Kuroshitsuji: female characterisation
Mar. 28th, 2010 11:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
narcasseWhen it comes to gender representation perhaps Kuroshitsuji isn’t the best series to quibble over at a first glance. The series itself while having a supernatural detective theme is still padded out with attractive male characters, which in turn has become the focus, if the marketing is anything to go by. This in of itself isn’t a particular issue: it’s marketing strategy and in a series that’s aimed at straight women it seems to be working. The only problem arises when while the male characters are all appealingly presented the few female characters present aren’t. And the creator being a woman doesn’t automatically prevent this. Being female under a system that is inherently misogynistic and encourages women as well as men to reinforce the patriarchal structure means that plenty of those misogynistic attitudes are internalised and therefore not recognised for what they are. The system itself sets up an internal ranking where women are rewarded with the status of being the ‘right type of woman’ if they maintain the hegemony in much the same way that POC are awarded privileged minority status for beating other POC down. It’s unpleasant and highly obvious but I’m stating it here for the record because I’ve already had the ‘being something = unable to be prejudiced about it’ argument thrown at me in discussion of this series. Misogyny is like racism in that respect: it’s not about who you are but what you do when it comes down to it.
A series that just doesn’t include female characters or only involves a handful in the background that the reader never sees much of need not be an issue depending on how those female characters behave. If you have a series set… in the janissary barracks for the most part, focusing on a group of janissaries, then the women who appear aren’t likely to have much screen time and as long as what screen time they do have involves them behaving like people rather than stereotypes their lack of input doesn’t really matter. That’s not to say that women can’t be flawed but that if all the female characters that ever appear fit stereotypes then I’d wonder about the author’s ability to characterise anyone. This works for positive stereotypes too: too much of anything starts to look less and less like reality and more like the author’s personal fantasy, and equally, positive stereotypes are still stereotypes that attempt to box people in and tell them how they should correctly be male/female/gay/straight/etc which doesn’t help anything.
Kuroshitsuji then is one of those series that does involve a smattering of female characters who have a fair amount of screen time and who seem to cover a rather odd spectrum. On one hand there are misogynistic tropes attached to what may well have been intended to be strong feminist characters and then on the other there’s a strong sense of self-determination about characters who at a shallow glance don’t seem to be pushed forward as feminist at all. It’s almost as if someone didn’t get the message that feminism isn’t about making the ‘right’ choices as decided upon by stereotype but rather having the choice. Just because a woman chooses to work instead of raise a family doesn’t necessarily make her ‘more feminist’ than a woman who chooses to stay at home and raise her children after all.
The first major female character on the scene is Madam Red, Ciel’s doctor aunt. At a first glance Madam Red seemes like a well-rounded character. She’s fond of Ciel, teases Sebastian, is popular in society and practices medicine. She also has fond memories of her sister and even her unrequited feelings for Ciel’s father don’t do anything like subvert her characterisation. It was a nice touch in fact to see how her confidence and the entire Madam Red signature colour emerged, especially when that turned the ‘only a man who loves her can inspire/help her’ trope on its head. Even her marriage and subsequent pregnancy simply fills out her characterisation, as did, initially, the fact that despite all tragedy she carried on. She is a woman living her life, forced to keep moving forward despite heartache and within the confines of Victorian society carving out her own niche. The fact that she’s specifically a doctor in the East End then is the laudable point that elevates her characterisation from fairly run of the mill Victorian woman into feminist heroine territory. And if her characterisation had stopped there she might easily have become a welcome reoccurring character working as a slightly dramatic foil to Elizabeth’s much milder constancy.
