I would have said that Tolkien didn't really have gender issues so much as a general failure to think about gender critically. Which I can attribute laregly to his time, and largely to the source materials he loved -- if you want to, it's easy to pay attention only to the guy-materials in a lot of OE sources.

You know, Shelob was going to be a spider, and that caused her being female to be the default -- and all of the ick and grossness in her portrayal followed as a logical/culturally normal assumption, I should think. Certainly, as a portrayal of feminine evil, she's rather a failure: her big act is to stab people with a big sharp pointy object located in the general area of the gonads.

I imagine if you wanted to posit Shelob as a monstrous-feminine creature appropriating signifiers of masculinity for her own evil feminine uses, there's an argument to be made in that general direction, but it would need to take into account all the other creatures -- male, female, genderless -- that have stabbed Frodo with big sharp pointy objects.

Frodo gets stabbed rather a lot in the course of the trilogy. So if you wanted to argue in favor of the monstrous feminine, you'd probably also have to examine the use of St. Sebastian imagery in undermining traditional concepts of masculinity.

Which would make a really good paper, but I'm not sure it would all come out with the Red Arrows of Authorial Psychodrama all pointing in the same direction.

Paul being a Tolkien geek, we discussed Tolkien and gender issues at great length last night (actually, because Paul was picking his nits, it was more a discussion of race and class issues, with some mention of gender). They're the same sort of ones (the gender ones) I see in Wodehouse, when I think about it for longer than half a minute (warning, no coffee here).

Where Tolkien (no matter how the wives have affected the men, or no matter how heroic some of his women have been) disturbs me is not the lack of women, but the feeling of women, when present, as foreign or other, so that it is a war story about men doing things isn't my problem with it. Your mileage may, obviously, vary.

Apart from the entire cast being amazingly talented, they're also really freaking pretty.

Gah! Naked feet! Naked feet of Dom!!

I can't look at Billy Boyd's anymore face without getting melancholy.

Where Tolkien [...] disturbs me is not the lack of women, but the feeling of women, when present, as foreign or other

Oh, I guess I do buy that. He does set up every woman as having a completely different mind than one might find in a man's body. I would have said he found women sort of vaguely mystifying, and sometimes in nice ways (Galadriel, Luthien). But, I guess, that sort of attitude doesn't say very much to me about Tolkien as a person/writer, as much as it does about his particular slice of English donnish 1940s culture.

So, I guess I can't say that he was working out his capital-I Issues int he female characters he wrote; certainly, I don't see any particular axes he is grinding in a consistent way; but I'll give that his writing of women hasn't aged well.

Actually, his attitude towards women is the exact thing I had such a problem with in the writing of the Angel episode "Billy". I can forgive that kind of fuzzy thinking in a writer in 1952; less so in a work written in 2002.

And cereal, because I crossposted with Nutty...

A little way ahead and to his left he saw suddenly, issuing from a black hole of shadow under the cliff, the most loathly shape that he had ever beheld, horrible beyond the horror of an evil dream. Most like a spider she was, but huger than the the great hunting beasts, and more terrible than they because of the evil purpose in her remorseless eyes. Those same eyes that he had thought daunted and defeated, there they were lit with a fell light again, clustering in her out-thrust head. Great horns she had, and behind her short stalk-like neck was her huge swollen body, a vast bloated bag, swaying and sagging between her legs; its great bulk was black, blotched with livid marks, but the belly underneath was pale and luminous and gave forth a stench. Her legs were bent, with great knobbed joints high above her back, and hair that stuck out like steel spines, and at each leg's end there was a claw.

That's the particular passage I'm thinking of, Nutty.

But PMM, if the beast was to be a spider, because he hated them, and for it to do what he had to it had to be a she, how does that affect the reading of the passage?

If you switch everything to "he", does it lose any coherence past the biological?

Ah, the cross-postiness. But Ple -- don't you think that's a reasonably accurate description of a spider from someone who is phobic of them? (I.e. heavy on the yucky.) I mean, if you blew up a normal garden spider to gigantic proportions, I would probably have described it mostly the same way. Without the genedred pronouns, I suppose, because normal garden spiders don't have consciousness or a major part to play in a novel.

Can you interpret for me specifically what makes that passasge disturbing to you?

If you switch everything to "he", does it lose any coherence past the biological?

To me? It seems to, but I've been filtering that passage through Freud for so long that it's hard to take that filter off.

That's the particular passage I'm thinking of, Nutty.

So the analysis is that this is his wife or his mother and not his attempt to describe a horror of the ancient world, channelled through his singular scholarship of the norse sagas? Ick. And no thanks.

Heh. X-posty with the avowedly freudian analyst

FWIW, I never interpreted Shelob as a manifestation of Tolkien's gender issues. Just his spider phobia.