Pratchett’s Women
Unauthorised Essays on the female characters of the Discworld
Tansy Rayner Roberts
Contents
Fair warning: Here be SPOILERS!
1. The Boobs, The Bad and the Broomsticks
2. Slash! Stab! A Lesson in Practical Queening.
3. Werewolf Glamour & the Sexing of Dwarves
4. His Henpecked Voice
5. A Wonderful Personality and Good Hair
6. The Seamstress Redemption
7. Has Scythe, Will Teach School
8. Pole Dancers, Goblin Girls, and the Family Man
9. The Truth Has Got Her Boots On
10. Socks, Lies, and the Monstrous Regiment
Also by Tansy Rayner Roberts
Sheep Might Fly
Love & Romanpunk
Fair warning: Here be SPOILERS!
1
The Boobs, The Bad and the Broomsticks
The Colour of Magic (1983)
The Light Fantastic (1986)
Equal Rites (1987)
Mort (1987)
Sourcery (1988)
Wyrd Sisters (1988)
Pyramids (1989)
Guards! Guards! (1989)
Eric (1990)
Moving Pictures (1990)
Terry Pratchett is one of those writers that you can see noticeably improving and honing his craft as he goes. One of the aspects of his writing that improved massively over the years was his treatment of female characters, and I always meant to stop at some point to figure out exactly how it was that his portrayal of women changed and developed over several decades.
I started reading the Discworld books in the early 90s, when Small Gods (1992) was the latest release. This meant that I read all the books before that in (mostly) the wrong order, and all of the books after that in (mostly) the right order. So it took me some time to figure out what was going on with Pratchett’s women, and to wrap my head around the chronology.
The first ten books of the Discworld series are problematic in their portrayal of female characters, particularly the younger women. I certainly don’t think this was intentional on Pratchett’s part, but an unfortunate result of the fact that in these early books he was largely parodying fantasy worlds and tropes, and only just beginning to develop the Discworld into something more substantial and complex. You can certainly see from his novels that Pratchett was very much aware of some of the dreadful sexism in his source material, and that he often wrote female characters in direct response to problems he saw in the fantasy genre.
His apparent intentions to point out the silliness of the portrayal of women in fantasy, sadly, often backfired.
In these early Discworld books, we find Pratchett mocking the semi-clad, bosomy fantasy women who traditionally reward the handsome hero with their sexy selves. He does this at first by creating semi-clad, bosomy fantasy women who a) say bitchy things to the (not handsome) hero in the hopes that no one will notice they are still a cliché of the genre and/or b) amusingly fail to fall in love with the protagonist but instead reward a less obvious male character with their sexy selves. Examples of this phenomenon include Bethan in The Light Fantastic, the glamorous priestess who is cross about being rescued from a temple and chooses to hook up with the aged Cohen the Barbarian instead of giving Rincewind a second look; Conina in Sourcery, the glamorous warrior woman who chooses to hook up with the nerdy Nijel instead of giving Rincewind a second look; Ptraci in Pyramids, who is totally hot for Teppic and vice versa, until they discover they are siblings and he promptly hands her an empire and his best friend; Princess Keli in Mort who goes for the dweeby wizard (finally a hot girl with a taste for wizards, as long as they’re not the protagonist!) over Mort; and finally Ginger of Moving Pictures and Ysabell of Mort, who are constantly bitchy to their respective guys, but ultimately choose them. Oh and don’t forget Elenor of Tsort in Eric, a parody of Helen of Troy… the joke being that ten years of being a wife and mother will turn the most beautiful woman in the world into someone plump, ordinary and unworthy of a teenager’s sexual fantasies.
I should admit at this point that when I was fourteen and reading the Discworld novels for the first time, I adored Conina and Ptraci and Ginger and totally wanted to be just like them when I grew up. I look back on that now and shudder, just a bit. Teenage self, how about we aspire to be something other than a Josh Kirby cartoon character?
And oh, Josh Kirby. There’s that, too. Even when the writing in the Discworld books challenged and questioned the roles of female characters in fantasy, the original covers reinforced the clichés so hard that the boobs of the heroines could be classified as lethal weapons in their own right.
Pratchett writes a lovely paragraph in The Light Fantastic (1986), only his second Discworld novel, in which he describes Herrena the Henna-Haired Harridan, a barbarian warrior. He expands at length about how in other fantasy worlds she would be dressed in a lurid but impractical costume, but in fact she is wearing some quite sensible armour. Have a cold shower, chaps, the woman is appropriately attired.
This elegant and witty piece writing is completely sabotaged by the fact that the cover art, as with all Discworld covers for the first couple of decades, depicts Herrena bursting out of a tiny postage stamp bikini with enormous beach ball bosoms. This is a character who only appears for a page or two in the entire novel, and thus can only have been included on the cover in order to raise the number of scantily-clad breasts to four.
Sadly, that is what I see now when I look back on my favourite Discworld heroines of my teen years—good intentions that simply didn’t go far enough. The girls got to look pretty and say the occasional witty line, but they didn’t get personalities that ran deeper than their bra size. (Also, it has to be said, they all pretty much had the SAME personality, which was Difficult+Snarky+Beautiful.)
