Annoying Teenage Heroines Redux

[mrissa]

I just finished the Stars anthology, and I want to say right here and now: Orson Scott Card's attempts at female psychology make me want to hurl. Some of his previous stuff was laughable: the idea that little girls weren't generally ruthless enough to be in Battle School, for example, made me just about fall out of my chair laughing. If there's anything more ruthless than a 9-year-old girl, I certainly haven't met it in the rest of my life to date. But this story, this just turned my stomach.

(And maybe if I was otherwise fine with a story, I'd buy that teenaged Jewish girls insisted on being called "Jewesses." Probably not, though; I am not an authoress, and I know no poetesses, and neither of those was extensively used in propaganda efforts in the last century. Am I wrong on this one? Do any of you know Jewish women who not only don't mind being called "Jewesses" but insist on it? Are any of you Jewish women of that description?)

Maybe it's just me; maybe I'm no longer giving Card a fair shake because his views are so extremely repugnant to me. (I mean, this is a man who is willing to say that my Onie (my grandma's older sister) is not part of my family just so he can deny gay people their families. Because "everybody knows" that a family is a mother, a father, and their children, and it "always has been" that way...except that it almost never has been that way, but never mind that, apparently.) But it seems like he's sliming all over more and more of his work. I liked Pastwatch unexpectedly, and I was more interested in the Bean books than in anything he's done since it became clear that the Alvin Maker books were all about Card's Mormonism. But I'm beginning to think I just shouldn't bother reading anything else he writes, because I'm going to feel slimy and sick afterwards.

I think I need some good honest death and deceit to wash my brain off after this. Ew.

Comments

[fiddledragon]

I had friends in high school who were proud to call themselfs J.A.P.'s (Jewish American Princesses), but I've never heard the word Jewess.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

No, I am not a "Jewess". The last time I saw an author appropriately referring to a fictional character, he was Sir Walter Scott and she was Rebecca. And not only was Scott writing 200 years ago but he was writing an historic novel. (Actually, if you go by setting instead of date of writing, possibly Shakespeare was the most recent.) Though I wouldn't particularly have a problem with a current writer having a character use that locution in a book set in the MIddle Ages. But no, not in a current book. Though you never know about 9-year-olds; I would have been entirely capable of insisting on using the term entirely because I had seen it in Ivanhoe. At least I would if I hadn't also been aggessively feminist enough at the time to eschew '-ess' endings on anything. But I was. (Nine is one of *my* touchstone ages.)

Incidentally, forgive me for pointing out that there seems to be a story lurking in the penultimate sentence of your first paragraph.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Do you mean a piece-of-fiction story or an anecdote-about-my-life story?

Anyway, the main character of this story was not 9 but in her early teens.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I mean a piece-of-fiction story. The closest things I can think of to a ruthless 9-yo-girl story are Artemis Fowl (but he's a boy) and Emergence (forget the author's name but he wrote Threshold as well) but she's 14 or so.

But I know your problems lie less with finding story ideas than with fending them off (I picture a whip and chair) hence the request for forgiveness. :-)

Emergence author

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

David R. Palmer wrote Emergence and Threshold.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Kipling uses it in The Light That Failed, but that's hardly an argument against it as an expression of misogyny and anti-Semitism. The reverse, if anything.

I do not call myself a Jewess, I do not call other women Jewesses, I have never been called a Jewess or heard anyone else called that. Honestly, it strikes me as less misogynistic and anti-Semitic than plain bizarre.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

That just bugs the crap out of me. People just don't say that.

Protestantess? Catholicess? Muslimess? See, the words don't do that. You just can't do that to the English language.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Well, actually, I think they did. They just don't anymore.

Granted it's a bit of an awkward word. Then again we were expelled from England from Edward Longshanks until Cromwell, so possibly there was little occasion to use it in every-day speech.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying that those words never did that. But they don't now, and I'd wager big money that the word isn't going to make a comeback anytime soon.

Jews in England

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

According to Antonia Fraser's biography of Cromwell (if I recall correctly), there were Jews in London before Cromwell decided to make Jews welcome (or at least tolerated) again. They were "hidden Jews," pretending to be Catholic -- which probably didn't work all that well at keeping trouble away from them in the England of that time.

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

Don't you mean Mohammedeaness? ;)

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

Actress.

But even there, I've heard tell of writers using "actor" instead.

(Well, okay, acting isn't a religion. *pause* Then again. . .)

[shawn-scarber.livejournal.com]

Ideology kills art.

[zangtt.livejournal.com]

And it's justifiable homicide.

[jenett]

The online OED shows citations up through 1970, but it's impossible to tell from the quotations how many of those are common usage things.

