fuck me sideways

[labellementeuse]

OK now. Of all the characters in fiction everywhere, Hermione Granger is the least likely in practically the entire WORLD to change her name upon marriage. She is career-motivated, widely-read, self-sufficient, politically aware and ACTIVE, and for fuck's sake, if that wasn't enough, she's marrying someone with FIVE LIVING MALE SIBLINGS.

Why is my fiction reading life so difficult, people.

Second question: do I get to count novel-length fics as 'books read'? I just read an epic Draco/Neville fic that I'm seriously considering counting even though I've never done that before. Thoughts? It was solidly novel-length, though I'm not sure how many words (averaging out a few chapters I would say it's about 150k, which is nearly four nebula novels; HP&tDH is apparently just under 200k and HP&tPS apparently 80k.) So it's the same amount of words as a novel. And they were pretty decent words, I guess. So... well, I don't know, you tell me.

PS I really mean it about Hermione.

Comments

[jeeps]

you don't think it's possible to be all of those things and still change your name after marriage? i do agree that of all the fictional characters, hermione's one who is much more likely to keep her name, but i don't think it's ridiculous to think that she might decide not to.

[labellementeuse]

Naturally it's possible. It simply happens to be something that I really object to in fiction, since I feel no need to respect choice feminism wrt fictional characters and additionally feel that characters in fanfiction, who after all can do just about anything, should act (in character) as role models for these kinds of decisions.

[labellementeuse]

And to clarify that so it's a bit less offensive. When I read a fic where a character like Hermione is changing her name, I tend to think two things:

1. The person writing this fic is a person who would choose to change her name, and for whatever reason has not bothered to apply whatever they know about Hermione herself to this decision, and so it has been written in a throwaway line. Apart from anything else, this perpetuates a mindset I dislike, and will generally ruin a fic for me, because it reinforces the idea that changing the name is automatic, rather than a decision that is made (this is true even in fic where Hermione is not a significant character.)

2. When I speak to women my age, or about a decade older than myself, and especially women like Hermione, about changing their names, they will typically justify their decision to change their name - that is to say, they are aware of it as a decision they have made, not something they did automatically. When Hermione in a fic in which she is a main character chooses to change her name with no explanation of that, I find it annoying for all of the reasons above. On the other hand, some people do offer reasons, and they tend to be the same reasons that women who I speak to offer: they don't see a distinction between their husband's name and their father's name (a rationale that, I think Hermione would agree with me, could just as easily recommend the idea of changing her name to Parker Bowles); their husband is traditional and it was a deal-breaker for them, or even more mildly their husband preferred it; their husband has no male siblings to carry on the name (although I don't find this especially convincing since children tend to take the father's name, as unnatural as I find this); they particularly disliked their last name or particularly liked their partner's; they are lesbian and wanted to make a statement. There are one or two others but they generally are similar to these. And most of these just aren't applicable to Hermione - she's never had a problem with her name which is in any case a lot prettier than Weasley; he has tonnes of male siblings; she's generally heterosexual (at least in the stuff I'm complaining about). etc. The only ones that really apply are 'pressure from the partner', which is the point at which I start getting extremely upset, because we actually don't have an opinion from Ron (or anyone in the books) on that and there is absolutely no need for him to want Hermione to have his name. It's just not a matter that I think is intrinsic. So I read it as forcing the issue and get mad.

I hope you read this one before the other one because it was written in haste!

[jeeps]

lol, i did read the other one first and was like, "RAR!" but i find the second comment to be a satisfactory explanation. i agree that most western women will actively make that choice at some time in their lives, and hermione especially would give it significant thought. though i would argue that ron is often not the most progressive person in the books. he's the one most annoyed with hermione re: s.p.e.w., he acts the most scandalized when he finds out certain characters aren't fully human (adhering to wizarding society's prejudices), such as with lupin and hagrid, and then there's this little gem —

‘I told you!’ Ron hissed at Hermione, as she stared down at the article. ‘I told you not to annoy Rita Skeeter! She’s made you out to be some sort of — of scarlet woman!’

Hermione stopped looking astonished and snorted with laughter.

‘Scarlet woman?’ she repeated, shaking with suppressed giggles as she looked round at Ron.

‘It’s what my mum calls them,’ Ron muttered, his ears going red again.

— which is hysterical, but also telling: his first inclination is to blame hermione for someone else essentially calling her a slut, and he clearly hasn't thought much about that beyond his mother's old-fashioned views. so i can easily imagine ron taking issue with the name thing. and maybe wondering if it's because hermione would be ashamed to be a weasley or something equally ridiculous. BUT, i think that's also an argument hermione would win. if she did take her husband's name, i don't think it would ever be because of pressure from his side, because i don't think that would be a good enough reason for her.

