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selenakOnce upon a time, Gillian Bradshaw, writer of entertaining and quite popular historical and fantasy novels, both for adults and children, posted on her website re: her novel Wolf Hunt:I've now decided that the heroine marries the wrong man, but I think it still works. (See here.) As far as I know - and of course I could be mistaken - this did not cause much of a stir anywhere, and certainly didn't cause Bradshaw readers to divide into "SHUT UP!" and "YES!" factions. These last few days, even if you haven't read a word of the Harry Potter novels in your life, the news that - in an interview that hasn't even been published yet - J.K. Rowling (towards Emma Watson, who played Hermione in the HP movies) said something along the lines of having paired up Hermione and Ron out of personal wish fulfillment rather than literary necessity reasons and that they probably would need couple therapy in the future was unavoidable, as were the very loud, virtually speaking, internet reactions. Betrayal! Justification! Just shut up already! How dare she say anything, doesn't she know the author is dead! Airing of grievances about all the other things in the Potter novels reader X doesn't agree with! 'Twas the Potterdämmerung all over again, and I hadn't missed it one bit.
Seriously though, I don't get the outrage. It's not like the woman is issuing orders on how readers should feel about the characters, relationships etc.; she never did. She simply seems to have changed her own mind about some authorial choices she made, and is neither the first nor the last writer to do so. It happens. (See above.) It doesn't change the novels themselves, and whatever you liked or disliked about them remains. Considering that readers can change their minds about books when rereading them with the distance of years, the idea that authors shouldn't be allowed to, or if they do shouldn't be allowed to say in public strikes me as extremely illogical. (You know, given that Arthur Conan Doyle if his letters are anything to go by developed a strong annoyance/dislike towards Sherlock Holmes, the more popular Holmes got, I can't imagine how dysfunctional the original SH fandom would have been if Doyle had been on twitter. Not to mention the constant cries of betrayal and selling out, given that Doyle when a stage adapter once telegraphed to him whether he could let Holmes get married in a stage adaption telegraphed back "Marry him, kill him, I don't care".) In the case of J.K. Rowling, it's also not like she's constantly talking Potter. I might have missed something, but the few interviews I've seen with her in recent years dealt with either her two adult novels, the Leveson enquiry, the importance of retaining the welfare state in the face of the Tories dismantling it. So the idea of a JKR constantly intruding on her readers is... bizarre? At least to me.
On to the show tirelessly advertising the value of the British National Health Service, now.
Sister Julienne usually functions as the authority figure/wise councillor of the show, so her getting the spotlight in another capacity was a welcome innovation. It was also, all in all, a more interesting choice to let her bond with the prisoner they were treating than to let Trixie do it, which would have been the obvious thing to do. I had a feeling the fiance had been invented but liked that Sister Julienne's ultimate solution was a practical one - she knew it wouldn't be enough just to be a character witness and then wash her hands of the girl, so to speak; if she really wanted to help, she needed to make sure that there would be a job, a constant source of income and the ability to take care of the baby waiting for mother and child outside prison, and that's what she did. En route, the episode delivered some potshots on the 1950s prison conditions and the judgmental attitude towards illegitimate mothers,
The thing with the My Fair Lady tickets cracked me up because I must admit to having bought the occasional theatre ticket from a street vendor myself in the past (though I always lucked out, and they were genuine). Jenny not wanting to commit herself deeper despite liking Alec didn't surprise me, both because she does enjoy her current existence and because the fact that in the past she had entanglements with two essentially unvailable men suggests at least ambivalence about the whole concept of settling down in marriage.
Shelagh not being pregnant didn't surprise me, either, see two reviews ago, because I know my laws of tv; if a woman wants to get pregnant a lot, she doesn't. Otoh she, Dr. Turner and Timmy continue to be as great a family as Chummy, Peter and "Young Sir", as Chummy calls him, and while this is a blow that will affect her, I have no doubt Shelagh will weather it.
Seriously though, I don't get the outrage. It's not like the woman is issuing orders on how readers should feel about the characters, relationships etc.; she never did. She simply seems to have changed her own mind about some authorial choices she made, and is neither the first nor the last writer to do so. It happens. (See above.) It doesn't change the novels themselves, and whatever you liked or disliked about them remains. Considering that readers can change their minds about books when rereading them with the distance of years, the idea that authors shouldn't be allowed to, or if they do shouldn't be allowed to say in public strikes me as extremely illogical. (You know, given that Arthur Conan Doyle if his letters are anything to go by developed a strong annoyance/dislike towards Sherlock Holmes, the more popular Holmes got, I can't imagine how dysfunctional the original SH fandom would have been if Doyle had been on twitter. Not to mention the constant cries of betrayal and selling out, given that Doyle when a stage adapter once telegraphed to him whether he could let Holmes get married in a stage adaption telegraphed back "Marry him, kill him, I don't care".) In the case of J.K. Rowling, it's also not like she's constantly talking Potter. I might have missed something, but the few interviews I've seen with her in recent years dealt with either her two adult novels, the Leveson enquiry, the importance of retaining the welfare state in the face of the Tories dismantling it. So the idea of a JKR constantly intruding on her readers is... bizarre? At least to me.
