CD Characters in Books etc.

[Anthony Simon]

When I was a teenager, like a lot of other people, I read Lord of the Rings. This is a book that still matters to me a lot and I like the film treatment too. One of the characters is Eowyn, the niece of the King of Rohan. When battles are to be fought, she's obliged to stay at home because women don't go to war. She decides to go anyway and dresses up as a man, Denhelm. She is rather a slight figure amongst the rest, but nevertheless carries it off.

When the reader (or audience) finds out that Dernhelm is Eowyn differs in the book and the films, but the key moment remains. This is when Theoden, the king of Rohan lies defenseless on the ground before the seemingly unkillable "Lord of the Nazgul", the leader of the Lord of the Rings' forces (He's a wraith who rides around on what looks like a gigantic pterodactyl). Dernhelm appears on the scene and attempts to defend Theoden. The wraith laughs at her saying "No living man may hinder me" (apparently there's a prophesy to this effect).

At which point:

Dernhelm laughed, and the clear voice was like the ring of steel. 'But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Eowyn am I, Eomund's daugher. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.'

And, indeed, she does dispatch him (with some help from her hobbit friend). I love it! It's always got to me in some quite deep way; I'm not clear exactly what. Part of it is the slightness of the woman warrior amongst men, which I've always identified with (even if I'm not quite so slight these days). But the other thing is I'm not clear if I'm identifying with her because, in some way, I'm a woman who has to pretend to be a man. And, in the story, this woman warrior turns out to be truly outstanding (even though women aren't suppose to be able to fight).

So...

Any other CD characters (in books, films etc.) who you like (hate...whatever)?

[Absaroka]

I do like how these prophecies have a way of coming true in unexpected ways.

Can't think of any CD heros, but I always liked Zena

Zari

[Susan]

Not a CD but in Robert Heinlein's Time Enough for Love there are a number of transgendered episodes. Elizabeth Libby Long started life as Andrew Jackson Libby. Lazarus Long - the main character - got the offer of being rejuvenated as a woman as he demanded a new experience before he would submit to rejuvenation.

Heinlein addressed trans themes a number of times in his various books. He is one of my favourite Science Fiction authors so I recommend you to explore his books.

[Anita]

We’ve written about CD characters in film before, and there’s a lot to write about there. But in literature—there’s not much at all. I read all kinds of books as a kid—adult books and juvenile books alike. With the exception of Huck Finn doing a poor impersonation as a girl, I can’t remember any stories where a man or boy tries to pass as a woman. Believe me, I would have noticed that, as a kid.

So I’ll be interested to what people come up with. Shakespeare had women try to pass as men in his plays—did he ever write of a man trying to pass as a woman? In the movies, men trying to pass as women is a great source of comedy, but it doesn’t seem to have made for good story-telling if I can’t think of at least one book off the top of my head.

Whitney Strieber wrote a novel about UFOs called Majestic, and in the story an Air Force pilot is transformed into a woman by an alien being who recognizes that the “woman within” is the essence of the pilot. Transformation occurs in science fiction, as Susan just pointed out. There, it’s safely removed from reality. It seems like it might be too threatening to write about the kind of transformation that we do.

[DonnaT]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bo ... er_persons

http://www.osmond-riba.org/lis/ElizTheatList.htm

Also:

In Tamora Pierce's The Song of the Lioness quartet of books, Alanna of Trebond disguises herself as a boy named Alan and goes to be trained in place of her twin brother to become a royal knight, a position only given to noble-born boys. Over the course of the four books, and others in the Tortall Universe, Alanna proceeds to fight for the kingdom as an accomplished knight both before and after the discovery of her true gender.

H. E. Bates's novel The Triple Echo is about a World War II army deserter who cross-dresses to avoid arrest. This was made into a film in 1972.