Unfortunately, Madam Red’s characterisation reached the point of well-rounded and sensible and then kept right on going. From being a woman who had no choice but to live through the tragic lost of husband and joyfully anticipated child she turns into a woman who murders others, others who come to her for help, because they make a choice that she can no longer make, which is about as anti-feminist as it gets. The women coming to her to procure abortions weren’t in any position to be raising children either so there isn’t even the straw man of selfishness or slut shaming to fall back on as justification. They are prostitutes working in the East End. That’s not a job that anybody did for fun while ignoring other options in Victorian London. The women who risked death, at the hands of everyone around them up to and including their own children via pregnancy complications, weren’t doing the job because they had a choice beyond doing that or starving. Having an extra mouth to feed, even if the pregnancy didn’t kill them via complications or just starvation while they couldn’t work, wouldn’t have been anything like easy even if the child had survived the first few months. Victorian London could be a horrific place depending on where you sat in society and these women were on the lowest rung. An abortion for an East End prostitute in that era could mean the difference between being able to ilk out a wretched existence and dying with a child alongside.
As a doctor who treats East End prostitutes Madam Red would know all of this, would have seen the consequences on either end of the scale which was bad enough but the justification for her sudden selfishness and derangement is where the real heart of the problem lies. If she’d quietly gone mad because she couldn’t have children then that could have been handled well enough but when her being unable to have children anymore is enough to derange her to the point where she believes that she’s justified in murdering other women who chose not to then that’s the point at which matters take a turn into misogynistic tropes. Because Madam Red no longer then represents a well-rounded female character but rather the stereotype that all women must want children and if they don’t have them then they’re unstable or ‘the wrong sort of woman’, though arguably the one glimpse of a prostitute that the reader gets typifies the unstable ‘wrong sort of woman’ example in combination. (Though it’s set in the 1950s and doesn’t focus on women living beyond the law Vera Drake is a pretty good fictional example of the sort of considerations surrounding women’s decisions to abort.) The whole stereotyping of women having abortions as villains cut down by the ‘right sort of woman’ who did want children but has now entered the twilight region between being the right sort of woman and the wrong sort, because women can’t do violence of course, due to her infertility really does reduce all the female characters involved to the choices they make about what to do with their wombs as if that organ alone was the point of their existence. And once you’re reducing female characters to vehicles for breeding, their decisions and intellect controlled by their ability or inability to breed, then there really is no hiding that you’re peddling misogyny.
Long after Madam Red that similar undercurrent rears its head again with the brief appearance of the tailor. Again this is another character who on the surface seems quite forward-thinking. Being a seamstress isn’t really anything out of the ordinary in Victorian England. Sewing was a woman’s work after all so there’s nothing particularly spectacular about that just as the cook of a great house wasn’t driving gender equality forward by doing her job either. Thus the tailor is simply doing an acceptable female job but apparently doing it so well that she’s employed to provide clothing to the aristocracy. She’s carving out her own niche within the confines of Victorian society as all Victorian women did, as Ottoman women did before them, as Heian women did before that and so on. It’s a particularly modern arrogance to believe that the women of the past just sat about and bewailed their lot while doing nothing about it. Where do these people think that the suffragette movement came from to cite just one example? Beyond the obvious competence in her own work what elevates the tailor’s characterisation into feminist territory is her dramatic moment of tearing away her skirt and advocating for female clothing reform: that’s suffragette behaviour with a flourish.
Of course to put her in the same category as Madam Red there has to be more to it than that and unfortunately, just as with Madam Red, what follows undercuts the statement made by the tailor’s initial characterisation. In Madam Red’s case the statement is about providing reproductive choice and it’s then undercut by the plotline that actually women don’t need reproductive choice because if they don’t want children/can’t have children then they’re deranged anyway. With the tailor the statement of equality is undercut by the notion that women can’t be equal because they’re simply not as powerful and in this case as intimidating as men. And there may even be a thread in there that women are always going to be afraid of men as they should be too.
