What I'm Working On: "Water-Logged Mona Lisa"
Below is the abstract (well, the project proposal abstract, which means it's about 6 pages long) for my MA thesis, "Water-Logged Mona Lisa: Who is Mary Sue and Why Do We Need Her?"
This outlines my research intent and background, my theoretical basis, and what I will be proving. It also explains why I've chosen the art project I have to accompany my thesis. The title comes from a quote from Anne Marie MacDonald, my most favouritest playwright EVER:
You're floundering the waters of a flood;
The Mona Lisa and a babe float by.
Which one of these two treasures do you save?
-Anne-Marie McDonald,
"Good Night Desdemona, (Good Morning, Juliet)"
Act II, i
Historically speaking, literary theory generally tends towards a specific, time-honoured interpretation of a classical work. This canonical methodology, typically from the viewpoint of the heterosexual Caucasian male, brings with it inherent binaries of understanding and meaning, which originates from, and thus reinforces, a heterosexual Caucasian male viewpoint. However, the advent of gender and feminist theory, post-structuralism, and other such fractal theoretical models force a re-examination of both classical literary works and the canonical theoretical interpretations of said work. The work of Susan Sontag, Henry Jenkins, Matt Hills, Hellekson and Busse and Harold Bloom among others are particularly concerned with the 're' aspect of literature interpretation, the creating-as-rewriting, though each with different creative outputs, from the written word, to re-staging, comics, costuming, and visual art in all its various mediums. Among these reinterpretations is a method of working with the text known variously as fanfiction, fanficcing, or my preferred term -which encompasses all art forms - 'fan crafting'.
Fan crafting is to create tales from pieced together 'patches' of different literatures, theories, and lived narratives in order to force a canonical work to talk about the creator's lived life, their marginalized subject positions, and their concerns. Post-modern works, such as re-quel novels, film adaptations, and comic versions, as well as fan crafts are literatures that are an answering-back to re-examinations, providing prose examples of what theorists envision. One such example is Gregory Maguire's novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which examines the political consequences of the Wizard's usurpation of Oz's throne and casts the formerly Wonderful Wizard as a Caeser/Hitler-esque tyrant. I call these stories 'patchwork bodies': tales created from pieced together 'patches' of different literatures, theories, and lived narratives in order to force a canonical work to talk about the creator's lived life, their marginalized subject positions, and their concerns. I posit that retelling these tales is very much like quilt work, but in that it helps readers and writers to (re)create their own identities and (re)create literatures, and the grand narratives of their own personal culture. Harold Bloom argues that great literature must always struggle with the tension between originality and our expansive creative history as humans, trying to find a balance between the burden of inherited stories and creativity, what he calls the "Anxiety of Influence" (Bloom, 1973). Fan crafters, however, embrace this burden; the patches that they select from the fabric of canon texts are chosen particularly for the information, morals, clichés, tropes, and allusions already inherent in the weave. This gives fan crafters the ability, like quilters, to world build and narrative build, to tell a story, without having to struggle with the more difficult aspects of originality or creativity. They can focus instead on their message or entertainment. To use another allegory, they are like children playing with letter blocks to spell words; the hard work of crafting the letters and writing the alphabet is taken care of for them, so they can concentrate instead on spelling out their messages Creating patchwork bodies gives creators - both professional and amateur alike - the ability to demarginalize their own voices and experiences, deconstruct the paradigms of classical theoretical interpretation, and destroy the walls between amateur and the academy by utilizing commonly known literature, theory, and media texts to tell personal narratives that have the ability to change the way the author and her subject position are viewed.
Every day, literally thousands of amateur authors and traditional/media artists create uncountable numbers of such pre-, se- and re-quels in the form of art, videos, costumes, and literature, based on their preferred media texts, such as comic books or graphic novels, movies, television programs, and novels. These creations - what I term fan crafts due to their not-for-profit and hand-made-gift qualities - are direct challenges to the time-honoured interpretations. I have a particular interest in this area as I have been fan crafting myself since 1991.