Here, citations:

1388 WYCLIF Acts xvi. 1 Timothe, the sone of a Jewesse cristen. a1400 Pistill of Susan 41 For gentrise and Ioye of at Iuwesse. 1526 TINDALE Acts xxiv. 24 Felix and his wyfe Drusilla which was a iewes [1534 Iewas, 1539 CRANMER Iewesse, 1611 Iew]. 1613 PURCHAS Pilgrimage (1614) 214 note, For the Virgin Mary, say they, wore the Ring on her middle finger, and therefore all Iewesses refuse that, and use the forefinger. 1820 SCOTT Ivanhoe xxiv, The Jewess Rebecca awaited her fate. 1876 GEO. ELIOT Dan. Der. xvii, I am English-born. But I am a Jewess. 1922 JOYCE Ulysses 756 As if we met somewhere I suppose on account of my being jewess looking after my mother. 1927 E. O'NEILL Lazarus Laughed II. ii. 84 And why should you plead for them, Jewess? 1936 G. B. SHAW Millionairess II. 39 ‘Are you..[an] Italian aristocrat..?’..‘My ancestors were moneylenders to all Europe..we are now bankers to all the world.’ ..‘Jewess, eh?’ 1970 J. UPDIKE Bech: a Book 35 ‘Is she also a typical Rumanian beauty?’ ‘I think..she is a typical little Jewess

[end citations]

I seem to recall seeing it in some journalistic sorts of ways in stuff around World War II - I don't remember the context directly, but I got the impression it was in more common use and not necessarily negative. (or at least not automatically... if I'm remembering right, it was in fairly mainstream newspapers which were not anti-Semetic in other ways.)

I'd take it in a historical story (I think it turns up in Sharan Newman's stuff, which is Abelard and Heloise France), be wary of it in 19th and early 20th century stuff, and have serious issues with it in something that's supposed to be contempory (except, of course, used to make a particular point about the kind of character who would use that kind of word.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, a cell phone is the major plot device of this story. Definitely contemporary or near-future.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Some fairly mainstream books and newspapers in England and the US were *extremely* anti-Semitic just pre-WWII (generally in an institutionalized not-realy-thinking-about-it-way). cf Gaudy Night, by Sayers: "What we need is an 'Itler."

Out of the citations you give, all of the ones after about 1900 seems to me to have at least a slight pejorative flavor. (Well, maybe not the Joyce, but he wasn't exactly writing Stenadard English.)

[wilfulcait.livejournal.com]

Although in Sayers' book, the comment wasn't made by a viewpoint character, but by someone accepted in the context as being crusty, authoritarian and a bit "off."

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Isn't it Padgett who says that?

Because I wouldn't describe Padgett as any of those things. Ill-educated, lower-class (and thus in Sayers likely to be "comic")--but he's loyal to Shrewsbury and its female dons and worships the ground Peter walks on.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but not really a bad guy (IMO).

[jenett]

I wish I could remember which paper it was - if it's from the project I think it was, it was microfilms of either the London Times or the New York Times (possibly both), because I was specifically looking for news reports regarding the Anschluss. [1] On the other hand, I might also be entirely misremembering.

Whatever the usage was, it didn't strike me as particularly anti-Semitic in that usage or context, and I do usually notice. (Though, granted, I was looking at a very small set of articles, not at broader patterns in whatever the paper was.)

As I said re: the citations, I can't really tell from the quotes. I'd want to see some surrounding context, and I don't really want to go looking right now. And the OED sometimes picks random stuff to cite, too.

[1] Due to bits of family history: my maternal parents lived in Vienna until 1938: the Jewish (but heavily assimilated) side of the family left right before the Anschluss, my mother and grandmother left just after.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

To me, "Jewess" is right up there with "Negress" for its racist and misogynist assumptions.

::contemplates the intersection of this sentence and Orson Scott Card::

Okay, I rest my case.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

I agree with your comment re: assumptions.

Do you think Card wrote that honestly thinking that teenage girls might say that, or was he Making A Point? If he was Making A Point, wtf was it?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

If he was Making A Point, wtf was it?

I shudder to think.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think to someone like Orson Scott Card, most of my lifetime (or possibly slightly longer) has been filled with confusing new identity politics, and he doesn't understand why. Why would young women belt out a song that proclaims themselves bitches? Why would people suddenly announce that they intended to have sex with people of the same sex? Why would Negroes colored people black people African-Americans and Indians Native Americans and Mexicans Chicanos Latinos Hispanics keep changing their minds about what they were supposed to be called? It may well look random from his vantage point, just another manifestation of "identity politics," so the switch from "Jewish women" or "Jewish girls" to "Jewesses" just isn't as fraught as it ought to be.

Card has often had a tin ear for other people's communities before, so it wouldn't surprise me if he really can't hear the problem. Also, he specifically had the main character disdaining a school counselor who was "always" going on about "people of color," "even though" the counselor herself was light-skinned Hispanic, and he specifically had the main character resenting the inclusion of Jewish people in the "people of color" category because "a glance" could tell you that "it wasn't true." (Apparently Mr. Card has never heard of the difference between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jewish people.) So I think he has something of a bee in his bonnet about people's ethnic identities, and possibly their religious identities as well.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

"Waitress" and "actress" still have some currency. And there *are* the lady poetesses from hell locally, but that's a rather quirky usage. And "jewess" has been pretty comprehensively slimed by the anti-semites, and I agree it can't really be used in contemporary work without carrying that flavor.

