“To our wives and sweethearts—may they never meet!”
–Captain Jack Aubrey (Traditional toast in His Majesty’s Navy)
“The society of well-educated ladies is sure to add dignity and refinement to the character of a young man. Without such society his manners can never acquire the true polish of a gentleman, nor his mind and heart the noblest and truest sentiments of a man.”
–The Young Man’s Own Book, A Manual of Politeness, Intellectual Development, and Moral Deportment, Calculated to Form the Character on a Solid Basis and to Assure Respectability and Success in Life. Key, Mielke, and Biddle, 1832.
The book’s title is only ten words shorter than the advice, but this excellent resource for writers of fiction set in the 19th-century spends a chapter extolling the virtues of the fair sex and the importance of treating them with the proper respect, always bearing in mind the desirability of holy wedlock.
So where does that leave a writer whose protagonists are men – and gay men, at that – who see wedlock as a consummation devoutly to be avoided?
The Young Man’s Own Book says, “The influence of the female sex on a young man must be something, may be much….” and I think that goes for gentlemen of either persuasion. The stereotype of a homosexual male as a man who hates women does, like all stereotypes, probably hold true for a few individuals. On the other hand, men whose emotional character is defined by hatred are not the most sympathetic candidates for the starring role in a romance.
But love of one gender doesn’t require hatred of the other. As people operating in human society, gay characters would at least have to interact with mothers, sisters, and other female relatives. Given social expectations, they might also have wives… in many cases, women they may have married before they were even aware of their same-sex inclinations. Oscar Wilde is probably the most well-known example, but others can be found in abundance in the headlines even today, often claiming that they’re not gay at all.
Of course, in a gay love story, women may be peripheral characters, if they appear at all. But writing about men who love other men doesn’t mean that women can or should be ignored or treated badly. So many of us who write m/m romance are women ourselves, it would require an odd sort of self-loathing to bash female characters, and it would be weak craftsmanship in any case.
So what’s different about writing a female character? Or, at least, what do I find different?
Apart from the plumbing… not all that much. And the best way I can think of to illustrate how the process works for me is to use a couple of examples from my stories.
One caveat: I must admit I write from the perspective of a born tomboy. I think of myself as a human being first and a woman second, and I expect any character I write to behave in a humanly reasonable way (except, as Mark Twain might say, in the case of lunatics.) In many historical settings, a woman has fewer options than a man, but that’s no reason to assume she has less intelligence or less nerve. Anybody willing to say “I do” and risk the horrors of septic childbirth is not, in my opinion, lacking in courage.
I haven’t yet written a story where one of my characters finds himself with both a male lover and a wife, and the shipboard romance of the Ransom universe seldom allowed much room for the ladies. But their influence does appear – in David Archer’s first ill-chosen romance with a girl below his social station that precipitated his entry into the Navy, in his correspondence with his mother and sisters, even in the Christmas gift he gives his lover—warm woolens knitted by those ladies and sent in quantities that far exceed his own needs. What we see, reflected in his attitude, is a general liking and respect for women and concern for their welfare. The odd son out, bookish, intelligent, and considerably more sensitive than his father, Davy’s affectionate nature was shaped by his mother and elder sisters. We don’t actually meet the ladies in Ransom or Winds of Change, but a few of them will appear eventually.
David’s cousin Christopher is more conventionally appreciative of female charms; his love story is told in my novella “See Paris and Live,” in the trilogy Sail Away, which also features Will and David some time before they’ve become lovers. Writing the heroine, Zoe Colbert, was a bit of a challenge. She was a French girl, gently reared; to make her a strong character in her own right, able to take the huge step of making herself known to a strange gentleman, took some consideration and a little more deliberate construction of background and motivation.
