I’ve had a few family issues keeping me away from writing and the blog and for those who are interested, I haven’t been near any of the bushfires, nor do I know anyone in them. So yeah. I anticipate a return to normal writing and blogging next week. I’ve got two story ideas I’m mulling over, so…

On topic: All stories, whether it’s mentioned explicitly or not, have a societal framework underlying the interactions of the characters. In a romance, this might take the form of a subtle mention when the heroine muses that she’ll be hearing no end of the scandal when the word gets around that she’s pregnant by the rich playboy. Right there, you can tell that to be pregnant outside of marriage is not a good thing in this society the heroine is in.

Societies change, that’s inevitable. Perhaps that’s cliché, but it’s no less true. We’ve seen evidence of it in the real world. A woman’s place used to be in the house with the children. Those times were a little more than a century ago. But now a woman’s place is not in the house with the children; she has the freedom of choice to choose what she will do with her life.

To continue with my example: women took care of children, did the cooking, washing, all of that; that was the status quo and it went back in history for centuries. Then came the Modern Women’s Liberation in the 1960s-1970s and as time passed, the status quo began to change. That’s pretty simplified; according to some friends, there had been activists as far back as the 1600s and the modern lib movement has roots in a Susan B Anathony in the 1860s and Wyoming was the first state of America to allow women to vote, a process completed by 1919, when women could vote in the US totally.

I think the first point is made: In some aspects societies can and will remain unchanged for centuries; but change can and will occur, provided there is sufficient motivation. (I don’t think motivation is quite the word I want, but the word I want eludes me, so motivation it will be.)

Margaret Mead was an anthropologist–an anthropologist being someone who studies humans from all over the world, from all times and tries to understand them. In her lifetime, she visited a island called Manus, where she observed that: the children did nothing but play until tired, then rest, then play again; the older children had no responsibilities; the parents chose brides for their sons and had to pay a great deal of money to the girl’s parents so their son could marry the girl; the son had to repay this bride price to his parents; most boys felt trapped and resentful; and most couples were very unhappy as neither knew how to take care of one another.

For the people of Manus, change did come and they were much happier. When Margaret Mead heard of how they were now happier, she returned to see why. It had taken a war–the American soldiers had landed on Manus and were taught how to live on it. In return they educated the people of Manus about America and the people of Manus saw how what they were doing was causing their unhappiness. They resolved to treat their children differently.

In my opinion, the arranged marriage and bride price is the one thing in Margaret Mead’s observations that people who live in Western society would be most bothered by, because the concept is far removed from our own. Yet these people of Manus accepted that this was how things worked.

And that’s my second point. On the whole, the people of a society accept–for one reason or another–how things are; they don’t step up and say it should change.

For Diminishing Hope, Book One of The Virtue Octology, my NaNoWriMo 2007, I created a society where women had a strictly defined place. When I chose to discuss the book’s plot with some friends, I encountered a lot of outrage over the strictly defined place I’d chosen. I didn’t mind, I’d expected there would be a lot of ‘That’s wrong’ and similar expressions of disapproval.

What I didn’t expect is that the friends would be unable to accept the second point I made above. They kept on about how what I was describing was wrong. I made the point that today, no one would let a twelve year old girl marry anyone, yet centuries ago, a twelve year old girl was considered old enough to marry and usually married someone at least a decade older. And that was wrong, too. Never mind that it was centuries in the past, never mind that societies of that time married them off at that age because they were considered ready to marry and have children… it was wrong.

Which prompts my third point (which extends off the second point): For the most part, when a society accepts something, it is what it is; it’s neither good or bad. Applying such labels is a value judgement usually placed by outsiders, who are using their own societal standards, which do not apply.

An example in fiction that occurs to me is Matthew Reilly’s The Six Sacred Stones. There’s a tribe in Africa called the Neetha. In the book, one of the Neetha claims one of the female characters as his own. However, his claim can be contested–in a fight to the death. Such are the laws of the Neetha and they have adhered to them for thousands of years.

I’m not saying you can’t feel that something is wrong with a society; I myself am trying to get people to feel that way in Diminishing Hope as a way of investing them into the story–make them think, ‘This is awful, this should be ended… what happens to bring the end about? Is there even an end?’ and hopefully keep them reading, wanting more. I think the feeling shouldn’t get in the way of accepting that it is what it is, though. I feel it’s important to be able to keep your own feelings separate, to be able to acknowledge that ‘insert name of society’ has their own customs and ways which are different to your own without letting the emotions invoked by it get in the way.

This entry was posted by Alex Collins on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 at 7:50 PM and is filed under Themes, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.