Let's Talk about Resistance: Why can't I read Regina Doman? Pt. 2

My difficulty with Regina Doman's novels really seems to originate from the very same place each and every time.  The problem is the assigning of stereotypical traits to a character to make that character representative of an ideology.  As a reader, I object on the one hand to the oversimplification, and to the knowledge that the author is trying to manipulate me into attaching certain actions and beliefs to people who identify with specific political and social movements.

And so what I know about myself that can help me to identify my point of resistance:

• I don't like labels.
• I'm not crazy about politics, and particularly name-calling and identity politics.
• I don't like when an author tries to manipulate my opinions without my consent--and I don't like implicit didacticism.  If you want me to think something, be honest about it.
• I don't like when an author makes assumptions about my agreement/disagreement with a particular, hmmm... I would say "issue," but I think it's more like a particular stereotype. I tend to be okay with the issues.
• I don't like fiction that blatantly engages with existing political ideologies.  Fantasy in particular can be a bit more nuanced.  Even in Brave New World, in which ideologies are evoked through the naming of historical figures, general rather than specific practices and concepts are targeted.  Even in Orwell, evil comes from both sides of the political spectrum.  Don't set Republican and Democrat against one another, because then you're telling me how to vote.  And that's too concrete.
• In my own attempt(s) to write fiction that is Catholic, I have avoided making characters representative of good and evil in themselves, because even though it is a convention of stories I love, it is not something I accept as true in human relationships in general.

So to recap my resistance to previous novels by Regina Doman:

From my Shadow of the Bear review:  "I was rather disappointed in the villain, as having a murderous atheist aesthete sketched with broadly homosexual overtones as the evil character in a Catholic novel was kind of facile--stacking the decks a bit.  And his association with post-Vatican II habit-less, possibly lesbian nuns was another moment in the early chapters that seemed a bit overdone."

From my Alex O'Donnell review:  "My first complaint about the book is something that I noted in The Shadow of the Bear, too--the tendency to set up an easy dichotomy to explain evil behavior.  In both novels, the bad guy is a flaming atheist.  This, to my mind, is a bit too easy.  It was far-fetched (and sketched in a much more detailed way) in The Shadow of the Bear, but in Alex O'Donnell, the motif is repeated in an offhanded way that sends the reader the message that bad guys are conscious atheists out to belittle and undermine Christian belief.  It isn't enough that the bad guys are trying to KILL the protagonists, they have to try to destroy their worldview, too.  And it sets up a persecution complex--everyone bad is trying to destroy my beliefs.  In both cases, you have a figure who is like the demon un-man from C. S. Lewis's Perelandra--consciously doing evil in order to fly in the face of God and belief--but without the demonic possession that justifies that character."

"As a remedy, I would like to see a "Catholic gone bad" "bad guy" (which, in The Shadow of the Bear, he kind of was--on an exaggerated level) or an atheist/agnostic "good guy":  not someone who is held up as an example of belief, but simply someone helpful who does not share the same beliefs as the protagonist(s), and yet enters into dialogue with the protagonists about belief.  Someone for whom the protagonists could say a passing prayer for understanding--hers or theirs.  In a similar vein, I would rather like to see an evil character, who, like Gollum, gives us the shadow of the possibility of redemption.  We are Catholic.  We believe that the possibilities of Redemption and God's grace exist for every human being.  Many of us resist the death penalty for this reason--perhaps we need to remember this in our fiction."

In Rapunzel Let Down, these are the problematic lines, words and phrases that occur in the early part of the book:

• The ideal of a society of womyn was one that filled her thoughts and political interests.
• Raphaela had her petit embroidery out. Her mother had resisted her daughter’s new hobby, saying it was an outdated and useless trap for a woman’s creativity, but Raphaela had been stubborn.
• Raphaela wondered if that’s why her mother had banished her to the tower room: so she didn’t have to be reminded of her daughter’s flirtation with traditional female garb.
• The way her mother talked, it seemed as though men liked women to be scantily clad in exploitational outfits her mother despised.
• Hermes was a male, one of those predators of the human race whose role was to subdue and trap females, force them back into the biological cages of traditional gender roles.
• “The independent female existence is civilized,” ran one book she had just read. “Rational, ordered, beautifully arranged, seeking peace, in harmony with nature. Each one of these attributes runs directly against the grain of the predatorial male. If your life reflects these values, then inviting an un-neutered male to share your personal life is like extending an invitation to a bull to patronize your china shop.”
• Feeling as though she were acting in front of an audience of horrified neo-feminists, she pulled out a plaid dress and held it up to her.
• The mouth was the area that contained some of the most sensitive tissues, and like her biology textbook authors, she had often wondered why it had become an orifice for mutual human contact.

I should note that these examples take place past the point in the book when I decided to start keeping track of them.

