I had an interesting research opportunity this weekend when taking part in the gladiatorial games at the Guildhall. How I wish I could say that I was a fighter, though I doubt anyone who knew me would believe it, knowing that I’m a dyed in the wool wimp and a malcoordinated coward.
The games were great. The crowd were baying for blood in a horribly realistic way and I found myself in the taverna cooking also in a horribly realistic way. That is what women have always done and though I am interested in fighting techniques and military kit, the male business of war and armies, I donned my borrowed Roman finery and ground pine nuts - in a pestle- because that’s what women did and do.
I am very inclined to write about feisty female characters who are much more likely to wield a sword rather than a pestle and I think I underestimate how hard it is to step away from the expectations of friends and family, to make a fuss, be a harridan, unfeminine, unprotected by the norms of society.
I am a domestic disaster, lacking much interest in cooking. I am a haphazard housekeeper, I can’t sew and you probably wouldn’t want so much as a scarf or dishcloth that I’ve knitted. I’ve spent my life working with men in male dominated environments and yet I slipped as easily into my role as servant of the men, as I did my first century clothes. I hid my short hair under a scarf and my expectations of equality under a smile. It was so easy.
In this case of course it was pretend. Everyone was really grateful for our work in the tavern and I don’t think I have ever felt so appreciated, but it was an important research opportunity and not in the obvious way. I learned a good bit about Roman cooking, and something of gladiatorial games but more than that I learned what I had almost forgotten that as a woman it is all too easy to fall into role, to be the support and not the main event.
I don’t know how much of that I want to reflect in my fiction. Maybe I will just have to make my heroines even feistier so that they can break away.
7 comments:
Now that sounds like my kind of research, taking part in Gladiatorial Games. Brilliant. I suppose it was inevitable that you were placed in a 'female' role but how interesting that you found it so easy to settle into. Is it any wonder that women over the centuries have accepted their position and I suppose, had we lived in days gone by, we would both have been tutored hard in how to knit a scarf that someone could actually wear!
I was there, too, Nicky! Have just posted a link to my pix on our History Girls Facebook page! As I'm sure you know, the female gladiators Amazonia and Achillea are based on a real Roman tomb which can be seen in the British Museum.
Yes - they were great too. Other ancient cultures did use women fighters too but representations of the past have historically reinforced our contemporary stereotypes and I wonder if our tendency to view the Roman Epire through the prism of the British one has coloured our view of it as being less diverse than it was. We like our soldiers to look the same, to follow similar religious practises and we like all our women as slaves, whores or ladies...
I think visitors might get the impression from reenactment and indeed from films that most Romans were old white and male...
Fascinating post - and very thought-provoking. That's a very telling point in your comment about the 'British prism' too: the extent to which we might be impressing our own stereotypes on the past.
But I do relate to the 'ease' with which you slipped into the woman's role. On my first re-enactment event I was working with the men, because I was there to learn how to fire a matchlock musket and 17th century culverin - but I felt increasingly uncomfortable doing it. I envied the women dressed as women sitting cooking by the fires. They were less exposed, less expected to perform, and there was a tremendous quiet dignity about what they were doing.
Maybe in my case it was just a question of being shy, but there IS something frightening about stepping outside an established gender role, whether it's in a game or for real. The women who did it must have been very feisty indeed.
I too admit to easily accepting traditional domestic role-playing at home, even while writing characters who would not be seen dead with a wooden spoon in their hands - unless they are wielding it as a weapon. Perhaps we female writers also fall into domestic roles more easily as many of us have the pleasure and privilege of working at home, and this can bestow a sense of slight guilt. After all, it's easy to slow-cook the vegetables while writing a chapter, or have the washing machine operating in the background while we check a copy-edit. No matter whether I have been up a mountain in Peru or wrestling a giant squid in my head and on the page all day - I also love to see my husband's face when he comes home and smells something good cooking. Maybe this role-flexibility is symptomatic not a dangerous passivity but of the much-discussed female aptitudes for multi-tasking, guilt-compensating and nurturing? Anyway, on a bad writing day, a good dinner IS the main event.
Did you fall into the role or did you just find out that your acting range didn't stretch to wearing a machaira on your head and wielding a trident and sica? Would Christopher Biggins have been any more comfortable as a pretend Spartacus? You took your personal values and attributes into a replica arena and finished up in the kitchen. No surprise there (so might Christopher). That doesn't mean that your feisty female characters are inherently incredible and need beefing up. Presumably you don't weigh them down with your time-bound values and attributes. Roman women don't seem to have been an especially downtrodden lot. They may not have enjoyed the equality of circumstance that you profess because physical and scientific realities were agin them. I don't think that stopped quite a few having a high feist factor. Reenactments are like painting by numbers. Arid and unimaginative. Their only value to writers is as a help to getting some details right.
Must add, as I hurry through the pages, that Trista in your "Wolf Blood" novel seems majorly feisty to me!
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