But fan crafting has a longer history than my own involvement. In the professional field of writing alone, there are hundreds of examples of fan crafters: “in the 19th century, the Bronte sisters wrote fan fiction about the Duke of Wellington” (Chapman & Truman). Even earlier than that, new stories were being added to the oral narrative The Book of A Thousand and One Nights with each successive telling or printing (Wikipedia, “T1N”). Shakespeare cannibalized popular tales and histories of his day to create his own plays. “Geraldine Brook’s March, the imagined adventures of the absent father in Little Women, took the National Book Award [in 2007]... [author] Gregory Maguire has made a career out of fanfic[tion], basing books on the untold stories of The Wizard of Oz, (his books Wicked and Son of a Witch, [and recently A Lion Among Men]) Cinderella, (Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister), and Snow White, (Mirror Mirror)” (Chapman & Truman). In 2006 the Great Ormond Street Hospital, copyright holder for J.M. Barrie’s children’s classic Peter Pan, authorized a sequel titled Peter Pan in Scarlet (Cross). While fan crafting has existed for as long as storytelling has, it did not gain the mass popularity it currently holds until the 1960s when the advent of Star Trek had fans “cranking out underground fanzines, many of which were dedicated to an imagined love affair between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock” (Chapman & Truman). These first fanzines became the basis for the online fan fiction and art archives and fanzines as we know them today, though the well of source texts has expanded to include not only Star Trek in its various incarnations, but literally thousands of other television series, movies, books, songs, and comics.
Writer Natasha Walter also says that in re-writing, re-contextualizing, by playing in and with, “by putting in the sexuality, the humour and the irony that the original tales often lack, these writers can change the way some readers see the works, and not always negatively (Walter). As Henry Jenkins has so famously and eloquently stated, “Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations, rather than the folk” (Jenkins, 1992).
Most importantly, fan crafting allows previously marginalized voices to take centre stage. Theorist Ika Willis, explains that “it is through writing fan fiction that a fan can, firstly, make space for her own desires in a text which may not at first sight provide the resources to sustain them; and, secondly, recirculate the reoriented text among other fans without attempting to close the text on the ‘truth’ of her reading” (Willis 155). Through such space-making and recirculations, fan fiction creates an opening in the canon in which a dialogue about the subjects absent from the canon can be addressed. In the case of fancrafting, Eagleton's unassailable, binary of ‘unimpeachable metaphysical ground’ that are the canonical intellectual property of a professional and said professional’s copyrighted work, its unique universe, its concepts, its settings, and its dramatis personae: “first principals of this kind are commonly defined by what they exclude: they are part of the “binary opposition... beloved of structuralism” (Eagleton 134). But fan crafting has the ability to include all that which the canonical author either intentionally or not discluded. In closely reading, in forcing a re-examination of canon through various fractal and fannish theories, and in critiquing the elements of a canonical offering, fans are able to point out gaps in subject and subject positions in canon. By means of fan fiction, these issues are confronted, addressed, worked with, and written through. Fan crafting, “as a sharing, as a making legible of these difficult negotiations between subjectivity and textuality, these complicated subject/text/world relations, is a way of reassuring each other that we have what Barthes calls the ‘immoral right’ to make and circulate meanings” (Willis 167). Any story can be told through/by the manipulation of a source text, despite the seeming narrowness of having to work within a pre-established canon. The only limit of re-interpretation of the text is imagination - understanding, of course, that there exist considerable social, cultural and unconscious limits to the act of creation and communication involved. Canonical universes can be crossed over, or their histories re-written to create alternate version of the events and characters. Extra original characters or events can be added, or others canonically present removed. Genres can be shifted and focal themes interchanged. Any alteration, or new subject position the author can invent can be played out upon the canonical characters and their world. Willis adds, “I, as a fan fiction writer, feel I have (despite copyright law, despite being aware that there are writers who experience fan fiction written about their work as a painful effacement of their investment in the text) a right to the stories I tell, a right which is granted in part by my readerly implication in a text, a right which has something to do with pleasure” (Willis 168).