I am not known to be a feminist.  In fact, I am extremely resistant to feminism, and have been for most of my post-adolescent life, in part because of my resistance to labels.  I don't want a tag that tells you everything you need to know about me, and in many ways, this is, in fact, what feminism--as an "-ism"--tries to do.  It is inclusive and prescriptive at the same time; it claims and rejects whomever it decides is acceptable--or not.   My "reactionary moments" posts on Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series frequently argue that Gabaldon is subverting certain feminist interpretations of history and gender identity, and when I resume my blogging about Gabaldon, I intend to argue further that she regains feminist "street cred" by promoting certain views of pregnancy and childbirth and advocating birth control in specific ways.

And yet, I still bristle when Doman evokes the predictible, and not entirely unfounded, feminist stereotypes.  But you know--I've lived in that world in some ways.  I have my own reasons for rejecting feminism--some of them based in my own Catholic faith, some that predated my conversion to Catholicism.  My reasons are based on what I know about academic feminisms and the problems and contradictions therein.  But academic feminism is also a world in which I can get around.  I have the road map.  I know the landmarks.  I can participate in the conversation, and *gasp*--I share some common ground.  I have friends who are feminist.  (For that matter, I have friends who are homosexual; I have had friends who are lesbian.)  All of which places me outside of Doman's implied and intended audience.  They have not tried to undermine the fabric of my worldview, though sometimes the particular policies they favor would, and sometimes academics in general do try, quite consciously, to undermine Christian students' worldview--at times, maliciously.   I've seen it and heard it from former colleagues.  Even academics whom I consider good people try to manipulate Christians into rejecting tenets of Christian teaching.  And yet, I bristle.  Perhaps because there's more to those people than their agendas, and generally, the agendas are formed in response to something, and I don't know what that something is.

And while I do think that hyper-political parents (on both sides of the political spectrum) do intentionally indoctrinate their children with their own beliefs, what's happening in the book is that the bad mother is keeping the child locked away--conspicuously via homeschooling (or the priviledged version of homeschooling)--as a means of "protection"; the indoctrinaton is not explicit as it tends to be in reality (with the exception of male- and Republican-hating), as in the case of my son's pro-choice friend who is the daughter of older academic parents, and who knows that the pro-life agenda intends to oppress women.  So even this does not feel real, because the child is locked away--but that's the Rapunzel convention, too.  Keeping her away from men.  And in this case, from the ability to develop informed opinions.  Which, in fact, is what the novel is doing to readers.

Thinking about Darwin's recent post on irony, if the pro-choice protesters who chanted "Hail, Satan" in an attempt to subvert (what they thought was) the Christian pro-life protesters' perception of them had been sincere, they might have been villians in one of Regina Doman's novels.  But reality is more complex.  People do things for reasons--and some people do evil things for reasons that they believe to be good.  And while fairy tale villians were black-and-white-good-and-evil, by setting a novel in a contemporary, realistic setting, and creating characters who are meant to be more or less realistic, you lose some of the ability to type.  Because then "typing" becomes "stereotyping."  When your main characters are sketched in more complex ways, it becomes somewhat irresponsible to fall back on a cartoon villain.  Consider:  Tolkien was writing about a Middle Earth with clearly defined good and evil, but he allows for complexity where people are involved.  Orcs are evil--but Orcs are not people.  Sauron is evil--but Sauron is absolutely not a person.  Everyone else with evil tendencies--from Saurumon (who isn't mortal) to Gollum (who is mortal, but not human) to the Haradrim to Boromir and Denethor--has some potential to be something other than evil.  Tolkien, who was writing a work with clearly delineated good and evil, nevertheless did not ascribe to certain characters ideologies that made them inherently evil.  

Labeling doesn't help us.  Labeling makes it impossible to understand the perspective that we seek, ultimately, to change or overcome.  By telling young people in her audience--which, I think we can assume, is largely composed of young people who have never met a real homosexual, a real atheist, a real lesbian, or a real feminist--that feminists, lesbians, homosexuals, and atheists look, think, and behave in predictable ways that are calculated to undermine all that a virtuous Catholic holds dear, an author is shutting down the conversation.  She is not protecting youth from the corruption, she is building fear, mistrust, and ultimately, bigotry.  Like the freshman who wrote the inflammatory pro-life paper when I was in my first year teaching, who knew exactly what kind of woman would consider abortion, and ended his paper with the line, "Now you know the facts.  All YOU have to do is decide"--he knew his opponent so well that he couldn't imagine a real, flesh-and-blood person with a soul beneath the monster he had created in his subconscious.  We don't need our Catholic fiction to do this for our youth.  Even if--or especially if--there is a good, moral story attached.

It may be that Rapunzel's male-hating feminist potentially lesbian female professional woman scientist nontraditional pants-wearing short-hair favoring anti-religious adoptive Democrat mother who wants to establish female-only colonies in the Third World so that womyn (yes, with the "y") can throw off the oppression of patriarchy (whew)--has a backstory, and a more complex psychology, and perhaps even some redeeming qualities that make her human.  But if so, I haven't gotten there yet.  I'll keep you posted.  I'll also try to talk about things I like, because the story is interesting enough to keep me moving past the resistance.  But it's sort of like viewing nice scenery with sand in your  eye.