Anna Karenina was one of the books that made me serious about reading, in high school - Anna is one of my pagebound sisters, in level of kinship. Between this and Les Miserables, and hopefully seeing Lincoln sometime, this whole month will be a movie squee fest (though I don't know if I'll have time to go SEE any of them. Hope! Hope!)

So, there are, as Ms Nymeth pointed out, weakly analagous examples of the opposite trend, of stories about men with a woman as their one weakness - isn't that the definitino of a femme fatale story, after all? But there's two big differences, and they point out what bothers me about these stories.

First of all, most of the stories I've seen that have the woman as dangerous, as Ms Nymeth pointed out, the woman is villified. She is the interloper stealing the power of the man. The story of the strong woman redeemed by the dark and dangerous man, on the other hand is inevitably a story about the man, as much as it is a story about the woman. The man is not an antagonist, he is a character - someone to be redeemed. Women who are dark and dangerous and sexy are seldom worthy of redemption in these stories. Women, in these stories, are not strong at all - its almost worse than if they'd simply been human doormats, because the message is that it is the job, the role of women to act as redemptive batter-sponges for men. Its like if you put a baby on the woman's doorstep - if the woman is a heroine, she has no choice but to take the baby in and care for it. That's WHAT WOMEN DO, you know? And that's patently unfair, because in either a baby or a lover, the man would be receiving them as objects - a baby is a problem to be solved, a lover is an antagonist to be overcome.

the other side of this to me (and I cant' speak to the specific examples you gave) is that the strong woman herself seems to frequently be less than human, that her strength is so often,it feels like, merely an excuse to add poignancy to her sacrifice to manhood. But, perhaps I am just not reading and viewing new enough examples, there.

*bounces up and down and claps* Lilith! Oh, I can't wait to have someone to talk about this book with :D I warn you ahead of time I may eat your comments feed with long spammy responses if you don't email me about it :D

Sorry to be a day late...

So... this is like the Taming of the Shrew?

I would love to be interested - we do this with our boys on Birthdays every year - we call them 'time gifts', and the boys always havve a long list of them. But, the thing is they're usually really ont any cheaper, in my experience. Except for my ugly little homemade gifts :P.

I've nver read the love language book, so I don't relaly know what I'm talking about, but the IDEA of a gift as a language of expression is powerful, when you say it, and sums up for me part of why gifts are so hard. HORRIBLE to receive, because I'm always afraid I donot know what language they were sent in, and because, well, I suppose the last thing you have to do with a gift you receive is to give it to yourself, and I don't like giving myself gifts - I'm not that fond of me, and have a poor idea of what I like ;). But when you give it to someone else... its the same as telling someone 'I love you', and that is such a heartbreaking, nerve-wracking act, too - will the be glad i said it? Will they know what I mean by love? Will they say it back? When they do, is it because they felt pressured to be kind or because they wanted to? I love to give gifts, but its a very selfish act for me - I give them, almost, and it is like tricking someone into a conversation

I actually have Gilead in my pile of books to read at some point. I would be glad to join in if I wouldn't be in the way.

I really enjoyed the movie, but I do sympathize with what you;re saying about the depiction of poverty. It did bother me, that they had to make 'beautiful poor' instead of actual poor. Where were the signs of starvation? The ragged skin, the bad teeth, the sluggishness, the hungry look in the eyes? Poverty is an ugly thing, despite our Dickensian ideas about it being beautiful and ennobling, and I felt like this gussied it up toomuch. By the same rights, I really wanted the people in District 13 to, for example, have Appalachian accents. But, that's just it, in a movie, you are trying to make people identify with the characters, adn sadly, the average viewer is going to have more trouble identifying with someone they can so easily put in an 'other' category - they are a hillbilly, white trash, whatever, so they are CLEARLY not me… :/