Monday, April 4, 2016

Like Kissing a Sword Blade



The field of Sword & Sorcery – like SF and Fantasy in general – was pretty much a sausage-fest in the early days. A listing of the luminaries of the genre seems like an unending parade of men, and while S&S is often seen as an even more ‛manly’ genre than Fantasy in general, it would be a crime for me to overlook the few women who did manage to make an impression. One of the earliest and most well-established names was Catherine Lucille Moore who wrote under the name of C. L. Moore.

It was common, up until quite recently, for women writers to cloak their gender beneath a shroud of initials, or a neutral name like “Andre” or “Harper”. There is a sad prevalence to the idea that women write things that are of exclusive interest to women, while the appeal of men’s work is supposed to be universal. Only now are people really beginning to try and punch serious holes in this asinine notion, and one of the very first hole-knockers was Catherine Moore and her fantastical imagination.

The initials may have fooled some people in the early days of her pulp work, but later her gender was not really a secret, and she frequently worked in tandem with her husband, fellow pulp luminary Henry Kuttner. But even on her own, Moore became a respected name in Fantasy and SF in an era when most women stayed out of the largely male field of fandom.

Moore likely became the creator she was due to her childhood. She always had terrible health, and spent a great deal of time alone and bedridden, which allowed her plenty of time for daydreaming, creating, and writing. Her first stories appeared in Weird Tales in the mid 30s, and it is here her seminal influence on S&S comes through.

The ‛Warrior Woman’ archetype has become a sort of bugaboo for the S&S genre. The image of a woman in the ubiquitous chainmail bikini, posed like a pinup, is an indelible and embarrassing relic of a comic-book era that has still not entirely passed. The prototype would supposedly be Red Sonja – a creation supposedly of Robert E. Howard, but actually an invention of the mid-70s comics. The Red Sonya Howard wrote about in one story was a late-Renaissance warrior who dressed far more practically at the Siege of Vienna. He also wrote about another red-haired warrior lady called Dark Agnes de Chastillon, though he only produced two full stories, and they were not printed until almost 40 years after his death.

Moore, however, saw them in manuscript during her correspondence with Howard, and they seem to have made a great impression. We don’t know for sure if her invention of her own warrior woman was influenced by Agnes, or the other way around. What we do know is with her tales of Jirel of Joiry, Moore created a character who still stands as a landmark in the field.

Jirel is a warrior woman, but she is never depicted as a pinup or sex object. Jirel is, in fact, probably the most well-drawn and well-rounded character of any kind to be depicted in the pages of Weird Tales. She is angry, violent, mercurial, and resolute. She is the definition of a flawed heroine, often allowing her pride and anger to drive her to decisions she later regrets. Her adventures in a fictionalized Medieval France are Sword & Sorcery tales with an unusual focus on character, emotion, and consequence.

Moore spent the second half of the 1930s producing a slew of Jirel stories. And though she never returned to her later, the woman had left her mark, both by being the first female writer and creating the first female S&S protagonist, and by delivering a degree of emotional depth and character that was unusual then and is still unusual now. Sadly, too many of the warrior women dreamed up in later decades have lacked Jirel’s personality and dignity, and she remains a standard to live up to, or fall short of.

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