Fundamentally I believe that writing about the rich and varied human existence is so important, and authors who do this end up seeming prescient in ways that naive analysis often rejects.
Two examples. First; a lot of people ship Frodo/Sam or Legolas/Gimli (or more obscure gay ships like Maedhros/Fingon), and some people say stuff like âwell, Tolkien was catholic, he clearly didnât intend for these characters to be gay.â But Tolkien himself says that he doesnât write Christian allegory, in fact he despises all allegory. What he does is write about the rich and varied human existence, and when he did so he drew on the experiences of the likely closeted gay and bisexual men he had met over his life! And he synthesized this as just a way people behave, not as ârepresentationâ but reality. And we can recognize that while in the early twentieth century, the 15% of people that identify as bisexual in the current generation (gen Z) would likely have married people of the opposite gender, that doesnât mean they didnât have same-gender relationships that had romantic elements even if they were never consummated.
A second example; in Tamora Pierceâs the Song of the Lioness Quartet, Alanna, the main character, dresses as a boy and trains to be a knight. As she grows up, she has to re-learn to connect with her femininity in secret with the few people who know who she is (thus making her a paradoxically-apt role model for both trans men and trans women, depending on which parts of the narrative one projects oneself onto). But Alanna never feels truly comfortable as a woman, either, and constantly has to assert both her masculinity and femininity to different people once she becomes a knight and reveals the secret. Tamora Pierce has since stated that if Alanna were born in the modern day, she would likely identify as genderfluid. But these books were written in the 1980s, and while there were people in that time period who were exploring the language of nonbinary and genderfluid identities, it wasnât really a widespread notion, and while I canât be sure Tamora Pierce didnât encounter that language I sort of doubt Alanna was intended from the beginning to fit that identity. Instead, Pierce wrote a character based on the people she knew in life, who perhaps uncomfortably chafed at their assigned gender, and wrote a character who really believably would be genderfluid today, despite (plausibly) not knowing what âgenderfluidâ was!
And I think thatâs beautiful. Thereâs not really a point to this but just to highlight a perspective in literary analysis that you can lose if you focus too much on the biographical details of the author.
