Tolkien and gender question

[chelseagirl]

Since I'm not a paid user, I can't set up polls, but I have a question and would love it if people would circulate it around *their* journals and then let me know. This is primarily (though not exclusively) for women, and really intended for people who read Tolkien before the films came out.

First time I read Lord of the Rings I was in junior high (13ish) and loved it, but was troubled by the lack of female characters to relate to. Arwen was a shadowy figure (one of Jackson's best moves, imho, was giving her a personality and things to do), Eowyn showed up late in the game (and I kinda, er, skimmed a lot of the battle scenes), and while I adored Galadriel, she was a bit too all-powerful to actually identify with. No, I needed there to be a female in the Fellowship itself.

So the first time I read the trilogy, I interpreted Merry as a female. Hey, it's a gender-ambiguous name, and yeah I had to ignore stuff to read him that way, but it worked for me and Merry became my character to identify with. When I reread them later on, I didn't. Years, later, I was talking to my law school roommate, who mentioned her father and brothers were big Tolkien fans but she found the books too male. And that on her sole reading of the trilogy she had solved the problem for herself by picturing Merry as (you guessed it) female. Which made my own doing the same come flooding back to me.

When I was in England recently, I mentioned this to silme, and she said that she used to picture both Merry and Legolas as female. (Which makes a lot of sense, really, since Legolas is graceful and delicate, yet powerful, not a bad image for a woman, especially if you haven't got Orlando Bloom firmly cast in the role in your consciousness . . . ) Aha, said I, so there were at least three of us!

So . . . anybody else do this? Do me a favor and ask your friends?

I guess a lot of this depends on how much you need a character to be of your own gender to identify with them. Clearly I did more when I was thirteen than when I was fifteen-seventeen (my subsequent rereadings, except for one when the movies came out, were when I was in high school), but even now, the presence of a strong and interesting female character often makes a difference in my response to works. Curious how this works for others.

Comments

[jennetj.livejournal.com]

The first time I read them in high school, I absorbed everything about them and don't know that I especially "related" to any character, but Eowyn was my favorite. I thought Aragorn chose the wrong woman (I recall being less than impressed with Faramir in those days, as I thought he was too "perfect" and was just a shadow of his brother. Needless to say my opinion on that score has changed!). But in general, I don't need a character to be of my gender to relate to them, though depending on the character and the situation, it may help. I'm less likely to relate to "manly men" than to men whose heads and sensibilities I can understand (which probably feminizes them).

[batdina.livejournal.com]

I was in university the first time I read them (living in a house named Lothlorien, which is why I read them in the first place). I don't remember thinking one way or another about women in the books, though their absence may well be why I didn't reread them for more than a decade. The most recent time through I attached myself to Eowyn with great joy, so I'm thinking I must have done that 25 years ago too, though I don't recall caring who Aragorn chose or not, except that I wouldn't have made the same choice he did.

Arwen still does nothing for me, even with the changes Jackson made, most of which I resented on first viewing, though don't much mind any longer.

[malinaldarose.livejournal.com]

I don't think I noticed the lack of female characters. I was twelve, I think, when I first read the books and I imagine that I identified strongly with Frodo; I still do to some degree.

But I'm weird.

[kfitzwarin.livejournal.com]

I read them first in elementary school, and I don't recall noticing a dearth of female characters. I identified a little with Eowyn and a little with Galadriel, but didn't need more than that. My favorite characters at the time were probably Aragorn & Faramir & Eomer.

[carocrow.livejournal.com]

I've never required that; I suppose I am somewhat gender ambiguous when I read; it wasn't until reading them as an adult that I noticed the dearth of feminine influence and character in the books... any more than I noticed "representative feminine" in Peter Pan, Lord of the Flies, etc. They were just boy buddy things. Note I said "boy".... I did not interpret the hobbits as in their thirties and therefore (for hobbits) young adults. But then again, in the books Aragorn is probably in his 60s by the time the major action occurs (perhaps that elven blood ameliorated his human in the ageing process).

I think I'm okay with buddy things being what they are, male or female. I don't see movies as being "chick flicks" just because the characters are predominantly female, either, though.

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

And Numenorean -- he was from a longer lived race of humans in any case.

[bethynyc.livejournal.com]

hmmm, I tended to identify with both Frodo and Merry, but didn't need them to be of my gender to do that. I first read LotR when I was 12-13 I think. Junior high.

I do like when there is a strong female character that I can identify with, but if I'm feeling the jones for that sort of thing, I just re-read the Anne of Green Gables series over.

I do massively identify with Lucy and Jill in the Chronicles of Narnia.

Does that help?

[cissa.livejournal.com]

I first read them in high school, so I was maybe about 15? I didn't read any of the fellowship characters as female, but I did- and do- feel that the dearth of female characters is a flaw of the books. I adored Eowyn. Considering how well Tolkein wrote her given that her plot "function" is based on a twist and her plot motives are so much of a female cliche, I really wish he'd not restricted the rest of the main characters to males.

I'll read books with male, female, and mixed protagonists, of whatever genders and sexual orientations anyone cares to write- but i do think somewhat the worse of writers who restrict their protagonists to males and who use women as cliches or plot elements only. They'd have to be a really brilliant writer to overcome that part of the way. And mostly they're not because hey- so much restriction in imagination? Not good for the rest of the job, either.

[silme.livejournal.com]

I was ten when I first read them, and I wanted female characters, as I said to you before. I was disappointed with Eowyn, to be honest.

Of course, I was disappointed in the film because of the lack of multi-cultural casting.