On to the show tirelessly advertising the value of the British National Health Service, now.
Sister Julienne usually functions as the authority figure/wise councillor of the show, so her getting the spotlight in another capacity was a welcome innovation. It was also, all in all, a more interesting choice to let her bond with the prisoner they were treating than to let Trixie do it, which would have been the obvious thing to do. I had a feeling the fiance had been invented but liked that Sister Julienne's ultimate solution was a practical one - she knew it wouldn't be enough just to be a character witness and then wash her hands of the girl, so to speak; if she really wanted to help, she needed to make sure that there would be a job, a constant source of income and the ability to take care of the baby waiting for mother and child outside prison, and that's what she did. En route, the episode delivered some potshots on the 1950s prison conditions and the judgmental attitude towards illegitimate mothers,
The thing with the My Fair Lady tickets cracked me up because I must admit to having bought the occasional theatre ticket from a street vendor myself in the past (though I always lucked out, and they were genuine). Jenny not wanting to commit herself deeper despite liking Alec didn't surprise me, both because she does enjoy her current existence and because the fact that in the past she had entanglements with two essentially unvailable men suggests at least ambivalence about the whole concept of settling down in marriage.
Shelagh not being pregnant didn't surprise me, either, see two reviews ago, because I know my laws of tv; if a woman wants to get pregnant a lot, she doesn't. Otoh she, Dr. Turner and Timmy continue to be as great a family as Chummy, Peter and "Young Sir", as Chummy calls him, and while this is a blow that will affect her, I have no doubt Shelagh will weather it.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-04 12:26 pm (UTC)There was a discussion of this on Woman's Hour this morning, in the course of which someone said that when she was a kid she thought Cathy and Heathcliff were the perfect couple but now she realised it would never have worked, to which I muttered "You didn't notice Emily Bronte spelling out that it wasn't working?" On the plus side, it suddenly occurred to one of the speakers that maybe Hermione didn't need to marry either Ron or Harry. "You mean she could have married a woman?" "Well, yes, that's possible, or she could have stayed single." They weren't quite sure whether this was heretical, but eventually decided it was a point of view.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-04 01:25 pm (UTC)I dimly seem to recall from back when the kids were still kids, i.e. aroundish the third book or so, that she mentioned in an interview Ron was modelled on her best friend in school. So I'm going out on a limb here and say she identified with Hermione. My other reason for assuming this is that the whole SPEW affair very much feels like a left-leaning woman ruefully looking back on her teenage years and making fun of her overeager and overearnest campaigning for the oppressed without bothering to check with the oppressed first. (It's not that Hermione is wrong about the status of the House Elves being appalling, it's how she goes about it at first.)
Re: Cathy and Heathcliff, one reason why I've always liked them while seeing they're appalling people was that the narrative was always clear on their flaws and didn't position them as the ideal anything. The whole Heathcliff/Isabella marriage is an illustration Why "He Just Needs A Hug" Is A Terrible Delusion. (A friend of mine once said there was no need for a Saragasso Sea for Wuthering Heights because Emily already wrote it via letting Isabella tell the story of her marriage to Nelly.)
re: "or she could have stayed single" - it says something about our times that this is still a revolutionary concept for a sympathetic character in a novel to end up as, I suppose...
no subject
Date: 2014-02-04 03:36 pm (UTC)A propos of the retweeted photo on Twitter, rather than anything here, I was listening to Marcus du Sautoy talking about Euler later in the day, and suddenly wondered whether Euler's name translates as Owler?
no subject
Date: 2014-02-04 04:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-04 04:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-07 02:41 pm (UTC)Rowling: Oh, maybe she and Ron will be alright with a bit of counseling, you know. I wonder what happens at wizard marriage counseling? They’ll probably be fine. He needs to works on his self-esteem issues and she needs to work on being a little less critical.
and:
Rowling: I know that Hermione is incredibly recognizable to a lot of readers and yet you don’t see a lot of Hermiones in film or on TV except to be laughed at. I mean that the intense, clever, in some ways not terribly self-aware, girl is rarely the heroine and I really wanted her to be the heroine. She is part of me, although she is not wholly me. I think that is how I might have appeared to people when I was younger, but that is not really how I was inside.
What I will say is that I wrote the Hermione/Ron relationship as a form of wish fulfillment. That’s how it was conceived, really. For reasons that have very little to do with literature and far more to do with me clinging to the plot as I first imagined it, Hermione with Ron. (...) Just like her creator, she has a real weakness for a funny man. These uptight girls, they do like them funny.