My problem isn't (necessarily) Marion Zimmer Bradley

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Title: My problem isn't (necessarily) Marion Zimmer Bradley
Creator: limyaael
Date(s): June 10, 2004
Medium: online
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External Links: My problem isn't (necessarily) Marion Zimmer Bradley, Archived version
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My problem isn't (necessarily) Marion Zimmer Bradley is a 2004 essay by limyaael.

Some Topics Discussed in the Essay and Comments

Excerpts from the Essay

1) There is feminist fantasy, and then there is preaching. The Mists of Avalon came along at just the right time, perhaps. At least that would account for a) the cultish adoration of it and b) my complete inability to understand said cultish adoration.

Thing is, I think that to make a fantasy feminist you have to have more than female viewpoint characters and goddess-worship. I've read plenty of fantasies with heroines who didn't achieve anything on their own; everything was done by the hero/their companions/the gifts the gods granted them at birth for whatever reason. And moon-goddess worship doesn't really strike me as all that active, sorry. Especially not the way Bradley presents it. She seems to be the genesis of the whole white temples-still waters-full moon-dancing idea that's infected writers like Anne Bishop. Yes, they're women, and yes, they worship a female deity. Is that in and of itself a reason to root for them? No. Not when their genitals and their goddess are used as an excuse to avoid doing anything else. The Mists of Avalon came off as preaching a particular religion to me, not as a fantasy novel saying that female characters are just as good as male ones, and here are some examples.

One of the reasons I couldn't empathize with characters like Morgaine is that old submission/renunciation of war and action idea. Morgaine acts pretty much in accord with destiny, from what I remember, and goes back to Avalon at the end. The other priestesses try to arrange matters so that certain things will happen, but catch them actually doing those things? Action and free will remain the province of males.

And from that spread things like the meddling Aes Sedai of Jordan, the incredibly stupid and ineffective Sisters of the Light in Goodkind, the moronic 'we are pure and good' witches of Anne Bishop, the 'let us hate technology!' heroines of Sherri Tepper. This is a place where I actually prefer Lackey's female Heralds. At least they went out and did things... although it usually wasn't of their own free will, of course; they had to get chosen by a Companion first. The only exceptions I can think of are Kerowyn, Tarma, and Kethry. Talia, super-virtuous heroine that she was, had to get dragged away from her farm by a pretty white horse. So, still a problem.

2) Grudges against men are not portrayed realistically. I enjoyed several of the Darkover novels Bradley wrote, but ones like The Shattered Chain and Thendara House left me cold. Those involve the Free Amazons, who have set themselves apart from the male-dominated society on Darkover. So, this should be good, right? They should be free of the stereotypes that dog the women in The Mists of Avalon, right?

Wrong. I didn't get a sense of these women leading man-free lives, even though they traveled in all-women companies and had female-only houses. They talked constantly about men, how much they hated them, and how much they wanted to rebel against them. One of their trials of initiation involved stripping just so they could make sure the potential Free Amazon wasn't a man in disguise. Instead of building a separate society, they were rebelling against the one they had left behind- and acting against a compulsion is still letting the compulsion control you.

3) Powerful magic is used as a sign of personal virtue. That is, if a person has it, he or she must be good. The only exception is the villain who will turn out to be less powerful, and who gets destroyed in the end for good.

I disagree with this violently. In fact, I think it works best the exact opposite way around.

[...]

It doesn't in Bradley's novels. In The Mists of Avalon, it comes from what gender you're born or who you worship. In Darkover, it comes from the mental powers, laran, that a person is born with and noble bloodlines. In the contemporary fantasy Ghostlight and its sequels, it comes from religion (again) and bloodline (again).

Bradley's hardly alone in that, of course. The problem is that she often created characters who the reader was supposed to root for because of that magic or that bloodline or that religion... and nothing else. Quite a few of the laran-using characters on Darkover seemed to be "good" just because they had that gift. (The technology-using Terrans were often bad, of course, or, at best, incapable of understanding the Darkovan way of life). The heroine of Hawkmistress! flees her home because her family is inbreeding in relentless pursuit of a particular laran gift, only to turn out, surprise, special because she has mind-magic after all. The hero of The Bloody Sun comes home in search of his heritage and is rejected because of his supposedly Terran father, only to turn out, surprise, to have powerful laran and really be the son of a noble couple. The only place I can think of that Bradley violated this canon was in Stormqueen!, where she had the title character's lightning-calling gift depicted as appropriately really fucking scary.

