Action and Agency
I wrote and thought I sent this post in July, and since I apparently didn’t, it will suffice for August!
I did not actually attend the Golden Crown Literary Society conference in Albany earlier this month, but I did pop over there after work one day to have dinner with the publishers of and some of the other authors from By Her Sword, and it was a wonderful time. I went back to the con hotel afterward to get my author copies, and a) we all signed each others’ books and it was just like high school yearbook time <3 and b) the hotel was full of queer women and it felt good to go in there!
I also got a heads-up on the next anthology’s theme, and have started working on an outline. I’d like to write something that reflects my interest in xianxia, which has been developing since roughly 2020, and I’m hopeful that this will be accepted.
I was reading this post from Charlie Jane Anders’s newsletter from March 2023 on agency, and it reminded me of a mental discourse I’ve carried out with myself in the past, so I thought I would go into it here.
Charlie Jane and I both find the way people talk about agency in characters off-putting. One of her points is that saying a character has it “often implies that a character is able to bring about a material change in their own circumstances”. She also points out that when people talk about character agency, they usually mean specifically “pursuing their goals and pushing back against whatever antagonist or obstacles stand in their way”.
This tallies very much with my experience of reading fiction analysis and writing blogs for years. People who write about writing often comprehend agency as the ability of a character to physically fight someone, to chase a suspect down an alley, to shout out a snappy comeback. Agency is made synonymous with being active rather than passive, and passivity is considered to be inherently bad.
I think this has stood out to me because I’ve always been interested in narratives about women, especially conventional historical women. And as we know, well-behaved women seldom make history. I’m an outlier in Jane Austen fandom for liking Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, a timid heroine who’s scared to stand up for herself and is typically ignored when she tries.
But agency is not physical activity — it’s the ability of a character to have her own personality even though others try to mold her into something more useful to them, and to make the few decisions that are open to her. Even a “passive” character has agency, if she can make decisions: Fanny Price doesn’t refrain from snapping at Aunt Norris because she has no agency, but because she’s aware of all the reasons not to.
T. Kingfisher’s A Sorceress Comes To Call is another great example — the heroine doesn’t get the chance to “drive the story” in the sense of performing dramatic actions that push the plot along. She gets chances instead to comply or subvert, to remain alone or to reach out to others, and her decisions in these moments end up having a great effect.
A lot of people simply don’t like this kind of story, and that’s okay! But it’s not an inherently bad story, as the limited definition of agency would make it out to be.
This month’s fashion history corner follows up on the outfit I made for French at Newport in July, with the portrait of Baroness Matilde Guiguer de Prangins in Her Park at Lake Leman by Jens Juel, 1779:
Matilde is dressed in a gown and petticoat of matching rich brown silk taffeta. The gown, either a robe à la polonaise or à la turque reflects the transition in bodice closures in the late 1770s: it fastens at the neckline with a bow, and then flows out over the hips without a waist seam, the opening over the stays filled in with a plain silk stomacher. The sleeves, made with cuffs that curve around the elbow, are also part of the new fashion.
The gown trimmings and her decorative apron are made of a muslin so fine that it’s completely transparent, only visible when there are multiple layers, such as in the horizontal tucks that appear as white lines. (Such a fine muslin would have been quite expensive, so it’s a status symbol to have so much of it in this portrait.) There is also a length of muslin draped over her powdered and styled hair.
Her shoes are white, possibly either silk or kid, trimmed with brown silk ribbons. The bows appear to be merely decorative, as these shoes would likely slip on.
She holds a long, thin walking stick across her lap. These were trendy accessories that implied that the owner was in the habit of taking walks in the country.