"The Seven Basic Plots," Feminism and Fandom
This morning I went across to the library in order to do a little more research on my Swinburne volumes. While there I spotted a rather well-known book, "The Seven Basic Plots" by Christopher Booker, which I swept up along with my nineteenth-century poetry. "Oooh, plots," thought I, not known for my great plotting skills. "Right there on the shelf, for free. Maybe I can steal one or two of them."
It contains the usual expected analysis of Star Wars in archetypal and mythic themes. Booker's basic thesis is that there are (surprise) seven basic plot types, equally visible in ancient mythology and in the movies of today. They include such classics as Quest, Comedy, Tragedy, and Voyage and Return. They represent something basic about the human psyche; through their resolution they symbolize the wholeness of the Self, integrating its masculine and feminine principles, coming to terms with the power of the ego and the unconscious, and so on. In Booker's view, the popularity in the twentieth century of stories that fail to resolve or to conform to these basic themes--think of Waiting for Godot and the like--is a symbol of the psychological deterioration of the modern world. Or something along those lines. No doubt a literary critic could sum up his message better than I, but suffice it to say that the back of the book is filled with laudatory reviews from the Washington Post, the Telegraph, the Times, Margaret Atwood, Richard Adams and, for some odd reason, Ian Hislop.
What started to disturb me was the fact that Booker obviously views these story archetypes as depending on a very traditional notion of gender roles. He argues that there is:
...a fundamental polarity which is crucial to the structure of storytelling. At one pole is the power of darkness, centered on the ego, limited consciousness, and an inability to see whole, making for confusion, division, and ultimately death. At the other is the power of the feminine, centered on selfless feeling and the ability to see whole, making for connection, the healing of division and life. At the deepest level, it is around this opposition that the whole of the eternal conflict presented by stories revolves: and it is this which, in a sense, makes the light heroine the ultimate touchstone of storytelling. For it is she who above all and most directly embodies the feminine value. (Booker, The Seven Basic Plots (London and New York, 2004), p. 257.
Booker does make room within his typology for the active heroine, such as the eponymous main character of Jane Eyre. He also acknowledges the rare examples of a dark heroine, such as Emma or Mary Craven from The Secret Garden, who has to be rescued from her own self-centered and emotionally-stunted existence by a more balanced hero. Yet his analysis rests fundamentally on the idea that there are distinct masculine and feminine values, and furthermore that they can be mapped onto the behavior of actual men and women.
This fact becomes clear when Booker turns to considering the twentieth-century decline in storytelling. Literature and film, he believes, have become overwhelmed by sex and violence, taken over by the power of the ego and unable to offer viewers a satisfying, fruitful and psychologically healthy resolution. They are symbolic of a disordered psyche. The modern world has, quite literally, 'lost the plot,' and Booker blames part of this on feminism. In the late twentieth century, he says, movies and books set about de-feminising women:
No longer were the styles of women's clothing intended to express such traditional feminine attributes as grace, allure, prettiness, elegance: they were designed to be either, in a hard, direct way, sexually provocative, or sexlessly businesslike.... No longer were female characters in stories expected to display such traditional feminine qualities as innocence, modesty, intuitive understanding, a loving heart.
There was now a premium on showing animus-driven women capable of competing with men and outperforming them in masculine terms. Female characters were expected to be shown as just as clever and tough as men, mentally and physically.(Booker, p. 486.)
This is, in Booker's view, problematic. He cites as examples, Alien, in which the heroine is basically a man in a woman's body, and The Silence of the Lambs, in which the heroine fails in the end to fulfill the proper role of the hero. (Due, one is led to believe, because of her feminine identity.) He concludes that "nothing in any of these stories is ever properly resolved, because their only real purpose has been to titillate the fantasies of their audiences with a stream of Self-defying images which by definition are incapable of leading to a resolution." (Booker, p. 494.) He argues that "feminists had become dominated by the animus: that masculine component in a woman's psyche which can give her the strength and rational intelligence which is necessary for balance, but which, if it is allowed to override her femininity, renders her negative, hard and combative." (Booker, p. 688.)
Never having seen The Silence of the Lambs, in order to assess Booker's theories I was forced to cast about for another strong and rational, yet hard and combative FBI agent with potentially un-feminine qualities. Hmm. Any ideas?
Well yes, there is the lovely Special Agent Dana Scully, who in some ways has become the poster child for the late twentieth-century reversal of masculine and feminine qualities. While she is rational and controlled, her male partner Fox Mulder is intuitive and spontaneous. Yet, as plenty of commentators have noted, this reversal of roles is problematized during the series. As it progresses, Scully is abducted, experimented upon, and increasingly objectified and victimised because of her sex. Is this, as in The Silence of the Lambs, a triumph of the archetypes over an ultimately-doomed attempt to break free of them? I'd like to say "no". In fact, I'm pretty positive that I say "no" with regard to the "ultimately doomed" part. And yet there may be something in the failure of the male-dominated entertainment industry to successfully or consistently portray women who don't fall into the usual molds.