Christopher—Kit—needed a wife who was respectable enough to marry a Baron and be able to execute the responsibilities required of that position. And she had to be resourceful, intelligent, and capable—as well as willing to take chances—because his life would depend on her intervention at a critical point. So I put her in the position of being mistress of her father’s house, her mother having died when Zoe was younger; this allowed her to be comfortable with making decisions, at least routine ones. Since her father was a doctor (again, to save Kit’s life) she was not unfamiliar with life-and-death crises. She was also a girl living through the convulsions of a society tearing itself apart and attempting to re-form, in the literal sense. I felt that the extraordinary times could provide enough of a push to make her take chances she never would have ordinarily. With death a possibility at any time, and the young men she’d known dead or vanished, she had motivation enough for her to reach out to Kit when he crossed her path. A girl—or boy!—who doesn’t expect to live long enough to grow up is more likely to take a risk for even brief happiness. And a hero(ine) has to have the courage to make a leap of faith.
Kit himself turned out to be the kind of young man who really needed a strong partner—he’s young, only 18, so he had time to grow up during the course of the story. He was not, at its beginning, his own master. His ill-fated trip to France was on his mother’s orders, and she’s a forceful character within her own domain.
Constructing the dowager Baroness was interesting. I didn’t want to make her just a caricature of the clueless upper-class lady, but for the sake of the plot she had to nag Kit into a trip to France that he really should not have attempted. Why did she do that, if not on a silly feminine whim? Well, she was concerned about maintaining her hospitality. War with France would cut off supplies of wine and spirits, and she did not want to patronize smugglers if she could avoid it. I thought this could be a legitimate concern for someone whose occupation in large part consisted of organizing social affairs. Sheltered from politics as many women were, she could very well be ignorant of the danger she was sending her son into. Her more irritating feature—her insistence that Kit marry and produce an heir as soon as possible—was also understandable given the social structure. Protecting the succession, through her son, was also part of her job—and the only thing preventing her eviction from the place that had been her home since she married Kit’s (deceased) father.
For a minor character, the Dowager required a lot of underpinning. And with all those annoying traits, she had to have a redeeming one, so I made her marriage to her late husband a real love match—something that Kit was influenced by, something he wanted for himself. That worked out well in the overall story arc, too—when Kit has found love with Zoe, it gives him the insight to recognize a similar connection between his cousin David and Will Marshall, and motivates him to give them a precious space of time together at his estate in the West Indies, in Winds. This may be an unusual attitude for the era… but no individual can be totally defined by his (or her) society. If a clergyman could bless gay couples—and there was one such known at the time—then why couldn’t Kit recognize that his favorite cousin had found love with an unconventional partner?
In my new novella “Gentleman’s Gentleman,” I’ve given my hero Lord Robert Scoville another managing mother—but though he loves her, he’s a younger son, he has no obligation to secure the succession, and he knows what a disaster it would be for him to marry. “I can’t bear the idea of marrying a woman I dislike just to satisfy my family. And tying myself to an unsuspecting woman that I did like—like, not love—would make two people miserable.” (His soon-to-be lover, Jack, is enormously relieved to hear this!) But Robert does recognize that his mother is acting out of concern for his well-being, so he and Jack come up with a creative way to discourage her matchmaking.
In today’s terms, I suppose Lord Robert would be at the far end of the Kinsey scale—absolutely uninterested in women—whereas David Archer would probably be near the middle (his first attraction was to a woman) but slightly more attracted to men. As for Will Marshall… he’s smack in the middle. Will, I think, fell in love with Davy because no one had ever loved him before and he’d been in the company of men all his life. He’d had a brief attachment to a girl, in his teens, but he never got up the nerve to do anything about it. I’m not sure whether Will would’ve wound up as happily married as Captain Smith if things had not gone pear-shaped when he and Davy were kidnapped. I think both the Ransom boys are functionally bisexual but basically monogamous—content with a single relationship. (Again, that’s my own perspective seeping into my characters—if my wife had been male, we’d have kids in college by now.) Of course, Will’s going to have his ideas of monogamy challenged in the next couple of books… with both sexes. Poor baby. He never met a woman as sweet and smart and interesting as Davy is – not yet. But that’s another story.
