Little Mumbles

Graceling, by Kristin Cashore

4 stars  * * * *

Apparently this book is considered un-feminist. I wonder how this can be possible. It seems there are a number of ways in which is performs its feminism.

Firstly, as a novel written by a woman, it is feminist in that it contributes a woman’s experience to the world by sharing her perspective. As it belongs to a fantasy genre, this viewpoint is able to bend everyday experience and to challenge social conventions. This book undoubtedly does this. By showing a woman’s perspective and experience within an intensely patriarchal society, it recommends, even demands, social change in favour of equality between men and women.

Secondly, the strong, independent female heroine who is determined to maintain control over herself, even while negotiating volatile interpersonal relationships, is feminist. She fights, she wants to fight, she wants girls to fight, not to stand as passive spectators.

Thirdly, her body is entirely unsexualised. Her physical appearance is never described other than how she is able to disguise herself as a boy. Her dresses are only described as a way of rejecting the need for conformity. The focus is entirely on her actions, not her appearance; on her subjectivity, not her status as an object.

Fourthly, the romance develops in a way that emphasises the dificulties of intimacy, the need for strong communication, and the absolute importance of trust and mutual respect. The central relationship is a meeting of equals who are different enough to challenge each other. This kind of relationship seems to me incredibly feminist, offering a politics of equality at the most basic of levels. It validates the fears women have about being able to preserve their sense of themselves while giving themselves over to another. The protagonist’s fear of trust and intimacy is heart-breakingly familiar to girls who used to being treated as objects by men. Through its representation of romance, this book participates in current feminist and queer debates about the politics of intimacy, where intimacy is seen as an important site for exploring and changing a wider politics of equality.

there is an idea
that mum and me
might write a paper together

a paper about water
and gender, and water
and people. The way
we use it, abuse it.

water societies, floating
in rivers. i wonder if water
is feminine. or if we could
argue that, perhaps.

it could be creative
we could introduce song.
we could claim that water
moves around solid objects.

Don’t make me explain

one more time

why i don’t shave my legs.

Let me remind you

boys don’t do it.

Don’t tell me its unhygienic.

Don’t make me 

stand here before you

self-objectifying; defending

my right to make this choice,

and the difficulty

living up to it.

It isn’t, like you say,

a decision 

about which side of the fence

to sit on,

because 

in your eyes

there isn’t a choice

between shaving and not shaving:

a woman 

who doesn’t shave

isn’t a woman at all.

          Here

        I am all blank;

              a body

        waiting

 to be written,

   given shape,

      moulded,

   like dough

into forms

  you recognise

   and in which

     you worship

         your own

            handiwork.

Juliet didn’t like the tasks she was set: violin, dance class, elocution. It was all abysmally dull, not unlike Juliet herself. Her clothes were dull, her face was dull, her eyes were dull.

Her mother tried to curl her hair, to dress her  in flowers and lace. But Juliet just looked plainer by comparison, her face fading beside the extravagant garments. Her school bow hung limp like a rag in her hair.

Her mother was jealous of the other women’s daughters, appearing cheerily at the school gates in the afternoon. They laughed with rosy cheeks and shiny hair. While Juliet would waver from the schoolyard like a shadow, and slip into the car.

There wasn’t anything Juliet particularly liked.  She could sit for hours reading or pouring over words with a big dictionary in her lap. But nothing she did amounted to any kind of ‘accomplishment’, interest or passion.

She was, for the most part, incredibly plain and uninteresting, overlooked by her teachers and ignored by her fellow students. The kind of girl whose socks were always drooping.

Like a child she loved him,

Never wanting to grow old.

She was Wendy

On adventure

Far from home.

She made Peter happy

Caring the way she did.

And he made her smile

To forget

The darkness of before.

Together they were always

In flight just off the ground,

Cupped against each other

In fear of glittered ladies

And pirates’ ticking sound.

Over so much innocence,

Marbled on the surface,

Hiding things of old.

Before the sun shone rising

Gold across the window

Lighting shadows

They wished they could ignore.

Romeo was the romantic type. He thought of himself as an artist devoted to Truth, Beauty, Sincerity. He wore his hair long and lank and carried with him everywhere a book and inky pen below his drooping shoulders.

To him, Juliet was a Gothic princess, pale and mysterious behind her veil. But in so many ways, behind the veil, Juliet was perfectly ordinary. In so many ways, she wasn’t special. For all his search for a superior Truth, what he found was the Absolute of the Mundane.

In Early Modern England, there was extreme anxiety over masculine authority. In his book Anxiously Masculinity, Mark Brietenberg argues that men who wrote poetry were considered melancholic because they focused too much on their feelings. Melancholia was seen as a disease of the feminine. Yet it was, in some ways, a necessary condition. Writers staged masculine loss and vulnerability for the purpose of maintaining control over the performance of gendered identity. The deliberately imposed difficulty of expressing love in words, of capturing the female form, allowed the speaker to exclude his own body from the text, to make his own emotions and feelings transcendent and universal. Within this logic, the purported defence of poetry actually stands as a testimony to the distance of poetry from criticism. As a result, the defence of poetry – as mother and first nurse – is framed as an instance of “feminine” weakness, from which the [male] writer is, or should, be able to transcend.