Wheel of Time side post: On Women
I 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 supplies 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?
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.
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.