When the tailor gropes Maylene it’s set up for comedy effect but unfortunately the only way that it works as a joke is if the tailor isn’t inherently threatening. If she’s powerless and thus groping Maylene is an empty gesture aping what would be threatening if done by a man then it’s cheap, crass humour in the order of finding it funny if a woman tells someone not to touch her inappropriately because being a woman of course she can’t really stop that inappropriate touching from happening. Of the two examples in fact this is the one that I find most cringe-worthy because it doesn’t just enforce the idea that a woman is powerless and thus can’t possibly be a threat but it also, on the other side, enforces that powerlessness through the notion that a woman can’t stop any inappropriate advances or advances at all should she choose to. Thus the tailor can pretend to hold a dominant position but the reader sees her actions for the empty threats they are. Her gushing over Ciel’s supposedly feminine figure likewise doesn’t help when coupled with her distaste of men because it one again reinforces the idea that while she might be able to claim some quarter within a female sphere, the minute there’s a man on scene she immediately becomes powerless by default.
What most unsettles me about Madam Red and the tailor’s characterisations is that they’re set up as feminist archetypes and then are suddenly undercut by a factor that strikes right at the heart of their strong characterisation to make them misogynistic stereotypes instead. This isn’t a case where the negative side to their characterisation is a part of the whole: it’s one where the negative completely topples the rest to the point where it starts to look very deliberate. I’ve no idea if the author thought she’d written them to be too strong or set them up as characters who were meant to be brought low but somehow didn’t realise that the way that defeat was managed was getting into very delicate territory. I’m not even sure if it was deliberate or internalised misogyny because while Madam Red and the tailor really are misogynist fables of strong women brought low there are also characters who remain strong female figures.
Since it’s worth a mention, Maylene for all her comedy screen time doesn’t get nearly enough coverage for me to make a reasonable assessment of her. She does have a moment of delight over being able to wear skirts but since it’s qualified that she’s never been able to before it’s hard to come to further conclusions. She may simply enjoy being able to do something she’s never been able to do before and having found that she likes doing it it’s only natural that she shares that opinion. On the other hand there might be a touch of suggesting that women will always like flouncy dresses and ‘pretty things’ with a subtle hint that the tailor’s suggestion for dress reform is a silly idea and that ‘real women’ would never take it up. Either is plausible at this stage so without further evidence it’s not yet a judgement called I’d make.
Of all the major characters Elizabeth is an interesting contrast to both Madam Red and the tailor because while they enter as strong feminist figures, playing to distinct feminist tropes, she doesn’t in the slightest. When Elizabeth first turns up she’s the love interest attached to the, arguably, main character. She’s Ciel’s fiancée and quite happy with that role, and yet her actions are quite solidly proactive in achieving her ends.
When Elizabeth sneaks over to see Ciel she does so under her own steam. She wants to see her fiancé so she goes to see him. Then because Ciel is fairly unhappy as per usual she attempts to cheer him up by proposing that they hold a ball. While the entire outline annoys Ciel and seems initially to be rather daft, from Elizabeth’s point of view she’s trying to apply a reasonable solution. She finds that going to a ball and wearing pretty clothing cheers her up and being as young as she is she’s hoping that it will have a similar effect on Ciel. Even the business with the ring is based on her not recognising the ring for what it is, understanding Ciel’s wearing it in terms of rejecting the ring she chose for him and not understanding why he wouldn’t want to do something that might make him happy, at least for a brief while. She’s young enough that her breaking Ciel’s ring isn’t a hugely unwarranted response nor is her crying, and despite that in the end perhaps she does succeed in, if not making Ciel happy, at least distracting him from his own pain for a while.
The above would be enough to establish Elizabeth as a proactive character within the range of her own knowledge and understanding but then later on comes an expository chapter where she talks to Sebastian while her mother and Ciel are hunting. She openly admits that while she wants to help Ciel she doesn’t seem to get it quite right and that qualifies the ball absolutely in terms of her trying to do her utmost to help her fiancé. Her help is limited because of the range of her knowledge, and Ciel isn’t likely to want to tell her about all the grizzly details, and her knowledge is framed in terms of her position in society but she actively makes a choice to try to help as best she can. It’s this choice and the ability to work within her means while recognising their limitations and not wasting her time bewailing said limitations that provides subtle feminist characterisation. Elizabeth may not be advocating reproductive health care for all classes of society or revolutionary dress reform but she’s acting on affairs where she can and in small iterations effecting matters. In fact it’s easy to imagine years down the line Countess Phantomhive inspiring that sort of regard for women as equals that prompts a fair number of men to question the established gender inequality.
