The immediate motivator for starting this blog was to find a means of alerting an always-busy and easily distracted world that I have a novel that needs to be read. And to this end, occasionally including a few posts about the book would make sense.
This is one of them.
One reader recently asked why the protagonist of Blood Machines was a woman.
My quick answer was, “because it’s 2015!” But, I soon remembered that it was in fact now 2022. Also, as my interlocutor did not follow Canadian politics that closely, my reply didn’t even make much sense to him in the first place. My next impulse was to challenge his sexist assumption that male protagonists were normative, but I then remembered that I had few readers and alienating any of them was a bad idea.
As I considered the question, however, I realized that a woman protagonist was essential to the novel. All of the aspects of it that I liked the best would be impossible if the main character was male. Without giving too much of the plot away, the novel deals with—among other things—institutional alienation. If Allie was a man, her uncertainty when dealing with senior administration would make her seem timid rather than disaffected. Also, her anxiety when interacting with characters from higher social strata would seem a little odd for most readers, and her regrettable habit of occasionally taking her frustrations out on others would become intolerable.
And this leads to an interesting idea. The novel is set in the context of crises deriving from the assault on Enlightenment institutions and values, and the majority of Allie’s insecurities originate from tensions regarding her place in the world. Is this best represented through woman protagonists? This would make some sense to me, because the Enlightenment afforded women greater freedoms than they previously enjoyed. While the protagonist in, say, Fight Club, can fantasize about throwing off the shackles of late capitalism and going back to a hunter-gatherer economy, that option would be far less attractive for women, who would be forced to revert to subservient roles. As a general principle, then, we could argue that women are more immediately invested in the drama of the Enlightenment project than are men simply because, for them, the stakes are higher?
Or, is it simply that our awareness of toxic masculinity has—at least for now—fatally compromised the male noir protagonist?
If anyone has any thoughts on this, I would be happy to hear them.
Travel Only By Night 