'The message is clear. Boys are the norm, girls the variation...'

The Smurfette Principle

Well, this evening, I was reading through Prof. Ted Underwood’s [Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois] insightful book titled, Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change.

In his chapter on ‘Metamorphoses of Gender’, Ted traces the history of gender roles in English-language fiction from 1780 to the present, through which he tries to discover some ‘broad patterns affecting the representation of gender over the last two hundred years’.

And by means of a learning algorithm, (logistic regression), he comes out with some real startling findings!

Giving just a few of his impactful findings for us -

Firstly, gender divisions (gender dimorphisms) between characters have become less predictable over the years. 

Secondly, in the middle of the nineteenth century, very different language is used to describe fictional men and women. But that difference weakens steadily as we move forward to the present; the actions and attributes of characters are less clearly sorted into gender categories, he says.

Thirdly, he has found out, (by means of the learning algorithm) that, if we trace the sheer space on the page allotted to women, we discover a startling decline both in the number of characters who are women or girls and in the percentage of a text writers devote to describing them.

Women smile and laugh, but mid-century men, apparently, can only grin and chuckle. 

Adds Ted, 

I cannot fully explain this weird twentieth century behaviour, but it is interesting that the feminization of the common verbs smile and laugh seems to have preceded the development of masculine alternatives - almost as though it became inappropriate for fictive men to smile once fictive women were doing it so much, he avers!

This gendering of mirth peaks in the years before and after World War II, and Raymond Chandler is a typical expression of its consequences for men. His male characters have a habit of grinning in an uneasy laconic way, he feels.

These expressions of gender can be periodized and dated because they are on their way out now.

But other expressions of gender have continued to expand.

Gender dimorphism tends to be higher in books where women are underrepresented, says Ted.

This may happen in part because the lonely woman in a Western or hard-boiled detective story is likely to be depicted in a deeply gendered way.

She becomes, in effect, “The Woman.”

We might call this the Irene Adler Distortion, if Katha Politt hadn’t already memorably dubbed it “the Smurfette Principle,” he observes!

Well, i was quite interested and intrigued by these tropes!

Particularly, ‘The Smurfette Principle!’

This term “The Smurfette Principle” was coined by American poet, essayist, and critic Katha Pollitt in an article that she had written for the New York Times, April 7, 1991 Edition. 

It would connote to mean “the tendency in works of fiction to have exactly one female amongst an ensemble of male characters, in spite of the fact that roughly half of the human race is female”.

Like for example, in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy series there is only one major female character in the first three books.

Movies also abound with any many instances of the Smurfette Principle!

Now looking back at our own childhood days, I now realise to what great extent we all have been conditioned, time and again, in such subtle ways, on the ‘Smurfette Principle!’

Such negative tropes, aren’t doing any justice to women’s equality, feels Katha Pollitt and her ilk!

In fact, they only serve to send a negative message to the readers / viewers that boys are the ones who always have the fun, and women who ‘attempt’ adventure are a mere ‘deviation!’

The quite recent ones that come under ‘Smurfette’ spell (on the OTT platform) being, Kate Winslet’s Mare of Easttown and Vidya Balan’s Sherni!

Well, I’d like to sign off on this post, with a few excerpts from Katha Pollitt’s take on her ‘Smurfette Principle’ in the New York Times!

Says Katha Pollitt -

The message is clear. Boys are the norm, girls the variation; boys are central, girls peripheral; boys are individuals, girls types. Boys define the group, its story and its code of values. Girls exist only in relation to boys.

Well, there's always the library. Some of the best children's books ever written have been about girls - Madeline, Frances the badger.

Dr. Seuss's books are less about individual characters than about language and imaginative freedom - but, somehow or other, only boys get to go on beyond Zebra or see marvels on Mulberry Street.

Do kids pick up on the sexism in children's culture? You bet. Preschoolers are like medieval philosophers: the text - a book, a movie, a TV show - is more authoritative than the evidence of their own eyes. "Let's play weddings," says my little niece. We grownups roll our eyes, but face it: it's still the one scenario in which the girl is the central figure.

The sexism in preschool culture deforms both boys and girls.

Little girls learn to split their consciousness, filtering their dreams and ambitions through boy characters while admiring the clothes of the princess.

The more privileged and daring can dream of becoming exceptional women in a man's world - Smurfettes.

The others are being taught to accept the more usual fate, which is to be a passenger car drawn through life by a masculine train engine.

Boys, who are rarely confronted with stories in which males play only minor roles, learn a simpler lesson: girls just don't matter much.

And this is exactly where ‘we have our work cut out for us’, says Katha Pollitt.

How true her words prove! 

image: amazondotcom