Burning the Straw Men

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Back in October, inspired negatively by a book I was perusing at the time, I scribbled a post about some of the most flagrant stereotypes applied to women in novels.  I don't believe it would be playing fair if after that, I didn't do something of the same for male characters.  I haven't seen this as commonly in modern books (probably because I don't read many of them), though it does crop up quite a bit in the more "sensational," romanticized literature of the 1800s.  However, I know many of Scribbles' readers, as well as myself, garner more inspiration from that era than from our own, so I think it still worthwhile to address the issue.

A plague that afflicts many male characters is one I've seen in several older books, and unfortunately, it seems to crop up most in books by Christian authors.  It might come from the writers being women; it might have grown out of the Progressive movements in the late 19th Century - I'm not sure.  Certainly one book I found guilty of it was written a long while before that.  So, without further ado,

the straw man

These are characters who, though men, act like women and are portrayed as something like feminine angels (and not the powerful angels of reality, either).  They are extremely good.  They are also extreme milktoasts.  They are as emotional as women, though I've found that the authors try to get away with this by calling them "manly tears" - protesting too much, mayhap?  You can't picture them going into battle, or fighting with everything they've got for something they love, or overturning money-changing tables in a temple.

The moral compasses of these straw men never waver.  They have no real struggles with anything so terrible as hatred; certainly not anything like drink (gasp!) or a foul mouth (oh noez!).  What "struggles" they do have are sanitized and even glorified to make the characters look even better: they might love another person too much, or be too sacrificial, or too trusting, or what have you.  But sin?  Oh, goodness, no, mustn't have that!

Caveats are in order.  Most of you know that I'm all for characters who, like the prince in fairytales, represent virtue in its purest form.  I'm all for them because those characters are true: they represent valor and honor and truth, all powerful and masculine virtues.  They've got backbone.  They are good, but that does not necessitate their being wimps.  In fact, it rules out their being wimps: there is no virtue in milktoasts.

This doesn't mean there can be no cowardly lions in our stories, only that it ought not be portrayed as a mark of piety and goodness.  My character Justin King from Wordcrafter is one of my own favorites, and yet he is also naturally the weakest.  His insecurities make him unwilling to stand for much of anything; he lacks conviction, and Agent Coulson has informed us what happens to men of that stamp.  You can't pretend that Justin's retiring personality and half-developed backbone is a good thing, while Ethan Prince's blood-and-fire impulsiveness is evil - and yet, by the Law of Straw Men, I suppose that's what you would say. 

The Straw Man reveals itself in different forms, some much more innocuous than this, and is quite apt to creep into our stories when we're not looking.  I prefer writing male main characters, and yet I make these kinds of mistakes in the rough draft and have to get them ironed out by my father-and-beta-reader; in particular, it seems my characters have a tendency to be pacifists.  Not to say they won't fight, but when it comes down to killing someone, my heart fails me.  I put myself in their proverbial boots and find war and killing so ugly that I usually take the easy way out, and have to correct myself later on to be more in keeping with the character.  I kick myself for it whenever it happens, but ho hum!  One of these days I'll get it the first time around.

do you find any straw men in your rough drafts?

The Stereotyped Female

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"So God created man in His own image; in the image of God 
He created him; male and female 
He created them."

- genesis 1:27 

The other day when I was over at Jenny's house, I idly picked up a novel about Mary, Queen of Scots that neither of us had read and started in on it.  The writing was so-so; but the subject was the murder of Lord Darnley, and historic "cold cases" are, to me, fascinating things to study.  I was enjoying myself, until the author introduced the main female character (not Mary) and, I suppose, the love interest.  And then I started to groan.

The woman was the archetypical kick-rear-end character, constantly overawing the men with her fearsome wit and amazing skills.  She was, apparently, around to protect the main male character from his own naivete, but when I tried to look beyond her "coquettish smile," she seemed quite brainless.  ...And we'll not even go into how historically inaccurate such a character is for the 16th Century.

The character started me chugging on a long train of thought regarding the sexes in modern literature and the amount of stereotypes that crop up.  Judging more from reviews than from contemporary novels themselves, since I read few of them, it would appear that there are two ways to write a female character: either make her irritatingly "awesome" and capable of wiping out the entire male population with her pinky finger; or make her inept, the sort who sulks 80% of the novel and cries the other 20% and whom the hero must rescue at every turn.  I've seen a host of reviews that say of the heroine, "She started out kind of wimpy, but about seventy pages in she got her act together and kicked the villain's rear."  So apparently a lot of authors manage to cram both stereotypes into a single book - even into a single character!

The author of the novel on Mary, Queen of Scots is a man, and as I thought, it occurred to me that a man writing a female character is in a much tougher situation than a woman writing a male character.  Feminism has taken such a tight hold on our society: frankly, even if we're not "feminists," I think we must admit that we're more influenced by the movement than we would like to believe.  Women can be very jealous of their self-image, and there's the underlying belief that a woman can do anything, be anything, just as well as a man.  For men, this has to present a difficulty when they try to write a woman - because if they err toward the stereotype of a woman being helpless, they'll be labelled misogynistic, whereas if they err toward the stereotype of a woman in steel-toed boots, they'll be more leniently called "ignorant."  Women get off with being called "ignorant" no matter how they abuse a man's image, it seems.

And yet women are by no means innocent when it comes to stereotypes, female (painfully ironic) as well as male.  For in order to make men and women the same - which is really what feminism is attempting to do, and goes much beyond equality of the sexes - authors must either make women out of their men, or men out of their women.  Why is it that so many authors can't seem to avoid turning their characters into such caricatures?  Might it actually be because a great many of the underlying beliefs in our day and age are patently false?  That women and men are not the same, emotionally, mentally, or physically, and that maybe maybe women can't do everything just as well men can?

Saying such a thing tends to break a great many toes, but I think it's reasonable to look around and realize that most of the women we meet are neither spineless sponges nor steel-booted superheroes.  (We'll leave Black Widow out of the picture for now.)  They're somewhere in between, perhaps nearer one end of the spectrum than the other.  And it doesn't denigrate who a woman fundamentally is to be there.  The only reason we think it does is that we've got our notions of equality and capability and worth all mixed up and snarled.

I'm not saying there is no place for strong female characters, nor even that there is no place for Black Widow heroines.  But these characters have to be real, and not caricatures.  They've got to have foibles and weaknesses, and times when they just can't handle all the lemons life is throwing at them.  It is unrealistic that a character should be able to take care of herself a hundred percent of the time, or that she is never a failure at anything, or that she never has need of a man's help.   It's worse than unrealistic; it isn't real.  And no matter how many awesome fight scenes there are in which the heroine kills forty men at a time, and no matter how many times she tells the hero, "You can't save me; I've got to save myself," readers can spot the flatness of her character.  For even with all the effects of feminism, we still have some sense of what is real - and this isn't it.

what traits do you appreciate in a female character?