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

by Tansy Rayner Roberts

  5

  A Wonderful Personality and Good Hair

  Maskerade (1995)

  Carpe Jugulum (1998)

  Maskerade makes me cranky that Magrat’s marriage has pushed her out of the narrative of the Lancre witches, but it’s hard not to be delighted about the arrival of Agnes ‘Perdita’ Nitt. She’s a fantastic character, one of Pratchett’s most interesting and nuanced portrayals of a younger female protagonist.

  Agnes is fat. And while Pratchett’s comic touch is very much in evidence, he brings such empathy to his depiction of Agnes that, even when fat jokes are flying around, she herself is never treated like a joke. This is an incredibly rare thing in fantasy fiction, where fat women are rarely seen (unless they are villains, motherly matrons or jolly service industry professionals) and young fat women don’t exist at all.

  There are so many things to like about the portrayal of Agnes in this book. For a start, we don’t get the clichéd emphasis on how she eats, or an ingrained narrative assumption that she is the size she is purely through over-eating or laziness. I also appreciate that while the reader is often confronted with the quite awful social ramifications of being a fat girl, it’s never entirely clear-cut how much the various perceptions surrounding Agnes reflect reality.

  Nanny Ogg, for example, a larger lady herself, muses on how Agnes is a better bet for joining the witches because she’s less likely to lose her maiden status than so many other village girls… but almost in the same breath acknowledges that fatness is no particular barrier to finding a husband in the Ramtops, especially if that corresponds with a talent for cooking. Nanny’s own figure has never put men off—even at her advanced age, she’s batting men away with her broomstick.

  Likewise, while the plot revolves partly around Agnes being less ‘stage-worthy’ than the tone-deaf but thin and beautiful Christine, and thus having to provide her with a fake singing voice from behind the curtain, we hear regularly about the famous (fat) opera singer Gigli, and how she is desired for her luscious appearance as well as her beautiful voice.

  The undercurrent of the story is that it’s not Agnes’ weight getting in the way of her happiness—it’s Agnes. She certainly is discriminated against because of her weight, and experiences some hurtful and embarrassing moments throughout the story, her ACTUAL problem is the wonderful personality that everyone keeps going on about (‘a wonderful personality and good hair’ being a euphemism for ‘not thin enough, not pretty enough’).

  Agnes doesn’t leave the Ramtop Mountains and come to the big city to audition as an opera singer because she is fat, or can’t get a boyfriend, and it becomes evident pretty quickly that it’s not entirely because she dreams of musical stardom, either. Opera isn’t her first choice, it’s just something to do. She is desperate to find herself an independent future that has nothing to do with the witches Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, who are looking for a third member of their coven—but even before the two of them strike out to follow her to the big city, she can’t escape the witches because she is already one of them.

  At every turn, it’s not Agnes’ weight that is the problem, but her brain. She can’t turn off the cynical voice that always says the wrong thing; the sharp inner bitchiness that sees all the daftness in the world for what it is. This, clearly, is what made it less likely she would find a boy to lose her “maiden” status too, and not her full figure.

  The joke is repeated (a touch too often) that inside every fat girl is a thin girl trying to get out— the one inside Agnes is called Perdita, the pseudonym she chooses for the theatre. Perdita is her imaginary ideal self.

  Agnes is a very intelligent girl who grew up in a village where getting married was the main concern of her peers, and she has escaped to a world where music and looking pretty are the only concern, because the fate of an intelligent girl in her village (becoming a witch) feels dreadful to her. Inventing ‘Perdita’ and joining the opera allows her to feel she has some control over her fate and her identity.

  Gradually, as the shine of opera starts to wear off and Agnes discovers that they’re all basically crazy and making her crazy too, serving the capricious god that is ‘opera’ starts to feel as onerous as serving Nanny and Granny as their third witch. Right on cue, in the elder witches march to demonstrate to Agnes that being a witch isn’t as terrible a life as it looks from the outside. Being a witch means being the smart person in the village who is allowed to say the wrong thing any time they like, and has the ability to help people even if they don’t think they want to be helped.

