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Jul. 8th, 2008 10:02 amI reread Diana Wynne Jones' Black Maria on the way back from Boston, because I'd lent it to Gen ages ago to read (and she actually did, which is why she is my favorite), she had just given it back to me and I am incapable of not reading a Diana Wynne Jones book when I have one in my hands. It is a complicated book, and one I have been thinking about in one way or another for a long time, so I am going to take the chance to set out some of my thoughts about it here.
Black Maria can be described as The One Where Diana Wynne Jones Takes On Gender Roles - it's set in the little town of Cranbury-on-Sea, where the main character Mig's great-aunt Maria and her coffee-klatching, Public Works Committee-running minion ladies have a strange control over the town. This seems at first to fall straight into the set of books where Women With Power Are Evil, and it might have come off that way if the narrator had been Mig's older brother, Chris, instead of Mig herself. But because it's Mig telling the story (and because it's Diana Wynne Jones writing, and she is much more complicated than that) instead you get, I think, a book that shows how traditional sexism and gender roles affect, not just women, but men as well. There's a bit that sums up a lot of what the book is about, to me, where Mig is talking about her father with her mother. It is longish, so I will put it (and my analysis; oh god, once an English major, always an English major) ( under a cut. )
I would tell people to read this book anyways, because the characters are fabulous, the book is very funny in places and thoroughly creepy in others, and I will maintain that Aunt Maria is one of the best villains of all time due to the sheer creeping ordinariness of her. But I really especially want people to read it so I can see what they make of the bizarre gendered mini-universe set up there. There are some very strange things in the book I can't even start talking about or I will be writing all day, so . . . I will stop here.
Black Maria can be described as The One Where Diana Wynne Jones Takes On Gender Roles - it's set in the little town of Cranbury-on-Sea, where the main character Mig's great-aunt Maria and her coffee-klatching, Public Works Committee-running minion ladies have a strange control over the town. This seems at first to fall straight into the set of books where Women With Power Are Evil, and it might have come off that way if the narrator had been Mig's older brother, Chris, instead of Mig herself. But because it's Mig telling the story (and because it's Diana Wynne Jones writing, and she is much more complicated than that) instead you get, I think, a book that shows how traditional sexism and gender roles affect, not just women, but men as well. There's a bit that sums up a lot of what the book is about, to me, where Mig is talking about her father with her mother. It is longish, so I will put it (and my analysis; oh god, once an English major, always an English major) ( under a cut. )
I would tell people to read this book anyways, because the characters are fabulous, the book is very funny in places and thoroughly creepy in others, and I will maintain that Aunt Maria is one of the best villains of all time due to the sheer creeping ordinariness of her. But I really especially want people to read it so I can see what they make of the bizarre gendered mini-universe set up there. There are some very strange things in the book I can't even start talking about or I will be writing all day, so . . . I will stop here.
