The Evolution of Princesses

It's springtime, and we all know what that means: the beginning of the blockbuster movie season. Last weekend Disney's John Carter opened, with many critics predicting its doom, pointing out that the viewing public has not been kind to movies about Mars. Speculation was rife that the movie—about a Civil War vet who goes to Mars—would bomb terribly. As it turns out, it wasn't a total dud; it did fairly well overseas so it may break even in the long haul. But prospects for a sequel—apparently the only criterion for success in movies—are bleak.

I liked the film. Over the years I've come to like historical dramas like Rome and The Tudors, alternative histories and retro-future Victorian steampunk settings. But I can see that for some John Carter might lack a certain pizzazz; it's more or less true to the understated tone of the Victorian era, and the characters don't have the same edgy sarcastic wit we've come to expect in summer blockbusters, even characters in the Victorian era like the Sherlock Holmes of Robert Downey Jr. The deserts of Mars feel more like Roman Egypt than Tatooine, especially with the casting of Rome's Ciaran Hinds and James Purefoy.

John Carter is based on  Edgar Rice Burroughs' first Barsoom novel,  A Princess of Mars. 2012 is the hundredth anniversary of its publication in serialized form in The All-Story, with the title Under the Moons of Mars. It was republished as a novel in 1917. (It's available for free at Project Gutenberg in HTML and e-book formats.)

Burrough's novels paved the way for the Tarzan movies and Buck Rogers serials in the thirties, which were the templates for modern blockbusters like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Arc. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells preceded Burroughs, but their work was somewhat abstract, while Burroughs's pulp fiction was full of rip-roaring swashbuckling adventure. And naked ladies.

Though I've read science fiction for more than forty years, I hadn't read any Burroughs until two years ago. My tastes tended more toward "hard science fiction" and writers like Asimov, Benford, Clarke, Heinlein, Niven, Varley, Zelazny, and so on. In my younger days Burroughs' Victorian writing style didn't attract me, and the social attitudes on race and gender expressed in his work, typical of his era, turned me off. Though I'm sure many of his contemporaries found his ideas outrageously radical and far too sympathetic to "primitives."

Making a movie from a book entails a great deal of condensation and restructuring. A two-hour film simply doesn't have the time to delve into subplots, or develop characters to the same extent a novel can.  Many characters have to be axed, or their functions must be combined into a single character. Often the conventions of a novel don't translate well into film.

Thus, many aspects of Burroughs' novel were changed: the mode of Carter's translation to Mars was altered to suit modern technological sensibilities; a new major character was added (pulled from a subsequent book in the series); even the characters' attire was altered—if filmed as originally written, the movie would have drawn an NC-17 rating. Did I mention naked ladies?

But perhaps the biggest change of all was the character of Dejah Thoris. As described in the novel, "She was as destitute of clothes as the green Martians who accompanied her; indeed, save for her highly wrought ornaments she was entirely naked, nor could any apparel have enhanced the beauty of her perfect and symmetrical figure." Symmetrical?

Burroughs' Dejah Thoris was the typical damsel in distress. When they first met, she was depicted as the haughty, condescending daughter of a nobleman, though somehow even this endeared her to Carter.

John Carter's Dejah Thoris is thoroughly modern, recast in the mold of Princess Leia. She's the Martian scientist on the verge of a technological breakthrough that would save her planet, only to be sabotaged by the villains. She's a top-notch sword fighter, wears more armor than Carter and could probably whoop him in a fair fight (his great Earthly strength is a major plot point). She's a scholar who can read ancient languages. When she's ultimately forced into cheesecake mode, she disdains it.

Even the underlying theme of the novel and the motivation for Carter and Dejah Thoris to meet—the deteriorating Martian biosphere—is discarded. Instead they are brought together when she flees a forced marriage to the villain who threatens to enslave all Mars.

In short, the changes with Dejah Thoris directly reflect the changed role of women in society a century after the novel was published. Today many top scientists, CEOs and politicians are women. Women serve in the military alongside men, and in workplaces everywhere else. Since 2000 women have outnumbered men in college 57-43%. Women still have not attained true equality, though the college numbers indicate that women will eventually to catch up.

Yet a hundred years after Under the Moons of Mars was published we still have politicians like Rick Santorum whose attitudes toward women seem to be even more antiquated than Edgar Rice Burroughs'. Santorum rails against birth control and abortion and women in the military; he seems intent on returning women to the chattel status that John Carter's Dejah Thoris fled. Women are not dainty, fragile princesses who must be coddled and simultaneously blamed for inciting men to lust.

Whether or not John Carter enjoys box office success, it's another clear reflection that in popular culture and among the young the issue of women's equality and their right to decide their own fate has been decided. And that's not just Hollywood propaganda. Women outnumber men in the voting age population, and they may well decide the election this fall.

It's just a matter of time until people like Santorum, Rush Limbaugh, the pope and the ayatollahs give up the ghost and give women their due.