I've already mentioned how The Mists of Avalon seemed to be the Good Magic-Using Priestesses against Those Evil Christian Men. The contemporary novels are even weaker. The heroines who seem to be ordinary at first (and actually more likable characters because of that) turn out to have Teh Special Magic because of who their parents were.

Mercedes Lackey, following in Bradley's path, does the exact same thing with most of the Heralds. What separates them from other people? Well, this magic, you see, and the pretty white horses. And why are they trusted with all the justice of the kingdom? Why, because the Companions chose them. They're good because of what they were born with, not what they do- or, to put it another way, they get a chance to help the Kingdom only because of what they were born with.

What about all those people who don't have powerful magic, or aren't female, or aren't descended of the right bloodline, and yet could still want to help?

4) Don't take your own message too seriously. This gets a section all to itself because, despite some preaching, Bradley herself only got really arrogant about "the Issues" she was tackling in one book that I remember.

This was in the afterword to Lythande, a little compilation of stories about a mage who had to keep secret the fact that she was a woman, and a lesbian. (Each member of the Order of Mages she was a part of had to keep a secret to retain their power, and hers was not revealing that she was female). She was constantly tormented about this. She also was more asexual than sapphic. And trust me, this book will get its full savaging when the portrayal of sapphic women in fantasy comes up. But it didn't stop there.

Bradley didn't just portray the character and have done. No. In this afterword, she talked about how she didn't show Lythande as more openly sexual because she was afraid of teenage boys finding the book and getting all excited from the sex scenes.

Yes. She honestly said that. She just couldn't let her writing be exploited for the sake of teenage boys, even though she thought there were teenage lesbian girls looking for a character to identify with in her writing.

And from there, we get people like Anne Bishop writing books- the Tir Alainn...thing- where the fantasy setting is utterly disrupted by preaching about issues important to the author, the religion is Wicca for all intents and purposes (and everyone who practices it is a saint), and the main bad guy is named Adolfo.

This isn't preachy fantasy, or even fantasy that tackles the author's own personal demons. This is the author deciding she is going to Change the World with her writing.

They scare me.

Comments

[silverwerecat]:

I never got to finish Mists of Avalon... I was bored before the second chapter ended, despite the fact that most of my pagan friends held it as equal to a Bible.

I should read it sometime, just to see what goes on in there.

[mhari]:

You've woken up my inner Darkover fangirl.

[ramble]

See, I think MZB's best female character was Lady Rohana. Who, no, wasn't "liberated", but was a lot more *likeable* than her whiny niece. I like, for example, Camilla, who is somewhat misanthropic but believably so, but most of the Renunciates are just. So. Whiny. Yes, okay, we get it. You are Teh Persecuted Visionaries. Shut *up* about it occasionally. That or they're shallow bitches, presumably in an attempt to prove that Renunciates are not uniformly virgin martyrs heroines. Bleh!

Or maybe I'm just brainwashed by the patriarchy. :P But I really liked Rohana. She didn't get a free ride, she didn't get to do what she wanted, but she did her best anyway. Rohana roXX0rz.

[apologist] But then MZB came along pretty early, so it's not surprising she's all ranty!feminist when she waxes feminist. [/apologist]

Stormqueen and Heritage are conventional? O_o Um. Maybe they were when they came out. Now it's damn hard to find a book with that much interesting plot, instead of a) wiccabunny rot or b) bad Tolkien devices or c) vampires. I haven't read World Wreckers in forever. :(

I think the laran thing is less MZB going "omg magick = kewliez!" and more what happens when you set up a stratified society that way and then write the majority of your stories about a certain layer of it. And let's face it, people were failing to write about the generic peasantry before MZB. ;) I think she did try to get away from that later on, what with the Renunciate books and the general latter-day dying-breed thing... of course, she ran into other problems then.

Jeff was kind of a schmuck, even though I'm fond of him. XD Also, that was one of the really early Darkover novels, so it is pretty clunky even in the revision.

Don't even get me started on Misty Lackey -- the only thing I've read of hers is The Black Swan and this is because everything she ever collaborated on with other authors that I liked has been uniformly inferior. Call me a snob.

Lythande, blah. S/he never did anything for me, honestly. I read some of the stories 'cos it was MZB and 'cos she was in the Thieves World anthologies that I was really into for a while, but... nope. No connection there.

[/ramble]

Sorry. Darkover was my Big Scary Obsession for years and years. :)

[limyaael, original essayist]:

See, I think MZB's best female character was Lady Rohana.

