Fictional, factual, feminist!

Last week I posted two days late for World Book Day, this week two days late for International Women’s Day. So what? Every day should be international women’s day, until the ridiculous imbalance between two types of human being is resolved.

That’s a big ask, so I’ll start with a few examples you can show your daughters and your sons. Stand by for two heroines from my childhood reading, two from that of my children, and a couple of adults. Some fictional, some factual, all pointing in the right direction though the route may look circuitous to some of you.

Photo from South Dakota State Historical Society, reproduced in “Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder” by John E Miller, University of Missouri Press 1998

The American writer Laura Ingalls Wilder fictionalised her own pioneer childhood. In the second half of the 19th century , Laura, the second of Pa and Ma’s four daughters,  travelled in a covered wagon from Wisconsin to South Dakota, encountering meteorological and man made hazards all the way. I read her books as a child in suburban North London. Her family were (had to be) independent, tough, adaptable and with four daughters, Pa lacked the help he needed to tend the farm they eventually settled. So Laura persuaded her mother to let her help him, and as he said, it was just the ticket. We learn that if a man gives a woman an opportunity, she’ll repay it manifold. Along the way, we learn how to clean a gun and make bullets (as clear a description as any Boy Scout manual, perhaps Trump should ban it as terrorist training), how to build a log cabin and all the necessary furniture, how to cross a river in flood or survive a blizzard on the prairie, teach a class of students when both teacher and pupils are the same age (sixteen), treat malaria, break in a horse, and make a poke bonnet. Without transgressing the politics of her stratified and conservative society, Laura Ingalls Wilder makes the strongest of social, business and emotional cases for girls and boys to be educated and valued equally.

photo from South Dakota State Historical Society, reproduced in “Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder” op.cit

Dido Twite is entirely fictional. She’s the heroine of Joan Aiken’s Wolves of Willoughby Chase series but first appears in the second book. A neglected London waif with an eye for the main chance, innate crafty intelligence and a yearning for affection, Dido is  resourceful, fit and adaptable from day one. She needs to be: over the course of seven books, she survives a burning shipwreck, comes round from a coma on a whaling ship in Nantucket, foils at least four treacherous plots against the king including one where a giant gun is to be fired across the Atlantic to displace the UK (sound familiar?) overpowers a tyrannical queen who practises human sacrifice, escapes an overturned coach with a drunken driver, a plague of spiders, and various poisoning attempts, stops St Paul’s Cathedral rocking on its foundations, shines a light on hypocrisy and privilege, cares for the sick and frail, rescues children trapped labouring down mines, puts an end to dangerous sects and stands up against injustice and cruelty. (This potted biography may be muddled; the books are complex and I’m due a reread. Anyway, she’s a helluva role model.)

The only edition of any Harry story I could find with Hermione on the cover

My children read these, took them in and then along came Hermione Granger and Lyra Belacqua. You all know Hermione: the ambitious want-it-all student who got a bit tired and stressed when a spell helped her attend several classes simultaneously to beat timetable clashes, thus enabling her to learn enough magic to get hapless Ron and dull Harry out of their latest dilemma all while juggling the two different worlds she lives in. (Dull Harry? Yes, I’m afraid I can only ever think of him as a plot dump with very little character of his own. But Hermione, Ginny, Luna Lovegood…J.K Rowling to my mind writes better female characters.) And both Emma Watson and J K Rowling have since put some of the Harry Potter money where their mouths are, promoting women’s rights in various practical ways. I can’t be bothered with the carping about the dresses they wear while doing so: nobody criticises the way men dress when they’re trying to better their world (all the time, since the dawn of it).

The only one of these heroines created by a man is Philip Pullman’s Lyra Belacqua, due to resurface soon, I’m delighted to hear. Time travel? Pah! This heroine does inter galactic travel (I think – my grasp of physics is less good than Pullman’s). She’s feisty (aren’t they all?), a bit uncouth (shades of Dido there), an incredibly fast learner and again like Dido, in need of a loving family. Instead her mother is Mrs Coulter, surely a magical version of Mrs Thatcher/Theresa May with her love of good accessories and her twists into sheer evil. She’s not pictured on any of the covers I found (strange: the iconography of women’s beauty is all over the place, but put an intelligent heroine on a book cover?) However, here’s an earlier Philip Pullman heroine, the wonderful 19th century detective Sally Lockhart. Who needs Holmes and Watson with her around? There are four Sally Lockhart books, all quite gripping.

 

This article would be too long if I went into the writers for adults who inspired my feminism, so I’ll just cite the first and the most recent. In the 1980s I studied Simone de Beauvoir’s fiction and how it related to her life and philosophy; I haven’t read it since but suspect it would still stand up, in a good translation. At university my path crossed very briefly with an author whose work was published two days ago on International Women’s Day 2017. How about this for an in your face title and cover, by the co-founder of the Women’s Equality Party which now has twice as many members as UKIP. Catherine Mayer is of course not fifty feet tall in real life, but history may well see her as a giantess. I bet she was brought up on  Laura and Dido.

