One
of the things that I’ve always loved about the use of the term “kick-ass” to describe urban fantasy and paranormal romance heroines is
that it indicates approval of heroines’ tendency to move from more
traditionally feminine roles into behaviors more usually associated with the
male heroes of action movies and literature; these women have power and carry
weapons, and they aren’t afraid to use them.
But
the shift of heroines’ roles in urban fantasy and paranormal romance from
passive recipient of romantic love to active participants in violence and killing
also carries a certain amount of anxiety in our culture. L. Jagi Lamplighter notes
that “today’s
audiences have welcomed this golden age of butt-kicking heroines with great
relish,” but also claims that these heroines face a “fundamental conflict
between modern culture and drama”:
Culture demanded
a heroine who is fierce, powerful, and spunky, who lives in a world without
taboos where she can do exactly as she pleases. But the needs of drama, the
laws that govern what makes a story romantic, require something else entirely:
a superior male who lives in a world where taboos separate the heroine from the
object of her desire.
Thus,
according to Lamplighter, urban fantasy requires a supernatural male love
interest—one who is inherently superior to the heroine simply due to his
supernatural nature. This is significant, Lamplighter claims,
Because violence
is masculine. The more violent the hero, and the more he is ravaged by desires
he cannot control—the desire for blood, the uncontrollable compulsion to turn
into a wolf under the full moon—the more excuse for the hero to allow his
passions to run away with him, and the greater the heroine’s victory when she
ultimately tames him!
But
this reading doesn’t account for the fact that most of the heroines of urban
fantasy (and often of paranormal romance, too, though I'm focusing primarily on
UF here) are every bit as violent as the male love-interests. Indeed, the heroines
are often exponentially more violent than the males, a fact that is often of
great concern to the heroines. As she develops her skills in necromancy, for
example, Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake (arguably the first urban fantasy
heroine) frets about her humanity; she says that “Raising the dead makes a lot
of people class me with the monsters. There are even days when I agree with
them” (Circus of the Damned). She
worries that she is becoming a monster, claiming that “It was getting harder to
tell the humans from the monsters. I was even beginning to wonder about myself.
There are more roads to monsterdom than most people realize” (The Lunatic Cafe). But almost as much as
worrying about remaining human, Anita worries about maintaining her place in a
masculine world. At one point, as she looks at a female civilian called out to
help take down a rogue zombie, she says,
The girl just
stared. I could almost smell her fear. She was entitled to it. Why did it
bother me so much? Because she and I were the only women here, and we had to be
better than the men. Braver, quicker, whatever. It was a rule for playing with
the big boys. (The Laughing Corpse).
As
the literary progenitor of virtually all urban fantasy heroines, Anita is an
important model for what happens when urban fantasy heroines act out the kind
of violence that is traditionally considered masculine—and what happens to
Anita is that despite acting violently because “if she doesn’t, someone
innocent will get hurt” (as Alasdair Stuart notes) is that she herself turns
into a monster. By the later novels, Anita is no longer particularly worried
about going to church or whether or not she has become a monster or even if she
is making the right decision about which monsters to kill. She comes to terms
with her own increasingly violent actions as she tracks and kills rogue
vampires, evil voodoo priestesses, shapeshifters, and other monsters, even as
she increasingly identifies with them. In Cerulean
Sins (the eleventh book of the series) for example, she says “One of my
favorite things about hanging out with the monsters is the healing. Straight
humans seemed to get killed on me a lot. Monsters survived. Let’s hear it for
the monsters.” Anita’s experience parallels that of any number of other urban
fantasy heroines: Faith Hunter’s Jane Yellowrock, Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty
Norville, Ilona Andrews’ Kate Daniels, Rachel Vincent’s Faythe Saunders—all of
them must embrace some degree of monstrosity in order to become the kind of kick-ass
heroines we love.
In
“Invisible Monsters: Vision, Horror, and Contemporary Culture,” Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock argues that “to
redefine monstrosity is to simultaneously to rethink humanity” (275). However,
urban fantasy novels’ definition of monstrosity as connected to feminine power
does not “rethink humanity”; rather, if these books have a message for
women, it is that in order to embody feminine power, a woman must become a
monster—but in doing so, she learns that to be monstrous is the natural order.
Asa Simon Mittman writes that
Monsters do a
great deal of cultural work, but they do not do it nicely. They not only
challenge and question; they trouble, they worry, they haunt. They break and
tear and rend cultures, all the while constructing them and propping them up.
(1)
In
the case of urban fantasy, though, there is more propping than tearing, and
despite any apparent nods to feminism, urban fantasy contains its potentially
dangerous female characters within carefully constructed heteronormative
narrative bounds by ensuring that femininity and monstrosity are ultimately
equated. This tendency to create characters with the (ultimately frustrated)
potential to escape traditionally patriarchal cultural norms shows itself
nowhere so much as in urban fantasy’s kick-ass heroines—which ultimately raises
the question: is it possible for those of us who write urban fantasy to create
the kinds of kick-ass heroines we love without simultaneously creating
monsters?
So
what do you think? Do all kick-ass urban fantasy heroines become the very kind
of monster they fight against? What about kick-ass paranormal romance heroines?
Are they different from urban fantasy heroines in this respect? How and why, or
why not?
_____________________________________________
My own urban fantasy heroine Elle, from Legally Undead, is working hard to avoid embracing the monsters as she works to eradicate them.
A
reluctant vampire hunter, stalking New York City as only a scorned bride can.
Elle Dupree has her life all figured out: first
a wedding, then her Ph.D., then swank faculty parties where she’ll serve wine
and cheese and introduce people to her husband the lawyer.
But those plans disintegrate when she walks
in on a vampire draining the blood from her fiancé Greg. Horrified, she screams
and runs--not away from the vampire, but toward it, brandishing a wooden letter
opener.
