Pratchett's Women: Unauthorised Essays on Female Characters of the Discworld

by Tansy Rayner Roberts

  Scenes where Magrat and her hapless ladies maid try to figure out the ridiculous clothes, her position on embroidery, and so on, are both funny and poignant. But it turns quite tragic when Magrat believes that she has to leave her old life as a witch and healer behind, ridding herself of all her magical paraphernalia. She literally steps out of one identity and into another. Understandably, it messes with her head.

  Pratchett is excellent at pointing out story tropes that are actually ridiculous if you try to fit ordinary people into them, and so Lords and Ladies comments not only on the traditional portrayal of queens in mythology, history and literature, but also on the shifting nature of women’s identity when they marry.

  Magrat’s personal journey comes to a head with her discovery of Queen Ynci, a warrior queen archetype no one had told her about, and then again with her encounter with the royal beekeeper, who tells her the most fascinating details about the selection criteria for queen bees. When the chips are down and her royal husband is in danger, Magrat gets to emulate both Queen Ynci and the queens of beekind, becoming a true ‘Slash! Stab!’ kickass heroine.

  Alongside Magrat’s personal journey is an ongoing narrative about how Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg are trying to deal with the actual hazard (elves returning to the Discworld) while keeping Magrat in the dark, because of their perception of her as someone who believes ballads over real life. They assume she is going to believe elves are cute and romantic. And yes, that is her first reaction, and yes it does almost get her killed, but mostly because the older witches never taught her otherwise. While this is deeply frustrating, it’s also a culmination of an ongoing character arc for the older witches over the last few books. They’ve never taken Magrat seriously, and Granny being wrong in this instance is vital to the plot. Because this is also the book in which Granny Weatherwax dies.

  She doesn’t die, of course—this is the book that made the ‘I Aten’t Dead’ sign so legendary—but this is one of several Discworld novels in which the narrative leads Granny into her final battle—and, against all laws of narrative, she survives it. This particular final battle is resolved because of a different Granny in her head, one who married young instead of becoming a witch. Pratchett deals with what he likes to call ‘the Trousers of Time’ quite regularly, but this is the most compelling of his stories about alternate universes, and how a little knowledge of them can go a long way. It’s important that Granny is wrong about Magrat, because it shows her vulnerability, which suggests that she might actually die.

  For many, many books, we’ve been told that witches and wizards know when they’re going to die—it’s one of the essential facts of the Discworld. Here, Pratchett provides a major fake-out that, crucially, is also not a cheat. It’s fascinating to see how he puts all the little pieces of this plot together, and how everyone’s narrative circles back to the same repeated elements, all tied up into a beautiful bow.

  Granny’s impending (not) death is prefigured by the introduction of Diamanda, a teen Mean Girl who wants to be a witch but thinks it’s all about black nail polish and looking glamorous. Because of this error in judgement, she lets loose sociopathic elves across the Ramtops.

  Pratchett conveys a girl clique startlingly well, with the other girls dancing around Diamanda and desperate to copy her (much like bees around a queen, oh yes, THEME I SEE YOU) and we get our first introduction to Perdita/Agnes Nitt, who only appears in a few scenes, but shows herself to be the most pragmatic of the girls. In a book that’s all about how Practicality Pwns Romance, it’s clear we’re supposed to like Agnes, and keep an eye on her in the future.

  It’s important that Granny is wrong about Magrat, but just as important that Magrat wins the day, because she has always been far more practical than the older witches gave her credit for. She’s romantic, but she has learned to harness that appropriately and not let it get in her way.

  The differences between the three witches are celebrated in this book, showing how each of their methods can be valid. In fact, the story is very much about relationships between women: pecking orders, cliques, love, rivalries, loyalty, generational divides, and how the memory of the young girl she was can very much affect the choices of an old woman.

