Bewildering Challenge 62 response

by Toby Wallis

A thoughtful response from Toby. Feel free to join in: all Challenges are open indefinitely. Send us your own! Bewildering Stories is all Challenges, all the time...

1. What images of women do we find in issue 62?

Seems to me that the images of women in these stories fall neatly into the long-established dynamic of women as powerful and knowledgable with men trailing behind lusting for a little bit of their power and wisdom. This knowledge makes them mysterious and appealing, but it is scantly given over to their male counterparts. I guess I could go out on a limb here and point at Freudian ideas, but I won’t. (Even though Rick Combs’ story “Teacher” seemed to be really very Freudian... or was that just me that thought so... erk...) Or I guess we could look at it from a post-feminist point of view, but again I won’t because it seems so contrived. I will go with woman as mother for the answer to that question.

2.Can the male and female roles be interchanged without changing any of the stories in any substantial way?

I think the importance of the above-mentioned dynamic is now a well-established stereotype, and as such gives us a useful inroad to understanding the characters in the story. It almost seems to me that switching the genders of the characters would almost have to be the point of the story itself.

Interesting though, I felt, was the “unidentifiable gender” of the kids in “The Hag.” Which was almost like having characters of a third gender, that encompassed both rather than neither.