this paper is so interesting to me because it is arguably one of the strongest critiques i've read of the ways in which the legendarium treats the question of sexual assault and womanhood, but it also specifically suffers from its cissexual and racial limitations in connecting the dots on the libidinal anxieties being expressed via shelob/ungoliant and eol - and specifically in a way that would ironically have been thoroughly enriched by an engagement w miller's critique of racial hierarchies in tolkien (tho i recognise these guys pubbed before miller's paper was published)
bc what really stands out to me in a glaring fashion, that the authors simply do not touch on, is the multiple ways in which shelob specifically is described as having a sting and wielding that sting to pierce/prick men and then "have her way with them". they even recognise it! observing that tolkien is essentially giving a "monstrous feminine" character a phallus. but the spectre of the monstrous transfeminine remains unobserved in a way that's very fascinating. certainly the figure of both shelob and ungoliant as having feminine genders and yet representing masculine 'rapaciousness' - literally embodied in phallic appendages, in the case of shelob - can't exactly be detached from historical anxieties about transfeminine (or transfeminised) figures, esp. colonial anxieties over gendered differentiation AND then attendant anxieties over upper class suffragetism (satirical depictions of these women always masculinising them or rendering them sexless and oversexed at the same time). there is almost a literal blurriness in shelob and ungoliant - like spiders, but not spiders, but something more and darker and intangible; like a female but possessing maleness - that i think speaks to this anxiety. plus their association with literal darkness and blackness, but also with foreignness & liminality (ungoliant with avathar (itself associated with the south and east albeit in valinor) and nan dungortheb; shelob with torech ungol, a liminal space that is neither mordor nor corrupted ithilien; both lacking a clear origin in space and place) also speaks to some of the racialised anxieties around light/dark and geography that charles w miller contextualises for us in his essay. and like, this racialised transfeminised figure specifically is the source of so much colonial anxiety right? black women and brown women who are rendered both sexually frightening against pure white women, but also mannish and therefore ambiguously gendered against the neat dichotomous genderdness of white women and men; white women whose femininity is defined in opposition specifically to the image of the ambiguously gendered black/brown woman and in opposition to the third-sexed, often transfeminised being.
but also re. upper class suffragetism & tolkien's anachronistic victorian/edwardian anxieties - it IS very interesting that for tolkien, the ideal woman is one who reflects the sort of virtues of these upper class suffragetists, who saw themselves specifically as stewards of british virtues and british purity (and therefore, also, for whom neat gendered difference was paramount; one thinks of the early proto-feminism of the bluestockings and women like hannah more who would set the terms for what would later become the tenets of upper class "feminist" thought in britain, framed heavily in terms of religion, spiritual motherhood if not physical, and intelligent virtue, but essentially "womanhood"). i was reading a very interesting paper ages ago abt the panic around "white slavery" at the turn of the nineteenth century which talked about early suffragetes framing the need for women to have the vote in terms of the failures of british upper class men - because of parliamentary corruption etc - to protect them against foreigners corrupting or threatening innocent british women, enslaving and sexually exploiting them. its an interesting recurrent strain in that many of the "empowered" women of the legendarium in some way or the other do represent some sort of stewardship of political virtues - galadriel, for example, and eowyn too in very direct 1-1 ways; varda of course at a cosmological level, as the one who receives the unsullied light directly from eru and stewards it; luthien & elwing at a higher metatextual level (i.e. by reflecting the higher purposes of eru iluvatar and in-turn, becoming quasi-custodians of this unsullied light via the silmarils). but its also interesting that the way gender operates in the legendarium, nearly all the women reflect some aspect or virtue of 19th century white feminine virtues, or else are disciplined back into that differentiation of genderedness (luthien's heroism is later reframed in the text into "the jewel which beren won and luthien wore" and she disappears from the narrative while beren returns to fight in various battles; eowyn becomes a wife; galadriel diminishes and goes into the west; aredhel, whose life has been characterised by "unfeminine" "selfishness" and a desire for freedom that is constantly framed in proximity to the masculine feanorians, dies in an act of other-centred, sacrificial motherhood).
which sort of brings me around to the "not wholly unwilling" problem, which this paper depicts as tolkien's squeamishness with sexual violence and of him wanting to have his proverbial cake and eat it too - which i agree is very much what's going on! but i also think that's a very surface level engagement with what's going on and where an engagement with charles w. mill's work could be so productive. because nowhere are the racial hierarchies that underpin the legendarium so so starkly and clearly enunciated as in the silmarillion, and especially in the story of aredhel and eol (with supplementary text in the essays on quendi and eldar, where there is an articulation of intra-elvish racialisation(s)). bc like, well, you could read "not wholly unwilling" as rape apologia yes, but at a much deeper level if you read it against the way the text explicitly positions eol as lesser (both turgon & curufin call him a dark elf; eol refers to himself as a teleri living on noldor occupied lands), it very much also reads as a depiction of the anxiety that not only might a white woman be enslaved and sexually exploited by a non-white man, but that even worse: she might enjoy it and welcome it more than she might the attentions of the white man ("she was often in the company of the sons of Fëanor, her kin; but to none was her heart’s love given"). this also puts it in line with the recurring references to aredhel's marriage as though the main problem is not the marriage itself, but the loss of property (and therefore, power and honour). not exactly indivisible from the anxieties and tensions expressed in texts like a passage to india: the simultaneous sexual fascination and repulsion and the class/race tensions that shape the simultaneous libidinal fascination/repulsion of the text.
which i think is sort of like... its interesting how the chaucer anecdote is described because i think it reflects exactly the ways in which tolkien has deeply conservative sensibilities that very much DO reflect in the legendarium outside of the expunging of overt references to sexual violence, or the sort of equivocating he does w things like "not wholly unwilling". the authors very rightly describe it as bowdlerisation, done ostensibly because of the "mixed" audience. but why! and well, if you look at the sociopolitical history of bowdlerisation, its not just about propriety but specifically the anxieties over reading and the corruption of virtuous, delicate women of sensibility (often the preserve of upper class women who embody this feminine ideal) and therefore about the preservation of an ideal, feminine womanhood. (just think about it: at the time that tolkien is doing this, women authors like virginia woolf and gertrude stein not to mention colette have been writing quite openly about sexuality). which again: this is an anxiety that runs right through all his texts in one way or the other and even reflects in the ways in which he keeps trying to change galadriel's narrative to establish her as an uncomplicatedly pure, virtuous woman. and it reflects also in what specifically is recounted and what is excised or written in extremely elevated allusion in the legendarium's texts AND also in the ways in which the women in the text are gently folded back into neat femininity, once they have fulfilled their ordained spiritual heroic purpose. it is also reflected in, therefore, shelob and ungoliant as these being straddling the lines of gender and with all kinds of racialised anxieties about the figure of the non-white woman clustered around them.
which is not to say this paper is not good bc i think its arguably one of the best enagements with tolkien's attitudes to sexual violence, sex and gender more broadly. but also just think what we could have with a transfeminist or critical race-based approach to the text and to also tolkien as a man of his time! this is actually so exciting and interesting to me, okay everyone bye.
annaxmalina
pixelskylines
areudirty
jacobvanloon
blakekathryn
