sought player is waiting in the wings. I have not forgotten that she is what I am moving toward.

When she finally shows up as more than a voice, on p 416, we get this:

“Looking up, I saw her and all I could think was, beautiful.

Beautiful.”

And one more, from p 417:

“Of course I talked to her. There would be no story if I hadn’t. Telling that part is easy. But first I must describe her. I’m not sure how to do it. […] My trouble, Bast, is that she is very important. Important to the story. I cannot think of how to describe her without falling short of the mark.”

I suspect all of this build-up is intended to make Denna seem awesome. Unfortunately, what it actually does is make her seem like an object. When we saw her first, she existed for Kvothe to make calf eyes at; here, where we don’t know it’s her again, it’s no better. In fact, it’s worse. She doesn’t get a name. She is the woman, explicitly standing in for all the other women whose absence from this story gets dismissed as soon as Bast brings it up. She gets compared to a wild animal. When she starts to show up, the story halts for Kvothe to reinforce that she is VERY VERY IMPORTANT — and apparently the most important thing about her is her beauty, because the story has to grind to a halt while Kvothe gets stuck on how to describe it. (Bast, trying to help, lights upon “She had perfect ears.”)

For literally sixty-eight pages — almost ten percent of the book, from when we get told she’s coming to when she finally appears — she isn’t a character; she’s a thing. A beautiful thing that shows up in the nick of time to help Kvothe when he needs it. The men go on for literally four pages about her appearance, with Bast saying her nose was a little narrow and crooked but Kvothe countering that this did not diminish her beauty in the slightest. We hear about her hair color, her eye color (a whole paragraph devoted to those), her lips (another paragraph) — we get all of that before we get her name, and then another page about her beauty before the story goes on. Including this gem:

“Finally, say that she was beautiful. That is all that can be well said. That she was beautiful, through to her bones, despite any flaw or fault. She was beautiful, to Kvothe at least. At least? To Kvothe she was most beautiful.”

Through an accident of typesetting, in my edition those four uses of the word “beautiful” line up almost perfectly in that paragraph. Did you know she was beautiful? LET ME TELL YOU THAT SHE WAS BEAUTIFUL. You could not hammer this point home harder if you used a jackhammer to do it. Forget whether she was smart, or brave, or ever did anything more important than the day she helped Kvothe win a music competition. SHE WAS BEAUTIFUL.

Oh, and nearly three more pages follow this, in which Kvothe marvels at her some more and angsts about whether she remembers him and so forth before finally, at the bottom of the third page, on the four hundred twenty-third page of this novel, she speaks.

Now, you may suggest that this is meant to represent the fact that Kvothe at the time of meeting her was fifteen. But Kvothe at the time of telling the story is older; we are led to believe he has had many experiences involving Denna, experiences that are vitally important to the tale of his life. Despite that, he believes the most important thing he can possibly focus on in introducing her is her appearance. This tells me that adult!Kvothe is a sexist, objectifying ass: Bast, ever hanging lampshades on things, points out that “All the women in your story are beautiful.” But there are ways to present this sort of thing as a character viewpoint without making it seem like that is the author viewpoint as well, and unfortunately, those ways are not on display here.

An unreliable narrator is not enough to counterbalance all of this. And even if it were: the fact would remain that Rothfuss chose to tell his story through a narrator who is a sexist, objectifying ass — thus reinforcing all the sexist, objectifying narratives we’ve already got.

It didn’t have to be this way.

4. Solution

I’ve been known to bang on about the problems with women in the Wheel of Time, but let’s give it credit where credit is due: in the first book alone, important female characters include Moiraine (the story’s Gandalf equivalent), Egwene (Rand’s childhood sweetheart, whom he does not end up in a relationship with, and who is one of the strongest channelers the White Tower has seen in a century), Nynaeve (even stronger than Egwene, and survived learning how to do it on her own, which is rare), Elayne (yet another strong channeler and heir to the throne of Andor), Min (possessed of a strange clairvoyant gift nobody can explain, and also good with knives), and Elaida (advisor to the Queen and also gifted with a rare prophetic ability). That’s six women off the top of my head, all of them less objectified and more proactive than just about anybody here, and it doesn’t include all the minor female characters who pass through the story along the way. Kvothe’s tale starts in a town where none of the women have names; Rand al’Thor’s does not.