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

As for the casting, I agree. I figure the films were probably pretty much the way things were in Tolkien's head, and I guess if Jackson had done multicultural casting he would have had purists accusing him of too much political correctness. But there's something *really* uncomfortable about the forces of evil and their minions being from points east and south and being darker-skinned, and that was doubled for me when I watched some of the DVD extras and saw that there were indeed nonwhite actors on the set -- they were just mostly hidden under orc makeup and the like. So, yeah, if the ethnicity of the actors playing men and elves and hobbits could have been more varied, I too would have been happier.

BTW, check out teenygozer's comment below -- she too was a Merry convertor!

[silme.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's something to do with how young we were when we first read them... And to what generation we belong. I don't know.

I'm not sure I pictured all of the characters as white when I read the books, but I'm sure Tolkien did see them that way. But yes, I kept thinking that a film made today would have been more multi-cultural. It would have been nice to have had an Asian or black elf if only in the background, you know?

[teenygozer.livejournal.com]

I did that changing-Merry-into-a-girl-in-my-head thing, as did you. And I think I had this same conversation with Seah way back when, and she did the same thing, too.

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

We are the few-but-more-than-one-would-think, the proud, the Merry-sex-changers! I always thought it was unique to me and my ex-roomie, Also-Catherine, but once silme and I had the talk, I began to wonder just how prevalent it was . . .

[littlebutfierce]

This is a really interesting topic!

I never changed the gender of any of the Fellowship, & when I was first reading the books (late junior high to high school, although it took me a long time to actually make it through ROTK), I didn't even really notice the dearth of women for a long time, which is weird because I definitely had issues w/the representation of women in SF/F at that time (which drove me to read the likes of Mercedes Lackey, heh).

I did, & do, identify w/male characters, but I am always happy to have female characters that I can do that w/too, & yeah, I think that ups my appreciation of a book.

women in Tolkien

[studiesinlight.livejournal.com]

(I've forwarded a link to this to a non-LJ-subscriber friend, as my way of passing it around. If she does not post herself, I'll let you know what she says.)

To answer your question directly: I never reinterpreted any of the characters as other than what they canonically are; I was a canon-nut long before I learned the word "canon." However, I'm afraid I still have the darndest time telling apart the secondary hobbits, and who says what when; perhaps I would have done better to reimagine them as you did.

That said, on to some ramblings on the lack of women in the stories.

I noticed the absence of substantive female characters from the first -- "the first" being The Hobbit at age six; long story -- and alternately wondered at that and resented it, at the different times I encountered the stories. It did make them somewhat harder to enter, but not much, and this is recognizable only in retrospect; we were all used to adventure stories usually starring boys rather than girls, surely. I have read that studies have shown that girls have an easier time identifying with male protagonists than boys have identifying with female protagonists -- why? practice, perhaps? -- and that book publishers and television programmers take this to heart, consciously choosing/ordering more male protagonists to coddle the male audience.

But back to Tolkien: the stories are so broad -- so sweeping -- that it still puzzles me how Tolkien could omit women so thoroughly. I certainly do not mean to require women in every scene, or to deny a world of male experience apart from women; it's just that such an otherwise comprehensive sketch of a world is puzzling for suffering such a large omission. All these characters have mothers, sisters, female friends; some of them marry women; some have daughters; women are around them in many capacities; and yet women go almost entirely unmentioned. Is that how men see the world now? Is it how they saw the world in the past? Could it be true, the utter dismissable incidentalness of women?

Arwen is a nonentity, of course. We must take it as given -- it is canon -- that Aragorn loves Arwen, but, please show, not tell, Mr. Tolkein! Come on! Give us something! Anything? Why on earth does he love her? (Habit? Obligation? Weird elf cultural resonance? Gak.) It is an eternal mystery, what Aragorn sees in Arwen. I just don't get it.

Despite my harsh dismissal of canonical Arwen, however, I did not approve Jackson's changes. (They were not the changes I'd wanted, you see.) We already had a wonderful warrior woman in Eowyn, and a meaningful mystical woman in Galadriel, so I had wanted -- even expected -- a third vision of womanhood, from this tiny female slice of the cast. I had wanted an artist woman in Arwen. There are a few references in the books to her weaving or doing needlework, and while that's so common as to be beneath mention, culturally, I know, I would have been delighted with that as an approach to justifying her existence as an independent character -- not a poor shadow of Eowyn and weak whisper of Galadriel, but someone entirely unto herself. Jackson didn't do her or the others much credit by gifting her with their characterization cast-offs.

Somehow, I had imagined a symbolism of Arwen weaving Aragorn's royal banner, or a tapestry, all throughout the quest, as the others lived it, being bound in through that, and also, obviously, through all the symbolism of the Fates and other mythical weavers and needleworkers. Even more obviously, wherever I got the idea, it wasn't, um . . . widely shared. :-) Ah, well.

Re: women in Tolkien

[chelseagirl.livejournal.com]

Just a couple of comments on your detailed and thoughtful response:

Somehow it bothered me more that the Fellowship was all-male than other books where there'd be one protagonist or perhaps a pair -- surely in a crowd of *nine* there'd be room for a woman or two. I also wonder if there's an impact because I read the Fellowship before the Hobbit, and interpreted it as an adult's book, rather than a boy's adventure.

Along those lines, I might note that while my usual baby gift is a hardcover set of the Alice books, I have sometimes hesitated when the child is male, depending on my knowledge of what the parents are like and whether they'd "get" that Alice is for boys too.

As for your notion of Arwen as artist, I like it a lot -- but I suspect it would have been problematic cinematically. (Reaction shot: Arwen painting. Reaction shot: Arwen at her loom. Etc.)