Bloody Jack is a historical novel by L.A. Meyer. It is centered on an orphaned girl in London in the early 19th century. After describing the death of the family of the protagonist and her entrance into a gang, the action starts out with the main character, Mary Faber, struggling to survive on the streets of London with the other orphaned children, led by a clever adolescent named Rooster Charlie who Mary learns to love as a brother and as a leader. The gang's life is rough as they try to survive each day on 18th century London streets. But then Charlie is murdered by a corpse seller named Muck, and Mary ends up taking Charlie's clothes and the name "Jack" to hide her identity as a girl. She quickly finds a position as a ship's boy. She is renamed 'Bloody Jack' after the crew of the HMS Dolphin boards a ship and she, still only about thirteen years old, shoots a plundered pistol to kill a pirate who is about to stab one of her fellow shipmates, Jaimy, who is paralyzed with fright. She comes back to the Dolphin covered in blood, and her proud shipmates nickname the little "boy" Bloody Jack.

Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld, is a steampunk novel in which Deryn "Dylan" Sharp disguises herself so she can join the Royal Air Service.

[Anthony Simon]

To add to Donna's stuff:

http://www.susans.org/reference/tsbooks.html

I've read The Passion of the New Eve by Angela Carter. This has a transsexual protagonist (a man who's turned into a woman unwillingly but it works out) and a Greta Garbo-like "ideal woman" who turns out to be a man. I felt I was being manouevred by this book - like it's written to make a feminist point and I was obliged to go along with it. But it's a proper novel, well-written and all that.

There's also some references in the above link to Dionysus (the Greek god) and Pentheus - a character in The Bacchae a play by Euripides about Dionysian rituals. Dionysus is often seen as an androgynous. The myth of his birth has his father, Zeus, carrying him in a surrogate womb to term. So there's quite a big TG thing there. Pentheus in the drama dresses up as woman to see women indulging in Dionysian rituals and gets torn to pieces by his mother as a result.

One interesting thing is that Greek drama (and so drama as a whole) came out of the womb of Dionysian ritual - all characters being played by men. So, like in Shakespeare, you've got men playing women on stage as a matter of course.

Anita, when I was a kid, I was in love with the Greek myths - one of my uncles gave me the Robert Graves collected version of them. In there there is reference to the story of Achilles - Because of a prophecy*(see below), he was disguised as girl by his mother and hidden amongst women. However the hyper-devious Odysseus got him to reveal himself and he went off to Troy to become a great hero - and die, just as the prophecy had suggested. That story always worried me - like the suggestion that there should be some sort of link between this (?)greatest of all warriors and CDing. But then I find all the people here who've been in the armed forces...

Susan, I have read a bit of Heinlein but not this. I'll see if I can find it.

....

*(From above)Yes, another of those, Zari. The Greeks were very keen on "fate". I seem to remember the Delphic oracle made a habit of uttering prophecies which could be taken a number of ways - to cover itself, as it were. But in a lot of Greek drama, character is fate. I like it when "fate" turns out to be quite other than what the protagonist had thought too.

[April Rose]

Keith Maillard, a Canadian writer, has two enjoyable novels with admirable androgynous/trans characters. Two Strand River is my favorite of the two, but The Knife in My Hands is worth reading as well. Both are about youthful relationships, primarily, but the protagonists happen to play for our team.

[Anita]

The Wikipedia page that Donna linked to lists works done after 1992, with the majority being written in the 2000s. There's no 'classic' novel on there that I might have read in 1962, for instance.

From looking at these lists, I have an assumption--it seems like disguising as the other gender is exciting when women do it, and less so when men do it. But transformation stories work with either gender.

[Lydia]

I have a vague recollection of reading an OZ book (not one by the original author), where the story centered on the wanderings of a boy. He eventually turned out to be an enchanted version of the Queen Ozma. The transformation of a boy into a girl somehow enchanted me at the time. I guess I was about 8 or 9 at the time and fixated on "borrowing" my mother's bra and stockings. I was severely whipped if caught, but it didn't stop me.

Hugs,

Lydia

[Anthony Simon]

Yeah, vague recollections....This whole thread is turning into an exercise, for me, in dredging up buried stuff from the past.

When I was a teenager (ca 13-15) I was obsessed with DC comics. One of these had "Superman's friend" Jimmy Olsen dressing up as a girl to test (I think) his fan club members. He seemed very convincing in his female guise. I remember wondering just exactly what this said about his relation to Superman. There's another Jimmy Olsen episode in the "Susans" list link, so maybe CDing was one those things that he did.