Denna does not fix the problem. She just brings it into the spotlight. I didn’t start to have any interest in her at all until page 550, when Kvothe finds her in Trebon, because that’s the first point at which she seems to have a life of her own. Before then, she’s just this beautiful woman (did I mention she’s beautiful?) who always has men hanging off her and floats in and out of Kvothe’s life in a pointlessly cryptic fashion. It’s possible that aspect is significant; for a while I wondered if she was actually supernatural in some way, and that’s why (we are explicitly told) men always go for her and women always hate her. But if there is indeed more to her than meets the eye, it doesn’t get made clear enough in this book. I’m just left with an objectified cipher I’ve got no real reason to care about, and no other women of real significance.

And here’s the most aggravating part: these problems are easy to fix. It doesn’t require a massive rethinking of the story to move it into a zone where I wouldn’t have felt the need to make this post. You don’t have to redesign the world. All you have to do is look at some of the characters and ask, is there a reason for them to be male?

If I were changing things, I would start with Bast. Make him female. He’s the second important person to show up in the story, after Kvothe; having a significant female character appear that early would make a good first impression. He takes less of Kvothe’s shit than most, and calls him out on the way he’s telling his story; putting that in the mouth of a woman would do a lot to highlight the ways in which Kvothe may be an unreliable narrator. And it would pay off really well at the end of this volume, when Bast threatens Chronicler if he goes digging too deep into the bad parts of Kvothe’s life. Bast was scary then, because he showed he had knowledge and power of his own. I would have loved to see a woman in that role.

Next I would make it so that Kvothe’s mother was writing the words of the Important Plot Song, and Kvothe’s father was composing the music. Then it’s a joint project, and it gives her agency in the resulting disaster, rather than just putting her in the refrigerator.

I’d make Fela one of Kvothe’s social circle from the start, and skip all the white-knighting incidents. I’d also make either Kilvin or Elodin a woman, so that there’s a woman in the story who possesses skills and knowledge Kvothe wants. As the tale currently stands, the things he learns from women are minor and mundane, like how to use the library. The things he learns from men are significant and powerful, like sygaldry and sympathy. Re-gendering one of the Masters would redress that imbalance.

And for the love of god, I’d skip all that crap about Denna’s beauty, all the objectifying framing and language that turns her into a thing and brushes off all other women as irrelevant. If there’s something more going on with her, make that clear, even if you don’t say what it is. Give the reader reasons to believe she’s important that don’t boil down to her appearance.

That’s four exceedingly simple changes and one that only requires a little bit of work. Five alterations, and the book would not become one I recommend to friends as having awesome female characters . . . but it would stop being one I feel the need to dissect for several thousand words on the internet. Really, when you get down to it, there are only two changes at the core:

1) Don’t objectify the women. (It isn’t just Denna. Take a look at the original stats and see how many of the female characters are in some fashion sexualized, or else exist purely to give a small bit of aid to Kvothe. By my count, it’s fifteen of twenty-nine.)

2) Ask yourself, from time to time, whether there’s a reason Character X has to be a man — instead of the other way around.

5. Conclusion

It really isn’t that hard. And that’s why I do not understand how we still have so many books, so many best-selling novels, that can’t even manage that much. Rothfuss said in a Q&A that when a friend of his read his high school novel, he was shocked to hear her say that he had no female characters in it at all. He hadn’t even noticed the absence until she pointed it out. He told that story to illustrate the problem, and he’s done better here . . . but there’s still a vast space for improvement.