One such form of modern literature that is answering-back and re-examining is the amateur Internet-based popular literary trend known as 'author-insert/ surrogate fan crafting' or 'Mary Sue fan crafting. 'Mary Sue' is both a genre of fan crafting, and the title of the sort of character that is central in a Mary Sue craft, a “pejorative term for a fictional character who is portrayed in an overly idealized way and lacks noteworthy flaws, or has unreasonably romanticized flaws” (Wikipedia, “MS”) , and who features heavily in a fan craft. She may appear as a male character, called ‘Marty Stu’ or ‘Larry Lou’, but it is admittedly rare. The Mary Sue is an author-representative character created by the fan fiction author and inserted into a familiar fandom in a story of their own devising; the Mary Sue represents the author in the world, and is a wish-fulfilment device for the fan fiction author who wishes to partake of the canonical universe. Jenkins explains that Mary Sue stories are a method of personalizing a canon which is otherwise out of reach. The writers of fan fiction “work to efface the gap that separates the realm of their own experience and the fictional space of their favourite programs.” (Jenkins, “TP”, 173) ‘Mary Sue’ stories, utilize idealized images of the writers as young, attractive, intelligent people who interact with the program and its canonical characters. The term ‘Mary Sue’ was coined by fan fiction author Paula Smith in her 1973 parody story ‘A Trekkies Tale’[1]In recent years, with the advent of internet fan fiction communities and archives, the term has expanded to include references to any author surrogate character, or highly idealized character, especially those who upstage the canon characters and 'save the day'. (Freeman; Wikipedia; Jenkins 1992). in which main character was Lieutenant Mary Sue (‘the youngest Lieutenant in the fleet - only fifteen and a half years old’.) The story poked fun at what Smith considered unrealistic wish-fantasy characters appearing in Star Trek fan fiction of the period. The term stuck. It now encapsulates an understanding of an original (non-canon) female character who has a romantic liaison with an established canon character, particularly if she possesses unrealistic or exotic traits beyond those expected of a character in that particular series, or an author surrogate.
There is an argument that fan crafting in general, and Mary Sue fan crafting in particular is merely a reflection of the current hyper-consumer mentality: crafters want certain things to occur within the canon and when they are not gratified, they create a means with which to achieve satisfaction, especially if they desire a self-reflexive mirror character. The concern is that fan crafting is merely a means of narcissistic gratification for consumers of canon texts which could possibly threaten the creation of any new canon text or endanger the histories of classical texts as readers become disinterested in that which holds no gratification. I do not disagree that for some fan crafters or consumers of fan crafts this may be the case; however, I argue that there are many fan crafters for whom fan crafting is a method of engaging particularly with those texts that do not satisfy them in order to investigate and understand why motivations, characters, or stories are dissatisfying and appreciate the canonical text for that very divide. Inserting a Mary Sue into a story that is dissatisfying allows the crafter to inhabit the space of the text and appreciate the previously dissatisfying and create a means to being satisfied in the text.
After fan crafting for so many years myself I have collected a checklist of requirements for being a Mary Sue must be confirmed against a character for them to be considered a Mary Sue (see appendix), and I also posit that there are five breeds of Mary Sues: Mary-Sue as Literary Masturbation, Mary Sue as Forcing a Subject Position in an Otherwise Unaccommodating Text, Mary Sue as Thief of Mythos, Mary Sue as Commenter on Narrative Convention and Deconstructer of ‘Inherent Truth’, and Mary Sue as Meta Sue. In my research paper, I will expand upon what each title means, and how each version of the Mary Sue engenders the deconstruction of classical literary theoretical interpretations of media texts.
