From Bangles to Broadswords

Ever the man in men! Let a woman know her proper place: let her milk and spin and sew and bear children, not look beyond her threshold or the command of her lord and master! Bah! I spit on you! There is no man alive who can face me with weapons and live, and before I die, I’ll prove it to the world. Women! Cows! Slaves! Whimpering, cringing serfs, crouching to blows, revenging themselves by – taking their own lives, as my sister urged me to do. Ha! You deny me a place among men? By God, I’ll live as I please and die as God wills, but if I’m not fit to be a man’s comrade, at least I’ll be no man’s mistress. … Better a short life of adventure and wild living than a long dreary grind of soul-crushing household toil and child-bearing, cringing under the cudgel of a man I hated.
– Dark Agnes, in Robert E. Howard, Sword Woman

A quick follow-up to my Pictish post:

Red Sonya or Dark Agnes Robert E. Howard was certainly no feminist; women in his stories exist mainly to be rescued or to be ravished, or both (and often both by the hero). But toward the end of his writing career he experimented more and more frequently with increasingly strong and independent female heroines. A first glimmer comes with the character of the pirate Helen Tavrel in his 1928 story “The Isle of Pirate’s Doom”; Tavrel starts out as a tough warrior, but ends up a weepy rescue object – a fairly typical arc in genre fiction even today (recall Maid Marian’s character arc in the Kevin Costner Robin Hood). Still, the story does present a mostly-independent heroine favourably; it was a start.

And then came the period 1934-36, the last three years of Howard’s life, and the years in which he created his four most memorable heroines: Belît in “Queen of the Black Coast,” Valeria in “Red Nails” (no, it’s not a reference to nail polish – nor, surprisingly enough, to blood either), Red Sonya (not to be confused with the chainmail-bikini-wearing comic-book character Red Sonja, who was inspired by both Sonya and Agnes, but not created by Howard) in “Shadow of the Vulture,” and Dark Agnes in “Sword Woman,” “Blades for France,” and the unfinished “Mistress of Death.” (It’s regrettable that the Dark Agnes stories, the most feminist of the lot, aren’t online. They can be found in the now out-of-print anthology Sword Woman – which includes the abomination of Gerald Page’s attempt to complete “Mistress of Death.” If you didn’t know where Howard stopped and Page started – for the record, Page takes over with the paragraph beginning, appropriately enough, “Stuart led the way” – it would be easy enough to guess, since Agnes’s character abruptly goes from confident and assertive to timid and passive. A new – and hopefully Page-less – Agnes anthology is in the works from Wandering Star.)

the impractically clad Red Sonja Why this sudden turn to powerful heroines in 1934-36? Some have suggested the possible influence of Howard’s independent-minded friend Novalyne Price, whom he got to know during this period; others have pointed to the possible impact of the Jirel of Joiry stories of C. L. Moore (which in turn were influenced by Howard’s earlier work); we know that Howard praised Moore and sent her a copy of “Sword Woman,” which she liked.

Howard also seems to have taken pains to differentiate his four warrior women from one another rather than imposing a single stereotype on them all. Some are grim, others cheerful; some cautiously thoughtful, others rashly impulsive; some straightforward, others devious; some sexually aggressive, others resolutely celibate. Only one, Dark Agnes, is in self-conscious rebellion against patriarchy per se (it’s often been observed that if the Dark Agnes stories had been written by a woman, she would have been accused of being a “man-hating feminist”), and her tales are moreover the only ones in which the female lead has center stage rather than sharing equal billing with a man.

Valeria’s status as Conan’s sidekick, in constant need of rescuing – from, inter alia, a lesbian vampire – somewhat weakens her status as heroine (though she is certainly more self-sufficient than Helen Tavrel); but Belît is closer to being Conan’s equal partner, while Sonya and Agnes are more likely to be rescuing other people than to require rescuing themselves. With all the different Howard anthologies coming out these days, it would be nice if someone were to collect his various warrior-women tales (Helen Tavrel, Belît, Valeria, Sonya, Agnes, and any others I’ve missed) in a single volume.

