I recently read The Terror by Dan Simmons. I’ve been interested in it for a while because I love horror and I’m fascinated by the doomed Franklin expedition. I’ve been hesitant to read it because I’ve heard some things about the author that made me feel iffy, but never with solid evidence behind it. I finally gave the book a read and I both loved it and hated it. I wanted to put my thoughts down here and see if anyone else noticed these things and what they thought. Obviously, there will be spoilers.
First of all, I loved the in-depth detail that went into this book. It’s clear Simmons spent a lot of time researching not only the expedition, but also the arctic, the native people, seafaring terms, ice, etc. I normally don’t read doorstoppers, but I really enjoyed how much information and detail went into this book. I thought the slow pace was perfectly fitting, and the chapters punctuated by the monster’s violent appearance were fantastic.
Unfortunately, my love for all the detail in this book is also paired by my real distaste for how women, especially native girls, are treated and described. At first we just get Franklin’s inner thoughts on a native woman during a previous doomed expedition and his focus on her breasts and how he thought she was being sly and sexually evil by sleeping around with his men and pitting them against each other. I felt another explanation for this could be, native teenage girl feels threatened by the dozens of armed white men who show up and feels she must align herself with one of them for personal protection. But, I thought that since this was a Franklin chapter, we’re getting it colored by Franklin’s perspective.
But then Lady Silence shows up, who is also vaguely described as a teenage girl (with several characters thinking about how since “these women” age and mature differently than good ol’ white British women you can’t really tell how old they are.. which feels gross), and then proceeds to have her bare breasts out in just about every chapter she appears in throughout the book. There’s also a lo of detail about her bare, sweaty breasts. And how they’re almost touching Irving’s silk handkerchief.. it’s a real point of fixation for what felt like an uncomfortably long time. Again, this is through another man’s POV and they have been stuck and isolated out on the ice for a while, but at this point I’m seeing a pattern.
To break away from sexualizing native girls, we get Crozier’s memory.. of a woman sexually using him. She has agency and isn’t being forced or coerced, and I understand this is a bit of a reversal of roles, but it’s also part of a larger pattern of the only few women we see in this book who are pretty much there for sexual reasons.. unless they’re an old sexless grandmother, or chaste widow Lady Jane Franklin.
The second native woman we see is the one Irving meets.. who we are told her name means “Big Tits.” And even though Irving gets this, we are then treated to another man pulling up the girl’s jacket so that we can get a gander at said “big tits.” Also, in the SECOND TO LAST PAGE of this behemoth novel we’re informed that Big Tits is still doing just fine. Cool.
I know this post is really long and I’m just ranting, but I was so unhappy with how tone-deaf the women were treated in this otherwise amazing book. I’ve described these scenes to my friends and they legit thought I was joking or being hyperbolic.
Did this bother anyone else in the book? Do you have a different take?
by Raediv
4 Comments
It’s a retelling of an arctic expedition in the mid 19th century. It’s not odd that there are few women in it, and not odd that they are treated in according to the norms of the time.
I’d rather read it as it was, then to have a version with modern day sensibilities imposed upon a time nearly 2 centuries ago.
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>Unfortunately, my love for all the detail in this book is also paired by my real distaste for how women, especially native girls, are treated and described.
Word! I was all prepared to give grace for Greenstockings and Lady Silence’s intro because, like you said, it’s Franklin’s POV and Franklin is a puritanical, condescending old Brit with PTSD and period appropriate misogyny.
Then we get Crozier and the Sophia interlude and I was still willing to forgive it, thinking “Okay, he’s a bitter drunk and probably an unreliable narrator”
Then we get the horrendous Act 3 love story with Lady Silence, with lots of assurances of how young and pure (yet sexually dominant) and destined for Crozier she is, and it all reads like she’s God’s gift to Job after his trials.
Despite them destroying the creature design of the Tuunbaq (how do you omit the serpentine neck that was its *defining feature*?!) I will forever cherish the miniseries for aging up Silence and making the other female characters something more than sexualized set dressing.
It is unfortunate that the indigenous people are depicted primarily for their exoticism and through that used as a supernatural element. I don’t think that is the only role, but almost impossible to ignore. A great deal of Simmons’ fiction takes on universal topics, but he strongly writes from a Euro-American approach and understanding of those topics. In some things like his far future sci fi that doesn’t come across as obviously uninformed or limited, but it becomes far more clear in his historical horror. Just one of those things about reading Simmons.
Anyway, as to the “iffy” things you have read/heard, I can say that he is a substantiated islamophobe, and has gone down the road to general right wing crank territory (ranting about political correctness, climate change being a hoax, etc).