I said this before, but I need to repeat it for emphasis: this isn’t even really about The Name of the Wind. It’s an example of a problem, not the cause of it. It’s a case in point, a thing to look at when you want to see what absence and objectification look like and consider how easy they would be to avoid. I’m not asking for Denna to be more awesome than Kvothe. I’m not saying that precisely 50% of the characters need to be women or I won’t read the book. (I enjoyed The Name of the Wind; I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t constantly been noting the lack of women.) I’m just pointing out, for fuck’s sake, we exist. We aren’t even rare. Why aren’t we in the story? Why don’t we matter?

It isn’t rocket science. Authors ought to be able to get this right.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[green_knight]

I can understand how a writer might fall into this trap, though I do not understand how they can stay there after the problem has been pointed out to them. (I was there once. My first book deliberately was a story about a world where the odds were stacked against women succeeding; my second book just happened to have male protagonists and men in every single important role. I cannot say whether it passed the Bechdel test, but the women in it were either in subordinate roles to my protagonist or needing his help or both.

But what really annoys me is how this book could have been written, and read by - at the least - an agent, editor, and copyeditor, and *still* have this problem. That says that the publishing industry has a major problem with wearing blinkers - or that the people who decide whether to put the book forward (and champion it in editorial meetings etc) are OK with leaving out 50% of their potential readership because 'women don't read this' (no. If it's got no female characters, they won't. Not a problem of the genre as such.)

Thank you for taking the time to go through this.

[swan_tower]

I default to assuming blinkers, because yeah -- otherwise it means there's a conscious choice to exclude. And that would be substantially worse.

[clare_dragonfly]

Yep, definitely one of the things that contributed to my dislike of The Name of the Wind. (Bast was my favorite character. If he'd been a woman, that might have actually tipped me over into liking the book.)

Your comments on Kvothe not having anything important to learn from women is interesting. I don't think I have any trouble putting women in my stories, but I may pay more attention to whom my characters are learning from in the future...

[thistleingrey]

So much yes.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I approve this message.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Now if only more people agreed.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

It reminds me of Geena Davis's study of Hollywood movies. Out of the top 100 movies of the year she did the study, women had 29% of the total speaking roles.

That's a world that's 71% male. Even many male-dominated professions aren't that overwhelmingly male.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Not to mention that she measured all speaking roles. Not lead roles. Just the characters who opened their mouths and said something.

[dhampyresa.livejournal.com]

Wait, Bast isn't a woman? Why would you name a male character after the Ancient Egyptian godess of cats why

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

It was a little distracting to me, too. I mean, it's a simple enough name that I can accept it as a thing that might occur independently in other cultures (not like naming a character Huitzilopochtli or something) -- but in a book with so few women of significance, yeah, my subconscious really wanted Bast to be female.

[mosinging1986.livejournal.com]

(Here via LJ Home Page)

Wow. It would never once occur to me to even notice that a book has no women, or no men, or people of this or that race. (Taking into consideration to some extent what type of book it is.)

Who cares? Who actually goes into a fiction story and even notices such things to the point of making it into a problem?

Rothfuss said in a Q&A that when a friend of his read his high school novel, he was shocked to hear her say that he had no female characters in it at all. He hadn’t even noticed the absence until she pointed it out.

Exactly! Normal people don't obsess over things like this. How sad that he was shamed into feeling bad about something so silly.

If an author's writing a story that needs female characters, he or she will write them in. If they feel the story doesn't need them, they won't. It just depends on the story. It really is that simple.

I’m just pointing out, for fuck’s sake, we exist. We aren’t even rare. Why aren’t we in the story? Why don’t we matter?

What IS it with females that are so obsessive about this? Good grief, the entire universe does not revolve around you! Don't females like this have MORE than enough books/shows/movies focusing on them? If I hear the term "strong female character" one more time, I'm going to rip out my hair!

When's the first, last or ANY time you hear anyone talking about "strong male characters"? Now there's something I'd like to see , and see discussed. But nope. It's females, females, females.


Thanks for the rec, though. I've been wanting to read that one. (I had to skim some portions here so as not to spoil myself.)

[samhenderson.livejournal.com]

Predictable troll is predictable. It's not even worth getting out the bingo card.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I love that you have data. Seriously. I am going to mention this post in future discussions because data data data.