Factoring Elizabeth into the discussion in contrast to Madam Red and the tailor actually makes me wonder if the point of the aggressive take down of the latter two was for the purpose of turning feminist stereotypes on their heads. Certainly Madam Red would qualify as a good example of the fact that working in female reproductive health care doesn’t automatically make anyone a feminist. That said the one problem I have with this idea is that the tailor’s deconstruction as a feminist icon doesn’t take place within the narrative: she isn’t deconstructed through her actions but rather through the audience perception of her being powerless, and it’s played for laughs.
After Elizabeth there’s also her mother, Francis, who actively encourages Ciel to become a gentleman worthy of Elizabeth. This encouragement doesn’t appear to come with gender-related trappings specifically and certainly Francis holds her own when they hunt, but then she also falls into the bifauxnen category which means that her prowess in a possibly male field is a given. She’s certainly not on screen for long enough for there to be more than possibilities about the matter at any rate and her being equalled by Ciel may not be a party to the ‘women can only be as good as young boys at masculine pursuits’ stereotype simply because Ciel is already demonstrably an exceptional individual in his own right.
Lastly then there’s Grell, the only transcharacter in the series and one who appears to be completely free from any real social bonds. She actively flouts social norms and to such a degree that anything she does is atypical. Her trans status allows her to transgress certain boundaries already and the fact that she’s a shinigami in a series where the reader is never really shown shinigami social norms makes using Grell for a gendered comparison fairly impossible. There’s no baseline comparison to be made for her and in the best fairytale tradition, having already crossed one boundary there’s no telling how many others she crosses in either direction.
Kuroshitsuji then is more than a little dubiously convoluted when it comes to female characterisation with not nearly enough evidence to form a concrete overall opinion. That said having Madam Red feature in an entire arc in the fashion that she did has made me at least a little suspicious about any further female characterisation in the series. Though regardless of the outcome I shall simply have to wait and see, and in the meantime I’ll continue to ponder the possibility of the whole Sebastian Michaelis form and persona being an elaborate façade for a female demon who knows just how to play those human male stereotypes to perfection.
A series that just doesn’t include female characters or only involves a handful in the background that the reader never sees much of need not be an issue depending on how those female characters behave. If you have a series set… in the janissary barracks for the most part, focusing on a group of janissaries, then the women who appear aren’t likely to have much screen time and as long as what screen time they do have involves them behaving like people rather than stereotypes their lack of input doesn’t really matter. That’s not to say that women can’t be flawed but that if all the female characters that ever appear fit stereotypes then I’d wonder about the author’s ability to characterise anyone. This works for positive stereotypes too: too much of anything starts to look less and less like reality and more like the author’s personal fantasy, and equally, positive stereotypes are still stereotypes that attempt to box people in and tell them how they should correctly be male/female/gay/straight/etc which doesn’t help anything.
Kuroshitsuji then is one of those series that does involve a smattering of female characters who have a fair amount of screen time and who seem to cover a rather odd spectrum. On one hand there are misogynistic tropes attached to what may well have been intended to be strong feminist characters and then on the other there’s a strong sense of self-determination about characters who at a shallow glance don’t seem to be pushed forward as feminist at all. It’s almost as if someone didn’t get the message that feminism isn’t about making the ‘right’ choices as decided upon by stereotype but rather having the choice. Just because a woman chooses to work instead of raise a family doesn’t necessarily make her ‘more feminist’ than a woman who chooses to stay at home and raise her children after all.