While The X-Files as a series is very complex and difficult to analyze as a whole, the movie provides a simpler example of the way in which Scully is forced back into traditional roles. At the beginning she's her usual assertive self, evacuating the building in Dallas with a direct non-nonsense don't-ask-questions command, and forcing Mulder to evacuate too, after he has a intuitive feeling that "something's not right". The hinge of the movie is the scene between Mulder and Scully in the hallway of his apartment, after she tells him that she's considering leaving the FBI. He says that she completes him, citing her traditionally 'masculine' qualities: "As difficult and as frustrating as it's been sometimes, your goddamned strict rationalism and science have saved me a thousand times over! You've kept me honest ... you've made me a whole person." This is the point at which their famous interrupted kiss happens. We have the hero and the heroine, two-halves-made-whole, the romantic resolution, and then comes that bee! As frustrating as it is, though, it sort of makes sense. For one thing, the quest isn't finished yet, so plot-wise it makes sense to put off the romantic resolution.
Yet in the second half (or final third) of the movie, we also have a clear and total return to old-fashioned gendered plotting. Scully is stung by a bee, falls into a coma and is whisked away to Antarctica by the evil shadowy figures of darkness. Mulder is now, unquestionably, the Hero of the movie, and his complicated quest is boiled down to a very simple one: to rescue his princess and bring her back to life. (In the series, his sister Samantha plays the role of main quest object, so it's interesting to see Scully cast in this role.) He makes his way to Antarctica, invades the dark castle of the alien spaceship, and finds Scully. She is just like Sleeping Beauty, entombed in ice, waiting for the Hero to rescue her. Which he does, with a little alien vaccine and the Kiss of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The end, happy ending.
When I first started reading various academic studies of the X-Files online, I was very resistant to the idea that Scully-the-feminist-heroine had eventually been forced by the show into these traditionally feminine situations. Yet in the end, she was, at least some of the time. Still, I don't want to admit that Booker is right. He can't be right. So I find myself asking, how is it possible to subvert these traditionally gendered tropes of storytelling? Does fanfiction, for example, sometimes manage it? Do we follow these same patterns, or does a female-dominated genre present things differently? Can we right the wrongs that we feel have been done to women like Scully, return them to the center of the story and present them as active, psychologically complex heroines? Or are we making Booker's point for him? (Are all those PWPs signs of psychological disintegration? Maybe they are, who knows.) I don't have any answers, only questions. But as infuriating as Booker is, it seems to me that he raises some interesting ones.
It contains the usual expected analysis of Star Wars in archetypal and mythic themes. Booker's basic thesis is that there are (surprise) seven basic plot types, equally visible in ancient mythology and in the movies of today. They include such classics as Quest, Comedy, Tragedy, and Voyage and Return. They represent something basic about the human psyche; through their resolution they symbolize the wholeness of the Self, integrating its masculine and feminine principles, coming to terms with the power of the ego and the unconscious, and so on. In Booker's view, the popularity in the twentieth century of stories that fail to resolve or to conform to these basic themes--think of Waiting for Godot and the like--is a symbol of the psychological deterioration of the modern world. Or something along those lines. No doubt a literary critic could sum up his message better than I, but suffice it to say that the back of the book is filled with laudatory reviews from the Washington Post, the Telegraph, the Times, Margaret Atwood, Richard Adams and, for some odd reason, Ian Hislop.
What started to disturb me was the fact that Booker obviously views these story archetypes as depending on a very traditional notion of gender roles. He argues that there is:
...a fundamental polarity which is crucial to the structure of storytelling. At one pole is the power of darkness, centered on the ego, limited consciousness, and an inability to see whole, making for confusion, division, and ultimately death. At the other is the power of the feminine, centered on selfless feeling and the ability to see whole, making for connection, the healing of division and life. At the deepest level, it is around this opposition that the whole of the eternal conflict presented by stories revolves: and it is this which, in a sense, makes the light heroine the ultimate touchstone of storytelling. For it is she who above all and most directly embodies the feminine value. (Booker, The Seven Basic Plots (London and New York, 2004), p. 257.
Booker does make room within his typology for the active heroine, such as the eponymous main character of Jane Eyre. He also acknowledges the rare examples of a dark heroine, such as Emma or Mary Craven from The Secret Garden, who has to be rescued from her own self-centered and emotionally-stunted existence by a more balanced hero. Yet his analysis rests fundamentally on the idea that there are distinct masculine and feminine values, and furthermore that they can be mapped onto the behavior of actual men and women.