One of my bits of advice to Alphans is to do things on purpose. Because if you don't, you do them accidentally. This is an good example of why.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I like data. :-)

Mind you, this isn't anything like statistically rigorous. But it does provide some concrete facts, which give me a way to measure my gut feeling of "there's a problem here."

[occulted.livejournal.com]

I have to admit, I prefer writing male characters, and I'm a woman. I am baffled as to why this is so. I intend no disrespect toward other women; it's just, for some reason, I'd rather write about men most of the time.

I enjoy reading stories featuring female main characters, but for some reason, what really gets me fired up with enthusiasm when writing is a really awesome, complex male protagonist. Go figure.

I will say, though, that when I write female characters, I don't try to make sure I don't objectify them; I just write them being themselves.

[ashkestral.livejournal.com]

If you're dealing with Sci Fi or Fantasy... there is no need to have people conform to any kind of current gender roles at all.

If you want an exercise try taking a story you've written, and just flip the gender on some characters and re-read it. Consider how differently it makes you view your own characters. I think it's a good way for someone to really challenge or think about how they view gender rules.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I'm glad that you found a way to enjoy the book despite this. I can, probably, come up with narrative reasons that this happens -- for instance, it's not clear how reliable a narrator Kvothe is, and he is in and a product of a largely male-dominated world, and so the male prevalence may be an artifact of the character -- but that doesn't at all change your point.

Because Rothfuss is ALSO a narrator, and a product of a largely male-dominated story-creation world.

I do feel that Rothfuss has attempted to do better in later books, because exactly what you're saying was pointed out to him. I feel like he made an actual attempt to create female characters with agency, once he became aware of the problem.

But that only happened because people made him aware of the problem. Talking about this stuff the way that you are is the only way to make changes.

Yeah, NAME OF THE WIND is an example of the underlying problem, which is entire-culture-wide, not just Rothfuss. But Rothfuss is ALSO an example of an attempt at a solution, since he IS part of a culture where people are willing to point these things out, and he IS a person who is willing to acknowledge that and try to make changes.

Does WISE MAN'S FEAR solve those problems? No, the problems are still there. But I think that there is also evidence in them that Rothfuss has been at least trying to think about them, and do things differently.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Yes, my impression of Rothfuss is that he does care about these things and wants to do better.

Can you give me any examples (spoilers are fine) of the ways that Wise Man's Fear shows evidence of him trying to change his approach? Somebody on Twitter told me I'd probably end up shooting flames out my ears if I tried to read it, so I'm wary.

[logovore.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this post! I feel pretty much the same way. It's like women are too distracting for the author to include unless they specifically serve a "womanly" function.

And, just as you say, it's in the frame tale, not just the first-person part, so saying the hero is an unreliable narrator is a nonfunctional explanation as well as an insufficient excuse.

Sometimes I feel like male fantasy authors let their stereotypes creep in without recognizing them. As if, because earlier times had more sexist systems, the author's own attitude toward women can be let play as historical truth.

In this author's case, the attitude is, I guess, that women are so different that they're only worth the trouble if they offer one romance, motherhood, sexual validation or manly rescuing.

Of course that sounds terrible, and I don't think he feels that way consciously! But that's how the book is written.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Devi is probably the best example of breaking that frame, with Auri and Mola as the runners-up. Even so, there's not enough done with them.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

There are some marginal improvements in the next book, but there is also one hugely problematic female character, Denna herself improves only slightly, and Devi is vastly underutilized.