[meigui]

I don't know how similar feminism in Britain is to feminism in America, but I do still spend quite a suprising amount of time explaining to strangers that, no, there is no Mrs. Zhou, because my mother kept her "maiden name"; and it takes all my self-control sometimes not to explain that, actually, "maiden name" isn't even entirely appropriate in this case, because women of Chinese decent generally don't do the whole changing-one's-family-name-upon-marriage thing. People sometimes have a lot of trouble understanding why my mother and I don't share a last name, and don't even seem to have the analogue of feminist practices for comparison.

(Which is, incidentally, the other reason I don't feel comfortable with "Miss" and "Mrs." as hypothetically applied to myself, feminist sensibilities in regards to that whole argument aside--I always thought that "Miss" implies "this is my 'maiden name,' which I intend to abandon upon marriage" while "Mrs." implies "This is not the name under which I was born," neither of which is appropriate for me personally.)

Anyway, I... think it's still too pervasively normative for Western women to change their surnames when they marry to be certain either way in regards to Hermione, although, personally--not having thought about it much before, given that HP isn't one of my primary fandoms--I do agree that it's quite likely she wouldn't.

Apropos of nothing--I think Dairine and Nita are less likely to change their surnames than Hermione, especially considering the differences between DD and JKR ;)

[labellementeuse]

Yeah, I have the same thing, only it's a little more complicated because I do actually share my name with my mother and my sister, it just happens to be a different name to that of my father and brothers (we have the other name as a middle name.) My mother sometimes hangs up on "Mrs. Herlastname" and ALWAYS hangs up on "Mrs. Hislastname". :P

I do think it's really interesting and you know, POINTED that it's a variable cultural practise, because so much of the Western women's attitude is it's just what's DONE/it's just what's PRACTICAL when obviously there are enormous chunks of women who it doesn't affect at all.

You probably know that we agree on the Ms issue.

Apart from anything else, I think 'Juanita Rodriguez' is just a little too pat, don't you?

[meigui]

I hate it when it's, like, a security question on your online bank account or something, because it's so common for "What's your grandmother's maiden name?" to be a security question, and I'm always like, "FU, MY GRANDMOTHER DOESN'T HAVE A MAIDEN NAME >8(" and my parents have both gotten to the point where they'll answer any and all security questions with weird family in-jokes. I haven't quite gotten there yet, but I'm pretty close :/

I think part of it is that Anglophone culture especially seems to consider the operative unit of familial interactions to be couples, while Sinophone culture is more focused on lineage, so getting married doesn't separate you as a unit from your parents if you're Chinese, but if you're USian, it does? IDK, man. Like, in English if you talk about "the Lees" you're talking about Mr. and Mrs. Lee and their one-and-a-half sproglings, but when you talk about "the Li family" in Chinese you probably mean a particular subtree of the hugemongous network of people named "Li" who can all trace their lineage far back enough that they know they're directly related to within a few generations. Or IDK, maybe I'm just pulling that out of my ass.

Yes, of course! Haha.

Haha, yeah, although I think Dairine is even less likely than Nita--Nita at least has some respect for tradition and cultural norms. Dairine is just like, what, you think these dumb arbitrary practices should have anything to do with me?

On the other hand, I think "Hermione Weasley" sounds kind of stupid. For one thing, it has way too much assonance on top of an amphibrachic meter.

[ellipsisblack.livejournal.com]

But her becoming Hermione Weasley is soooooooo romaaaaaantic! *runs away*

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

*smacks you with a cushion*

[aimeesworld.livejournal.com]

Hermione is the sort of character who would insist her children have her surname, or at least that it gets shared out evenly between herself and Ron.

I don't understand the automatic response in fanfiction for all characters to change their names, regardless of personality and circumstance.

[aimeesworld.livejournal.com]

Although I also understand that I have more cause to think about this than many.

[sixth-light.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's not just in fanfiction. I've had to have the my-name-is-the-same conversation a *lot* over the last three months, and I was always about as likely as Hermione to change my name.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

I do see hyphenation for the kids quite a lot, actually - despite this rant, plenty of fics DON'T have Hermione change her name, enough that I can afford to be my judgemental instant-hit-of-the-backbutton-for-Mrs. H Weasley self. Anyway, I'm not myself a huge fan of hyphenation, I agree more with the sharing that you propose, but at least I think people who are hyphenating are thinking about it. (Plus, it's the 80/90s, so they're probably temporally accurate, too.) But yeah, ITA.

[aimeesworld.livejournal.com]

I like to think Hermione convinced Ron that it would be a good idea to have a Hugo Granger and Rose Weasley. Molly was HORRIFIED.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

I like your ideas and wish to enforce them on everyone in the HP fandom.