  Being a witch means being the person who says ‘WHY must the show go on?’ when everyone else is running around like headless chickens and enjoying the melodrama. In short, everything Agnes wanted from her mythical ‘Perdita’ is waiting for her in the job description of ‘witch’. She just has to stop sabotaging herself.

  There’s a lot of pantomime and humour in the portrayal of the two elder witches, but it’s nice to get some insight into the characters of Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg as a unit, as friends, and also as women who probably shouldn’t spend too much time alone together. I love to watch the different ways they approach the mystery: Granny goes directly for the insides of people’s heads, while Nanny watches their body language and behaviour.

  The sympathy they feel for Mrs Plinge, the woman who knows pretty much everything that’s going on in the theatre and suffers through her own personal tragedy every day, comes across clearly, and that’s important because it tells us that Agnes is at least partly wrong about them.

  I’m uncomfortable with the characterisation of thin girls in this book—though I will admit to having a soft spot for the line about how the ballerinas are crazed with hunger. It would be nice to have a book that deals positively with fat female characters without judging and deriding thin women.

  Christine’s thinness gives her unfair advantage over Agnes, though she is not an unsympathetic character. Her presence shows us how thin privilege works: Agnes is overlooked and misses out on opportunities, while opportunities are thrown in Christine’s way. Christine takes her ‘luck’ for granted without questioning its source, and is often thoughtless in how she accepts the rewards for her beauty, but is never deliberately cruel. Those who can see how much of her ‘luck’ is due to her beauty tend to resent and despise her for it, or want to possess her because of how she looks.

  Christine’s innocence and generosity is what salvages the character from being a Pretty Girl cliché—she is a good friend to Agnes, despite the competitive situation they are in (and Agnes, thanks to the urging of Perdita, is less than a good friend to her). Agnes might be the one who is blessed with ‘a good personality’ but of the two, Christine is the only one who behaves like a nice person. Of course, Christine can afford to be nice, because everything she ever wants falls into her lap…see? NUANCE. I am impressed once again to see a story this complex about the interactions of women told by a male author.

  In the end, while we know that Agnes has decided to submit to the witches and join them, she is not prepared to go home on their terms. The final scene of her drenched in mud and rain while they speed home in the comfy coach shows her stubbornness and tenacity, as well as her general tendency to cut off her nose to spite her face. She is going to be a very different kind of third witch than Magrat.

  And, speaking of Magrat…

  It’s funny how motherhood completely changes your perspectives on what’s relevant, and important. I remembered that Lords and Ladies was the last time Magrat got to shine, and that once she got married, she disappeared out of the narrative of the Lancre witches. I also remembered that Carpe Jugulum was mostly dull, with a few good Granny Weatherwax bits, and not much else of interest.

  How wrong I was!

  Carpe Jugulum is one of those Discworld books (like Hogfather) where the mystery doesn’t work as a murder mystery should; it’s far more powerful and effective in the reread when you know what’s going on. Granny Weatherwax is under attack from som
e very smooth vampires who are determined to take control of Lancre from under her nose. She responds by disappearing, apparently surrendering her power, leaving the three remaining witches in the kingdom to come together and save the day.

  The sneaky twist being that when the vampires bite Granny and leave her for dead, she manages to infect them instead of vice versa, so they start saying things like ‘I can’t be having with this’ and craving tea. She turns a whole pack of slavering ageless vampires into cranky old ladies.

  This is a brilliant narrative choice. Our culture now has many, many stories of a woman getting the better of a pack of vampires, of which Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the most iconic example. Any attempt to subvert that popular trope would result in the same horrid double subversion that turned Sergeant Angua into a damsel in Jingo.