Secret? I think I liked her a little bit, too. The problem was that I had the feeling, from the narration, that I was supposed to like the Free Amazons *more.* I have a real problem when I feel like the author's pushing me in the direction of liking a character or group of characters just because, as you said, they are Teh Persecuted Visionaries. So any liking for Rohana I had got dimmed by the constant presence of Those Bitches I Hated. Also, I think (from what I remember of The Shattered Chain) that she didn't show up often enough to outshine the Amazons.

[...]

Lythande, blah. S/he never did anything for me, honestly. I read some of the stories 'cos it was MZB and 'cos she was in the Thieves World anthologies that I was really into for a while, but... nope. No connection there.

It was the afterword that really ticked me off. Otherwise, as you said, it would have been pretty much a bland set of stories. But the idea that she was trying to show off a strong lesbian character, and if she didn't succeed it was only because of horny fanboys, is stupid and wanky.

[yay4pikas]:

Actually, my understanding is that her last several Darkover "collaborations" were basically written by the collaborators -- I had also heard that she never really recovered fully from her stroke in the 80s. [1]

I used to be rather a Darkover fangirl and I'm still intrigued by the entire concept, but I have mixed feelings about Lackey in general. And The Catch Trap was...wow, what a creepy, bizarre presentation of gay men.

[erythros]:

I remember that the first LotR fanfic I ever read was MZB's story about the white gem that Arwen gives to Frodo in the end of RotK. I liked it. It was pretty cool.

I cannot remember much of it, but I remember liking Elladan and Elrohir in it, and there was mention of the white gem being a "small favor" given to Galadriel by Celebrimbor, which usually makes me squee a lot.

... And then I read The Mists of Avalon, and immediately decided that there were far better things to read.

(I raged through all of Anne Bishop's books because first of all, you DON'T NAME a heroine "Jaenelle" and expect people to like her. HONESTLY.)

[erythros]: She did [write fanfic]. I had been startled about it, too. A librarian friend of mine, who is mighty in research-fu, found it for me and printed it on nice paper and bound it up in a little book for me for a birthday a few years back. I need to find the box it's in - I seem to remember that it was a very decent attempt at writing in Tolkien's style, and there was a line of Arwen's that I MELTED over. It was a very RESPECTFUL story, and I am always charmed by courtesy to Professor Tolkien.

[gehayi]:

Stormqueen! was powerful, in my view. The main plot did concern Dorilys' laran, yes, but it was clear that it was a power she had terrible trouble controlling (leading her to have killed three people by accident by the time she was eleven), and she would have been much better off without laran--at least not her particular variety of killing laran. And there were political and social ramifications as a result of her power, and the reactions of others to it. I also pitied poor Allart, whose "gift" of foresight caused him to see a thousand possible futures at the moment of every decision.

I didn't have much patience with Free Amazons Jaelle or Margery/Margali. They were pretty tiresome. Everything they did was supposed to be so Liberated and Significant.

Rohana, however, rocks; she's believable both as a member of her class and her society and as a strong person.

Now I want to write something about an educated woman of the merchant class who isn't a warrior, a priestess or a sorceress, who isn't an elf (or part elf) and who has no noble blood whatsoever. (I think her earliest ancestors were horse thieves, actually.)

[catfish42]:

While I've never read MZB, I've always been irritated by the so-called 'feminist' fantasy characters that pop up. *Especially* the "I don't need men at all, and I will prove this by talking about how much I don't need them ALL THE FREAKIN' TIME." Yeah-huh.

Also, I applaud you for the use of the word 'sapphic,' because I was just a few days ago thinking about it, and the fact that it ought to be used more often. And lo and behold, it is! Huzzah. (Although LiveJournal's spellcheck doesn't recognize it, more's the pity.)

[tiferet]:

Hmm. I loved MZB in the late 70's/early 80's as a teen. I was one of the dorky girls who actually wanted to be a Renunciate. We took the Oath, had 'Houses' etc. And omgwtfbbq the wank when we grew up, got married, etc. Had there been a WWW then I would never be able to show my face in public.

I was in Friends of Darkover, went to Darkovercon...started a local Council...

I agree they're overly polemic, looking at them from the perspective of a 40 year old woman in 2004. But in 1977 when I was 13--they were the bomb.

