Modtheow
Lorien
Jun 2 2009, 6:42pm
Views: 953
|
|
Fanfic, gender studies, and Timmons on hobbit sensuality
|
|
|
I’m not quite sure where to stick this post, so I’ll put it here, since sador has raised some interesting points about current gender studies and I’d like to add my own thoughts on that subject (though I don’t claim to be a spokesperson for any group). Sometimes I wonder whether ideas about literary critics who study gender and sexuality aren’t getting mixed up with ideas about fanfic writers (though not in sador’s post), and I’d like to try to disentangle these threads if possible, if only to clear my own head.
Fanfic
I think it’s fair to say that fanfic writers do “impose” their ideas about sexuality on Tolkien’s text, if by “imposing” we mean that they acknowledge that they are adding to the story an explicit sexual dimension -- often a homosexual dimension -- that Tolkien was not interested in writing about. However, many fanfic writers do believe that the sexual dimension of the relationships they write about is implied in Tolkien’s text; there is something there that could turn into an explicit sexual relationship. As N.E.B. reports in one of his posts, the point has been made that the idea of a “Brokeback Mount Doom” video doesn’t come out of nowhere. (Of course, we should also remember that not all fanfic is about sex.) As for “permiscuity” -- there is something about that spelling that just seems right, isn’t there? -- some fanfic writers do play with creating promiscuous relationships, although many stories also specialize in monogamous, romantic relationships (OTP: One true pairing) in which two characters are exclusively bonded through love, which is expressed sexually. In any case, I do think that fanfic writers who write about sexual relationships are playing with and exploring ideas that are currently acceptable in our culture (well, maybe western liberal culture), but such ideas were not explicitly discussed by most people in some other times in history (like the mid-20th century), or they weren’t discussed using the same terminology that we use today (like “homosexual”) and so were seen slightly differently.
Literary criticism
Professional critics who study gender overlap to some extent with fanfic writers in that both groups are scrutinizing what is and what is not in Tolkien’s text, what is implied, what is explicit, and what all of that means in terms of Tolkien’s representation of gender, sex, sexuality. I suppose you could see the critical examination of sexuality as an “imposition” of contemporary concerns on older material, but in my opinion it’s more accurate to think of it as a way of looking at older material. In good gender criticism, the critic isn’t trying to impose any ideas on the text and is certainly not trying to rewrite history; the critic is trying to understand the text and its historical context more clearly by pursuing questions such as how did people think about sex at that time? What were the important questions to them compared to us today? How did they conduct their relationships then compared to us today? What does the difference, if there is one, tell us about our lives and our world today and in the past? Good criticism that uses sex and gender as a way of looking at older material doesn’t impose contemporary ideas about sexuality on the text; instead, it should aim to clarify what is in the text, implicitly or explicitly; to say what isn’t there; and to articulate what is different about the text compared to our present-day assumptions. Of course, I said “good criticism” – bad criticism, to my mind, is something like Catharine Stimpson’s famous article, which wants to find a certain version of women depicted in Tolkien’s work and when she doesn’t find what she is looking for, she criticizes the text for not being her idea of a good story that contains her desired heroines, without looking closely at what is actually there. That kind of criticism, I would say, is an imposition of contemporary expectations on the story.
While I find the question of sex/gender/sexuality an interesting way of looking at the text, it is true that we have come through a period in literary criticism that persistently asks the same questions: about sex and gender, about class, and about race. But then again, every period in literary criticism has its dominant questions – in the 1950s, we’d be preoccupied with unity, structure, and irony; or in the 1890s, we’d be persistently examining texts for signs of Saxon racial qualities as expressed in our myths. Recent critical questions about sex, class, and race were born out of the civil rights and feminist movements of the 20th century, a political foundation that is not to everyone’s liking, and early versions of such criticism especially were prone to identifying negative stereotypes that led to condemnations of their writers, but I think that examples of the best of these critical explorations go beyond that somewhat superficial level to try to understand the writer in his/her historical moment – the exact opposite, in other words, of trying to rewrite history according to modern views.
Questions about sex aren’t the only way that literary critics approach texts these days – thank goodness for some variety! – and just as in the Reading Room so too in professional criticism: certain questions interest some people more than others. But basically the whole critical enterprise – whether on these boards or in professional journals – involves asking questions, examining the text, discussing different interpretations, challenging ideas, and formulating a better appreciation of and greater pleasure in what Tolkien has done through such analyses. In fact, I would go further and posit that a major rewriting of history occurs when one is not willing to question or analyze any assumptions at all and remains paralyzed in an unexamined belief that clichés about past times are all true and require no further comment. But thank goodness that’s not the Reading Room that I love, which includes disagreements and debates and information and new ways of thinking about the text.
<ok, end of polemic>
A brief word about Timmons on hobbit sensuality
As sador points out, the title of Timmons's article is “Hobbit Sex and Sensuality in The Lord of the Rings.” It was published in Mythlore 89, Summer 2001 – it’s not available in my library’s online databases and I can’t find it on the internet anywhere, but I do have a print copy that I got through inter-library loan, so if anyone would like a copy, I would be happy to mail it to them (just send me an address by PM). Just to clarify: Timmons does not believe that there is any explicit sex in LotR; in fact, he states “No overt or implied sex scenes occur in Tolkien’s work.” Timmons covers various points in this article, including commenting on Partridge’s and Stimpson’s articles, Tolkien’s letters about sex, and the fact that hobbits obviously have sex because they have lots of children. I don’t agree with all of Timmons’s ideas and I think there are blind spots in his argument, but one point that I found interesting was his look at the hobbits’ sensual awareness of the feminine: their initial reaction to Goldberry; Frodo’s first sight of Arwen in Rivendell; the way Galadriel unsettles them when she looks at them. I’d be happy to discuss this article further if anyone has read it -- or if anyone has even read my post all the way to this point.
Oh, and sador, I have no particular enlightenment to offer about Sam and Rosie, though I do think it would be interesting to look at Sam’s blushes.
|
