Tanith Lee, BDSM, Feminism, Et Cetera

People asked what I think of Neil Gaiman, but this is really the Tanith Lee tribute I've been seeking an excuse to write

Tanith Lee is my favorite author. But she’s obscure. So I was surprised and pleased recently to see that Lee is now, suddenly, widely recommended. In the wake of awful behavior by Neil Gaiman, who is a very famous writer, it seems that people started recommending Lee as a potential replacement for readers who like Gaiman’s style but don’t want to support Gaiman’s work anymore. There have also been claims that he stole some of his material directly from Lee. I have a lot to say about Lee, so I thought I’d write a post about her.

Before I write about Lee, it’s worth describing the context with Gaiman. I’ve read a fair number of his books and some are good. The famous Sandman series has moments of extraordinary beauty. I quite liked Neverwhere; American Gods was pretty good; and I still have an illustrated edition of Stardust that someone gave me decades ago. But I was never impressed with Gaiman’s originality — in fact, when I was a teenager, I remember noticing that Gaiman lifted an entire short story plot from Ray Bradbury. Gaiman is clearly smart and skilled, but in my opinion, Gaiman’s work is best described as a synthesis of greater talents. Some artists make fortunes by remixing tropes, and he is one of them.

Recently, some MeToo-style rumors began surfacing about Gaiman, but the level of evil was not clear until a reporter named Lila Shapiro published a full investigation in New York Magazine. (Disclosure: I am currently working on a project with New York Magazine, but I have no professional connection to Shapiro.) Shapiro’s article is brilliant and horrifying. In gut-wrenching detail, she describes Gaiman doing very abusive things while claiming it was consensual BDSM.

I’ve been thinking about Shapiro’s article a lot, because I used to be a sex writer who specialized in BDSM. I was also trained as a rape crisis counselor in my twenties¹ and I have done various feminist writing and volunteering. Over a decade ago, I published an essay collection titled The S&M Feminist. At the time, this title was a deliberate provocation, because BDSM and feminism were commonly perceived as oppositional, though they aren’t really perceived as oppositional anymore. At the time, trying to reconcile these realities, I wrote many posts about BDSM and abuse, and about the distinction between them. So on the day Shapiro’s article was published, I re-posted one of my old articles, “Aftercare or Brainwashing?: A BDSM Theory Post,” which contains some of my best thinking on the subject. There is still more to be said about Shapiro’s article and how it handles these issues, but now I want to talk about Tanith Lee.

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I would have loved to talk with her, but sometimes I wonder how much I really had in common with her. There are hints of BDSM in Tanith Lee’s work, but it’s not her main subject, at all. And I sometimes see her described as a feminist, but I’m not sure she ever identified herself that way. I think many feminists would find her work problematic.

Lee never had children, and her stories indicate a distrust of doing so. Some of her books end with the heroine pregnant and happy, but I don’t recall ever seeing a positive portrayal of a Tanith Lee character raising a child. This made me feel a bit sad a few years ago, when I first experienced and wrote about pregnancy and birth, as if I had lost a friend. An odd feeling, perhaps, since we never met, and Lee died in 2015. Soon before she died, I had a vivid dream that I met her, that we walked slowly together through gemstone palaces, the colors so deep and vivid that I can still feel them. I sent an interview request but it went unanswered.

In my favorite short story of Lee’s, “The Glass Dagger” (1991),² Lee portrays the main character, a painter named Valmé, as utterly uninterested in having children. In these descriptions, Lee shows a characteristic cynicism about many women’s desires: “The aspirations she had observed in other women — to be fêted, to be adored, to mate and produce small toy replicas of themselves — Valmé lacked.”

What a way to describe romance and family! This was often how Lee described stereotypical femininity, with an almost detached contempt. I see traces of that internalized misogyny in myself as well, sometimes, which perhaps was part of Lee’s point, being a female author herself. I sometimes feel so odd when I’m with children, spending time around brightly colored toys and playgrounds, surrounded by places and objects somewhat different from the aesthetic I’d assemble left to myself. Sometimes I hear my own voice becoming high-pitched and syrupy-sweet talking to a child and think: Really? This is me? But these aspects of motherhood don’t touch the deep beauty of it, and even aside from that, is it right to feel contempt for them, anyway?

Anyway. Simultaneously, Lee’s stories — and especially “The Glass Dagger” — are deeply perceptive about men and women. I’ve wondered what it would mean to acquire a glass dagger, just to have a physical instantiation of the symbol Lee delineates so well. “The Glass Dagger” is about Valmé’s relationship with a wealthy, famous, charming athlete named Michael. Michael is accustomed to getting what he wants, and having fallen in love with Valmé at first sight, he has already gotten himself an affair with Valmé. But although Michael has Valmé’s sexual attentions and does not doubt her physical fidelity, what he now wants is for Valmé to feel for him the way Michael feels for Valmé. He is frustrated that she puts her work above all else, including him. He hates the way that, although Valmé appreciates and is kind to him, she seems un-obsessed, undisturbed by any threat of losing him.