As I am proposing that fan crafting is actually very useful as a method of connecting personally with a fandom and finding a way to exercise active creativity in a predominantly passive consumer oriented medium, I will, at the same time as I am researchi,g and writing this thesis paper, be creating four Mary Sue fan craft stories. In the first, a multi-fandom story titled Slipstream, the Mary Sue is Marie, a direct reflection of myself and my graduate student status, who enters into a fandom-based adventure with full knowledge of who and what Mary Sues are. In the second, Across Time, the Mary Sue is Vega, a young woman from reality who discovers that the world she currently inhabits is actually fictional. Both of these stories will be based on actual, existing copyrighted television programs, books, and films in order to firmly catagorize them as fan crafts and entrench my work withing the same legal liminal space as those fan crafters whom I study. The third story, The Dark Side of the Glass, does not feature a Mary Sue who is aware of the theory of Mary Sues, but is, however, intimately aquainted with the very commercial and awkward world-building that often occurs in television program creation, as she works on the (made up) television show which she accidentally comes to inhabit. The fourth and last story will be about a Mary Sue who is entirely obvious to her own Mary Sue nature, and the only of the four stories without a meta undercurrent within the plot. Each of these stories will be written on the assumbption that a good Mary Sue story - well written, consciously plotted and with an emphasis of the inherently meta nature of the Mary Sue - can exists and can be meaningful and break down walls and make the reader think. Each of the four stories will also contain a Mary Sue who exhibits one or all of the Mary Sue Checklist requirements and demonstrates within Prose some of the Faces of Mary Sue. The fourth story will be especially important to the project, as it will be a standard commercial novel (whereas the first two will be fanfictions and the third an original short story) in the style of Maguire or Cross, and a re-telling of Jane Austen's life and her novel Pride and Prejudice. Titled First Impressions (the original title of Pride and Prejudice) it will be a standard length novel (approx. 400 pages,) about a Meta-Mary Sue who interacts with Austen and thus directly influences Austen's creation of Pride and Prejudice. However, as many fan crafters do with other narratives, I will centralize the previously marginalized tension of queerness that runs as an undercurrent throughout the source text and Austen's life, thus making the text address my own socio-political concerns as well as Austen's. Austen's books are always very concerned with the roles of women in the household and the socio-political sphere, and are always pointing out the flaws inherent in the Regency English social system. I intend to add another layer of critique to Austen's books by putting the Regency attitude in direct juxtaposition (and contact) with the current one. The main character, currently tentatively named Jessie, will be a lesbian, self-employed single woman in possession of a great fortune (comparatively), and in want of a wife. She will be everything treasured by the mamas of the Ton in Austen's books, yet female. This will create a tension that will educate the reader in the present concerns in gender roles, and the flawed nature of specific, time-honoured interpretations of classical works, the canonical methodologies and the inherent binaries of understanding and meaning.
This manuscript will be accompanied by a rigorous research paper on the role of the Mary Sue that critically and analytically situates my fan craft First Impressions within the larger realm of fandom studies and transformative writing. To aid my text-based research, I will also be posting questionnaires and surveys on online forums concerned with fan crafting in general and Mary Sues in particular for fan crafters to answer. The interview questions/survey portion of the research will serve to augment and quantify my own literary theory-based research into Mary Sues. User and reader reaction will help to position the Mary Sue in the spectrum of literary tropes. The answers provided by participant responses will help to solidify my thesis that fan crafters utilize Mary Sues in order to centralized previously marginalized subject positions (usually their own) in popular media texts. Participants will be solicited for the interview questions/survey via fandom, anthropological, metafandom, or Mary Sue themes websites. Participants who participate via the website may also have come to the site through advertisement of the site on LiveJournal, any other website, or through their own search engines, friends, or recommendations.
Following completion of the manuscript, I intend to approach publishers to print First Impressions, the short story The Dark Side of the Glass and the resulting research paper together. If by July of 2009 I've had no publication offers, I will take the book and the essay to a self-publishing agency, as an existing short story collection has already expressed interest in The Dark Side of the Glass. It will be vital that the research paper and novel be read together and ought to be published in tandem. In publishing the book, I will further legitimize the practice of creating 'patchwork bodies' through fan crafting. In writing First Impressions I will challenge this classical interpretation, I will further legitimize the practice of fan crafting, and I will create a Mary Sue worth reading about, a Mary Sue who - like any other self aware Meta Sue - has the potential to change the world. Or, at least the way readers interpret classical literature.