  Here, Pratchett subverts the ‘female victim gets the better of the vampires’ trope by employing a completely passive method—Granny literally lies down and lets them drink her blood—and allows the results to be devastating. It’s one of the best examples I can think of how the ‘strong women characters’ trope has rendered so many types of female strength invisible—any female hero who acts other than violent and aggressive (while also being sexy) is often derided by critics as a weak, passive or sexist character, while those who act in traditionally masculine/active ways are treated as the only female heroes worth celebrating. This is especially the case, sadly, in SF and fantasy media.

  I discovered to my surprise that this is now my favourite Granny Weatherwax book, despite the lack of her in a fair chunk of the story. Whenever she does appear, she is mesmerising. Her not-quite-friendship-let’s-say-alliance with the hapless priest Oats is compelling to watch, especially because he is the only person not in awe of her reputation—he perceives her as an old lady who needs help (which for once is true), and has to figure out ways to circumvent her ego in order to help her, because she can’t accept that she is vulnerable.

  Oats is probably the most interesting male character ever to interact with the witches, not least because each of them react very differently to him: with Granny he is the outsider who sees her more clearly than anyone else; with Nanny there is ongoing religious disagreement because of his Church’s history of burning witches; and with Agnes there is a sort-of-maybe romantic tension, which remains largely unaddressed because they are equally incapable of allowing their interest to rise above subconscious level. (Plus she spends most of the book batting a hot vampire away with a broomstick.)

  But there are four witches in this story, not three. Magrat begins the story as the ex-witch, concentrating on her new baby’s christening and other queen things. But as the vampires take over the kingdom and her husband (yet again!) falls victim to magical predators (let me tell you how much I love the constant damselling of Verence in these books) Magrat has to put on her big witch knickers, strap her baby to her back and save the day.

  As someone who has been doing the mother-of-small-children thing in recent years, I’ve become fascinated with how rare it is to see mums with babies on the front line in magical stories, and how they deal with it when it happens. (I really do have to get around to that article I’ve been meaning to write on Gwen Cooper and working motherhood in Torchwood: Miracle Day.)

  The problem with incorporating babies into magical adventure stories is that there is little excuse, most of the time, for taking the baby into danger. Unless of course, there is nowhere safe to leave the baby, which is the situation here! Young Esme is much safer strapped to her mother’s back, with Nanny Ogg at her side, than being babysat by anyone else in a kingdom full of vampires. Indeed, getting the baby to safety becomes a driving part of the plot, leading them into worse danger.

  There’s an ongoing thread about how Magrat isn’t a virgin any more, and thus understands a lot more of Nanny Ogg’s dirty jokes than she used to. Given how much focus the Lancre Witches novels place upon the roles of maiden, mother and crone, it’s nice to see some exploration as to how the transition into mother or crone can be, well, perspective changing!

  Then there’s Agnes. In Maskerade, Perdita is presented as Agnes’ inner voice, the one who says the bitchy and intelligent things she normally tries to damp down. By Carpe Jugulum, it’s clear that Perdita has become a powerful character in her own right, as much as a cross for Agnes to bear as the overwhelming personalities of Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg.

  Perdita also has a role to play in the plot, as the only one immune to the mesmerism of the vampires. Her resistance alerts Agnes to what is going on, and allows her to help the other witches resist. I am glad to see that now she is a witch, Agnes has taken back her inner snark as part of her own personality, leaving the inner Perdita with the more romantic and impractical views on life. Their interactions are quite fascinating, and I am sad that Pratchett leaves the characters here—he continues using Granny Weatherwax in the Tiffany Aching books, and even Nanny and Magrat get a tiny epilogue in those books, but this is the last time we see Agnes.

  Considering the thematic importance of Agnes’ weight in Maskerade, it’s refreshing that it’s not remotely relevant to Carpe Jugulum. The only time her fatness even referred to is when the bitchy female vampire Lacrimosa uses it to insult her—and that tells us a lot more about Lacky than Agnes. Meanwhile, Lacky’s brother Vlad spends most of the book trying to seduce Agnes, and there are implications of a quieter and less showy potential romance between she and Oats. Romantically desirable fat women in fantasy fiction for the win!