The first major female character on the scene is Madam Red, Ciel’s doctor aunt. At a first glance Madam Red seemes like a well-rounded character. She’s fond of Ciel, teases Sebastian, is popular in society and practices medicine. She also has fond memories of her sister and even her unrequited feelings for Ciel’s father don’t do anything like subvert her characterisation. It was a nice touch in fact to see how her confidence and the entire Madam Red signature colour emerged, especially when that turned the ‘only a man who loves her can inspire/help her’ trope on its head. Even her marriage and subsequent pregnancy simply fills out her characterisation, as did, initially, the fact that despite all tragedy she carried on. She is a woman living her life, forced to keep moving forward despite heartache and within the confines of Victorian society carving out her own niche. The fact that she’s specifically a doctor in the East End then is the laudable point that elevates her characterisation from fairly run of the mill Victorian woman into feminist heroine territory. And if her characterisation had stopped there she might easily have become a welcome reoccurring character working as a slightly dramatic foil to Elizabeth’s much milder constancy.
Unfortunately, Madam Red’s characterisation reached the point of well-rounded and sensible and then kept right on going. From being a woman who had no choice but to live through the tragic lost of husband and joyfully anticipated child she turns into a woman who murders others, others who come to her for help, because they make a choice that she can no longer make, which is about as anti-feminist as it gets. The women coming to her to procure abortions weren’t in any position to be raising children either so there isn’t even the straw man of selfishness or slut shaming to fall back on as justification. They are prostitutes working in the East End. That’s not a job that anybody did for fun while ignoring other options in Victorian London. The women who risked death, at the hands of everyone around them up to and including their own children via pregnancy complications, weren’t doing the job because they had a choice beyond doing that or starving. Having an extra mouth to feed, even if the pregnancy didn’t kill them via complications or just starvation while they couldn’t work, wouldn’t have been anything like easy even if the child had survived the first few months. Victorian London could be a horrific place depending on where you sat in society and these women were on the lowest rung. An abortion for an East End prostitute in that era could mean the difference between being able to ilk out a wretched existence and dying with a child alongside.
As a doctor who treats East End prostitutes Madam Red would know all of this, would have seen the consequences on either end of the scale which was bad enough but the justification for her sudden selfishness and derangement is where the real heart of the problem lies. If she’d quietly gone mad because she couldn’t have children then that could have been handled well enough but when her being unable to have children anymore is enough to derange her to the point where she believes that she’s justified in murdering other women who chose not to then that’s the point at which matters take a turn into misogynistic tropes. Because Madam Red no longer then represents a well-rounded female character but rather the stereotype that all women must want children and if they don’t have them then they’re unstable or ‘the wrong sort of woman’, though arguably the one glimpse of a prostitute that the reader gets typifies the unstable ‘wrong sort of woman’ example in combination. (Though it’s set in the 1950s and doesn’t focus on women living beyond the law Vera Drake is a pretty good fictional example of the sort of considerations surrounding women’s decisions to abort.) The whole stereotyping of women having abortions as villains cut down by the ‘right sort of woman’ who did want children but has now entered the twilight region between being the right sort of woman and the wrong sort, because women can’t do violence of course, due to her infertility really does reduce all the female characters involved to the choices they make about what to do with their wombs as if that organ alone was the point of their existence. And once you’re reducing female characters to vehicles for breeding, their decisions and intellect controlled by their ability or inability to breed, then there really is no hiding that you’re peddling misogyny.
Long after Madam Red that similar undercurrent rears its head again with the brief appearance of the tailor. Again this is another character who on the surface seems quite forward-thinking. Being a seamstress isn’t really anything out of the ordinary in Victorian England. Sewing was a woman’s work after all so there’s nothing particularly spectacular about that just as the cook of a great house wasn’t driving gender equality forward by doing her job either. Thus the tailor is simply doing an acceptable female job but apparently doing it so well that she’s employed to provide clothing to the aristocracy. She’s carving out her own niche within the confines of Victorian society as all Victorian women did, as Ottoman women did before them, as Heian women did before that and so on. It’s a particularly modern arrogance to believe that the women of the past just sat about and bewailed their lot while doing nothing about it. Where do these people think that the suffragette movement came from to cite just one example? Beyond the obvious competence in her own work what elevates the tailor’s characterisation into feminist territory is her dramatic moment of tearing away her skirt and advocating for female clothing reform: that’s suffragette behaviour with a flourish.
