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hrjIn the Alpennia novels, I’ve chosen to tell only those stories in which women do not die for loving other women. That seems a pretty bleak statement when put so baldly, and yet in the larger world of fantasy fiction, the “tragic queer” story is still pretty common and only rarely challenged. (See, for example, this review.) But that doesn’t mean that I’m presenting an unrealistic view of how those relationships were viewed in history and how people reacted to them.
In Daughter of Mystery, we get faint whispers of the hazards: social disapproval, the potential for blackmail, the differential dangers depending on social status. It’s established that rank and money can go a long way toward deflecting attention, and that Alpennian society has allowed for an accepted category of “Eccentrics” (which covers all manner of social transgressions, not just sexuality), so long as one is sufficiently discreet and otherwise follows the rules.
In The Mystic Marriage, those limits are tested more closely. If one doesn’t have the protections of rank, of wealth, or of the approval of a powerful patron, transgressive sexuality leaves one vulnerable at best to the derision and scorn of one’s friends and neighbors, at worst as a tacit excuse for enhanced penalties for more ordinary crimes. In our modern world of free-thinkers and individualists, it’s sometimes hard to fathom how serious a step it would be for someone like Jeanne to risk being shunned and cut off for daring to live openly with a female partner, rather than keeping such things in the shadows. And for someone whose life is already as precarious as Antuniet’s, we may be too impatient with the way she is torn between fear and love.
The current book (Mother of Souls) looks more closely into the realistic concerns and dangers for women whose relationships are protected only so long as others agree to look the other way. Someone has written a roman a clef that is easily recognizable as mirroring the lives of Margerit and Barbara…except that Barbara’s character has been changed to a man, thus making the romantic and sexual nature of their relationship overt. If it were only a matter of whispers and secret smiles, there would be nothing they could do about it—indeed, to take any action would be to confirm the truth of it. But on the night of the New Year’s Court—that night legendary for prickly tempers flaring into duels of honor—a man deliberately calls Barbara by the name of the fictional character and refers to Margerit as “her wife”.
Truth doesn’t matter. In previous books, I’ve alluded to the flash-tempered nature of Alpennian “honor culture”. Indeed, to some extent the anachronistic persistence of the position of armin is due to the rituals meant to keep that culture reasonably in check. Barbara must answer the challenge, not to refute its truth, but to enforce her social right to be left unscathed by that truth. And by the same rules of that ritualized culture, it is not her life, but that of her armin Tavit, which is placed in jeopardy to maintain that right. This is the ugly side of the dashing, swashbuckling vision of elegant nobles parading through the streets followed at one step behind by an armed swordsman. Someone will die that night. And they will die to maintain an official social fiction that Barbara and Margerit are nothing more than close friends. If that fiction crumbles, not all the wealth and titles in Alpennia can repair it.
In Daughter of Mystery, we get faint whispers of the hazards: social disapproval, the potential for blackmail, the differential dangers depending on social status. It’s established that rank and money can go a long way toward deflecting attention, and that Alpennian society has allowed for an accepted category of “Eccentrics” (which covers all manner of social transgressions, not just sexuality), so long as one is sufficiently discreet and otherwise follows the rules.
In The Mystic Marriage, those limits are tested more closely. If one doesn’t have the protections of rank, of wealth, or of the approval of a powerful patron, transgressive sexuality leaves one vulnerable at best to the derision and scorn of one’s friends and neighbors, at worst as a tacit excuse for enhanced penalties for more ordinary crimes. In our modern world of free-thinkers and individualists, it’s sometimes hard to fathom how serious a step it would be for someone like Jeanne to risk being shunned and cut off for daring to live openly with a female partner, rather than keeping such things in the shadows. And for someone whose life is already as precarious as Antuniet’s, we may be too impatient with the way she is torn between fear and love.
The current book (Mother of Souls) looks more closely into the realistic concerns and dangers for women whose relationships are protected only so long as others agree to look the other way. Someone has written a roman a clef that is easily recognizable as mirroring the lives of Margerit and Barbara…except that Barbara’s character has been changed to a man, thus making the romantic and sexual nature of their relationship overt. If it were only a matter of whispers and secret smiles, there would be nothing they could do about it—indeed, to take any action would be to confirm the truth of it. But on the night of the New Year’s Court—that night legendary for prickly tempers flaring into duels of honor—a man deliberately calls Barbara by the name of the fictional character and refers to Margerit as “her wife”.
Truth doesn’t matter. In previous books, I’ve alluded to the flash-tempered nature of Alpennian “honor culture”. Indeed, to some extent the anachronistic persistence of the position of armin is due to the rituals meant to keep that culture reasonably in check. Barbara must answer the challenge, not to refute its truth, but to enforce her social right to be left unscathed by that truth. And by the same rules of that ritualized culture, it is not her life, but that of her armin Tavit, which is placed in jeopardy to maintain that right. This is the ugly side of the dashing, swashbuckling vision of elegant nobles parading through the streets followed at one step behind by an armed swordsman. Someone will die that night. And they will die to maintain an official social fiction that Barbara and Margerit are nothing more than close friends. If that fiction crumbles, not all the wealth and titles in Alpennia can repair it.
well, when you frame it like THAT
Date: 2015-07-29 01:42 am (UTC)And narratively, a great way to up the stakes.
Allison