Meredith N: Dear Stephen,
I've been a fan for the last 5 years, having read all of the Thomas Covenant books up to date, Mordant's Need, and just now the first two books of The Gap Series. I suppose my question will be considered typically female, but my concern drives me to ask it.
Why all the rape and victimization of women? Why are you driven to destroy both soul and flesh of nearly every woman in your novels, especially those who play a lead role? I realize that these women also demonstrate a sort of primal strength in survival, but I am still left wondering why you depict so many women as living their lives in subjugation...fighting, but entirely hopeless.
I know that I cannot really say what motivates you personally to write these things. I've read your commentary about Angus and how you feared that he was truly a public revelation of your own hidden darkness, but that doesn't really tell the whole story does it?
I appreciate your desire to keep your personal life just that, personal. But could you please give me some indication that you know women who are more than survivors, who are able to live their lives with joy, sense of purpose and wholeness?
My apologies if I have offended, but I am one of the many women who feel personally pained at your depiction of women, even while I immensely enjoy your literary talent and ability to weave tales.
I've been procrastinating here. Similar questions have come up (and have been answered, here and elsewhere) fairly often, and now I find that I'm tired of them. (Please don't take this personally.) Or maybe I'm just tired in general. So I'm going to approach your question indirectly. Bear with me. And forgive me if I sound exasperated. That's the fatigue talking.
First, I grant that my protagonists (men as well as women) lead very difficult lives: in some cases raped (metaphorically and/or physically), in most cases victimized in one form or another. Neither Terisa Morgan nor Linden Avery has been raped (physically). Both Thomas Covenant and Angus Thermopyle have been dramatically brutalized, if in very different ways. [Brief digression. Without pausing for thought, I could come up with a list as long as your arm of important female characters in my books who have been neither raped nor victimized. If I did so, I could start with Giants, Ramen, or Lords in "Covenant," Min Donner or Mikka Vasaczk in the GAP books, all three of King Joyse's daughters in "Mordant's need," or Ginny Fistoulari in my mystery novels.] Certainly the rape of Lena in "Lord Foul's Bane," and Morn Hyland's experiences in the first two GAP books, stand out. As they should. But they are not thematically unique. Indeed, they are thematically universal. What happens to Angus in the GAP books is not less of a violation than what he does to Morn. What Covenant endures is not less hurtful than what he does to Lena.
This is WHAT I DO. It isn't optional for me. I write about the damaged and the maimed, the violated and the bereft. And I seek in them the seeds of regeneration, healing, salvation, honesty, integrity, forgiveness, love. Broadly speaking, I don't have anything else to write about. And anyway, who else *needs* to have these kinds of stories happen to them? Who else could benefit from the possibilities which my stories provide? Certainly not the healthy and the happy, the whole and the unharmed.
But still: why rape? From my perspective (which is exclusively my own), that's the same as asking: why leprosy? Why zone implants and gap sickness? Why...fantasy and science fiction? Because I'm a writer who works best when he has access to physical metaphors for emotional states, psychological conflicts, spiritual quests. I use "the external"--as well as every other resource I can think of--in an attempt to shed light on "the internal". (Why else does Mick Axbrewder take SUCH a beating book after book?)
On this subject, I want to paraphrase former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins. Among other things, he says that he writes a poem to express an emotion for which we have no name, no direct language. In effect (he says), the poem *becomes* the name of that emotion. So it is with rape in my stories. And maiming. And sickness. And abuse. And possession. They are part of the "language" by which I'm trying to express emotions/needs/conflicts/yearnings that have no other name; that cannot be conveyed by simpler means. (I also want to cite Edgar Allen Poe at this point; but I'll spare you.) I could argue--if I have to--that the whole of the first "Covenant" trilogy is an attempt to *say* what the rape of Lena MEANS.
One example (from a work of fiction, admittedly, but not from my fiction). A woman is locked involuntarily in a box and abandoned. Later a man finds and rescues her. He asks, "What was it like?" She replies, "It was like being locked in a box and abandoned." OK, it was a light-hearted work of fiction. But what else *can* the woman say? ("It was like being buried alive." I'm sorry: that doesn't help. Analogies are only useful when they refer to shared bodies of experience.) Her only meaningful alternative is to tell the story of her life (of herself) up to, during, and after the experience.
So I write stories that include rape. And leprosy. And child abuse. And zone implants. If I want that "meaningful alternative," what else *can* I do?
(06/16/2009)
Ahead of your time dlb!
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