Wolfe: Misogynist or Realist?

David DiGiacomo · 17 Oct 2006, 22:59 · from 2006-October.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: david at slack.com (David DiGiacomo)
Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 15:59:01 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Wolfe: Misogynist or Realist?
Message-ID: <10610172259.AA08321 at slack.com>

>It's just that Wolfe seems to be really fond of including misogynist
>characters and situations in his stories.

What I would say is that his woman characters are often foolish or evil,
creating situations where misogyny is apparently justified.

Compare Wolfe to Iain M. Banks, who also has a penchant for including
"misogynist characters and situations" (not to mention torture) in his
writing, but to completely different effect.

Maybe it's not fair to bring this up, but when I read "Letters Home" I was
struck by Wolfe's lack of empathy for the Korean prostitutes he encounters.
He was very young at the time, but it's hard not to draw a connection to
his later fiction.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net