Of course to put her in the same category as Madam Red there has to be more to it than that and unfortunately, just as with Madam Red, what follows undercuts the statement made by the tailor’s initial characterisation. In Madam Red’s case the statement is about providing reproductive choice and it’s then undercut by the plotline that actually women don’t need reproductive choice because if they don’t want children/can’t have children then they’re deranged anyway. With the tailor the statement of equality is undercut by the notion that women can’t be equal because they’re simply not as powerful and in this case as intimidating as men. And there may even be a thread in there that women are always going to be afraid of men as they should be too.
When the tailor gropes Maylene it’s set up for comedy effect but unfortunately the only way that it works as a joke is if the tailor isn’t inherently threatening. If she’s powerless and thus groping Maylene is an empty gesture aping what would be threatening if done by a man then it’s cheap, crass humour in the order of finding it funny if a woman tells someone not to touch her inappropriately because being a woman of course she can’t really stop that inappropriate touching from happening. Of the two examples in fact this is the one that I find most cringe-worthy because it doesn’t just enforce the idea that a woman is powerless and thus can’t possibly be a threat but it also, on the other side, enforces that powerlessness through the notion that a woman can’t stop any inappropriate advances or advances at all should she choose to. Thus the tailor can pretend to hold a dominant position but the reader sees her actions for the empty threats they are. Her gushing over Ciel’s supposedly feminine figure likewise doesn’t help when coupled with her distaste of men because it one again reinforces the idea that while she might be able to claim some quarter within a female sphere, the minute there’s a man on scene she immediately becomes powerless by default.
What most unsettles me about Madam Red and the tailor’s characterisations is that they’re set up as feminist archetypes and then are suddenly undercut by a factor that strikes right at the heart of their strong characterisation to make them misogynistic stereotypes instead. This isn’t a case where the negative side to their characterisation is a part of the whole: it’s one where the negative completely topples the rest to the point where it starts to look very deliberate. I’ve no idea if the author thought she’d written them to be too strong or set them up as characters who were meant to be brought low but somehow didn’t realise that the way that defeat was managed was getting into very delicate territory. I’m not even sure if it was deliberate or internalised misogyny because while Madam Red and the tailor really are misogynist fables of strong women brought low there are also characters who remain strong female figures.
Since it’s worth a mention, Maylene for all her comedy screen time doesn’t get nearly enough coverage for me to make a reasonable assessment of her. She does have a moment of delight over being able to wear skirts but since it’s qualified that she’s never been able to before it’s hard to come to further conclusions. She may simply enjoy being able to do something she’s never been able to do before and having found that she likes doing it it’s only natural that she shares that opinion. On the other hand there might be a touch of suggesting that women will always like flouncy dresses and ‘pretty things’ with a subtle hint that the tailor’s suggestion for dress reform is a silly idea and that ‘real women’ would never take it up. Either is plausible at this stage so without further evidence it’s not yet a judgement called I’d make.
Of all the major characters Elizabeth is an interesting contrast to both Madam Red and the tailor because while they enter as strong feminist figures, playing to distinct feminist tropes, she doesn’t in the slightest. When Elizabeth first turns up she’s the love interest attached to the, arguably, main character. She’s Ciel’s fiancée and quite happy with that role, and yet her actions are quite solidly proactive in achieving her ends.
When Elizabeth sneaks over to see Ciel she does so under her own steam. She wants to see her fiancé so she goes to see him. Then because Ciel is fairly unhappy as per usual she attempts to cheer him up by proposing that they hold a ball. While the entire outline annoys Ciel and seems initially to be rather daft, from Elizabeth’s point of view she’s trying to apply a reasonable solution. She finds that going to a ball and wearing pretty clothing cheers her up and being as young as she is she’s hoping that it will have a similar effect on Ciel. Even the business with the ring is based on her not recognising the ring for what it is, understanding Ciel’s wearing it in terms of rejecting the ring she chose for him and not understanding why he wouldn’t want to do something that might make him happy, at least for a brief while. She’s young enough that her breaking Ciel’s ring isn’t a hugely unwarranted response nor is her crying, and despite that in the end perhaps she does succeed in, if not making Ciel happy, at least distracting him from his own pain for a while.