I fear that some of the marginalization and objectification of women may be inherent to the enterprise which The Name of The Wind and its sequels are embarked on. Kvothe not only has every fantasy origin story ever (consecutively and concurrently), but as a fighter/wizard/rogue/alchemist/bard, his narrative arc is all about how awesome and singular he is. Which means that only he gets to bang Fellurian and not go mad; only he gets to learn the martial secrets of the mysterious Occident; only he gets to hang out with Auri; only he gets to see sides of Denna that she hides from others, and so forth and so on. The women in his life are props because nearly everyone in his life is a prop, a foil, or a helping hand, and 'foil' is off-limits because opposing a woman would undermine Kvothe being the Best Evar.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Even within that structure, though, there's room for characters to be interesting -- but it only gets used for men. In the "helping hand" type, for example, we can include both Fela and Kilvin . . . except one of these things is not like the other. Kilvin teaches Kvothe substantive, valuable skills, the sort of thing he has to work (at least a little bit) to learn and can be respected for in society. Fela? Teaches him how to use the library. Similarly, Trapis constitutes a major turning point in Kvothe's time as a beggar -- but the woman in Hillside just gives him a coin. Kvothe's University friends get to sort of just be people in his life, but none of the women get that honor.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Ugh, yes.

I read this one not long after it came out and was irritated by the constant "had I but known!" air of doom and the fact that Denna was the sort of person where the narrator went on and on and on about how awesome she was without telling me anything actually interesting about her, while Fela, who did seem awesome, got regarded as the emergency back up love interest.

These days I usually stop reading things that handle character balance that badly.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I was enjoying the book enough early on that I didn't mind continuing onward. When I hit the part that went on forever about Denna being beautiful, I might have quit -- but by then I was prepping this blog post, and wanted a full data set before I tried to present my argument.

[spectralbovine.livejournal.com]

I love this book, and I love that you have data, and I love your suggestions for fixes. Although Bast and Elodin are fixed in my mind as male now (and I feel like Bast works better for me as a man because of the sort of bro-y feel between them), I do think making Elodin female would have been a good idea if only to make him less Gandalf/Dumbledore-y.

When I'm writing now, I try to force myself out of the male default if it starts happening. This is all good stuff to think about, so thank you for writing this, and I hope that ludicrous troll above is the worst you get.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I totally get that regendering a character can be hard. If you asked me to flip one of my own characters, my brain would melt; they are who they are, and changing that isn't just a matter of swapping out pronouns. But that's why it's important to keep this stuff in mind from the start -- so you can catch these patterns before they get set in stone, and make alterations while things are still in flux.

In a way, the bro-y feel (at least as it plays out in the first book) is part of why I'd have loved Bast to be female.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

I don't default to women necessarily, but in short stories I mostly write them, and I flip genders regularly (except I sometimes miss a few pronouns, which has been known to confuse my betas) to get things to line up when a story doesn't go exactly the way I want it to.

I recently got screwed up by not realizing that if I wrote a series, something that looks balanced in #1 doesn't necessarily lead to balance in later stories unless I work very hard at it, depending on which characters get focus, etc. :( Especially when I'm going for trans* and non-binary characters as well.

[sam mills (from livejournal.com)]

Great discussion! I very much enjoyed these books, but was also constantly struck by this point (so this opinion is coming from the "you can enjoy something and still see the flaws" camp!).

I was under the impression that the book was purposefully toying with the stereotypical epic fantasy hero narrative, hence all the lampshading by Bast. BUT. In order to deconstruct a narrative trope you really have to subvert it, not just present it normally with some meta-commentary alongside it. So if the intention was to draw attention to the tropes, that worked, but also did not actually produce something undermining those tropes.

Denna was my favorite because you actually get these glimpses of her struggling to lead life on her terms *despite* being trapped in this type of narrative, and you see through the cracks of Kvothe's romanticized vision of her. But again, why settle for peeks through the cracks?

I didn't want to directly engage the dude up above and add to a derailing comment thread, but whenever somebody says, "Oh why do you even nooootice things like character demographics" I just kind of laugh. Because if an epic fantasy novel had 90% female characters you knoooow the same guys would come out of the woodworks saying it's weird, and unnatural, and they just couldn't connect with the story and what was the reason for them all to be women... lol like you honestly wouldn't notice if the characters were all women, HOKAY.

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

No, no, an epic fantasy with 90% female characters, if it could get published at all, would be billed as "women's fiction" and most male readers of the genre wouldn't even know it exists, and if they did, they would dismiss it without reading a word.