So to get back on topic and finish up, the most significant thing I’ve found about writing women in a m/m universe is that it just takes a little more time and attention. I think any woman can identify with that—any woman who’s ever tried to get a degree in a “man’s” field, land a job in an occupation that is generally considered a man’s domain—in fact, to accomplish anything and be taken seriously in a world, past or present, where men are expected to look for action and adventure and the ladies are expected to be the trophy for the alpha male. Writing complete, believable women in gay romance is more or less dancing like Ginger Rogers, who did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards – and in high heels. It may not be easy, but it’s definitely worth the effort.
May 21, 2008 at 10:47 am
Hee! That’s a great start to a novel:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, sees wedlock as a consummation devoutly to be avoided. *snorts*
Excellent post, Lee – and it’s great having these posts showing that we DON’T consider all characters in m/m to be male. I’ve read so many books where not only are the characters all male, but they are all gay it drives me mad. Also there are many stories where there might be a token woman, but she’s the villain, or a shrew in some way.
I’ve fallen foul of this myself in Transgressions as there’s a girl who wants David and will try anything to get him, but as the story is set among the war, I think the male cast is excusable, mainly!
I like to see women characters, particularly mothers and sisters, I wish more writers did it.
May 21, 2008 at 1:32 pm
hmm very interesting article, and Erastes’ comments are food for thought too. Thinking of my coming novella, there is only mention of one woman as far as I can recall and she is mentioned in a positive, if distant light, but I think that my setting makes the lack of feminine presence (except for a parlor maid) believable. I guess it will remain to be seen.
May 21, 2008 at 2:42 pm
I think a lot of m/m stories are set in situations that exclude women–situations that create the kind of stories I’m interested in writing–and that’s one of the reasons I like m/m. Xena Warrior Princess isn’t 100% fiction–Queen Boudicca-of-the-many-spellings was at least as interesting as any fictional heroine–but too often, half the work of writing a story with an adventurous female character is setting up why and how a woman finds herself in the situation, and dealing with other characters’ reaction to her presence. With male h/h it’s possible to just jump right into the story. (I know, one way around the ‘men’s work’ scenario is to write fantasy or ‘futuristic,’ but I’m not science-geek enough to write good sci-fi and I like historical.)
May 21, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Great post, Lee! It is always a worry that – in an industry where books written by men so often have no female characters – it’s difficult for women to get female characters into a story too. I don’t like to see a world where there are no women at all, *or* where they’re there only to prove how superior the heroes relationships with each other are. (Like the scheming wife and evil ex-girlfriend.) And sadly I have seen a lot of that.
I solved it in Captain’s Surrender by having a m/f subplot, and in False Colors by having more working women on the scene (and I mean working as in laundresses, chambermaids, barmaids, doctor’s assistants etc) as well as brother officer’s wives and widows. It is very hard when the characters are aboard ship much of the time, or in the Army, but even then they can still write to their mothers and sisters. And that also makes for a chance for them to show their humane, gentle sides as good sons and brothers 🙂
May 21, 2008 at 4:14 pm
As per usual, an excellent post.
As a “newbie” in the world of m/m writing with a story set in the 1850s-60s, my female characters are none of them villains. They are pretty much minor characters except for the mother of one and the sister of the other. The mother – supportive, understanding and loving. The sister, torn with the period’s abhorrence of “unnatural behavior”, but still trying to be as good a sister as she can be given the times.
I hope I pulled it off.
May 21, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Alex, Erastes–If there’s one thing I’ve probably not tried yet (and probably should) it’s the scheming, manipulative woman–because they do exist. In a system where women have very little overt power, manipulation is a survival trait. Scheming to get a desirable mate… well, when an unmarried woman’s fate was usually dire poverty and/or economic slavery to whatever male relative was willing to put a roof over her head… I suspect many of us might be desperate enough to slacken a few standards of behavior for the chance of her “own establishment.” It’s no accident that so many Regency heroines are anxious to land a husband so they don’t have to become governesses.
