I have to agree with Lexicat that, even if your thesis of certain minor characters being crypto-females is correct, it doesn’t necessarily do much to address the overall gender concerns–but I love you for the effort. That was a good read.
Maybe more people should read it with Bilbo as a girl. I like this idea so much I’m seriously considering reading it like that to my son. Boys also need more stories with female protagonists.
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I have an idea: what if I were to re-write this article and change the genders of the mother and the child? What do you think would happen? Do you think that it would improve the text of the article? I’m thinking that it wouldn’t. Because this is a perfect example of poor parenting. The reason children of this generation are obnoxious and entitled is due to parents who capitulate to their children’s demands. I’m forty years old. If I had “demanded” anything from my parents, I would have been sent to bed early….without a story. And my parents would have been right to treat me like that.
My wife earned her Ph.D in comparative literature at Berkeley. She regards the idea that changing the gender of Bilbo Baggins in any way improves the text of The Hobbit to be abhorrent and stupid. As other people have already pointed out: if gender is not or should not be an issue, then why change the gender of the protagonist of the story in the first place?
If your child is having trouble relating to a particular character, then read her a different story with a protagonist she can relate to. Or write a story that would placate her. Or, even better, encourage her to create her own story, one that allows her to express what she wants without compromising the integrity of the relationship she maintains with you. Encouraging your child to think that the world is a place where the needs of the many are always subordinate to the desires of the individual is profoundly irresponsible. Because the world doesn’t work that way. Nor should it work that way.
Does not follow.
A perfect example of poor parenting might be allowing your children to go hungry so you can go out partying. A parent spending time reading to their child and happening to changing the gender of a protagonist? Doesn’t even break the top million examples of poor parenting, even were I to concede that it’s on balance, a negative parenting example rather than a positive, which you have yet to convince me of. I think if you were in a family court, and claimed somebody was a poor parent, and they asked you to give a good example of it, and you cited, “She read the child the Hobbit, and changed Bilbo into a girl,” you would be laughed out of there.
Oh, well, then, case closed! Your local expert in literature has spoken, thinks it’s abhorrent and stupid, therefore we don’t need to have the discussion!
I don’t see this happening anywhere this situation. Unless… do you actually think that ‘the needs of the many’ is ‘Bilbo must be a man in all tellings of this story, everywhere’? The world demands everybody continue to affirm Bilbo is a male? If you make Bilbo a girl when reading to your child, other children around the world will know, and cry?
Because that would be a perfect example of cah-razy. You must think Peter Jackson’s a menace to society, with all the changes he’s made to the source material when he retold it for the world.
Or maybe you just think that your right to not have gender roles challenged after 40 years on this Earth is more important than anything else, and you personally being hurt outweighs any benefit a child might get. But I hope not, because then you’d just be a $@!$.
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At least in the BoingBoing article and the excerpt, I didn’t see where it said it improved the story over the original, just that it worked surprisingly well, added to the value of the original and that it improved the overall experience of literature for this individual child to have a serendipitously well-written female main character added to her imaginative canon. Nothing was taken away or devalued.
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Handyman’s Tale, all the clandestine prostitution of the original, none of the progressive feminist satire. Finally, a Book for MEN.
Kids also don’t know that they’re learning to count when the sing The Ladybug Picnic. That’s doesn’t mean they’re not.
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Teaching kids that storytelling is an art and that the storyteller makes decisions – and that stories can be retold in other ways – strikes me an excellent lesson.
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Try Ancillary Justice. One of it’s quirks is that the main narrator uses a language that has no gendered pronouns, so in the book any person defaults to “She”. Throw in the fact that the narrator (AI) is gender-blind and you get entire sections of book where you imagine one character to look and act like one thing, only to have another character reveal that person’s true sex. It’s refreshing since by that point it doesn’t really matter, and it scrubs away any preconceived notions of how they should act or behave or what relationships are appropriate.
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It does in the headline. Which may point, again, to the problem BoingBoing’s headline authors have of overstating the case to catch attention… and then having discussion react to the headline as much as (or more than) the actual story. (Which, I think, is exacerbated by the decision to move discussion outline, but I’ve given up on that debate; what we’ve got is what we’ve got until the next “hey, I’ve got a better mousetrap” comes along.)
(My ball-bearing mousetrap doesn’t catch mice. He’s hell on millipedes, though. And actually he isn’t ball-bearing any more.)
Seconding the recommendation for the book, although given that it’s a pretty hefty SF novel, it may not be appropriate for all the same audiences as The Hobbit.
(But hey, if you think they’re up to it, feel free to give it a try!)
Both The Left Hand of Darkness (Le Guin) and The Gods Themselves (Asimov) are worth a read for interesting SF takes on gender. But I suspect most interested people here have already read both.
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