  My favourite part of Lords and Ladies is when Granny takes the unconscious Diamanda to Magrat:

  ‘It’s all very well a potion calling for Love-in-idleness, but which of the thirty-seven common plants called by that name in various parts of the continent was actually meant? The reason that Granny Weatherwax was a better witch than Magrat was that she knew that in witchcraft it didn’t matter a damn which one it was, or even if it was a piece of grass. The reason that Magrat was a better doctor than Granny was that she thought it did.’

  Even though Granny has grossly underestimated Magrat’s ability to be sensible in the face of elves, she trusts her medical abilities over her own, which is a hell of a thing for a woman her age to admit.

  Towards the end of the book, Granny Weatherwax reveals that the inspirational Queen Ynci, who inspired Magrat to fight the elf queen, almost certainly never existed—and her spiky armour definitely is not authentic. But it doesn’t matter whether she was real or not: the function of folklore to warn and educate as well as to entertain infuses this book, from the surreal Midsummer Night’s Dream parody to the deadly morris dancers, the songs and traditions, and the vicious nature of the elves themselves.

  There’s also romance in the book—a romantic storyline for each of the witches. Our pragmatic, raunchy Nanny Ogg is courted by the younger and much shorter Casanunda the dwarf. He thinks he’s worldly and experienced until he gets a load of what’s going on in her brain. Then we get Ridcully the wizard being soppy and sentimental about what could have been between him and Esmeralda Weatherwax in another lifetime, almost getting them killed through his nostalgia. Meanwhile, Granny herself is hard-edged and practical, far more concerned with saving the world than getting all silly about that boy she once kissed. (Oddly, that reminds me somewhat of the relationship between Katniss and her boys in The Hunger Games.)

  Then there’s the newly betrothed Magrat and Verence. Their awkwardness and inability to have actual conversations with each other is balanced out by their slow journey towards being a married couple, which includes sending off for a book to teach them about sex since they are both inconveniently inexperienced in that department. This is a romance of two people being sensibly in love with each other, and I adore them. There should be more stories that show how some of the best romance can be practical, rather than all dramatic and eyes-across-a-crowded-room. Plus, when it comes down to it, Magrat saves her man. So there’s a bit of epic folksong love story in there too.

  Have I mentioned how much I love this book? It’s funny, clever, feminist and has so much to say about the power of story. The plot is perfect, down to the last detail. The relationship between beliefs and real magic is expressed powerfully, without suggesting that either of those are more important than the other. The adventure, the comedy and the romance all exist to serve the narrative of three extraordinary women.

  ‘Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.

  Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.

  Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.

  Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.

  Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.

  Elves are terrific. They beget terror.

  Elves are bad.’

  3

  Werewolf Glamour & the Sexing of Dwarves

  Guards! Guards! (1989)

  Men at Arms (1993)

  Feet of Clay (1996)

  I always loved the City Watch books of the Discworld series almost as much as those of the Lancre Witches. Vimes is a wonderful character, utterly broken down by life when we first meet him. He gradually pulls himself up by his bootstraps, but never loses his deep cynicism about the world.

  The books are packed with other memorable characters: Nobby Nobbs who is a big mass of p
ersonality quirks mushed together into a smelly vest, cautious Sergeant Colon with a quip for every occasion, and the utterly adorable Carrot, a man so damned GOOD that bluebirds sing whenever he walks down the street. He’s basically a Disney Princess. We also get some of the best appearances in the Discworld of the Patrician, one of the most compelling evil overlords ever to exist in fiction, and some of the best stories centred around the city of Ankh-Morpork. All this and airtight plots, mostly based around police procedural or murder mystery structures. Pretty good stuff.

  But what about the women?

  Guards! Guards!, the first book featuring the City Watch, is light on when it comes to female characters. The most central woman in the whole story is Sybil Ramkin, dragon expert. She emerges as a fascinating, fully realised and complicated female character despite (it has to be said) the narrative’s constant attempts to undermine her as a person and a woman. Each time Lady Sybil appears, she has to wade through a sea of fat jokes, posh lady jokes, lonely spinster jokes, and in some cases, all three at once. More than once, she is described vividly as something monstrous or other than human, including scenes from the point of view of the man she will marry in later books.