[immemor.livejournal.com]

I agree that women are often under-represented in fiction. But it seems you’re reading fantasy genera fiction which is usually (but not always) behind the times. For fiction about well-rounded female characters, I’d recommend the works of Toni Morrison, Jennifer Egan, Margaret Atwood or Alice Munroe. Also, J.M Coetzee's "Foe" and "Elizabeth Costello" have great female characters.

Also, you have writing talent so you could always pen your own novel and do it your way.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

Not to be rude, but swan_tower has published ten novels so far. (I think it's ten.)

[drplokta]

There is in fact a good reason why Kvothe's mother's name is not revealed here -- it would be a spoiler for a big reveal in the second book.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Good to know. It would not have bothered me so much if the surrounding material weren't also rubbing that particular sore spot.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

*Wow*. Thanks for doing the numbers; they're inarguable. (Or should be.)

[beth-bernobich.livejournal.com]

I can't begin to express how much I admire this post.

[sophia-helix.livejournal.com]

I'm going to be shameless and link here to a story I wrote for a Yuletide in 2011 (http://archiveofourown.org/works/299602). The recipient wanted Devi, and upon rereading both books I was struck by exactly the same things you were and felt I had to write something examining the role of women in this world as well as filling in some backstory for Devi and Auri. Rothfuss has since written a novella about Auri, which I haven't yet had time to read, so I'm hoping there's some course correction in the third (final?) book.

I found both books so frustrating because he often seems to be challenging or inverting fantasy tropes, but some of them (paricularly the unexamined replication of white patriarchy and Denna's lack of characterization beyond appearance and Kvothe's reactions to her) are just bedrock.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Challenging/inverting tropes in this fashion is hard to do, because it's easy for that to turn into just replicating them, with a passing nod to "yeah, they're problematic." I felt that way about the LEGO movie: I recognize that it was trying to comment critically on the whole "everyman" hero thing, and mostly I think it was more successful in doing so than this was . . . but when all was said and done, it commented on the everyman hero by having an everyman hero.

A few thoughts

[mb-s.livejournal.com]

1. For much of the text, Kvothe is doing the remembering and telling. Kvothe is not exactly a paragon of gender equality in POV. Perhaps his lack of mentioning women or remembering their names is at least partially intentional (by Rothfuss) to illustrate this.

2. Much of the text occurs at the University. I don't remember enough about the University to know whether it was supposed to be largely male (for example, had it been historically male-only and only recently open to women, e.g. Princeton University or something) or whether it as an "engineering" school self-selects (or selects based on certain gender issues with the society at large, e.g. discouraging young women to be interested in science, etc.) e.g. Rose Hulman, Colorado School of Mines, etc.

3. As a less-than-wealthy, non-family-name student, Kvothe is not exactly the center of general social activity at the University. He is left to find friendship with the loners and outcasts. (At least, until finding success as a musician.)

(This is not meant in any way as a rebuttal, etc.! Just some additional thoughts. My own experience as a low-social-class student of an engineering school certainly is very, very male-heavy.)

Re: A few thoughts

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I know you said you didn't intend that as a rebuttal, but I feel obliged to point out that all of the things you said are points I already addressed.

1) Kvothe being sexist is a choice the author made, and in my opinion a troubling one. Furthermore, there are ways to highlight his view as sexist, separating it from the author's own intention . . . but the book is not very successful on that count.

2) The novel tells us outright there are ten men at the University for every woman. Again, this is authorial choice; it is also one that could have been represented in-text without having the text itself marginalize women to the extent that it does.

3) "Loners and outcasts" sounds like a good description of the few female students, doesn't it? And, as you say, Kvothe makes connections outside the artificially limited context of the University -- but the only female musicians we see are Marea, who fails to win acclaim and then becomes one of Kvothe's admirers, and Denna.

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this. I enjoyed the book immensely, but there was a continuous nagging thing in the back of my head the whole time, and this was it. I wasn't all, "Where are the women with agency?" but more "This is really good, but something's missing."

