madwoman in the attic

in recent weeks, i've been reading the madwoman in the attic. while i haven't read every book discussed in the analysis, i've been enjoying it thoroughly. i can see how from a modern perspective it fails to account for i guess perfect intersectionality, but that's honestly something to be expected, given that it's kind of a founding piece of work for the genre it's in. i feel like the ideas presented, of women in fiction being either on the extreme of monster or angel, are ones that are relatively understood at a subconscious level when people approach female characters in fiction. i also had that sort of understanding of there being a moral extreme that female characters sat on; in the things i've been into recently, i've noticed that too. there's some grace and characterization you can extend to an author by assuming that bigotry is an intentional thing on their part and is meant to be part of someone's characterization, but at some point, it does start plainly being the author's own biases. i won't make the excuse that it's just age or inexperience or whatever. it's just a fact and kind of stays that way. regardless, i like the book, and its ideas. its snow white read was very intriguing, and it's a lot clearer about the subject than i could hope to be.

anyway, aside from that, it got me thinking a lot about the treatment of women in fandoms. in posts i've made wayyyy earlier talking about my distaste for many "yuri fans" (in quotations since i dislike the treatment of yuri as a genre, but that's a different thing), i've mentioned the tendency to make women angels. i think that it's more common nowadays to find treatment in fandoms of women as calling them angelic, because this has interplay with an obsession with morality and the notion that liking things that are moral somehow extends to your own morality. i think this also stems out of an unwillingness to genuinely interact with the female character. it's a lot easier to write everything off as just them being a "girlboss" than having to interact with their own neuroses and motivations and flaws. the argument originally presented was more of an authorial issue of men turning women into either seductive monsters or self-less mothers (& also how this reservation of writing impacted female authors' mindsets and works), but it's still very applicable to the treatment of women by fandom collectively