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Man, I’m loving all this discussion. XD Seems like we hit a nerve with this topic.

Just to follow up about the whole Lewis and Tolkien thing – there are a lot of factors that I learned about which I hadn’t previously considered about the two of them. I originally posted my essay-thing in a FB group and got a lot of helpful comments on it.

About Tolkien: His devotion to Mary definitely influenced things. Also, his overall positive interaction with women – his love for his mother, and then his wife (whom he married at 24, vs Lewis who married much later in life), and his daughters after that. While these relationships were overall positive, I don’t think it’s fair to say that he idolized women, or that his experience of women in general was biased. It appears to be healthy, more than anything else.

His chosen mythmaking influences, as someone mentioned in this conversation, were probably more significant in feeding into his positive presentation of women. This is in clear contrast to Lewis, who consciously drew from the Medieval aesthetic, in which the Evil Queen is a definite motif. There is probably more to be said about the literary traditions which these two men were pulling from than anything particularly profound about their own view of women.

That said, I think they were both conscious about how they were presenting women, and the places/roles they filled in their stories. Tolkien was building a bird’s-eye, global view of positive femininity, whereas Lewis was far more down-to-earth, giving examples of both good and bad. Lucy and Susan, in the Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe, end up as Good Queens – a balance to the Evil Queen who was overthrown over the course of the story.

Note about Eowyn: My thoughts about her arc is evolving. I got some pushback against the failed masculinity narrative which I presented in the original post on FB, and the other person was able to show pretty convincingly that her arc is from vice to virtue – abandoning her duties to take up unfeminine ones, and then gradually growing into acceptance for them. The movies introduced a lot of the negative masculinity factors and made that a much bigger focus than Tolkien actually does in the books.

When Eowyn leaves to join the fighting, Theoden has been made well, and Wormtongue has been cast out. So there’s no negative masculinity and she’s still itching to get out and fight, rather than travel to Dunharrow to fulfill her duties. Either way, the personal growth of her arc is beautiful, and I don’t want to make any judgment calls either way. But it’s fascinating and reminded me that I need to read the books again. My memory about things is getting regrettably fuzzy!

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@morreafirebird This is a fascinating question, about how to portray true femininity in fantasy. I’m still working through this myself, and I’m not exactly sure where I stand. I know we have several options:

1. Implying the positive from a negative. We can include female characters who have abandoned the feminine – or entire cultures/species that have abandoned it. These characters would not necessarily have to undergo any realization or arc away from this; you can build your story to showcase the weakness or shortcomings of that abandonment.

2. Moving from the negative to the positive. This is Eowyn’s arc.

3. Portraying the positive. Women who live within their femininity.

But how exactly you incorporate these characters into your stories is another question altogether. I’m gonna have to come back to this because it’s getting late, but I’m gonna be thinking about this more.