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Sep. 26th, 2011 02:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsSo okay guys, let's talk about Equal Rites!
Actually though, before we do that, let me link tokate_nepveu's blog post about The Color of Magic and The Light Fantastic. If anybody else is following along and making their own posts, let me know and I will link to them too - I want to stalk other discussions and here everyone's thoughts!
Okay, now let's talk about Equal Rites. I should start out by saying that I have kind of a different relationship with this book than I do with almost any other Discworld book, because it's the only one of the early ones that I couldn't find as an adolescent. So I didn't read it until much later, at which point, precisely none of it stuck in my head except I guess the existence of a girl named Esk. Many things were surprising to me! Perhaps most surprising of all: GRANNY WEATHERWAX. So here is the first scene in which the character who will later be revealed as Granny Weatherwax shows up:
SOME WIZARD: I am going to give this staff to your son! Have him brought down here.
GRANNY WEATHERWAX: But -
ESK'S DAD: Quiet! This is very important. What do we do now, sir?
SOME WIZARD: The child must hold it.
GRANNY WEATHERWAX: But -
ESK'S DAD: It's all right, Granny. I know what I'm about. She's a witch, don't mind her. (! !!!!)
We all know what happens from there - the son is a girl who is Esk who becomes the first female wizard - but the really startling thing is that somebody gets away with interrupting Granny Weatherwax. This would NEVER HAPPEN in a later Witches book.
As the book goes on, proto-Granny does get more and more Granny-ish, and in the end she even gets to have a confrontation with/flirtation with/total domination of a Chancellor of the Unseen University whom we may as well call proto-Ridcully. You can see where Granny's going to come from. But I do find myself wanting to fanwank that is, you know, a cousin who happens to have the same name.
Also, she Borrows a swarm of bees like it ain't no thing.
ANYWAY. The other clear thing about this book as a Witches book - and one of the reasons, I think, that the witches as a whole just don't come across as nearly as powerful in this book as they do elsewhere - is because Pratchett hasn't yet figured out that he's writing about witches as a community. Equal Rites is a first attempt at a feminist book by a guy writing in the eighties, and in my opinion it is not a bad effort (although I want to hear what everybody else thinks!) He actually does better than most by having proto-Granny be pretty gender essentialist and also still pretty badass in her mastery of traditional female stuff - he has already figured out that you don't have to put down what's there in order to complain about what isn't, which is a step that a lot of people, especially in the eighties, found hard to grasp. But I think the story of the witches of Ankh-Morpork gets a lot better, and better at being feminist, with the development of Granny in conjunction with Nanny Ogg and Magrat and Agnes. It's not that we don't need books about adolescent girls figuring out if they can be powerful, but it's so much rarer to find books about grown-up women who are powerful.
In other news: how weird is it to have creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions showing up as a plot point in a Witches book? So weird!
Actually though, before we do that, let me link to
kate_nepveu's blog post about The Color of Magic and The Light Fantastic. If anybody else is following along and making their own posts, let me know and I will link to them too - I want to stalk other discussions and here everyone's thoughts! Okay, now let's talk about Equal Rites. I should start out by saying that I have kind of a different relationship with this book than I do with almost any other Discworld book, because it's the only one of the early ones that I couldn't find as an adolescent. So I didn't read it until much later, at which point, precisely none of it stuck in my head except I guess the existence of a girl named Esk. Many things were surprising to me! Perhaps most surprising of all: GRANNY WEATHERWAX. So here is the first scene in which the character who will later be revealed as Granny Weatherwax shows up:
SOME WIZARD: I am going to give this staff to your son! Have him brought down here.
GRANNY WEATHERWAX: But -
ESK'S DAD: Quiet! This is very important. What do we do now, sir?
SOME WIZARD: The child must hold it.
GRANNY WEATHERWAX: But -
ESK'S DAD: It's all right, Granny. I know what I'm about. She's a witch, don't mind her. (! !!!!)
We all know what happens from there - the son is a girl who is Esk who becomes the first female wizard - but the really startling thing is that somebody gets away with interrupting Granny Weatherwax. This would NEVER HAPPEN in a later Witches book.
As the book goes on, proto-Granny does get more and more Granny-ish, and in the end she even gets to have a confrontation with/flirtation with/total domination of a Chancellor of the Unseen University whom we may as well call proto-Ridcully. You can see where Granny's going to come from. But I do find myself wanting to fanwank that is, you know, a cousin who happens to have the same name.