The above would be enough to establish Elizabeth as a proactive character within the range of her own knowledge and understanding but then later on comes an expository chapter where she talks to Sebastian while her mother and Ciel are hunting. She openly admits that while she wants to help Ciel she doesn’t seem to get it quite right and that qualifies the ball absolutely in terms of her trying to do her utmost to help her fiancé. Her help is limited because of the range of her knowledge, and Ciel isn’t likely to want to tell her about all the grizzly details, and her knowledge is framed in terms of her position in society but she actively makes a choice to try to help as best she can. It’s this choice and the ability to work within her means while recognising their limitations and not wasting her time bewailing said limitations that provides subtle feminist characterisation. Elizabeth may not be advocating reproductive health care for all classes of society or revolutionary dress reform but she’s acting on affairs where she can and in small iterations effecting matters. In fact it’s easy to imagine years down the line Countess Phantomhive inspiring that sort of regard for women as equals that prompts a fair number of men to question the established gender inequality.
Factoring Elizabeth into the discussion in contrast to Madam Red and the tailor actually makes me wonder if the point of the aggressive take down of the latter two was for the purpose of turning feminist stereotypes on their heads. Certainly Madam Red would qualify as a good example of the fact that working in female reproductive health care doesn’t automatically make anyone a feminist. That said the one problem I have with this idea is that the tailor’s deconstruction as a feminist icon doesn’t take place within the narrative: she isn’t deconstructed through her actions but rather through the audience perception of her being powerless, and it’s played for laughs.
After Elizabeth there’s also her mother, Francis, who actively encourages Ciel to become a gentleman worthy of Elizabeth. This encouragement doesn’t appear to come with gender-related trappings specifically and certainly Francis holds her own when they hunt, but then she also falls into the bifauxnen category which means that her prowess in a possibly male field is a given. She’s certainly not on screen for long enough for there to be more than possibilities about the matter at any rate and her being equalled by Ciel may not be a party to the ‘women can only be as good as young boys at masculine pursuits’ stereotype simply because Ciel is already demonstrably an exceptional individual in his own right.
Lastly then there’s Grell, the only transcharacter in the series and one who appears to be completely free from any real social bonds. She actively flouts social norms and to such a degree that anything she does is atypical. Her trans status allows her to transgress certain boundaries already and the fact that she’s a shinigami in a series where the reader is never really shown shinigami social norms makes using Grell for a gendered comparison fairly impossible. There’s no baseline comparison to be made for her and in the best fairytale tradition, having already crossed one boundary there’s no telling how many others she crosses in either direction.
Kuroshitsuji then is more than a little dubiously convoluted when it comes to female characterisation with not nearly enough evidence to form a concrete overall opinion. That said having Madam Red feature in an entire arc in the fashion that she did has made me at least a little suspicious about any further female characterisation in the series. Though regardless of the outcome I shall simply have to wait and see, and in the meantime I’ll continue to ponder the possibility of the whole Sebastian Michaelis form and persona being an elaborate façade for a female demon who knows just how to play those human male stereotypes to perfection.
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Date: 2010-03-29 04:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2010-04-05 08:42 am (UTC)Exactly. I actually liked the character so it was doubly offensive to see what she degenerated into. Even if it was the plan all along to have her be Jack the Ripper a better justification for that could have salvaged the matter e.g. if she was killing because her sister was dead and now these other girls didn’t have the right to live either or because the fact that Sebastian looks ridiculously like Vincent’s made her believe that he cheated on her sister. They’d still be insane reasons of course but at least they wouldn’t be so horribly misogynist.