Several lines from the story that live rent-free in my head occur during the initial exposition of their relationship. The couple is out walking and they pass a shop window in which a glass dagger is displayed. Valmé, who rarely asks Michael for anything and tries to dodge his generosity — on this walk “it was his intent to buy her a present, hers to frustrate him” — is almost involuntarily drawn by the sight of the dagger. She refuses to ask him for it, though. So Michael buys the dagger behind her back and has it sent to her studio, where she silently accepts and keeps it.

Lee describes Valmé alone in her studio as she picks up the dagger and holds it to a shaft of sunlight:

“In her hand it was a shard of burning nothingness, a sort of hard-edged flame. To glimpse it in this way was to be entirely puzzled about what it might be. And when she lowered the thing, it gave off a flash like lightning, striking the walls in a flaming cartwheel, before going out. What was this apparition?… [The story shifts into exposition, then returns to the scene in Valmé’s studio.] It was this, then, this dagger made of harsh and tactile air, which Valmé had taken from its box and lifted up into the light, flashing and dying, like a flame.

“Why should that be so? She had never attempted to paint the dagger. She kept it close. Had it become for her a cipher of what her lover should have been? Not necessarily noble, handsome, or wealthy, but an enigma, transparent and merciless, blazing and incalculable, the instrument of sudden death, and mystery?”

I also think often of a single line from later, the end of the story, after Valmé is driven almost suicidally mad — or is she? — by the game Michael devises to make her obsessed with him: “The artist saw and judged as only an artist could.”

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Valmé’s story is tame compared to many of Lee’s other stories. She wrote often of terrible realities, generally those of women. Not all her stories were science fiction or fantasy. She has a fiction story from 1988 called “The Devil’s Rose,” whose style is similar to a Russian novel. The story is written from the perspective of a man who deliberately seduces a young girl, even though he has syphilis. He is her first lover. He seduces her in secret and then leaves town without telling her. And so the girl dies young, driven insane by the syphilis, in agony, and hardly understanding what has happened. All from their single night of passion. All of which could occur in our world.

In the collection where I first read this story, Nightshades, Lee wrote this introductory paragraph: “I have always said I find this one of the most horrific of my own stories. How many times it must, in some form, have happened. And, in more modern guise, still does. One wishes to assume a strong moral stance. Yet self-denial is a wicked thing. The air is always full of first-thrown stones.”

The way Lee describes the seduction, and the girl’s death, is eerily beautiful. Yet I do not find it difficult to take a strong moral stance about it.

As I’ve aged, it’s become clear that I’m more an activist than Lee. There are things she portrays with no apparent condemnation, which I certainly condemn, and sometimes have trouble stomaching. And yet I find that, sometimes, I stand accused of the same: Others express frustration with my desire to connect and understand, rather than condemn, and it’s gotten me in real trouble occasionally. I’ve always felt a desire to watch and sense and understand and know. Perhaps there is a tension there, a way that my desire to sense all that I can collides with my desire for impact, or safety. Overall, though, it seems as if Lee’s primary subject in life was experience and its complexities, its intricate edges, its liminal spaces, and I relate to that.

Some characters in Lee’s stories are heroic, but rarely straightforwardly so. Even the most heroic of them, like Cyrion of Cyrion (1982), are occasionally cruel. Among her female characters, their heroism can seem oddly passive, especially given the genres in which Lee most often worked. The main character of Lee’s famous book Biting The Sun (1976), to whom I related strongly when I was a teenager, is active and does a lot — but she lives in a world where she can and does body-swap to switch biological sex at will.

With that said, the ways she portrays women gives Lee a different way of gesturing at female power. One of her preoccupations appears to be imagining women’s power that is really feminine, and the darker sides of this. Often Lee shows witchcraft, and not always in a wholly positive way, though it is now standard in fantasy for witches to be good. One of Lee’s most amazing collections, Dreams of Dark and Light, includes two Cinderella retellings. In one, the girl is a witch, an instrument of vengeance for a wronged ancestor, whose seduction of the prince wreaks havoc on the kingdom. In another, through a magical trick of time, the prince sees the girl but doesn’t find her again until he is an old man, and so, though she loved him as a young man, when she sees him again she is disgusted. She treats the old king cruelly, killing him using nothing but words.

Where would frameworks like BDSM and feminism fit into any of this? The categories involved in those communities seem hard to find within a Lee story. I wonder now what Lee made of true stories of extreme abuse like Gaiman’s, but also what she would have made of actual BDSM relationships that are consensual. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the word consent in one of her tales, though she portrays many violations of it, as well as situations where it is actually hard to tell. The story “Zelle’s Thursday” (1989), which is reprinted in the recent collection Tanith Lee A-Z, is from the perspective of a female-shaped robot whose owners would certainly be abusing her if she were human. Yet her subjectivity is sufficiently unclear — and her healing capacities sufficiently advanced — that it’s hard to assess the monstrousness of their actions.