But even considering the circumstances, there would always be some women who weren’t just scrabbling for survival, who would get into the power trip. And that sort of woman could be a really effective villain. But that would take some finesse to accomplish, and it’s not the sort of character a writer could use too often without becoming predictable.
May 21, 2008 at 9:13 pm
A most interesting post, Lee. I’ve often wondered why so many authors writing m/m romance are women, and where (or if) we see ourselves in the story. Your approach helped me recognize all the other ways female characters can be important to a story without having to be the wife or girlfriend of a male protagonist.
I think another important factor to consider is the very different meaning the institution of marriage had for most people up until around the mid-18th century. If you read Stephanie Coontz’s book, Marriage: a history, you see how marriage was important and necessary to most men and women for every reason except “romance.” Most of us are setting our stories after the shift to the more modern idea of marriage based on love, but I imagine many people, and not only gay men, had some very practical reasons to wish to marry a partner of the opposite sex throughout most of the nineteenth century. Legitimate heirs, a partner to help run a home business, and influential in-laws were three of the top reasons in the past.
Of course, this kind of relationship is the antithesis of the “romance” plot, so it’s probably not very appealing to most of us 😉
May 21, 2008 at 11:57 pm
Can’t speak for anyone else, but I enjoy m/m because I like to be part of the action, not waiting on the sidelines wringing my hands.
As for the purposes of marriage, the institution of romance, courtly love…I understand that marriage has had many definitions and served many purposes in different ages and in different cultures. I’m not sure if I’ve read Coontz’s book, but one that I ran across years ago was “The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest,” which deals with, if i remember, the 12th-14th centuries, the way that marriages were arranged for alliances, economic and political. “Knight” had some fascinating tidbits, such as an ecclesiastical letter warning men that it was sinful and idolatrous to love their wives too much. Gah.
Since most of the stories I’ve written are late 18th-early 19th century, I’m dealing with a set of expectations that were relatively close to our own. One of my favorite quotes from a Parisian survivor of the Reign of Terror was “I didn’t notice–I was in love at the time.”
I’m sure there were marriages of convenience and inconvenience. But after reading some of John Adams’ correspondence with his wife, I think this primary source shows a deep affection that would be at home in any romance novel.
When I’m thinking of a love story, I do look at facts–but I also look at poetry, where the heart does the talking, and I think there’s plenty of evidence there that proves the emotions we feel today are nothing new.
Let me quote snippets of two poems written by Bai Juyi, born in 772, who had an uneven career at the Imperial court during the Tang Dynasty. He was often separated from his wife, and though love poems were not considered high art for Chinese gentlemen, some of the ones he wrote to his wife still survive.
“Mulberry trees were just putting out
their green leaves when we two
parted; now persimmon leaves
are turning red and I have not returned…”
“While we live it will be quietly
together in our home;
when we die we will lie in one grave together
turning to dust…”
(Bai Juyi, 200 selected poems, New World Press, Beijing, 1984)
And ladies wrote their own poetry; from Kuan Tao-sheng, 1262-1319:
Married Love
You and I have so much love
that it burns like a fire
in which we bake a lump of clay
molded into a figure of you
and a figure of me.
Then we take both of them
and break them into pieces
and mix the pieces with water,
and mold again a figure of you
and a figure of me.
I am in your clay.
You are in my clay.
In life we share a single quilt
In death we will share one coffin.
(Women Poets of China, Rexroth & Chung, New Directions Books, 1972).
The imagery in this poem is particularly striking when you realize these people had never read the book of Genesis.
I think social structures come in a lot of different forms, and it is important to get those right–but I think the human heart has been singing the same songs for a long, long time.
May 22, 2008 at 8:24 pm
Thanks to the inimitable Erastes for a link to the article on the evil of loving one’s wife “as if she were a mistress.”
http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article05190801.aspx
I’d say more but I’m just too disgusted to be polite.
May 23, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Lovely stuff, Lee.
