JAFF & prejudice
Nov. 19th, 2009 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineSome thoughts on prejudice in Austen fandom.
First, I'll get my general opinions out of the way.
-- Prejudice does not equal oppression. I could be violently prejudiced against US Senators and they would still not be oppressed by me. Their privileges of class and political power are such that it's not possible for me to oppress them. If you consider bigotry as a mathematical function, say, we have prejudice as an input and oppression as a (potential) output. The constants, I suppose, are the power society allows me to realise my prejudices. The degree of my prejudice is fairly irrelevant as far as oppression is concerned, if I am not enabled in some degree.
-- Prejudice is prejudice is prejudice. Suppose that I would have all US Senators killed, if only I could; I can't, so my prejudice doesn't amount to anything, practically speaking. Would that make me less prejudiced than, say, my Anglo-American grandparents, who are passively but painfully racist? No. Just that I'm not oppressing anybody.
-- Not all oppressions are created equal. For example: Polygamy jokes stopped being funny before I turned ten. My best friend calls himself 'Defender of the Faith' because when he, a male atheist, talks about the religion I was brought up in, people listen. But ultimately it's a small part of my life, I'm not defined by it in most people's eyes - it's more of an annoyance, really, I get lots and lots of white privilege, and it can't begin to approach what POC deal with every day.
-- Oppression Olympics are stupid. Not the phrase - the phrase is awesome - the, er, phenomenon. 'My oppression is worse than your oppression because . . .' Your situation is not any less bad just because somebody else has it worse, even assuming they do. And if it's a space to discuss, say, homophobia, a straight woman saying 'well, at least you don't have to deal with misogyny' is spectacularly unhelpful. (Worse than unhelpful, actually.)
-- It's much easier to dwell on the ways we're the victims of prejudice than to even acknowledge the ways in which we're prejudiced against others.
Okay, soapboxing (mostly) over. Now on to Austen fandom.
The thing is, Austen fandom has it easy in a number of ways, since almost everything is based on Pride and Prejudice. In P&P, everybody is English. Almost everybody is upper-class. (The rest are comfortably middle-class, except for a handful of presumably or explicitly well-treated servants.) Compared to what we see in most fandoms, the protagonists' flaws are so minor as to border on the insignificant - mere blips on our moral radar. After reading HP or DW or LOTR fic, Elizabeth and Darcy's self-castigating soliloquys come off as, um, a bit excessive. The vast majority of prejudices confronted - or ignored - by other fandoms don't even exist for us.
At least . . . they needn't exist. The problem is that they do, and not in a good way.
(1) The big one. Racial prejudice. For most Regency ficcers, this is not a problem. There's exactly one POC in the Austen canon, the biracial heiress Miss Lambe from Sanditon. Her racial background is mentioned once in passing, and never again because nobody cares about it (even critics, who can hang an entire reading on a single ambiguous line, pay little attention to this). The rest of the cast does care about her fortune and accordingly we hear a good deal about that. Hardly anybody writes Sanditon fic (understandably, what with it being unfinished and all) so this rarely comes up in the first place.
So, if you're writing P&P fic with any remote resemblance to canon, this will simply never come up. It's a sort of get-out-of-fail-free card in that you can completely avoid it without being an utter bastard. But.
But not all Austen fics are Regency. More often than not, in fact, they're retellings set in the modern world - the American modern world, usually. The authors of these are almost invariably American themselves.
Which means they have no excuse whatsoever for pretending POC don't exist. The town I grew up in, sure, was completely - er - homogenous. But I can count the number of fics set in places like that on one hand. Most are in major metropolises. When the entire cast is (1) white, and (2) living in New York City, something is not okay.
There are two notable exceptions to this tendency, sort of. First, when cultural clashes is used as the analogue to Elizabeth and Darcy's defensive prejudices in canon, wherein they're almost exclusively directed towards members of their own country, culture and class. (Darcy comes from a much higher echelon of their class, but that's all.) It's hard to explain, but I've always found something vaguely disturbing about cultural/racial prejudice being equated to class-based snobbery. It's - yes, they're both prejudices - prejudices based on an external factor - prejudices based on birth - but, but, they're different. Classism just isn't, and shouldn't be, equated to racism. At all.
The second exception is the inclusion of token minority characters. With very few exceptions, they are never major characters.
(Somebody recently brought this up, and the Austenfen rushed to reassure each other that of course they're not racist, it's because of XYZ and, hey, what's-her-name wrote a [token minority] character once.)
(All of this said, I tend to think that most ficcers simply transplant the English cast to some modern metropolis and just don't think of the implications. Which doesn't justify them but makes it slightly less fail-worthy than those who write in fandoms originating in the modern world. White!postHBP!Blaise is ... I don't have words for the fail, but, um, SO MUCH FAIL.)
(2) Misogyny and misandrism. Birds of a feather, those, though you wouldn't expect it. (Or maybe you would. I didn't.)