I think the biggest problem are the later books she wrote when she was dying of Alzheimer's, which are basically old outlines of hers developed by members of her writing circle, such as Diana Paxson, who can write, and Deborah Ross, who can write, and Mercedes the Lackwit, who should have damn well stuck to filk. [MZB] wrote "Mists" when her brain still worked. "Lady" was by Diana Paxson from her outline, when she was really starting to get ill. (I know people who spend a fair amount of time at Greyhaven.)

Also her imitators. Word on the suckociousness of her imitators.

Anne Bishop...sigh. The worst thing about Bishop is that the powerful women are even worse sexual torturers than the evil men!

Anyhow, the books you listed--they're some of my favourites. I love "Stormqueen".

[limyaael]: *nod* Some of those books were probably the kind of thing you had to be there for. It probably didn't help that I read the earlier ones, like Stormqueen!, when I was just dying for any fantasy I could grab (my local library had several Darkover books, so I read them all) and found The Shattered Chain and the other Renunciate books after I'd already started to get a sense of how wide the fantasy world was and how differently people could do things. (I kind of felt the same way about the feminism theory class I took a few semesters ago. I couldn't understand why the works written in the late 60's-early 70's seemed so determined to ignore complexity and nuance, and the professor told me that at the time acknowledging the complexity would have destroyed the movement. Maybe. I still find it hard to accept them whole-heartedly).

[karenrei]:

That was exactly the same thing for me (although more recently, as I'm younger). I read "The Mists of Avalon" as a teenager, and thought it was the best book ever written. It was really formative for me (not to mention I had just been bored stiff by "The Once and Future King", and loved the new take on the story). Then, a few years ago I reread it, and I had the same reaction you did: it was full of tired cliches.

Now, I think she partly suffers from Tolkein Syndrome - that is, much of what she wrote wasn't cliche when she wrote it, but has become so through repeated copying. On the other hand, the only other MBZ that I read ("Firebrand") was just painful, and I read it not long after The Mists of Avalon (so the genre wasn't worn for me). The plot built up decently, but ended with the main character getting abducted and repeatedly raped by Agamemnon, then concluded with a pseudo-catharsis of Agamemnon being killed on his return and the main character running off with a "very sensitive" man (who she first found crossdressing because he hated the way women were being treated) to found a pro-women commune in ancient Greece where no women would suffer discrimination ever again. Yes, seriously. Ow, ow, ow.

[criada]:

It's funny, because I've always heard that the Darkover books, particularly the ones you mention, are her best, and she herself wondered why everyone made a big deal about Mists of Avalon, since she didn't think it was her best work. I read it, to find out what the big deal is, and now I avoid all pseudo-wiccan stuff like the plague.

I also might disagree that having laran makes a person good in her stories, since she hints at some nasty stuff that went on in the Ages of Chaos. In the first story of hers I read, The Sword of Chaos, there is a sorcerer/telepath who is responsible for some nasty stuff. But thinking on it, many of her good men do have that, as Camilla Paglia might put it, "castrated feminist" feel to them.

[wordserpent]: I think the problem is that often fantasy is general, whereas the actual issues of feminism nowadays are also historical, in that they're very rooted to the time and place (which is obvious, as conceptions of gender differ from society to society and from era to era). And so the archetypes begin to conflict with historical reality. Plus, who's to say that just because a society worships a female goddess that they're necessarily matriarchal? (have there every been any matriarchal societies?)

[wineandroses]: i liked mists of avalon when i read it for the first time (i was thirteen) because it was a completely different take on the story. and then i read her imitators, and they told the EXACT SAME take on the story... over and over... and all the sequels to mists of avalon either told the same story again or completely didn't go into their potential (priestess of avalon could have been WONDERFUL). firebrand, though, i think is a pretty good book.

[marumae]:

One of their trials of initiation involved stripping just so they could make sure the potential Free Amazon wasn't a man in disguise

WTFOMGBBQ?!?! Sorry that just seemed the most moronic thing I've ever heard.

Yes I do love it how, these *liberated* women socities do nothing but talk about the men they are so liberated from and their whole society and world revolves around seperating themselves FROM the men. It just makes me wonder what would happen, if the men dissapeared. Would their society collapse because they had no men there to hate?

I remember just getting out a book from the library (I never finished), called Queen of the Amazons, by Judith Tarr, besides the fact that novel had *other* problems with it, one of the main things that stuck out in the book that made it appeal to me. Is the way men are portrayed, at least in the beginning of the book. They aren't talked about in endless, hating detail they are just acknowledged as being there and yes, the women need them to reproduce, but other then that, they are concentrated on their own way of life. Which is such a rare treat for me, to read about amazons that *gasp* don't talk about eval EVAL MEN IN ENDLESS DETAIL.