To save the reader, and themselves, fan crafters must let classical art drown.
[1] http://www.fortunecity.com/rivendell/dark/1000/marysue.html
This outlines my research intent and background, my theoretical basis, and what I will be proving. It also explains why I've chosen the art project I have to accompany my thesis. The title comes from a quote from Anne Marie MacDonald, my most favouritest playwright EVER:
You're floundering the waters of a flood;
The Mona Lisa and a babe float by.
Which one of these two treasures do you save?
-Anne-Marie McDonald,
"Good Night Desdemona, (Good Morning, Juliet)"
Act II, i
Historically speaking, literary theory generally tends towards a specific, time-honoured interpretation of a classical work. This canonical methodology, typically from the viewpoint of the heterosexual Caucasian male, brings with it inherent binaries of understanding and meaning, which originates from, and thus reinforces, a heterosexual Caucasian male viewpoint. However, the advent of gender and feminist theory, post-structuralism, and other such fractal theoretical models force a re-examination of both classical literary works and the canonical theoretical interpretations of said work. The work of Susan Sontag, Henry Jenkins, Matt Hills, Hellekson and Busse and Harold Bloom among others are particularly concerned with the 're' aspect of literature interpretation, the creating-as-rewriting, though each with different creative outputs, from the written word, to re-staging, comics, costuming, and visual art in all its various mediums. Among these reinterpretations is a method of working with the text known variously as fanfiction, fanficcing, or my preferred term -which encompasses all art forms - 'fan crafting'.
Fan crafting is to create tales from pieced together 'patches' of different literatures, theories, and lived narratives in order to force a canonical work to talk about the creator's lived life, their marginalized subject positions, and their concerns. Post-modern works, such as re-quel novels, film adaptations, and comic versions, as well as fan crafts are literatures that are an answering-back to re-examinations, providing prose examples of what theorists envision. One such example is Gregory Maguire's novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which examines the political consequences of the Wizard's usurpation of Oz's throne and casts the formerly Wonderful Wizard as a Caeser/Hitler-esque tyrant. I call these stories 'patchwork bodies': tales created from pieced together 'patches' of different literatures, theories, and lived narratives in order to force a canonical work to talk about the creator's lived life, their marginalized subject positions, and their concerns. I posit that retelling these tales is very much like quilt work, but in that it helps readers and writers to (re)create their own identities and (re)create literatures, and the grand narratives of their own personal culture. Harold Bloom argues that great literature must always struggle with the tension between originality and our expansive creative history as humans, trying to find a balance between the burden of inherited stories and creativity, what he calls the "Anxiety of Influence" (Bloom, 1973). Fan crafters, however, embrace this burden; the patches that they select from the fabric of canon texts are chosen particularly for the information, morals, clichés, tropes, and allusions already inherent in the weave. This gives fan crafters the ability, like quilters, to world build and narrative build, to tell a story, without having to struggle with the more difficult aspects of originality or creativity. They can focus instead on their message or entertainment. To use another allegory, they are like children playing with letter blocks to spell words; the hard work of crafting the letters and writing the alphabet is taken care of for them, so they can concentrate instead on spelling out their messages Creating patchwork bodies gives creators - both professional and amateur alike - the ability to demarginalize their own voices and experiences, deconstruct the paradigms of classical theoretical interpretation, and destroy the walls between amateur and the academy by utilizing commonly known literature, theory, and media texts to tell personal narratives that have the ability to change the way the author and her subject position are viewed.
Every day, literally thousands of amateur authors and traditional/media artists create uncountable numbers of such pre-, se- and re-quels in the form of art, videos, costumes, and literature, based on their preferred media texts, such as comic books or graphic novels, movies, television programs, and novels. These creations - what I term fan crafts due to their not-for-profit and hand-made-gift qualities - are direct challenges to the time-honoured interpretations. I have a particular interest in this area as I have been fan crafting myself since 1991.