©Jessica Norrie 2017

Words from the wise: writing with Marina Warner

In the warmish summer of 2016 there was a wise and beautiful lady who ran a writing course in the grounds of the medieval hall at Dartington, among the trees and flowers where music plays and voices sing from dawn until the moon rises shimmering over the river.  I stumbled onto Marina Warner‘s course by accident, having been too dreamy to read my brochure attentively, and expecting only music in this enchanted place. But her welcome was as gracious to the wandering stranger as to the more studious participants, and this is what happened over the next five magical  days.

Replete with a breakfast of local fruits and meats, we passed through fertile gardens and followed a green slope shaded by a spreading mulberry tree. Steep stone steps led to a small wooden hut whose interior swelled Narnia-like to encompass a bay window and another storey below. Here we descended to write our stories on days when the rain lashed the leaded panes and the clouds grumbled through the grey skies. But such times were few: in sunnier hours we found secluded dells and tranquil shade wherein to nurse our newborn words.

“Cross-currents in the Ocean of Stories” was the theme: Marina led our journey through stories past and new, across oceans and deserts, from Mount Olympus through Arabian nights, crusades and silk roads and Celtic woodland, widdershins through conflict and desire and the eternal plight of the refugee. In safety we met monsters and explored the byways of fairy tales. We were a varied group of ages and styles, with backgrounds in writing and teaching and radio and television, psychotherapy and the visual arts. One of us could say with proud truth:”I was born in a place called Drama”. And because Dartington is a meeting place for young and old, raw and persevering and gifted and internationally famous musicians, we were also viol players and lutenists and singers, and when we were not listening, reading and writing, we were making music together.

Marina spoke of realism and fantasy, how Ted Hughes and Philip Pullman make the fairy-like corporeal and psychological, of the highly valued slave musicians of the caliphs and of the souls of trees. In our hut in the garden, we considered plants: no respecters of borders, cross fertilising, blow-ins without language. We agreed that fairy tales can be told and retold ad infinitum, in an oral tradition that seems everlasting but is yet vulnerable, a tradition that is bottom up, but used and reused by the gods of literature, by Chaucer and Shakespeare and Boccaccio and Dante, Kafka in his “fairy tales for dialecticians” and in our own times by Angela Carter and AS Byatt.

We considered riddles, quests and prohibitions, objects that come to life and speak, (magic carpets; violins strung with the hair of murder victims), astrology and imprisonment, the princess who says no and the princess who yearns, the ghost and the creature transformed. We found love, hate, desire, and shame and redemption in these stories; curses and physical deficiencies; possibilities that break all known rules and yet reside within a universally recognisable framework.

And what of language? There were proverbs, rhymes, repetition, alliteration, rhetoric…strange languages and onomatopoeia. We learned from admonitions and fables and received advice. We told the time: predictive, recollection, time stopped as in the Sleeping Beauty, time postponed as in the Arabian Nights. Who is the narrator and what does she know? Is the child reliable; does the old crone tell the truth; can the messenger be believed?

We talked of modern fairy tales, making sense of horror. Marina told of a Nobel Prize winner writing of Chernobyl and of the Last Wolf of Extremadura. Does cruelty in fairy tales incite, or comfort? She is working at present on storytelling projects with refugees; some psychologists do not want to add to their trauma by using fairy tales; others see it as cathartic. But refugees are not a blank slate: they disseminate and collect their own tales on their journeys, as did the men (and women?) who accompanied Marco Polo and Richard the Lionheart. (See more details of the Palermo based project here.)

Marina set us tasks. We’d to find an object in the garden and set a riddle; we’d to use repetition as in a traditional tale (I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll BLOW your house down). We’d to write of an item precious to ourselves: jewellery proved popular here, but one man chose the participant badge without which he would not be fed, instructed or entertained at Dartington and I chose my glasses which enable me to see. We were asked to write a piece of persuasive dialogue.Some of us faltered, some of us omitted it, nobody failed, most of us bloomed. This was not a modern course, with aims and objectives and evaluations at the end, or if it was they were well disguised: it appeared that we meandered from curious to fascinating, from touching to heart-rending, from personal to universal, but in the terrible world of today it all made perfect sense. Marina quoted André Jolles: “The miraculous is here the only possible guarantee that the immorality of reality has stopped.”

It’s too early to say that we all wrote happily ever after, but we were set on our way. Updating this in July 2019, I’d like to thank Marina again here, a few weeks before my second novel The Magic Carpet is published. I’m not sure it would have taken the form it has, or any form at all, if it were not for that initial inspiration from her course. I cannot recommend highly enough a reading of Marina Warner’s work. If you can combine it with a visit to Dartington, you will be in a fairy land of your own. May your good wishes be granted and bless you for reading.

 

©Jessica Norrie 2016