[bad-mushroom.livejournal.com]

Never thought about that, but TRUE. I think I just sort of discounted the Crapilogue, though, so that accounts for my lack of rage. It's weird, because I was brought up with it, since my last name is my mother's and she's been married twice and didn't change it either time; and it always shocks me that some people just cannot wrap their heads around where my surname came from.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

I believe, though I could not swear to it, that Hermione's surname isn't specified in the epilogue (thank god, because it's so 60s I just wouldn't trust it at all.) I think we have similar experiences in these matters! <3

[kitsunerei88]

I really hate to bring up the spectre of different cultures, etc, but I would argue that all those things you said about Hermione, while true, may not necessarily indicate that she WOULDN'T change her name upon marriage. I don't know. I feel a little offended because when you're describing a character as "career-motivated, widely-read, self-sufficient, politically aware and ACTIVE" and then insist she wouldn't change her name, I feel like you are saying that women who do [choose to change their name] cannot be all those things.

Straight up, I am all those things and more, and I would change my name upon marriage if it were all that important to my fiance. Changing my name doesn't change me. Of course, I wouldn't do that for just anyone.

Furthermore, I feel like you're speaking from a community where a woman not changing her name is normal. I think that's great! However, in the community I come from (which, admittedly, is pretty much the middle of bumfuck nowhere farm country), it's almost strictly not acceptable for a woman to keep her own name. I don't know how it is in Britain. But here, there are many "career-motivated, widely-read, self-sufficient, politically aware and ACTIVE" women who change their name upon marriage. Canada is a progressive country; for example, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court here along with half the Supreme Court is female. The Chief Justice changed her name upon marriage. The only place I've seen where women generally keep their names is academia.

I think whether Hermione keeps her name has more to do with outside environmental influences than her personality. I also want to emphasize that whether a woman changes her name is a personal choice, and I don't think a woman should be condemned or congratulated on that choice.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

I'm not speaking from a community where women keeping their names is normal, since that isn't true most places in the western world. In fact, I would venture to say that I'm speaking from a country that is similar in very many respects to your own (progressive social-ish democracy Western Commonwealth country with low population density and some disjunction between politics in the city centres and politics in the country) as well as similar-ish to the UK, although I can't hunt down statistics to the number of women who choose to change their names upon marriage in either country.

My little list of traits of Hermione is intended to suggest that people with these traits are unlikely to change their name. As I explained in a bit more detail in comments to this post on dreamwidth (http://labellementeuse.dreamwidth.org/) (there's also some discussion there about changing names in women of Chinese descent), I know that there are women who are all these things that do choose to change their name. However, in my experience (by which I mean talking to a lot of women in communities all over the internets - i.e. mostly from the USA, a country more conservative than either of ours) women like this who do change their names experience it as a decision, not as an inevitability, and they will typically justify their decision in an argument - as you did when you said 'I would change my name upon marriage if it were all that important to my fiance.' Whereas when I see this in fic one of two things happen: either it is portrayed as an inevitability rather than a decision, which I think is frankly thoughtless and totally ridiculous considering the general Hermione-ness of Hermione; or they give a reason which is, indeed, something like 'it's so important to Ron.' And then I think to myself: we don't have information from Ron about this. I don't think it's completely out of character, but I also don't think that it's something intrinsic or obvious. Why would a fic writer choose to give Ron this conservative, selfish trait when he's marrying someone who he must be aware is not a conservative person? Since Ron isn't actually a real person, and all. I find I generally do not enjoy the answers I produce to that question.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

I also want to emphasize that whether a woman changes her name is a personal choice, and I don't think a woman should be condemned or congratulated on that choice.

I agree that it's a choice, and I don't think I was judging Hermione in my post, I think I was judging people who write Hermione. However, since you bring it up, I do happen to think that women who choose to change their names are perpetuating some fairly conservative social ideas about women, men, marriage, and the family, and I feel no compunction in saying that I think you should have a good reason to do that. Being in love with someone for whom it is a dealbreaker does, in my opinion, constitute a good reason, although keeping my name would be a dealbreaker for me. However, I don't think people get to hide behind choice as a justification for doing whatever they want and pretending that their actions don't affect others. The personal is political.

[kitsunerei88]

I see your point. I don't read fic, so I can't really comment on HP fic at all (mostly anything I've read dates back about eight years and comes from the horror-pit known as fanfiction.net), but your points re: Hermione are good ones.

I don't think Ron would care, one way or another. Ron doesn't come off as a particularly stubborn person compared to Hermione, I don't think.

I think it's something so ingrained in Western culture that fic writers just don't think about it. In the future I think I will always ask women I know why they are changing their names if they do so. I am always secretly looking to make people think.

I understand the point between personal/political, but it's a hard balance to work with. At this point I make what small changes I can without jeopardizing my entire career. I hate politics. Thank god I don't live in the southern states.

[duskshadows.livejournal.com]

i would totes count novel-length fic, but that's just me.
also: valid points on the name-change there. i think if it's going to be important for anyone in the Weasleys it would be Molly, but it's not like she's hasn't just adopted everyone anyway.
it would, however, be awesome, if Harry had changed his name to Weasley. admittedly, he wouldn't as blahblah fathers name blahblah family line, but still. or Ginny stayed a Weasley. actually, i can see her being more stubborn about staying a Weasley than Hermione a Granger, for some reason. hmmm.