But fan crafting has a longer history than my own involvement. In the professional field of writing alone, there are hundreds of examples of fan crafters: “in the 19th century, the Bronte sisters wrote fan fiction about the Duke of Wellington” (Chapman & Truman). Even earlier than that, new stories were being added to the oral narrative The Book of A Thousand and One Nights with each successive telling or printing (Wikipedia, “T1N”). Shakespeare cannibalized popular tales and histories of his day to create his own plays. “Geraldine Brook’s March, the imagined adventures of the absent father in Little Women, took the National Book Award [in 2007]... [author] Gregory Maguire has made a career out of fanfic[tion], basing books on the untold stories of The Wizard of Oz, (his books Wicked and Son of a Witch, [and recently A Lion Among Men]) Cinderella, (Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister), and Snow White, (Mirror Mirror)” (Chapman & Truman). In 2006 the Great Ormond Street Hospital, copyright holder for J.M. Barrie’s children’s classic Peter Pan, authorized a sequel titled Peter Pan in Scarlet (Cross). While fan crafting has existed for as long as storytelling has, it did not gain the mass popularity it currently holds until the 1960s when the advent of Star Trek had fans “cranking out underground fanzines, many of which were dedicated to an imagined love affair between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock” (Chapman & Truman). These first fanzines became the basis for the online fan fiction and art archives and fanzines as we know them today, though the well of source texts has expanded to include not only Star Trek in its various incarnations, but literally thousands of other television series, movies, books, songs, and comics.
Writer Natasha Walter also says that in re-writing, re-contextualizing, by playing in and with, “by putting in the sexuality, the humour and the irony that the original tales often lack, these writers can change the way some readers see the works, and not always negatively (Walter). As Henry Jenkins has so famously and eloquently stated, “Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations, rather than the folk” (Jenkins, 1992).
Most importantly, fan crafting allows previously marginalized voices to take centre stage. Theorist Ika Willis, explains that “it is through writing fan fiction that a fan can, firstly, make space for her own desires in a text which may not at first sight provide the resources to sustain them; and, secondly, recirculate the reoriented text among other fans without attempting to close the text on the ‘truth’ of her reading” (Willis 155). Through such space-making and recirculations, fan fiction creates an opening in the canon in which a dialogue about the subjects absent from the canon can be addressed. In the case of fancrafting, Eagleton's unassailable, binary of ‘unimpeachable metaphysical ground’ that are the canonical intellectual property of a professional and said professional’s copyrighted work, its unique universe, its concepts, its settings, and its dramatis personae: “first principals of this kind are commonly defined by what they exclude: they are part of the “binary opposition... beloved of structuralism” (Eagleton 134). But fan crafting has the ability to include all that which the canonical author either intentionally or not discluded. In closely reading, in forcing a re-examination of canon through various fractal and fannish theories, and in critiquing the elements of a canonical offering, fans are able to point out gaps in subject and subject positions in canon. By means of fan fiction, these issues are confronted, addressed, worked with, and written through. Fan crafting, “as a sharing, as a making legible of these difficult negotiations between subjectivity and textuality, these complicated subject/text/world relations, is a way of reassuring each other that we have what Barthes calls the ‘immoral right’ to make and circulate meanings” (Willis 167). Any story can be told through/by the manipulation of a source text, despite the seeming narrowness of having to work within a pre-established canon. The only limit of re-interpretation of the text is imagination - understanding, of course, that there exist considerable social, cultural and unconscious limits to the act of creation and communication involved. Canonical universes can be crossed over, or their histories re-written to create alternate version of the events and characters. Extra original characters or events can be added, or others canonically present removed. Genres can be shifted and focal themes interchanged. Any alteration, or new subject position the author can invent can be played out upon the canonical characters and their world. Willis adds, “I, as a fan fiction writer, feel I have (despite copyright law, despite being aware that there are writers who experience fan fiction written about their work as a painful effacement of their investment in the text) a right to the stories I tell, a right which is granted in part by my readerly implication in a text, a right which has something to do with pleasure” (Willis 168).