There are some exceptions. Lady Sybil, in Guards Guards (1989), is an unusual romantic interest in that she has a fully defined personality, gets lots of witty lines that aren’t mean, and is an equal match for the protagonist, Commander Vimes. She’s also a woman of mature years who is not lithe and pretty, and thus escapes much of the usual ‘I am standing here in my fur bikini being ironic about the sexist portrayal of women’ depictions of early Discworld women. She was developed more substantially later on, but this was a good start.
Then there are the witches. After two books featuring the same hapless wizard running away from trouble and occasionally colliding with astoundingly sexy women who don’t want to sleep with him, Pratchett turned his attention to feminist issues with Equal Rites (1987). This book tackled one of the most problematic ideas with which he had saddled his Discworld: that magic was segregated by gender, men becoming wizards and women becoming witches, with drastically different magical traditions. In Equal Rites, a girl is born with the magic and destiny of a wizard, and with the help of her mentor witch Granny Weatherwax, fights the system to be allowed into the Unseen University instead of simply settling for being a witch.
My teenage self hated this book.
Which is bizarre, because it sounds exactly like my sort of thing. But I think we’ve already established that there is a big difference between my teenage self’s reading tastes and my own.
The problem was that my teenage self was reading through the backlist of Discworld books in the wrong order, and having read the blurbs, I had completely fallen in love with the concept of Equal Rites. So I saved it for last. By the time I got to it, my expectations were through the roo
f, and I resented that it was not the book I thought it was going to be: it was about a child, not a teenage girl or adult woman (yep the fact that it wasn’t Conina-Ptraci-Ginger in a wizard’s hat seemed like a flaw to me at the time), and while the best thing about the book is indeed Granny Weatherwax, I’d already read her being far more awesome elsewhere. She seemed a pale shade of herself without Nanny Ogg or Magrat to grate against. I later revisited Equal Rites more than once, and came to terms with it, though I never learned to love it. Still, it hardly matters now that it is the least interesting book that Pratchett ever wrote about witches. (It’s #3 in a series of over 40 books, so that’s good news. He got better.)
Despite my lack of love for Equal Rites, I was disappointed over the years that we never returned to Esk’s story. No matter how many times we visited the Unseen University, she wasn’t there. We never saw how she turned out, and never got to see her as an adult. Until, of course, the Tiffany Aching book, I Shall Wear Midnight (2010), which also features cameos from Nanny Ogg and Magrat. I Shall Wear Midnight felt like a satisfying line was being drawn under the saga of the Lancre witches, and having that unexpectedly delightful resolution about Esk made me want to go back and revisit the other witches stories, from the beginning.
Thanks to the wonder of unabridged audiobooks, I reintroduced myself to Wyrd Sisters (1988), and immersed myself utterly in what is still, I believe, one of Pratchett’s most effective standalone books. You can praise Reaper Man and Small Gods all you like; I’ll take a Witches book over those two every time. Finally, Pratchett stopped satirising fantasy and looked further afield for material to poke sticks at… and he decided Shakespeare would be his first port of call! This glorious work amalgamates the best and worst aspects of the plots of Hamlet and Macbeth, producing one of my favourite fictional double acts of all time: Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg. Also, for the first time, Pratchett created a young female character (Magrat) with the same ruthless, complicated comedic touch that he brought to Rincewind, Mort and his other male protagonists.
Magrat isn’t a sexy treasure with which to reward the hero (or someone other than the hero). She’s a real person, warts and all, and her voice is every bit as compelling and sympathetic as it is nasal and long-suffering.
The three Lancre Witches, maiden, mother and crone, (listen to them argue about which is which!) are a masterful creation. It doesn’t matter what the plot is, any excuse to see them riff off each other, poke holes in the pomposity of the world and then save it anyway, is a genuine pleasure. The surprise in coming back to Wyrd Sisters is just how good the plot is—how cleverly the Shakespearian elements weave together, into an elaborate comedy of errors. Indeed, all of the Lancre Witch novel plots tend to be about stories, and how stories work in a world of magic. This meta-element raises them into being far more than amusing romps with complicated sentences (which I think is a fair description of all the Discworld books before Wyrd Sisters).
These are stories about witches who know that fairy tales exist; witches who know about the dangers of cackling too much and getting a reputation for gingerbread houses. Wyrd Sisters is about what happens when the legends and stories about witches are used against them as a weapon; and how they fight back. It was fascinating to reread this one so soon after reading I Shall Wear Midnight, because there are huge parallels between the plots of the two books, another reason why I thought at the time that Pratchett had deliberately written it as his last witch book, tying up the last remaining threads of the characters.
But back to Wyrd Sisters! The female characters are absolutely in command here, on both sides of the story—the Duchess is a magnificently awful villain, one in a long line of marvellous female antagonists set against Granny Weatherwax. She completely overshadows her husband, as is appropriate considering the parallels to Lady Macbeth.
I also want to mention that there are some fantastic male characters in this book. Pratchett writes interesting and complex male characters who work against the traditions of masculine fantasy heroes, the most obvious early examples being Rincewind, Mort and Vimes. One who often gets forgotten about, however, is the Fool in Wyrd Sisters.