Edit:

Oh, I’ve remembered another — Ayesha in “Road of the Eagles.” I didn’t initially think of her because, although she’s handy with a knife, she’s not strictly a “warrior woman,” at least by profession; instead she falls into the category of “scheming slave girl,” a role usually assigned in genre fiction of this period either to villains or to rescue/ravish objects. But Ayesha is neither; she’s a sympathetically portrayed, courageous woman, with a cool head and an iron will, who makes all the plans as her male lover tags along in a daze. In keeping with Howard’s avoidance of fitting all his heroines into a uniform mold, Ayesha does it all out of love for her male rescue object , giving her a different motivation from all the others.

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7 Responses to From Bangles to Broadswords

  1. Anon74 August 9, 2008 at 12:19 pm #

    Hey Roderick, I found a interesting interview with Thomas Frank on DN Now! railing about how Bush and Abramhoff want the “market to be the nexus of society”:

    http://www.democracynow.org/2008/8/8/stream

    Frank also has a new book which he discusses with the same theme.

  2. Richard Garner August 10, 2008 at 12:13 pm #

    Interesting subject. I started reading thinking “but what about Belit”? But I saw you had it coverred.

    I wonder how many answers may be provided by looking at Howard’s relationship with his own mother. Didn’t he spend most of his short life living alone with her?

  3. Administrator August 10, 2008 at 10:32 pm #

    and any others I’ve missed

    Oh, I’ve remembered another — Ayesha in “Road of the Eagles.” I didn’t initially think of her because, although she’s handy with a knife, she’s not strictly a “warrior woman,” at least by profession; instead she falls into the category of “scheming slave girl,” a role usually assigned in genre fiction of this period either to villains or to rescue/ravish objects. But Ayesha is neither; she’s a sympathetically portrayed, courageous woman, with a cool head and an iron will, who makes all the plans as her male lover tags along in a daze. In keeping with Howard’s avoidance of fitting all his heroines into a uniform mold, Ayesha does it all out of love for her male rescue object , giving her a different motivation from all the others.

  4. Administrator August 10, 2008 at 10:36 pm #

    Anon74,

    about how Bush and Abramhoff want the “market to be the nexus of society”

    At last those deeply closeted libertarians have been outed.

  5. Administrator August 10, 2008 at 10:42 pm #

    Richard,

    I wonder how many answers may be provided by looking at Howard’s relationship with his own mother. Didn’t he spend most of his short life living alone with her?

    Yes. I don’t know that much about his mother, other than that he committed suicide when she died. (But that makes it sound as though she was more important to him emotionally than perhaps she was; the spirit in which he committed suicide, I gather, was less “I’m going to kill myself because life without mother will be unbearable” and more “I’m going to kill myself because my life has been generally unbearable for a good long while, and only my obligation to take care of my ailing mother has kept me from an early escape.”)

  6. Paul Herman August 21, 2008 at 8:14 am #

    I must admit to some shock. Two posts on REH, by someone of obvious intelligence, who has actually done his homework and isn’t out to argue just one side. Not bad at all. Though completely atypical of REH studies, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.

    When in need of REH information, bibliographic, biographic, pretty much any facet, feel free to contact myself or the other board members of The Robert E. Howard Foundation, a charitable non-profit corporation that is getting the rest of the works into print, and helping out with REH’s home town of Cross Plains, TX. http://www.rehfoundation.org. If you haven’t read them yet, the Collected Letters are particularly insightful.

    And for the record, your statement about his suicide is spot on with my own conclusion, after looking at as much information as I could lay hands on. His father, the doctor, lived with them as well, though he was on the road quite often.

  7. Roderick September 16, 2019 at 3:42 pm #

    2019 addendum: While my idea of a volume that collects all of REH’s warrior-women stories has yet to be realised, the Dark Agnes stories have finally been collected (without the ersatz continuations — actually there were two different ersatz continuations by different authors, but both have been excluded, which is very much fine by me) in a new, completely different collection also called “Sword Woman,” which also includes inter alia the Ayesha and Red Sonya stories. (Despite what the title might imply, the unifying theme here is not “warrior women” but rather “mostly realistic adventures taking place in actual recorded history,” which is why Belit, Valeria, etc., aren’t included. There’s a lot of overlap here with the REH anthology “Lord of Samarcand and Other Adventure Tales of the Old Orient,” now out of print, but that one didn’t include Dark Agnes.)

    https://www.amazon.com/Sword-Woman-Other-Historical-Adventures/dp/0345505468/?tag=praxeologynet-20

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