One such form of modern literature that is answering-back and re-examining is the amateur Internet-based popular literary trend known as 'author-insert/ surrogate fan crafting' or 'Mary Sue fan crafting. 'Mary Sue' is both a genre of fan crafting, and the title of the sort of character that is central in a Mary Sue craft, a “pejorative term for a fictional character who is portrayed in an overly idealized way and lacks noteworthy flaws, or has unreasonably romanticized flaws” (Wikipedia, “MS”) , and who features heavily in a fan craft. She may appear as a male character, called ‘Marty Stu’ or ‘Larry Lou’, but it is admittedly rare. The Mary Sue is an author-representative character created by the fan fiction author and inserted into a familiar fandom in a story of their own devising; the Mary Sue represents the author in the world, and is a wish-fulfilment device for the fan fiction author who wishes to partake of the canonical universe. Jenkins explains that Mary Sue stories are a method of personalizing a canon which is otherwise out of reach. The writers of fan fiction “work to efface the gap that separates the realm of their own experience and the fictional space of their favourite programs.” (Jenkins, “TP”, 173) ‘Mary Sue’ stories, utilize idealized images of the writers as young, attractive, intelligent people who interact with the program and its canonical characters. The term ‘Mary Sue’ was coined by fan fiction author Paula Smith in her 1973 parody story ‘A Trekkies Tale’[1]In recent years, with the advent of internet fan fiction communities and archives, the term has expanded to include references to any author surrogate character, or highly idealized character, especially those who upstage the canon characters and 'save the day'. (Freeman; Wikipedia; Jenkins 1992). in which main character was Lieutenant Mary Sue (‘the youngest Lieutenant in the fleet - only fifteen and a half years old’.) The story poked fun at what Smith considered unrealistic wish-fantasy characters appearing in Star Trek fan fiction of the period. The term stuck. It now encapsulates an understanding of an original (non-canon) female character who has a romantic liaison with an established canon character, particularly if she possesses unrealistic or exotic traits beyond those expected of a character in that particular series, or an author surrogate.
There is an argument that fan crafting in general, and Mary Sue fan crafting in particular is merely a reflection of the current hyper-consumer mentality: crafters want certain things to occur within the canon and when they are not gratified, they create a means with which to achieve satisfaction, especially if they desire a self-reflexive mirror character. The concern is that fan crafting is merely a means of narcissistic gratification for consumers of canon texts which could possibly threaten the creation of any new canon text or endanger the histories of classical texts as readers become disinterested in that which holds no gratification. I do not disagree that for some fan crafters or consumers of fan crafts this may be the case; however, I argue that there are many fan crafters for whom fan crafting is a method of engaging particularly with those texts that do not satisfy them in order to investigate and understand why motivations, characters, or stories are dissatisfying and appreciate the canonical text for that very divide. Inserting a Mary Sue into a story that is dissatisfying allows the crafter to inhabit the space of the text and appreciate the previously dissatisfying and create a means to being satisfied in the text.
After fan crafting for so many years myself I have collected a checklist of requirements for being a Mary Sue must be confirmed against a character for them to be considered a Mary Sue (see appendix), and I also posit that there are five breeds of Mary Sues: Mary-Sue as Literary Masturbation, Mary Sue as Forcing a Subject Position in an Otherwise Unaccommodating Text, Mary Sue as Thief of Mythos, Mary Sue as Commenter on Narrative Convention and Deconstructer of ‘Inherent Truth’, and Mary Sue as Meta Sue. In my research paper, I will expand upon what each title means, and how each version of the Mary Sue engenders the deconstruction of classical literary theoretical interpretations of media texts.