  But Sybil proves to be awesome. She’s not just aristocratic and dragon-obsessed and lonely and less than slender; she’s also smart, brave, funny, generous, and a good person. I don’t know how to feel about the final scene in which Vimes capitulates to her romantic expectations—it’s gorgeously written, but I rankled at him admitting so reluctantly that he finds her attractive. She is pretty much described as a perfumed siege engine rather than a person. But I love her, I love him, and I do think their later relationship is one of the best things about these books (gosh I hope it still is, better brace myself for the visit of the suck fairy) so I will forgive the author for giving Sybil such a problematic debut.

  The rest of the women in Guards! Guards! are invisible. We are told about Carrot’s mother, his old girlfriend Minty, his new sort-of-girlfriend Reet, and his innocent friendship with the local brothel madam Mrs Palm and her ‘many unmarried daughters’, all through scenes in which they don’t appear, via dialogue or his letters home. Likewise Mrs Colon is referenced but we don’t meet her; she’s basically an old school “Her Indoors” joke. The entire plot, about a man who uses another bunch of men to summon a dragon and overthrow the Patrician in favour of a fake king to rule them all, and the men who stop him, is a total cockforest. But this is a very early Discworld book, from the era where women were not getting roles other than sexy lamps, landladies and witches.

  As I discussed in Chapter 1, later Discworld books are far more inclusive of female characters, and that holds true for the City Watch volumes too.

  The most interesting gender issue of Guards! Guards! is dwarf sex. In the early days of the Discworld, there were several throwaway jokes about dwarves, and why people only ever see the ‘males’ of the species (ie: the gruff little men with large beards and pick-axes). Here, we learn that the female dwarves are all over the place, but are physically indistinguishable from male dwarves when clothed. While this is basically one long, multi-book bearded woman joke, Pratchett is to be credited in that he a) acknowledged how often in fantasy we see whole magical species which appear to be 100% male and b) eventually expanded on his joke about the tact required in dwarfish romances, exploring gender presentation, femininity and cultural norms of sex.

  Sadly none of that development is in this book. Here dwarf courtship is mentioned only because Carrot’s relationship with Minty is deemed inappropriate (he’s human, though adopted by dwarves, and more than twice her size). This is dealt with in an incredibly patriarchal way—while their mothers are referenced, it’s handled by the fathers. Pratchett has not yet worked out how a truly blind-to-gender society might function, and is falling back on default settings.

  The gender of dwarves is mirrored in a final revelation about the mighty dragon tormenting the city, which is that she’s a girl. In light of the other gender issues of this book, I found the handling of that revelation not just problematic but infuriating, not least because Pratchett serves up several fat jokes about the dragon INSTANTLY upon discovering her gender. Even worse, this revelation is treated as a reason to dismiss the valid danger of the dragon.

  Gender should not actually make a difference to the fact that this is a monster we have seen wantonly destroying people and psychologically tormenting several other people. As soon as we learn that the dragon is female and that Errol the tiny swamp dragon isn’t fighting her so much as courting her, however, we’re supposed to go awwww and laugh about the variation in their sizes (as is mirrored with jokes about Carrot/Minty and Vimes/Sybil) and everything’s okay. Sure, it’s nice for Errol that he escaped with his mass-murdering girlfriend, but I remain troubled by that particular statement about gender.

  Men at Arms, the second City Watch book, is notable for the introduction of Angua the werewolf. Sadly, Sybil’s role has been diminished, and there’s still no interesting exploration of dwarf sex.