This fact becomes clear when Booker turns to considering the twentieth-century decline in storytelling. Literature and film, he believes, have become overwhelmed by sex and violence, taken over by the power of the ego and unable to offer viewers a satisfying, fruitful and psychologically healthy resolution. They are symbolic of a disordered psyche. The modern world has, quite literally, 'lost the plot,' and Booker blames part of this on feminism. In the late twentieth century, he says, movies and books set about de-feminising women:
No longer were the styles of women's clothing intended to express such traditional feminine attributes as grace, allure, prettiness, elegance: they were designed to be either, in a hard, direct way, sexually provocative, or sexlessly businesslike.... No longer were female characters in stories expected to display such traditional feminine qualities as innocence, modesty, intuitive understanding, a loving heart.
There was now a premium on showing animus-driven women capable of competing with men and outperforming them in masculine terms. Female characters were expected to be shown as just as clever and tough as men, mentally and physically.(Booker, p. 486.)
This is, in Booker's view, problematic. He cites as examples, Alien, in which the heroine is basically a man in a woman's body, and The Silence of the Lambs, in which the heroine fails in the end to fulfill the proper role of the hero. (Due, one is led to believe, because of her feminine identity.) He concludes that "nothing in any of these stories is ever properly resolved, because their only real purpose has been to titillate the fantasies of their audiences with a stream of Self-defying images which by definition are incapable of leading to a resolution." (Booker, p. 494.) He argues that "feminists had become dominated by the animus: that masculine component in a woman's psyche which can give her the strength and rational intelligence which is necessary for balance, but which, if it is allowed to override her femininity, renders her negative, hard and combative." (Booker, p. 688.)
Never having seen The Silence of the Lambs, in order to assess Booker's theories I was forced to cast about for another strong and rational, yet hard and combative FBI agent with potentially un-feminine qualities. Hmm. Any ideas?
Well yes, there is the lovely Special Agent Dana Scully, who in some ways has become the poster child for the late twentieth-century reversal of masculine and feminine qualities. While she is rational and controlled, her male partner Fox Mulder is intuitive and spontaneous. Yet, as plenty of commentators have noted, this reversal of roles is problematized during the series. As it progresses, Scully is abducted, experimented upon, and increasingly objectified and victimised because of her sex. Is this, as in The Silence of the Lambs, a triumph of the archetypes over an ultimately-doomed attempt to break free of them? I'd like to say "no". In fact, I'm pretty positive that I say "no" with regard to the "ultimately doomed" part. And yet there may be something in the failure of the male-dominated entertainment industry to successfully or consistently portray women who don't fall into the usual molds.
While The X-Files as a series is very complex and difficult to analyze as a whole, the movie provides a simpler example of the way in which Scully is forced back into traditional roles. At the beginning she's her usual assertive self, evacuating the building in Dallas with a direct non-nonsense don't-ask-questions command, and forcing Mulder to evacuate too, after he has a intuitive feeling that "something's not right". The hinge of the movie is the scene between Mulder and Scully in the hallway of his apartment, after she tells him that she's considering leaving the FBI. He says that she completes him, citing her traditionally 'masculine' qualities: "As difficult and as frustrating as it's been sometimes, your goddamned strict rationalism and science have saved me a thousand times over! You've kept me honest ... you've made me a whole person." This is the point at which their famous interrupted kiss happens. We have the hero and the heroine, two-halves-made-whole, the romantic resolution, and then comes that bee! As frustrating as it is, though, it sort of makes sense. For one thing, the quest isn't finished yet, so plot-wise it makes sense to put off the romantic resolution.
Yet in the second half (or final third) of the movie, we also have a clear and total return to old-fashioned gendered plotting. Scully is stung by a bee, falls into a coma and is whisked away to Antarctica by the evil shadowy figures of darkness. Mulder is now, unquestionably, the Hero of the movie, and his complicated quest is boiled down to a very simple one: to rescue his princess and bring her back to life. (In the series, his sister Samantha plays the role of main quest object, so it's interesting to see Scully cast in this role.) He makes his way to Antarctica, invades the dark castle of the alien spaceship, and finds Scully. She is just like Sleeping Beauty, entombed in ice, waiting for the Hero to rescue her. Which he does, with a little alien vaccine and the Kiss of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The end, happy ending.
When I first started reading various academic studies of the X-Files online, I was very resistant to the idea that Scully-the-feminist-heroine had eventually been forced by the show into these traditionally feminine situations. Yet in the end, she was, at least some of the time. Still, I don't want to admit that Booker is right. He can't be right. So I find myself asking, how is it possible to subvert these traditionally gendered tropes of storytelling? Does fanfiction, for example, sometimes manage it? Do we follow these same patterns, or does a female-dominated genre present things differently? Can we right the wrongs that we feel have been done to women like Scully, return them to the center of the story and present them as active, psychologically complex heroines? Or are we making Booker's point for him? (Are all those PWPs signs of psychological disintegration? Maybe they are, who knows.) I don't have any answers, only questions. But as infuriating as Booker is, it seems to me that he raises some interesting ones.