As I am proposing that fan crafting is actually very useful as a method of connecting personally with a fandom and finding a way to exercise active creativity in a predominantly passive consumer oriented medium, I will, at the same time as I am researchi,g and writing this thesis paper, be creating four Mary Sue fan craft stories. In the first, a multi-fandom story titled Slipstream, the Mary Sue is Marie, a direct reflection of myself and my graduate student status, who enters into a fandom-based adventure with full knowledge of who and what Mary Sues are. In the second, Across Time, the Mary Sue is Vega, a young woman from reality who discovers that the world she currently inhabits is actually fictional. Both of these stories will be based on actual, existing copyrighted television programs, books, and films in order to firmly catagorize them as fan crafts and entrench my work withing the same legal liminal space as those fan crafters whom I study. The third story, The Dark Side of the Glass, does not feature a Mary Sue who is aware of the theory of Mary Sues, but is, however, intimately aquainted with the very commercial and awkward world-building that often occurs in television program creation, as she works on the (made up) television show which she accidentally comes to inhabit. The fourth and last story will be about a Mary Sue who is entirely obvious to her own Mary Sue nature, and the only of the four stories without a meta undercurrent within the plot. Each of these stories will be written on the assumbption that a good Mary Sue story - well written, consciously plotted and with an emphasis of the inherently meta nature of the Mary Sue - can exists and can be meaningful and break down walls and make the reader think. Each of the four stories will also contain a Mary Sue who exhibits one or all of the Mary Sue Checklist requirements and demonstrates within Prose some of the Faces of Mary Sue. The fourth story will be especially important to the project, as it will be a standard commercial novel (whereas the first two will be fanfictions and the third an original short story) in the style of Maguire or Cross, and a re-telling of Jane Austen's life and her novel Pride and Prejudice. Titled First Impressions (the original title of Pride and Prejudice) it will be a standard length novel (approx. 400 pages,) about a Meta-Mary Sue who interacts with Austen and thus directly influences Austen's creation of Pride and Prejudice. However, as many fan crafters do with other narratives, I will centralize the previously marginalized tension of queerness that runs as an undercurrent throughout the source text and Austen's life, thus making the text address my own socio-political concerns as well as Austen's. Austen's books are always very concerned with the roles of women in the household and the socio-political sphere, and are always pointing out the flaws inherent in the Regency English social system. I intend to add another layer of critique to Austen's books by putting the Regency attitude in direct juxtaposition (and contact) with the current one. The main character, currently tentatively named Jessie, will be a lesbian, self-employed single woman in possession of a great fortune (comparatively), and in want of a wife. She will be everything treasured by the mamas of the Ton in Austen's books, yet female. This will create a tension that will educate the reader in the present concerns in gender roles, and the flawed nature of specific, time-honoured interpretations of classical works, the canonical methodologies and the inherent binaries of understanding and meaning.
This manuscript will be accompanied by a rigorous research paper on the role of the Mary Sue that critically and analytically situates my fan craft First Impressions within the larger realm of fandom studies and transformative writing. To aid my text-based research, I will also be posting questionnaires and surveys on online forums concerned with fan crafting in general and Mary Sues in particular for fan crafters to answer. The interview questions/survey portion of the research will serve to augment and quantify my own literary theory-based research into Mary Sues. User and reader reaction will help to position the Mary Sue in the spectrum of literary tropes. The answers provided by participant responses will help to solidify my thesis that fan crafters utilize Mary Sues in order to centralized previously marginalized subject positions (usually their own) in popular media texts. Participants will be solicited for the interview questions/survey via fandom, anthropological, metafandom, or Mary Sue themes websites. Participants who participate via the website may also have come to the site through advertisement of the site on LiveJournal, any other website, or through their own search engines, friends, or recommendations.
Following completion of the manuscript, I intend to approach publishers to print First Impressions, the short story The Dark Side of the Glass and the resulting research paper together. If by July of 2009 I've had no publication offers, I will take the book and the essay to a self-publishing agency, as an existing short story collection has already expressed interest in The Dark Side of the Glass. It will be vital that the research paper and novel be read together and ought to be published in tandem. In publishing the book, I will further legitimize the practice of creating 'patchwork bodies' through fan crafting. In writing First Impressions I will challenge this classical interpretation, I will further legitimize the practice of fan crafting, and I will create a Mary Sue worth reading about, a Mary Sue who - like any other self aware Meta Sue - has the potential to change the world. Or, at least the way readers interpret classical literature.
To save the reader, and themselves, fan crafters must let classical art drown.
[1] http://www.fortunecity.com/rivendell/dark/1000/marysue.html