Everyone else in the story is taking part in a comedy, up to and including the ghost of the dead king, but the Fool is in a tragedy, carrying an abusive past and a more recent emotional burden along with his unwavering, committed loyalty to Duke Felmet, the villain of the piece. Even when he’s being funny—and he is very funny—he’s utterly miserable. The romance between Magrat and the Fool, with its many wrong turns and awkward silences, is one of the most egalitarian and sincere love stories I have come across in fantasy fiction.
On the other side of the scale, Tomjon is a great creation, and I like what Pratchett says about destiny and kings through his character—for all this story is mostly about Shakespeare’s stories, it also nicely undercuts some of the sillier notions of fantasy fiction, notably the legend of the lost king turning out to be exactly what his kingdom needs despite no actual training, a trope that Pratchett also plays with to great effect in the City Watch books. The relationship between Tomjon and his sidekick, the playwriting dwarf Hwel, is a pleasure to read.
Ultimately, the best thing about this book is that triad of witches: Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick, each vibrant characters that leave the rest in the shade. The scene in which the three of them perform a huge feat of magic, recharging broomsticks and flying around the kingdom to transport it in time, is epic and breathtaking—though any scene with the three of them in it makes me happy, even if they’re talking about cups of tea and what kind of sandwiches they like best.
After my Wyrd Sisters reread, I moved straight on to Witches Abroad (1991), which has always been one of my favourites: this is the Discworld novel which most effectively deals with the role of the witch in stories and fairytales, and is pure Ogg-Weatherwax-Magrat hilarity from beginning to end.
Only when listening to Nigel Planer read the unabridged book did I realise something I had never entirely noticed before: this is a fantasy novel in which all the important characters are women.
This is a fantasy novel by a bestselling male author in which all the important characters are women.
We have the trio of Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat, travelling to foreign parts. We have the witches/cooks of Genua: Lilith, Mrs Pleasant, and Mrs Gogol. We have Emberella, the hub around which the story is constructed. But the only male characters of any note are a) a frog turned into a prince who rarely speaks and is basically a MacGuffin, b) a cat-turned-human who has no agency, barely any voice, and no personal needs beyond a bowl of fish-heads, c) a zombie, and, d) a dwarf one-note-joke about Casanova, who arrives in the final act and provides some brief comic relief. (Casanunda becomes a far more important character in later books, but is blink-or-you’ll-miss-him here.)
How rare is it to find a book that does this? How rare to have a story with so many women in it that you don’t even need a romance because the women already have plenty to do? In the fantasy genre. This revelation completely did my head in, forcing me to re-evaluate a novel that I had already loved for half my life.
Despite the glamour girls and snarky wenches which populate the first decade of Discworld, the witch books redeem this period for me as a feminist reader. They are packed with female protagonists who are as three dimensional, complicated, flawed and fascinating as Pratchett’s best male protagonists, and are allowed to be more important than the men in their stories.
But that’s not the good news. The good news is that after this, Terry Pratchett only got better at writing women—and in particular, at writing young women who had a soul as well as (or even instead of) a great rack. There was Angua, Cheery, Agnes/Perdita, Susan Sto Helit and Sacharissa Cripslock. There was even another book that featured all female protagonists (and no witches)…but I’ll get to that eventually.
2
Slash! Stab! A Lesson in Practical Queening.
Lords & Ladies (1992)
The greatest thing that fantasy as a genre can do is to say something important about our world and history, ideally while also commenting in some way on the traditions of the genre itself, and being a damn good read to boot. If you add to that a bunch of female characters driving the plot, my heart will certainly be won over.
Oh, yes. Lords and Ladies is that good.
In one sense, this book is the last third of an unofficial trilogy (with Wyrd Sisters and Witches Abroad) featuring the original trio of Pratchett’s witches: Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick. In another sense, it’s the beginning of another unofficial trilogy (with Maskerade and Carpe Jugulum) about the mortality and power of Granny Weatherwax, with bonus Nanny Ogg at every turn and the growing pains of Agnes ‘Perdita’ Nitt.
Lords and Ladies is also, like so many of Pratchett’s best books, a book about stories. Having already taken on Shakespeare and fairy tales, he addresses the roles of women in English folk songs and folklore. This is a story about cold iron and fairy glamour: of midsummer rituals and blood in the snow and dodgy innuendoes about Morris dancers and maypoles. It’s a story about how practicality trumps romance every time, if you’re lucky.
Most of all, while it has much to say about witches and wives and mothers, this is a story about queens.
I love the progression of Magrat in Lords and Ladies: she finds herself in the unexpected position of being engaged to a king, then awkwardly tiptoes around and through the question of what exactly a queen is supposed to do all day. There is a running commentary on the double standard, of how Verence can basically trot around ‘with his arse out of his trousers’, acting only slightly more regally than when he was a Fool. Meanwhile, the new queen has fashion requirements and antiquated traditions to juggle, not to mention the juxtaposition of high feminine status with officially sanctioned uselessness.
Pratchett's Women: Unauthorised Essays on Female Characters of the Discworld Page 1