In thinking about all this, I always come back to the first novel Lee wrote for adults, a fantasy novel called The Birthgrave from 1975. It starts with a woman who awakens in a hidden chamber in the depths of a volcano, her memory lost. She stumbles outside to make her way in an unfamiliar world of sword-and-sorcery tropes, where she is sometimes revered as a goddess and sometimes taken as a slave. She discovers that she is a powerful sorceress, but for much of the novel she cannot use her magic to defend herself due to psychological blocks. At one point, after she is raped, she bears her rapist’s child.

The woman with the lost memory goes through much of the story masked. She believes her face is hideous. Whenever anyone sees her unmasked face, they fall silent. Towards the end of the story she meets a strange man from another world. He has technology to help her recover her memory and her true identity. But the most important moment between them is not technological at all: He seizes her and pulls her bodily to look in a mirror. As he holds her, she fights and screams and pleads, but in the end he succeeds in forcing her to look. And when she finally sees her own face, she realizes that everyone falls silent seeing her, not because she is ugly, but because she is beautiful.

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Postscript: Book Recommendations

Someone in the comments asked me for some specific book recommendations. Here is my answer :)

First, I should note that while I love Lee, some of her books are not great. She was a professional writer almost her whole life, so I suspect that sometimes she had to write sub-standard material to hit deadlines. Because of this, I do not recommend selecting any random Tanith Lee book and assuming that it will be good, because it might not be! (With that said, if you become a Lee superfan then it’s worth checking out all her books; there’s always something stylistically interesting.) There is a bibliography of all her work at DaughterOfTheNight.com.

She was able to write across a wide range of styles. Many of her books are quite different from each other as a result. Here are my favorites:

• Biting The Sun is a great, fun, and easy read. One of my all-time favorite novels. The book fits in the science fiction sub-genre I sometimes call “utopia/dystopia.” (Note: This book was originally published as two books, Don't Bite The Sun and Drinking Sapphire Wine. But right now, it’s cheaper and easier to find as Biting The Sun.)

• The Silver Metal Lover is a science fiction romance novel about a girl and a robot. It’s easy and lovely to read, with deep moments.

• “The Glass Dagger” is my favorite short story by Lee.

• Cyrion is an incredible set of short stories about one character, a sword-and-sorcery hero named Cyrion. It makes great use of sword-and-sorcery hero tropes, while also being compelling and original.

• Tanith Lee A-Z is a wide-ranging collection of shorts, published by Lee’s husband after she died. He had great taste in the stories he picked out. Many of my favorites are in here, including “The Devil's Rose” and “Zelle's Thursday,” both stories that I mentioned in the OP, as well as “Rherlotte,” which I didn't.

• Dreams of Dark and Light is another short story collection. I like this one because it covers Lee’s range of styles. She was a highly versatile writer, and this collection shows her versatility. This book is way out of print, though. It looks to me like the minimum you’d have to pay for a copy is $52 (found via Bookfinder.com).

• The Flat Earth series contains five beautifully written mythic fantasy novels. The series is really original, while drawing clearly from many different myths. If you buy the five novels separately, then the first one is Night’s Master, and you can see if you like it enough to continue the series.

If you are ready to commit to buying more than one Flat Earth novel at once, then there’s a nice hardcover edition that isn’t too expensive, which takes the form of two collections published by Reader’s Digest. One of these is called The Lords of Darkness and the other Night’s Daughter.

A lot of people on social media are saying that Gaiman stole from Flat Earth, but I don't think that’s likely, because the Flat Earth series is so strikingly written and well-known. However, I do think it’s likely that Gaiman stole material from Lee, because she told multiple people before she died that he had done so. I would love to know which Lee titles were involved. If anyone knows the answer to this question, please tell me. I’m so curious!

Fun fact: One of my first writing jobs (almost twenty years ago!) was with White Wolf Games. I got to work on the second edition of their Exalted line, which was a real honor because I fell in love with the first edition of the game during college (my senior thesis was partially about the game). The first edition of Exalted listed Lee’s Flat Earth among its inspirations. Before I played Exalted, I felt annoyed by some of the surface facts that I’d heard about it. However, I had already read Lee’s Flat Earth, and so when my friends insisted that I look at the Exalted rulebook, I became impressed by the taste demonstrated by its authors in their “Influences” section. So I gave the game a chance. The rest is history!

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1. Regarding my training as a rape crisis counselor, I was specifically trained as a medical advocate by an organization in Chicago that is now called Resilience. When I did the training, it was called Rape Victim Advocates. Sometimes I think “rape crisis counselor” isn’t quite the right phrase to describe a medical advocate, but I think most people don’t know what a medical advocate is, so hopefully it’s close enough.

2. This extraordinary story is from a collection that I otherwise found forgettable, The Secret Books of Paradys 3: The Book of the Dead. The book is now out of print, so I am providing a PDF of the story here, but if someone involved with Lee’s estate asks me to take it down, then I will.