Aisling Ltd
the debut novel by Seán Harnett
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Hag's Head Press didn't ask me to change too many things during
the editing of Aisling Ltd. And any amendments they did suggest
were all very wise and all immeasurably improved the quality of the
book.
But there was one cut that caused me some pain. In Chapter 6 one
of the characters, Tom Drover, sets forth a nine-fold schema for
classifying women. I really liked it (mostly because I really
liked writing in Tom's 'voice'), but the version that appears in the
book is much shorter than the one I originally wrote.
I'm including the original version here. I don't expect that you'll will find it terribly interesting (it was cut for good reason), but something in me feels that Tom ought to have his full say ... for the sake of completeness, if nothing else.
Tom's 'Typology of Totty'
I have this theory that there are essentially just nine basic
female body types, morphogenetically perpetuated by nature in each
generation. Distribution of type is determined by environmental
factors and varies from place to place; it might even be the case that
nature is constantly selecting for new types and that the nine I have
identified will be supplemented or replaced in future generations by
new types, just as the current types have been supplemented as our
species has developed.
The nine basic types are, in their evolutionary order (that is, the
order in which they appeared in the species): Stone Age Woman, Warrior
Princess, Venusian, Rubenesque, Everywoman, Pretty Girl, Beauty Queen,
Supermodel and Waif. Not very imaginative names, I'll admit, but they
are evocative, and they conjure up mental pictures of precisely the
type of woman I am describing. Take 'Stone Age Woman', for instance.
What does that name conjure up, conceptually? If you imagine a tough,
plain, hardy woman then you have imagined correctly and, moreover,
imagined exactly the sort of woman they must have been present at the
dawn of the human story. The savannah would not have been kind to many
of the women living today. You needed to be tough back then: bear your
children, gather the berries and the other wild fruit, fend off
attacks by wild animals. Today, the same conditions produce the tough,
wiry women found in the remaining pre-modern agricultural or
hunter-gather communities on the planet.
At the other end of my scale I have placed the Waif. The Waif is the
apex of the modern woman, an adult in the elongated body of a child
that has never been challenged by her environment to exert herself at
doing anything. She is beyond the Supermodel, but her presence is
striking rather than beautiful, largely because she seems strangely
sexless. She is not even androgynous, because that term suggests a
combination of male and female characteristic, whereas the Waif
belongs to a new gender, beyond male and female; the final form of a
species that will eventually reproduce itself without all the messy
business of sexual intercourse ... One can't imagine a Waif every
being pregnant, let alone giving birth: surely no child could ever be
squeezed through those attenuated hips. But make her work for her
living for a few years, put her into a situation where she must
struggle to survive, and she will either die or transform into a Stone
Age Woman.
Who knows, she might even reproduce.
My typology is, then, a circle, with each type tending towards the
next type, until it cycles around on itself with the Waif tending to
develop into Stone Age Woman. Of course, such movement from type to
type is not easy to accomplish: physiology is relatively unyielding,
but, nevertheless, a woman can transform — given exercise, diet and
grooming — from Warrior Princess to Venusian, or from Rubenesque to
Everywoman (this latter being the type of woman we meet most of
everyday; she is the median, the average type).
The reverse is also true: a lack of concern for, or wilful neglect of,
exercise, diet and grooming could result in, for instance, an
Everywoman piling on the pounds and becoming Rubenesque, or a
Supermodel neglecting her skincare regime and becoming merely a Beauty
Queen.
Now, within each type there is a great deal of scope for variety. I
have isolated four distinct variables (but I'm sure there are more):
size, shape, colouring and poise. Size relates to height, or lack
thereof; shape, to how wide or narrow a woman is; colouring, to her
complexion and the shade of her hair. All of these are important — a
tall, lean Stone Age Woman with blonde hair and sallow skin is
strikingly different from a small, stout Stone Age Woman with auburn
hair and pale skin (though you would still recognise them both as
belonging to the same type). The most significant differentiator on
any level is, however, poise, by which I mean self-confidence and
self-possession. There are gradations here too, of course, but the
important fact to remember is that a shy woman with no self-confidence
is an entirely different proposition to woman with utter belief in
herself, regardless of what body type or how conventionally attractive
either of them might be.
Page created on 23 November 2005
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