In the Austen fandom, there are several things you have to understand about Real Men and Real Women. I'll list the first - oh - three to spring to mind.
(a) Real women are emotional, nurturing and above all, personal. It is, of course, perfectly defensible to write Elizabeth as a person who allows her subjective feelings to overwhelm her reason because - um, yes. Not because she's a woman. To write her as a supernurturer beloved by every child who meets her? Not so much. Especially given that the only children she has any contact with in canon, her Gardiner cousins, prefer Jane. The only reason for this, as far as I can tell, is that she's the heroine, and sympathetic, and therefore a Real Woman. Real Women, as we all know, are conflations of Spunky Young Things and Mother-Saints. If they diverge from either, they're instantly degraded.
(A sidenote. Just about every next-generation ficcer in every fandom known to man relies on the Law of Offspring. The original heroine will always produce a problem child of some kind, almost invariably a rebellious teenage girl. It applies almost as strongly to men and sons - not quite, because no paternal bond can compare to the awesome force of Mother-Love [cf "Harry Potter"!] - but nearly. Ultimately, the child will acknowledge his or her ingratitude and they reconcile, often on the parent's deathbed. Sometimes it's the child's deathbed, and occasionally no death is involved at all. Anyway, I expected it even more than usual with Elizabeth, given her charmingly difficult personality, and the fact that she went and married someone equally difficult, if more even-tempered, but people flail at the very idea. Apparently if she is less than perfection as a parent, or if her children are less, or if their relationship is, then it so degrades her perfection as to make her unrecognisable. Or something.)
What is even less acceptable, IMO, is to write Charlotte Lucas as that type. The fact that she is actually capable of some feeling (ie, human) doesn't automatically render her into Spunky Young Thing material.
(b) Real women do not have institutional prejudices unless they're evil or brainwashed; in fact, rebelling against The Institution (whatever it may be - it doesn't actually matter too much, though breastfeeding, caps, and midwives are popular areas of contention) is the ultimate proof of a real woman's Girl Power, aka spunk. And if you don't have spunk, you're not a Real Woman.
Marginalised non-heroines in the original text - especially the kind I think of as Aluminum Chicks, female foils whose distinguishing trait is their total dissimilarity from the protagonists - are promptly turned into second-rate versions of the heroine (either Sues or pale imitators; or both). Authors apparently take on these characters as the stars of their own stories for the sole purpose of doing this.
For instance, just about every Georgiana-sequel in creation describes itself as "Georgiana Darcy develops into an assertive, strong-minded woman." Develop apparently means "her own personality is utterly destroyed so that she can become a pale shadow of her sister-in-law." The Spunky Young Thing is the Ur-woman, and all worthy females will either be like her, or desperately trying to be like her.
I think that these fen (most of them, evidently) are reacting against the idea of saintly Pollyanna-ish Angels of the House as the only acceptable models of womanhood. Apparently the only possible way to correct this is by forcing all women, including Pollyannas, into a different stereotype, and insisting that Pollyannas, specifically, don't actually exist. They're all just hiding their inner Real Woman.
(c) Real Men are, to quote
tree , complete debauched horndogs. Er, I mean, sensual creatures with a richly appealing physicality. Any man who doesn't think about sleeping with the heroine 24/7 is either gay or repressed. There is no possibility that he could ever not find her attractive. However, he will never so much as notice her more conventionally beautiful sister/cousin/best friend/archrival, barring a Moment of Weakness for which he must grovel later (it's only a Moment of Weakness if it involves someone else, however); effectively, male sexual attraction is heroine-radar.Usually, they're also devastatingly - and broodingly - handsome, though sometimes it's scaled down to sex appeal without good looks.
Darcy is all but invariably painted as the ultimate Real Man. This is something of an irony, because he doesn't find Our Heroine remotely attractive at first and says so. Out loud. In public. At a party. I mean, there is no avoiding this blatant violation of Real Man standards. Why, it's almost as if Dear Jane were trying to make him unReal. (Who'd a thunk it?) So, of course, it has to be retconned away. See, he didn't actually mean that he didn't find her attractive. He was just in a bad mood. Or, what actually happened was that he was overpoweringly attracted to her. So attracted that it frightened him, so he had to fake the opposite extreme. Or so attracted that he had to repress it and even he didn't realise it which (a) explains why he says she's unattractive in his own inner dialogue, and (b) allows him to have lurid dreams.
Win-win!
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on 2009-11-20 12:00 pm (UTC)(also, considering that 'spunk' is a slang term for semen, i'm not too sure why anyone would want a 'spunky' heroine. just saying.)
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on 2009-11-23 11:51 pm (UTC)as for spunk: heeeeeeh. I just wrote an essay about the spunky heroine phenomenon, and mentioned in passing that it sounded like an STD to me. win!
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on 2009-11-20 06:12 pm (UTC)*brb, laughing too hard*