  The premise of Men at Arms (quite apart from the plot, which is about assassins, clowns, gentlemen and the Patrician, mostly male characters) is that the Ankh-Morpork City Watch are undergoing two major administrative changes: Vimes is stepping down to marry Sybil and become a Gentleman of Leisure, and the Patrician has brought in reforms which demand a greater representation of diversity among the guards. Thus the new recruits are A Troll, A Dwarf, and A Woman. Though of course Angua being female is a red herring—while Carrot and those readers not paying close attention assume she was hired for gender diversity, she was actually hired as a werewolf, representing of the Undead.

  This inclusion of nonhumans in the City Watch will become a vital aspect of their identity in later books. The culture clashes are explored through several relationships, such as the growing tolerance/friendship of Lance-Constable Detritus (troll) with Lance-Constable Cuddy (dwarf) and particularly with the friendship and romance of Angua and Carrot.

  On my recent reread, with this essay topic in mind (and because she is generally the first person most readers cite as an Awesome Discworld Woman), I found myself scrutinising the portrayal of Angua. She’s handled unevenly in Men at Arms, which was a surprise to me as consistent characterisation is usually one of Pratchett’s great strengths as an author, and I remembered this as being her book. But it feels ike the author hadn’t decided what she was there for, and the male gaze is everywhere in the narrative. There are constant references to Angua ’s knockout gorgeous good looks; the descriptions of her fall of loose blond hair are especially irritating. The character is practical—she’d tie her damn hair back for work. Likewise I wasn’t happy about how often we are encouraged to think about Angua naked—sure, that’s a side effect of being a werewolf, but I was put off by the snigger-snigger tone of these scenes.

  It’s always uncomfortable to realise that a book is assuming its reader to be a heterosexual man.

  Angua’s point of view doesn’t enter the book until quite late in the narrative—at first she’s just part of the crowd, alternating between being the rookie who is sharper than everyone else (getting the dirty joke no one else does) to being the rookie who needs to have something quite simple explained. Her personality shifts for narrative convenience.

  Once her point of view finally arrives, and we learn about how she functions as a werewolf and her bemused thoughts about Carrot, her character comes beautifully to life. She’s smart and snarky, and her vulnerability about being a werewolf is countered by her resentment and sense of injustice. Angua really is a fantastic character; I was just surprised how long it took for us to get there.

  Another problem I had with the narrative of Men at Arms is Carrot’s blatant anti-undead sentiment. His character has been so untroubled by any other form of bigotry up until now, even those ingrained in him from being raised a dwarf. It seems odd that he is weirded out by Mrs Cake and her lot, but doesn’t bat an eyelid about trolls being people too. So A
ngua isn’t the only one whose character doesn’t always make sense!

  Their romance is handled effectively, and I like that it is about the meeting of two equals with radically different perspectives. The sex scene, which like all other Pratchett sex scenes is handled with so much discretion that you could blink and miss it, progresses both plot and character. Despite my reservations about aspects of this storyline, I like that Carrot has to suck up and deal with his prejudices—not just about the undead, but about women. In the end, getting his head around Angua’s strength and invulnerability is probably a bigger deal than her spending a few days a month as a canine.

  Angua doesn’t have to learn anything from this relationship because she’s already great; sadly, this relegates her to supporting character rather than protagonist. Once she decides to sleep with Carrot, we don’t get to see inside her head any more, and the story goes back to being about his reactions. It’s a pragmatic romance than a soppy one, and doesn’t assume a happy ever after. Still, Angua’s friendship with Gaspode the Wonder Dog brings out far more honesty and personality in her than any of her scenes with Carrot…

  It’s disappointing to me that Sybil takes such a back seat in this novel, especially considering that her wedding to Vimes forms the climax of the story. We mostly only see Sybil as background to his crisis about how to fit into her world. We don’t see them talk about, for instance, the fact that she has signed over her entire fortune to him (he finds this out from her bank manager), or that he has quit drinking to make her happy. It’s Carrot, and not Sybil, who comes up with the idea of making Vimes a Knight and putting him back in charge of the expanded Watch, which is disappointing because she is left with so little agency. Mostly she worries about him, from afar.