You know my feeling about MoA, as I've ranted about how bloody tired I am of hearing about how fecking wonderful it is. As a lover of Arthurian mythology, I was highly annoyed at how...how USELESS the men were in her story. It's like she didn't write the novel she intended to, to begin with. At least it seems that way to me. It should have been a novel about how the women had a larger role over all in the myth instead of merely being fodder in the background, but instead of balancing this out, she went the opposite way. Suddenly the women weren't just background, they did play a larger role. The WHOLE role, not just being equally involved. *That* annoyed me, especially when it seemed to me the women weren't any better then the *evil* men she was trying to say they were better then.

*sigh* If only more authors approached female leads without this uber man hating feminist viewpoint.

[darksylvia]:

The thing I hated most about the psuedo-feminism of MZB was the way that she thought this excused her from having to write any interesting characters whatsoever. By concentrating on the women and putting the men down, all she really showed was that both of them were worthless. And I hated every second I read The Mists of Avalon worse than the second that had gone before it, especially when I got to the part where Lancelot and Morgaine almost get it on for the second time and then...they stop...and become, officially, the weirdest and most unrealistic human beings on earth.

Yeah. Anyway. I could never stand to read any other MZB. I really tried with her popular series and stuff, but I could never do it. Fall of Atlantis pissed me off before I even got three chapters in, and this was because the heroine was being a whiny little numbskull and not DOING anything about her plight.

As for Mercedes Lackey, I definitely think she got a stronger line on feminism. I like By the Sword to this day. I haven't tried rereading the Oathbound series, but I think I'd probably still like them.

I didn't really like Arrows of the Queen but I think it satisfied some of my need for teenage angst at 15. However, in defense of the whole herald thing, I will say that I think the companions supposedly "chose" the hero/ines because they were all noble and good on the inside and the companions somehow could know this. Because they didn't really get chosen for bloodlines, and definitely not for magic in the books where magic had all but died out. I don't think *all* of them had mind gifts, did they? Yeah, so I think we were supposed to believe that they were special because they were all moral and honorable and that's why the companions found them.

I will now studiously avoid all the authors compared with MZB on here. I haven't tried Sherri whats-her-face yet and now I don't have to.

[white serpent]:

I think I'd agree that Stormqueen! is the best of Bradley's books. The characters felt a bit better realized there. The other Darkover novels I like are The Heritage of Hastur and Sharra's Exile (which at least is a great improvement over The Sword of Aldones). I think The Heritage of Hastur is generally thought to be among the greatest of the Darkover novels, so I don't get why it would be thought to be conventional/not her best work.

The Mists of Avalon was interesting (as a contrast to Arthurian legends), but MZB got very caught up in rewriting the same story again and again and again (The Free Amazons series, The Firebrand, and others). What was interesting about those is that when I did pick up a copy of The Sword of Aldones in its awfulness (bundled with Planet Savers, I think), it had an extensive author's note in it which sort of changed the way I viewed her militant feminism/women good/christianity bad/men evil oppressors writing. She clearly was not approaching it from the same mindset that her circle/imitators did (Diana Paxson, ML, etc).

Sherri Tepper has been rewriting Grass for the past dozen years or so. Grass itself was a good book and somewhat groundbreaking, but I can't say I've thought much of any of her writing in many, many years. (I did also like the Marianne books for their sheer strangeness, but I think I'm alone in that.)

The Diana Tregarde books (well, the first two, at least) are, I think, the best of Mercedes Lackey's writing. For once, we don't have to read about the poor abused main character and angst angst angst. In the third book, Diana morphs and becomes the author's avatar/Mary Sue (and there are totally unbelievable teenagers which doesn't help either). But for the first two books, you can almost see why people think Mercedes Lackey can write.

[rosindubh211]: omg one of my friends recommended Mists of Avalon to me, knowing how much I love Arthurian legend. I was struck, not so much even by the "men are bad" theme, but the "Christians=Teh Evil". It was so surreal, and so pointless as far as I could see. I like some of the ideas in that book, and it could have been very good, but really, the Issues should have been left out. She needed to take a step away from it and take a really good look at her characters.

References

  1. ^ See Marion Zimmer Bradley Fanfiction Controversy, specifically Marion Zimmer Bradley Fanfiction Controversy#Ghostwriters and Collaborators.
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