I’m reading The Time Traveler’s Wife now. This puts me behind about half the reading public. I’m okay with that; I have priorities.
I have several things to say about this book, but I’m going to start with a point that Maggie Stiefvater made in her blog about a year ago, but has been bugging me ever since. It seems that recently a number of books have been published with titles that fall into this pattern: [Article] [Profession]’s [Traditional Female Role].
Let’s play with this pattern in Amazon search, shall we?
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Alchemist’s Daughter
The Doctor’s Wife
Captain Ahab’s Wife
Hitler’s Niece (?!?!)
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (Ok, a stretch maybe)
The Mad Knight’s Bride
The Black Knight’s Bride (The last two are both explicit romances)
These are all I can find in ten minutes of messing with Amazon.com, so maybe this “pattern” is just my paranoid, caffeine-addled mind picking up a comment Ms. Stiefvater made in her blog and running with it. Regardless, I’d prefer to live in a literary world where a disproportionate number of books with names like “The Captain” or “The Astronaut” starred a woman – or where “The Submariner’s Mistress” was as likely to focus around a homosexual couple as a heterosexual one.
(Note that I’m not intending to attack the authors of any of these books – just to mention an interesting pattern of titles that seem to turn on implicit gender assumptions.)