I couldn’t agree with you (and Erastes) more in terms of the characterisation within m/m books. I love to see positive female characters, full of warmth and humanity, in the m/m I read – and the ones I write.
I don’t object to old fashioned villainesses, but there has to be a balance and the whole package should reflect the society it’s set in, ie a mix of gay, straight, male, female, nice, nasty, whatever’s appropriate to the setting. That’s how life is and, in fact, having all the female characters as wholesome and life affirming would be as much of a betrayal.
May 23, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Of course, people have fallen in love with each other ever since we had the capacity for human emotions. What was different in much of the past was that this kind of romantic love was not supposed to be the reason for people to marry–and for many people it couldn’t be. There were too many overriding practical considerations.
Most of us are setting our stories in the period when marriages based on love had become the norm for many people. I’m not advocating the practical, marriage-of-convenience plot for us as a way to get more women into our m/m stories (even if I used it myself for my “bisexual” romance–but that’s another story 🙂 )
The ideal of romantic love leading to marriage seems to me to make an m/m love story problematic, and therefore interesting, from a writing perspective, in late eighteenth and nineteenth century settings. Before that, two men in love with each other could see their relationship as something completely separate from any marriages they may have with women. Their own love didn’t compete with or threaten their marriages, or vice versa, because marriage did not have to be based on love or involve such an intense emotion. It could, but it didn’t have to.
Later, in this more modern period, the romantic love of two men could not coexist with a love marriage a man had with a woman. It would be seen, then as now, as the same kind of relationship: love for another man, or love for a woman. Writing m/m romance in this period means that our heroes can no longer have friendly, if not very passionate marriages with women. (Well, again, they can, but most of us don’t like that idea.)
And it also gives writers the opportunity to present the m/m love story as “equal” to the m/f stories that have been written for years. Equal in passion, equal in intensity, and equal in a moral sense.
Naturally, some of our heroes may have a problem with that: “It’s not equal–it’s superior.”
That’s for us and them to sort out. Back to the writing.
May 26, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Here, here! I am 100 percent in agreement. I don’t want to know ahead of time how a story is going to end. I’ve read so many comments from readers who ask, “Is there a HEA? No? I’ll pass on reading that, then.” And then I know of at least one site that REQUIRES an HEA for you to submit your book for review!
For my book, “The Filly” several reviewers spoiled whether or not there was an HEA, which I’d have preferred if they hadn’t, but oh, well…
May 29, 2008 at 2:39 pm
I love the concept that without women, men would still be sitting around the cave, grunting and amusing each other with body noises. Oh, wait, that was at my house this weekend…
When I was younger, I read Lord of the Flies and shook my head at the ridiculous notion that a group of proper English school boys could crumble into chaos and destruction without polite society. (What they really meant was without their mothers.)
Lo and behold, years later, as I joined my son on his first Cub Scout campout I watched as an entire troop of eight year olds (and a few grown men) de-evolved before my eyes in the space of a single afternoon.
With each foray into the woods, they would run past us with clothes missing, “killing” sticks clutched in grubby hands, and leaves and twigs stuck to them as camouflage. Small animals fled before them, as they hooped and hollered in the forest.
When they finally returned to us womenfolk tending the fire (roasting hot dogs), they were a band of heathens, sweaty, smelly, mud streaked, wild-eyed and wild-haired, and having the time of their lives.
If we women had been with them, their clothes would have remained on, they would have stayed clean, not picked up anything that wasn’t clean or that they didn’t know where it had been and they would certainly not be running around with pointed sticks. Subdued, orderly, and fit for polite society.
And we womenfolk loved them anyway.
When I write women characters in my m/m stories, I write them as strong, loving, compasionate people, just like the women I know, who have sons, brothers, and friends who just happen to love other women’s sons, brothers and friends.
Villans come in all flavors, and in m/m romance they don’t have to be women, or straight men, but (as in one of my stories) can be another gay man. And even with villians, I try to see what lies beneath, why they became the people they are, it adds to their dimentionality.