Control Issues
Sep. 15th, 2008 12:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerPushing Daisies is coming out on DVD tomorrow! I can see it, finally!
Provided Netflix and school both cooperate, I’m going to try to see the first season before season two starts. For once in my life I want to watch a show as it comes out and squee with everyone else.
***
In other news, the local library is having a book sale, and I’ve been buying books at rock-bottom prices. My favorite acquisition: a copy of Patrice Kindl’s The Woman in the Wall, which is about Anna, who is so shy that she lives in a network of secret passageways in the walls of her house for seven years.
I first read the book at about the time that I read Losing Christina, and they’re associated in my head. Not just because I love them both despite their patently ludicrous premises, or because they both have wonderful flawed heroines (well, Christina is a heroine; Anna is a protagonist) but because thematically, they’re both about control.
More specifically, both books are about losing control. In Losing Christina, the Shevvingtons take away Christina’s ability to control anything, even her own mind. (It’s like the movie Gaslight, which I would recommend to any Losing Christina fans.) In The Woman in the Wall, on the other hand, Anna voluntarily if somewhat reluctantly gives up her total control of her surroundings.
Obviously Anna’s total control of her world is unsustainable. The world is too unpredictable for anyone ever to be in total control, as Anna’s dream about a fire engulfing her house shows. Even Anna’s body betrays her by changing during puberty.
(Tangentially—one of the things I like about The Woman in the Wall is Anna’s fear and anger about her changing body. I’ve always found the rah-rah-rah-YAY MENSTRUATION approach that some books take to puberty alienating and boring.)
Often I despise stories that revolve around a reserved person (generally female) learning to open up. (This is a theme in Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness, which is probably why I’m not fond of that quartet.) I find them obnoxiously judgmental, given their implicit (and sometimes explicit) suggestion that reserve is by nature pathological.
The Woman in the Wall, despite revolving around a character whose shyness really is pathological, eschews such judgment. Anna’s entrance into the wider world is a trade-off, not an unalloyed good. She loses her total control of her immediate surroundings, but she gains the ability to influence other people, which she didn’t have before.
I think it’s a pity that there aren’t more children’s books with themes of power and control, partly because I find the topic intrinsically fascinating (just look at my fanfics) but also because control is an issue for children—given they have almost none. Losing Christina and The Woman in the Wall both build on the emotional resonance of that lack of control: Losing Christina is a nightmare about losing control completely, while The Woman in the Wall is in part a fantasy about having control.
I think these control issues are the reason I find most romances so dull. It seems to be a romantic axiom that love levels power imbalances, and it doesn’t. It might make the imbalance less steep, but level? No.
Hence the fact that I don’t ship Jack/Ianto, couldn’t ship Josh/Donna from The West Wing, and cannot write this stupid Aly/Taybur fic. Which has an illustration and everything!
Provided Netflix and school both cooperate, I’m going to try to see the first season before season two starts. For once in my life I want to watch a show as it comes out and squee with everyone else.
***
In other news, the local library is having a book sale, and I’ve been buying books at rock-bottom prices. My favorite acquisition: a copy of Patrice Kindl’s The Woman in the Wall, which is about Anna, who is so shy that she lives in a network of secret passageways in the walls of her house for seven years.
I first read the book at about the time that I read Losing Christina, and they’re associated in my head. Not just because I love them both despite their patently ludicrous premises, or because they both have wonderful flawed heroines (well, Christina is a heroine; Anna is a protagonist) but because thematically, they’re both about control.
More specifically, both books are about losing control. In Losing Christina, the Shevvingtons take away Christina’s ability to control anything, even her own mind. (It’s like the movie Gaslight, which I would recommend to any Losing Christina fans.) In The Woman in the Wall, on the other hand, Anna voluntarily if somewhat reluctantly gives up her total control of her surroundings.
Obviously Anna’s total control of her world is unsustainable. The world is too unpredictable for anyone ever to be in total control, as Anna’s dream about a fire engulfing her house shows. Even Anna’s body betrays her by changing during puberty.
(Tangentially—one of the things I like about The Woman in the Wall is Anna’s fear and anger about her changing body. I’ve always found the rah-rah-rah-YAY MENSTRUATION approach that some books take to puberty alienating and boring.)
Often I despise stories that revolve around a reserved person (generally female) learning to open up. (This is a theme in Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness, which is probably why I’m not fond of that quartet.) I find them obnoxiously judgmental, given their implicit (and sometimes explicit) suggestion that reserve is by nature pathological.
The Woman in the Wall, despite revolving around a character whose shyness really is pathological, eschews such judgment. Anna’s entrance into the wider world is a trade-off, not an unalloyed good. She loses her total control of her immediate surroundings, but she gains the ability to influence other people, which she didn’t have before.
I think it’s a pity that there aren’t more children’s books with themes of power and control, partly because I find the topic intrinsically fascinating (just look at my fanfics) but also because control is an issue for children—given they have almost none. Losing Christina and The Woman in the Wall both build on the emotional resonance of that lack of control: Losing Christina is a nightmare about losing control completely, while The Woman in the Wall is in part a fantasy about having control.
I think these control issues are the reason I find most romances so dull. It seems to be a romantic axiom that love levels power imbalances, and it doesn’t. It might make the imbalance less steep, but level? No.
Hence the fact that I don’t ship Jack/Ianto, couldn’t ship Josh/Donna from The West Wing, and cannot write this stupid Aly/Taybur fic. Which has an illustration and everything!
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no subject
Date: 2008-09-15 05:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-15 10:34 pm (UTC)Really, Aly's whole reaction to Taybur is just so...off. She finds out that the Rittevons have a spy good enough to match her, and what's her first emotion? Glee. Fear and worry are a long way down the list instead of right on top, where they ought to be, given that Taybur could get her and the Balitangs killed.
It's like Aly sees this civil war as a big game, instead of something serious, and you'd think after having seen Mequen and Bronau killed she would have gotten over that.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-15 10:36 pm (UTC)Is this before or after the end of TQ?
no subject
Date: 2008-09-16 01:44 am (UTC)I bet Aly has seen someone die, of disease if not of violence. I think she was still in the nursery when the Immortals attacked Pirate's Swoop?--but she might have seen the bodies if not the actual deaths.
So she probably is more callous than the average person, but I think that makes her reaction to Taybur even more inexplicable. He's a very real threat to her rebellion . The fact that she doesn't kill him to eliminate the threat--doesn't even seem to see him as a threat--contradicts her supposed skill as a spy.