I love how Rothfuss stands so many standard fantasy tropes on their heads. It felt as if he was deliberately building a tropetastic world, and then would zig instead of zag, and the plot thereby felt more fresh.

Except for all those missed opportunities to do something, anything, with a female character.

I wondered if he was doing that deliberately as yet another trope he was setting up to undermine, but nope, never did. (Unless we get to the end of the series and discover that everything Kvothe is credited with was actually done by Denna, a la all those Nobel-prize winning dudes who copped their data from women.)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

My god, I would laugh if it turned out Denna was the actual hero.

I doubt it's going to happen, and even if it did, it would still be a problem -- because the people who would most enjoy that are likely to have quit out of the series before then, while those who eagerly read to the end are the most likely to be ripshit over the reversal. But it's a fun thing to contemplate. :-D

Excellent Post on a Rampant Problem

[eric r. jackson (from livejournal.com)]

This blog post was brought to my attention from a friend from my writing group. I've even made a recent blog post on how this can be diffused in the creative process:

http://dimanagul.com/2015/01/28/musing-backwards-character-development/

Fantasy is SO bad about this, but so is most fiction. It was brought up at my writing group as well: A chapter I brought in a few weeks ago featured a female guard captain and I got positive feedback from the women in my writing group.

I would really prefer this to be common sense.

Re: Excellent Post on a Rampant Problem

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

We're getting there, slowly.

[landofnowhere]

I have mixed feelings about those books -- and am reluctant to recommend them to anyone until I see what book 3 does with the story. I want Kvothe to get his comeuppance as an objectifying ass, and that the women he's been underestimating/failing to notice get to have Crowning Moments of Awesome --but I'm not sure it will live up to my expectations. Underestimating women is one of his character flaws -- you already see him underestimating Devi in book 1, which will come back to bite him when he picks a fight with her in book 2, but she chooses to let him go and he ends up with the upper hand by figuring out one of her secrets (he thinks?). (Also, to be fair, he does seem to underestimate everyone who isn't himself :-D)

Also, I *hope* that he was being super-objectifying about Denna because he wants to lead his audience into the same trap that he himself fell into, not because he doesn't know better. (I may be confusing him with Rothfuss here, though?) But I generally feel like I'm giving the unreliable narrator somewhat more credit than he deserves.

Rothfuss is certainly more self-consciously male-gaze-y than most male-gaze-y authors out there -- I think the reason for making all the frame story characters male is that he wants to write about the sort of stories that men tell each other when there are no women around (but how would I know?)

(Side note: our culture seems to have a thing of "stories men tell men = heroic sagas, stories women tell women = gossip". Any fantasy out there that engages with the latter? The closest I can think are epistolary novels, e.g. Sorcery and Cecelia. Lady Trent & most other novels I read with female narrators don't count, because they are generally addressing a mixed-gender audience. Also, I think it's harder to pull the "unreliable narrator" trick with a a female narrator in a culture that views male-coded voices as more authoritative.)

I think TNTW benefits from rereading, but I'm also sympathetic to the people who got ticked off by the lack of women the first time and don't want to reread -- as I don't think the lack of women gets that much better after rereading. (Also, I reread it while working at a summer camp which was 85% male and had more than its share of child prodigy types, which probably helped me appreciate it better?)

Finally, I'm curious what you think of the comparison with Zelazny's Amber books (just the Corwin ones -- I'm going to ignore the Merlin books as being HELLA PROBLEMATIC). The big differences to me are that Corwin is such a misogynist asshole, while Kvothe is a Nice Guy -- also, it takes less time for him to come around and realize that, e.g., Flora isn't such a ditz as she appeared at first. (Not that the gender roles are anywhere as good as they should be.) (Also, my impression is that Zelazny did plotting by way of The Author Had a Better Idea, as opposed to Rothfuss's Grand Plan.)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I've only read the first Amber book so far, so I can't judge Corwin vs. Kvothe very well. And off the top of my head I can't think of any fantasy that's really "stories women tell other women" -- that kind of thing would get shoved off in a corner as women's fiction if it weren't fantasy, and there's probably not much of a market for it within the genre.