Also, she Borrows a swarm of bees like it ain't no thing.
ANYWAY. The other clear thing about this book as a Witches book - and one of the reasons, I think, that the witches as a whole just don't come across as nearly as powerful in this book as they do elsewhere - is because Pratchett hasn't yet figured out that he's writing about witches as a community. Equal Rites is a first attempt at a feminist book by a guy writing in the eighties, and in my opinion it is not a bad effort (although I want to hear what everybody else thinks!) He actually does better than most by having proto-Granny be pretty gender essentialist and also still pretty badass in her mastery of traditional female stuff - he has already figured out that you don't have to put down what's there in order to complain about what isn't, which is a step that a lot of people, especially in the eighties, found hard to grasp. But I think the story of the witches of Ankh-Morpork gets a lot better, and better at being feminist, with the development of Granny in conjunction with Nanny Ogg and Magrat and Agnes. It's not that we don't need books about adolescent girls figuring out if they can be powerful, but it's so much rarer to find books about grown-up women who are powerful.
In other news: how weird is it to have creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions showing up as a plot point in a Witches book? So weird!
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no subject
Date: 2011-09-26 07:41 pm (UTC)Also I think you may be missing a 'not' here?
It's that we don't need books about adolescent girls figuring out if they can be powerful, but it's so much rarer to find books about grown-up women who are powerful.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-26 07:44 pm (UTC)And yeah, I think that may be one of the reasons it didn't sink in for me when I read it later - because at that point I had already read loads of Witches books and I just kind of tuned out everything that felt a bit off, which was a big chunk of the book. I am really curious what people who read Equal Rites first think, though!
no subject
Date: 2011-09-26 07:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-26 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-26 10:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-27 01:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-26 07:46 pm (UTC)I certainly agree with you that it's more a proto-Witches book than a true Witches book (also, Terry clearly got better at knowing what was going on with the discworld books as a whole as he went on). But regarding the gender issues, this is one of the reasons I really like Nanny Ogg--she's very female in some undeniable ways -- but this doesn't mean she isn't also very powerful (quite the reverse).
no subject
Date: 2011-09-26 07:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-26 10:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-27 12:29 am (UTC)I am struggling to parse this sentence, possibly because it's too early in the morning. Help pls? 'Cause I was going to complain about the gender essentialism, but now I'm not sure if you've already complained about it or not. IT'S TOO EARLY.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-27 01:34 am (UTC)a.) Granny is really gender essentialist but
b.) so were/are a lot of older women, especially at that time period, and while this can be problematic it's also because they take pride in and perceive power in their roles as women and therefore
c.) while I don't agree with Granny's gender essentialism, obviously, I am also really glad that Pratchett complicated it and did not take the easy and popular-in-the-eighties road of making Granny Weatherwax, and by extension women who hold more traditional views, useless and ridiculous - that he has Eska challenging the status quo, because it needs to be challenged, but at the same time does not devalue the roles women have been playing prior to those challenges, which unfortunately a lot of really gung-ho challenges often tend to do. Does that make sense?
no subject
Date: 2011-09-27 11:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-27 06:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-28 10:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-27 02:33 am (UTC)Own post (not very substantive) coming when not falling over.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-27 03:30 am (UTC)Agreed on the Borrowing
Date: 2011-10-02 12:22 am (UTC)Of course, Granny's ethos has always been that magic is what you use when you can't do the job any other way, so her having but not using the power isn't out of character. However, in later books she can't shift Greebo into human form without Nanny's help and muses that it's much easier to make someone think they're a frog than to actually turn them into one. It's just another case of the rules still settling, which they didn't start to do until Mort, Sourcery and Wyrd Sisters.
Re: Agreed on the Borrowing
Date: 2011-10-02 05:54 pm (UTC)Re: Agreed on the Borrowing
Date: 2011-10-02 07:10 pm (UTC)(Sample lyric:
She turned into a full dress ship and sailed across the sea
But he became a bold captain, and aboard of her went he)
no subject
Date: 2011-10-09 09:11 pm (UTC)http://www.steelypips.org/weblog/2011/10/pratchett_03-04.php
The Annotated Pratchett File
Date: 2011-10-02 12:31 am (UTC)http://www.lspace.org/books/apf/index.html
Re: The Annotated Pratchett File
Date: 2011-10-02 05:53 pm (UTC)