  There’s so much to like about Carpe Jugulum, which challenges the mythological traditions of vampires, and argues that a world in which the vampires are organised, methodical and POLITE about taking the blood of their victims is far more horrific than one where they are openly monstrous.

  One of my favourite feminist moments of the Discworld occurs in this book—well, two of them. The first is Granny Weatherwax taking out a horde of vampires by lying down and letting them bite her; the second is the big finale, where Vlad is trying to convince Agnes to let him escape, because the possibility of romance always trumps personal safety, right?

  Vlad looked imploringly at Agnes, and reached out to her.

  ‘You wouldn’t let them kill me, would you? You wouldn’t let them do this to me? We could have… we might… you wouldn’t, would you?’

  The crowd hesitated. This sounded like an important plea. A hundred pairs of eyes stared at Agnes.

  She took his hand. I suppose we could work on him, said Perdita. But Agnes thought about Escrow, and the queues, and the children playing while they waited, and how evil might come animal sharp in the night, or greyly by day on a list…

  ‘Vlad,’ she said gently, looking deep into his eyes. ‘I’d even hold their coats.’

  6

  The Seamstress Redemption

  Night Watch (2002)

  Deriders of the Bechdel Test tend to gravitate immediately towards what I like to call the Shawshank Redemption Clause. They cite as many works as possible that are completely awesome, and have no ladies in them, as evidence that the test is stupid.

  Me, I see that as evidence that their faces are stupid. Also that they have missed the point of the Bechdel Test.

  No one would deny that it’s possible to create a masterpiece that has no women in it. However…there are few true masterpieces in the world, and there are almost no stories in the world that are so VERY amazingly perfect that they couldn’t be improved by having more than one interesting female character.

  I had this in my head upon revisiting Night Watch, because I remembered very clearly that a) this is primarily a story about men and b) this is one of my favourite Discworld novels of all time. I say this as someone who is meh about Small Gods and Reaper Man, two of the most celebrated of the Discworld novels, precisely because the overwhelming focus on male characters and male gaze left those books, in my opinion, lacking something.

  Mostly, I was scared that my focus on female characters would spoil this
book. It’s not like it would be the first thing that my developing feminist perspective has utterly ruined for me.

  But it turned out okay. Because (spoilers, sweetie!) Night Watch is still awesome. It’s mostly a male narrative, AND it’s awesome.

  (As it happens, it passes the Bechdel Test. Just.)

  This was the book, way back when, that got me excited about the Discworld and Pratchett’s writing after a long dry spell of not loving his books any more. Night Watch is not a book to give to Discworld newbies. It does, however, contain some of Pratchett’s most understated and subtle prose, it is the quintessential Vimes book, it’s a time travel narrative that makes actual sense, and it reveals a secret history that links a whole bunch of Ankh-Morpork personalities in all manner of revealing ways.

  Mostly the men.

  I think that by this stage in his career, even in a novel all about war and police and serial killers and fatherhood and mentorship and men men men, Pratchett had become incapable of reaching for the easy sexist defaults that adorned his early books. Here, he gives us a whole subplot based around the Seamstresses (a socially accepted metaphor for prostitutes) who have been a background joke in every Ankh-Morpork book to date (the City Watch books in particular), and he humanises them.

  We meet Rosie, the young woman who will eventually grow up to be Mrs Palm, the most notorious madam in the city and Carrot’s unseen landlady back in Guards! Guards! Rosie is a fabulous character—confident, intelligent and cynical—and despite the book’s nudge-nudge-wink-wink attitude to her profession, she is never portrayed in a degrading or sexualised way. This does have a lot to do with so many scenes being shown through the point of view of Vimes, who is so utterly married that everyone can see it from ten blocks away, but I respect the fact that there is no attempt to make their interactions flirty, or anything other than a wary alliance and almost-friendship.