There's a book called the Twyborn Affair by Patrick White - a gay Australian who won the Nobel Prize. It's a really good book - has the ring of truth - which has as the central character a man who lives as a woman for a lot of the time. I think it's clear that the author intended him to be seen as gay. The book is apparently somewhat autobiographical in that:

White was one of those homosexuals who see themselves as part woman and part man: not so much a woman as to be effeminate, but enough to understand and share feminine virtues. He admired in others signs of his own ambivalence; men of unexpected gentleness, and women with masculine strength. 'True friendship,' remarked Eadith Trist, 'if there is anything wholly true - certainly in friendship comes - I'd say, from the woman in the man and the man in the woman.
Patrick White, A Life/David Marr

He was writing this book in 1978 (I read it about 15 years ago). During the writing process White said: 'I think the novel...will be good, though no doubt it will horrify a lot of people, and I shall be ostracised for the rest of my life.' To me this says a lot about why Anita wasn't seeing "classic" books with CDing central characters in 1962. It just wasn't acceptable. It took the sexual revolution of the 60s, gay and woman's lib to change that.

And White, already a Nobel Prize winner, writing in 1978 still had to worry.

[Added Later, more vague recollections: Also on the Susan's list is Orlando, her 1928 novel in which the extremely long-lived protagonist (100s of years) turns from a man to a woman in the middle. I've read this and it's a good book (and my memory is like a sieve). Because of the film, it probably now has canonical status - if not perhaps a "classic", it would be the sort of thing interested kids might now find. But this also relates to the changes in the 60s and 70s alluded to above - for the book was certainly around in 1962.]

[DeeDee]

When I was a young girl, I read Greek mythology quite a bit...it was very Cd. I must say though, often it didn't turn out well for the poor Cd. Hercules spent a year as a maid as one of his "trials", but now, in newer renditions, its not mentioned (pc correct). Other than the crazy Greeks, I can only think of one other Cd reference in a book and that would be Huck Finn....he spent a day in a dress. So thats it for me, but I'm sure there must be others~
Hugs all
DeeDee

[Anthony Simon]

In my endless quest for stuff in charity shops I bought an Oxford World Classics compilation of Ben Johnson's plays. Flicking through the introduction I was surprised to find:

Epicene [subtitle: The Silent Woman]

When the theatres [in England] were reopened in June 1660 [following their suppression during the Puritan/Civil War era 1642-] Epicine was the first play to be performed. Pepys recorded in his diary his view that it was 'the best comedy, I think that ever was wrote'...In 1989..the Royal Shakespeare Company mounted an exuberant production [dir. Danny Boyle later of Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire etc]...Epicene was played by John Hannah whose name appeared in the programme as Hannah John; most members of the audience thought he was a woman, so the revelation of his true sex at the end of the play caught the audience by surprise, as it must have done in the earlier productions, in which all the actors were male....

I just think it's interesting that the first play put on in England after the lifting of the Puritan religion-based ban was one with CDing at its core...

[Susan]

When I was a young girl, I read Greek mythology quite a bit...it was very Cd. I must say though, often it didn't turn out well for the poor Cd. Hercules spent a year as a maid as one of his "trials", but now, in newer renditions, its not mentioned (pc correct). Other than the crazy Greeks, I can only think of one other Cd reference in a book and that would be Huck Finn....he spent a day in a dress. So thats it for me, but I'm sure there must be others~
Hugs all
DeeDee

From a Classical Mythology book I have:

Caeneus (the a and e are fused but I do no know how to replicate it here) was originally a girl name Caenis (same) but was changed into a man by Neptune. He became one of the Argonauts and was later transformed into a bird. But in Elysium, he became a maiden again.

[DonnaT]

Alt 145

Cæneus

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26073/26 ... I_fableIII

[Vieja]

"Another Woman" is an excellent story about a man who leaves his family to get a sex change operation. After some years he/she decides to reestablish a relationship

with his children. In the end he even gets an embrace and hug from his wife. very well done. I don't know if there is a book as I have it in DVD form.


Vieja