As she slams the improvised stake into the
vampire’s heart, a team of black-clad men bursts into the apartment. Turning
around to face them, Elle discovers that Greg’s body is gone—and her perfect
life falls apart.
Available on Amazon and other retailers: http://www.amazon.com/Legally-Undead-Vampirarchy-Book-1-ebook/dp/B00KKV44BK/
World Weaver Press: http://www.worldweaverpress.com/store/p19/Legally_Undead_%28Vampirarchy%2C_1%29.html
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Excerpt
The worst thing about vampires is
that they're dead. That whole wanting to suck your blood business runs a close
second, but for sheer creepiness, it's the dead bit that gets me every time.
They're up and walking around and talking and sucking blood, but they're dead.
And then there's the whole terminology problem--how can you kill something
that's already dead? It's just wrong.
I was twenty-four the first time I .
. . destroyed? dispatched? . . . a vampire. That's when I found out that all
the books and movies are wrong. When you stick a wooden stake into their
hearts, vampires don't disintegrate into dust. They don't explode. They don't
spew blood everywhere. They just look surprised, groan, and collapse into a
pile of corpse. But at least they lie still then, like corpses are supposed to.
Since that first kill (I might as
well use the word--there really isn’t a better one), I've discovered that only
if you're lucky do vampires look surprised before they groan and fall down. If
you're unlucky and miss the heart, they look angry. And then they fight.
There are the other usual ways to
kill vampires, of course, but these other ways can get a bit complicated.
Vampires are notoriously difficult to trick into sunlight. They have an uncanny
ability to sense when there's any sunlight within miles of them, and they're
awfully good at hiding from it. Holy water doesn't kill them; it just distracts
them for a while, and then they get that angry look again. And it takes a
pretty big blade to cut off someone's head--even an already dead someone--and
carrying a great big knife around New York City, even the Bronx, is a sure way
to get arrested. Nope, pointy sticks are the best way to go, all the way
around.
My own pointy stick is actually more
of a little knife with wood inlay on the blade--the metal makes it slide in
easier. I had the knife specially made by an old Italian guy in just about the
only ratty part of Westchester, north of the city. I tried to order one off the
internet, but it turns out that while it’s easy to find wood-inlay handles, the
blades themselves tend to be metal. Fat lot those people know.
But I wasn’t thinking any of this
when I pulled the knife out of the body on the ground. I was thinking something
more along the lines of “Oh, bloody hell. Not again.”
_____________________________________________
About the Author
Margo Bond Collins is the author of urban fantasy, contemporary
romance, and paranormal mysteries. She has published a number of novels,
including Sanguinary, Taming the Country Star, Legally Undead,
Waking Up Dead, and Fairy, Texas.
She lives in Texas with her husband, their daughter, and several spoiled pets.
Although writing fiction is her first love, she also teaches college-level
English courses online. She enjoys reading romance and paranormal fiction of
any genre and spends
most of her free time daydreaming about heroes, monsters, cowboys, and
villains, and the strong women who love them—and sometimes fight them. All of
her novels feature kick-ass heroines with varying degrees of inherent
monstrosity.
_____________________________________________
Connect with Margo
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Works Cited
Hamilton, Laurell
K. Circus of the Damned. 1995. New
York: Jove, 2002. Kindle.
---. Bloody Bones. 1996. New York: Jove,
2002. Kindle.
---. Guilty Pleasures. 1993. New York: Jove,
2009. Kindle.
---. The Killing Dance. 1997. New York: Ace,
2011. Kindle.
---. The Laughing Corpse. 1994. New York:
Jove, 2002. Kindle.
---. The Lunatic Cafe. 1996. New York: Jove,
2008. Kindle.
---. Narcissus in Chains. New York: Berkley,
2001. Kindle.
Lamplighter, L. Jagi. “Dating the Monsters: Why It Takes
a Vampire or a Wereguy to Win the Heart of the Modern It Girl.” Ardeur: 14 Writers on the Anita Blake,
Vampire Hunter Series. Ed. Laurell K. Hamilton. Dallas: BenBella Books,
2010. 43-56. Print.
Mittman, Asa Simon. Introduction. The Ashgate Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. Ed. Asa Simon
Mittman and Peter J. Dendle. Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2012. 1-16. Print.
Stuart, Alasdair.
“The Other Side of the Street: Anita Blake and the Horror Renaissance.” Ardeur: 14 Writers on the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Series. Ed. Laurell K. Hamilton. Dallas:
BenBella Books, 2010. 81-90. Print.
Wolfe, Gary K. Evaporating
Genres : Essays on Fantastic Literature. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press, 2011. Print.
I’m fascinated by the ancient Celtic idea of an ‘otherworld’ that is situated, not in some distant, unknown region of planetary space, but here on our own earth just out of sight and within our grasp…if we really believe in it and want it enough. 
Sometimes, the Celtic Otherworld was located in the middle of the Western Ocean, as though it were the 'double' of the lost Atlantis. Faerie women came from that mid-Atlantic world in magic boats like spirit boats, to charm away mortal men, or else to take King Arthur when he was wounded unto death. And on that island world there was neither death, nor pain nor suffering. Instead there was only immortal and unfading youth, endless joy and feasting.
I believe the truth is simpler and yet more complex. Otherworld exists everywhere. It is right here, alongside our mortal realm, just out of sight but easily within reach. All we need is a belief in its existence and a desire to go there.
The Otherworld in my forthcoming series for Harlequin Nocturne is a beautiful place inhabited by many races, including faeries, vampires, lycanthropes, phantoms and gods. Unfortunately, the constant battles between these warring dynasties threaten to spill over into the mortal realm.
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