A 1001 Word Rebuttal (including the title)

Recently, a (white, male, Australian) friend of mine read Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Lions of Al-Rassan on my recommendation. He gave the book back, unfinished, with two criticisms:

1. All the women are beautiful, unless they’re peasants.

2. The sex scenes are ridiculous. They come out of nowhere; there’s no motivation!

Now, this is one of my favourite fantasy novels. I’ve read it several times, but not recently, so I’m re-reading it now and I think I’ve figured out why I didn’t see what he saw.

It’s because he’s missing something fundamental and profound about the lives of these women. These two criticisms are actually one.

(Major spoilers after the jump)

1. All the women are beautiful, unless they’re peasants.

Okay, yes. All the women (with one important exception) are explicitly called beautiful. But who are these women?

Miranda Belmonte d’Alveda, “said to be the most beautiful [woman] in Valledo”. This specific phrasing is used several times, by the narrator and by men (in particular a teenage boy) who’ve never seen her. She’s the wife of a high-ranked military man, so respected he’s often referred to as “the Captain” without need of his name.

She’s referred to as his property. She can read well, but it’s exceptional for a woman in her culture. It’s also worth noting that she’s mother to two teenage boys and yet still regarded as beautiful.

Zabira, courtesan, favoured consort of the king and mother to his younger sons.

Jehane bet Ishak, doctor. Member of a race/religion explicitly called animals by at least one other culture. Has eyes of an unusual colour for her race. Mostly referred to as beautiful by a teenage boy (the same one as for Miranda) who is charmed by her exoticism. In other cases her eye colour is always mentioned in conjunction with her beauty (“comely enough…blue eyes, rare for a Kindath,” “pretty for a Kindath… Her eyes were extremely blue.”)

Queen Ines. Described, but never called beautiful or striking or anything else.

So let’s break it down: why are these women beautiful?

Miranda and Zabira are married to powerful men. Powerful men who choose their own wives and consorts choose beautiful women. It’s probably just a side-benefit that both women are also talented and intelligent in their own ways.

Jehane is beautiful because she’s exotic. She’s remarkable in a few ways: she’s considered less than human, but becomes a friend and colleague to the men who describe her; she’s a woman who isn’t married, even though she’s in her late twenties; she’s a woman who has a job in two cultures where women are property; she’s valued by the upper status cultures because of her medical ability; she doesn’t swoon at the feet of the men she travels with. And also, she has that “human” eye colour.

Ines was married by arrangement. She doesn’t need to be beautiful. Her husband desires her anyway.

As well, in a cultural context like this, a woman isn’t worth noticing unless she’s beautiful. Why else would you notice her? It’s not like women are important in any other way.

2. The sex scenes are ridiculous. There’s no motivation.

The sex scenes in question are Miranda’s and Zabira’s, and possibly Ines’s.

Miranda stabs her husband and then has sex with him right after.

Miranda’s pissed. Her husband, Rodrigo, has done something thoughtless which has just put her and her sons (not to mention their farmhands and entire livelihood) at risk, and she had to kill a man to protect them all.

She has Rodrigo tied up in an outbuilding so she can stab him in the leg a few times with an arrow. It’s actually a rather funny scene. Then they have mildly kinky sex.

So why did she have sex with him if she was so angry?

To drive the point home, so to speak. Miranda’s body is the only real currency she has, the only real power over her husband. She can rebuke him with words all she wants, but she needs to show him what he’s got so he doesn’t risk it again. Also, because she’s been celibate for the weeks he’s been gone (and he has too).

Zabira seduces the man who just killed her lover, the king.

Zabira has nothing left. Her king is dead, her life and her sons’ are at risk from the new king, their older half-brother (or possibly from his brother). The assassin, Ammar, is an old friend of hers. Of course she’s going to seduce him, if only to ally herself with the most powerful man who doesn’t want her dead. She needs his protection for herself and her sons and her body is the only thing she has to tie Ammar to her. She’s also grieving, and most likely has no one in the palace who would risk reaching out to her.

Ines trades sex for religion, although she secretly enjoys the sex. She sleeps with her king and in return he observes their shared religion. Again, sex is the only currency available to her.

Contrast these women with Jehane, who has no explicit sex scenes that early in the novel. Why? She has her own power. Her currency is her medical knowledge. She doesn’t need to buy a place in society, or her safety, with sex.

For storytelling purposes, Miranda’s sex scene shows why Rodrigo loves and is faithful to her (and also pretends to be frightened of her). Zabira’s shows what she’s willing to do for herself and her sons. Ines’s sets the reader up for a major change in both her and her husband later.

So no, the sex scenes are not ridiculous (unless you’re threatened by a little light bondage) and they do have motivation. It’s just not a kind of motivation a young, white, modern man is equipped to recognize without reading up on feminism and the place of women in history.

You’d think this would be something a person would absorb from exposure to other cultural sources (it’s not like I’ve done any intense studying on either subject), but I guess not.

~ by Cheryl on February 4, 2010.