[dancingwriter.livejournal.com]

There was for a time, oh, about ten years ago, a trend in some of the women's-spirituality press to use the term "editrix." Ugh! (And that would be the mildest of my responses to that usage.)

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

Editrollop? Okay, you win! :-)

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Do the black girls call themselves Negresses too?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Silly Nick. There are no black girls.

[mmerriam.livejournal.com]

If there's anything more ruthless than a 9-year-old girl, I certainly haven't met it in the rest of my life to date.

Funny you should say that. I wrote these words last night near the end of my little urban fantasy short story.

"You're evil," Grimpleflur said.

"I'm nine," Jenny countered.

Girls aren't really ruthless

[(Anonymous)]

Girls are ruthless when crushing other people's feelings. Boys are ruthless when crushing other people's skulls. I think Battle School was for the latter.

-
Yore

Re: Girls aren't really ruthless

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'm going to have to disagree with you on both counts, Yore. A few young psychopaths aside, boys aren't ruthless when crushing other people's skulls. Boys learn rules of physical confrontations pretty darned early, and most of them don't exceed what's locally considered acceptable.

Girls learn that they get more power if they avoid physical violence except for key strategic moments. That doesn't mean they're less ruthless. It means they're socially quicker. If little girls got more power from beating the crap out of each other, they'd do it.

If the events of the last year have taught us nothing else, they certainly should have taught us that women can be just as physically unpleasant as men. But we shouldn't have had to see the pictures from Abu Ghraib to know that.

Re: Girls aren't really ruthless

[(Anonymous)]

I agree Abu Gharib was bad, but posing with a bunch of naked prisoners isn't very ruthless. The MPs that unleashed the guard dogs were worse.

There are many male examples of ruthlessness - Stalin, Mengele, Osama, Saddam, Uday, Pinoche, Pol Pot.

In general I think women are more compassionate than men. That is what keeps them from being the "ultimate" in ruthlessness.

Re: Girls aren't really ruthless

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yore, I think you are wrong and being unreasonably sexist. The fact that the sexism comes out in my favor doesn't really help. And if you think posing for the camera is the only thing Sabrina Harmon and Lynndie England did at Abu Ghraib, well, I don't really know what to say to that.

Diminished opportunity for cruelty doesn't mean diminished capacity for cruelty. No matter how ruthless she was, a woman could not have risen to Stalin's position in the USSR at that time. Could not have. The same actions would not have produced the same results.

Where they have had opportunities -- largely within their own families -- women have been just as vicious, just as destructive, and just as ruthless as men. Now that we're seeing the opportunities expand, we're seeing the scope of the damage expand, too.

Re: Girls aren't really ruthless

[fitzcamel.livejournal.com]

I think you may be underestimating the importance of psychology in the Battle School a bit...

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I have no idea what significance this data point has, but in Girl Meets God by Lauren Winner (a memoir), the author tells of being crushed when a guy she is dating breaks it off because she had converted to Judaism, instead of being halachically born Jewish. A friend comforts her:

"I found that Beth had filled my wall with homemade, hand-lettered signs: Lauren is a Jewess, they said, Lauren the Jew, to remind me that I really was Jewish..."

That would have taken place sometime in the 1990s. Still, the first time I read it, I thought, "Jewess? Did she really say Jewess?" Certainly not a word I would trust a cultural outsider to use, in any case.

Orson Scott Card

[mackatlaw.livejournal.com]

I gave up on the Alvin the Maker series, also, after I grew tired of the Mormonism. It wasn't as apparent to me in the first couple of books, mainly because I didn't know the background story. Then I had a close friend who was a Mormon, and it all made sense. I have problems with that theology. (She and I no longer talk, but that wasn't the reason.) I did find that the theology was overpowering the characters, and somewhere along the way I lost interest.

The Bean series was very good, but he's no longer an author I really follow. I read through his book on How to Write Science Fiction, but it didn't do much for me. It seemed either fairly obvious or not the way I would do it. On the other hand, most books on writing, except for Susan Cooper's and Stephen King's, have left me cold. I need the time to write instead. Twyla Tharp's book on creativity was wonderful, though... (Sorry, tangenting, tired.)

Mack

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

Am I the only one who has never liked Card? I read Ender's Game and Xenocide, and found the stories lacking a few things...like coherent plot, characters I could actually care about or see as people, plausible sci-fi premises, and such. And I didn't care for the moralizing, or the way in which his characters would justify things to themselves.

And was it just me, or was Ender Wiggin a rotten kid? I really thought so.