Week 3

1. What gaps are there in Hergé’s representations of women?

Herge’s representation of Women within his works display significant gaps that need to be addressed, in order to understand his stance on Women. The absence of Women within many of his works are painfully noticeable. In the rare occasion that Women are featured, their portrayal is unfavourable, and they are provided with little to no character development.

Female characters within Herge’s works are merely background ornaments, passerbys’ amongst the crowds. Women are often seen carrying out domestic duties such as preparing foods and managing their children. They are wiped off any rights to dialogue or contributions to the storylines. Herge makes Women seem unsubstantial, diminishing and failing to acknowledge their necessity within the setting. Mountfort’s supports the claim by stating “In many of Hergé’s albums there is an almost total absence of female characters, and the only women we do see are background characters who do not speak (Mountfort, 2020).” He further states ‘If Women were present within the story, the portrait was hardly flattering’. (Mountford,2020). This can be seen in Tintin in the Congo, in which a couple of female characters are surprisingly given dialogue yet limiting it to simple hostile phrases. For example, poor Mrs. Wang’ first appears in Lotus weeping over the fate of her mad son and is given three lines of dialogue ([1946] 1983, 29) and a woman is seen upset over her husband being sick within Tintin in the Congo (Mountford, 2012). Herge’s portrayal of Women is misleading, often domesticating them to stereotypical roles with no room for development. Women are portrayed as extensions of their husbands with no agency of their own (Mountfort, 2020).

Although Herge does not directly bash Women, he associates them with inferiority by portraying them as the weaker class whose emotional needs are accommodated by the superior class, Men. This shows a dangerous gap within his representation of Women, as he fails to acknowledge the rise of second wave feminism along with the many social movements  during the time of publishing his works. Herge, ignorantly so,  failed to understand the struggle and plight for  freedom of Women; failing to change his notion of thinking by including more female characters  or by representing Women in an equivalent manner to Males. Accordingly, Herge chose matters that he thought were worthy of publishing while completely disregarding the second wave feminist movement (1960’s-1980’s)- his orthodox views on Women being the home maker while Men were portrayed as the saviour, suggests that his primary ideologies were both mysogynistic and chavinistic.

Another gap in Herge’s representation of Women is his need to hypersexualise and display overprotectiveness over Women, within his works. Herge explains his need to eradicate Women from his works through claiming that  ‘[w]omen have nothing to do in a world like Tintin’s. I like women far too much to caricature them. And, besides, pretty or not, young or not, women are rarely comic characters’ (Mountfort, 2020, p. 2). Herge’s justification of alienating Women from his works derives from his love towards Women, making it seem as though he is intentionally trying to keep them away from the limelight, in order to savor their innocence from comedic adventures. While Herge may have positive interests, he discloses benevolent sexism rooting from mysogynistic values, which essentially causes more harm than good to the female sex. Herge perpetuates stereotypes that once again reinforce the idea that Women are inferior to Men, drawing a bold line of distinction between the two by shunning one gender, and raising the status of the latter through including them within his works. 

 It is blatantly obvious that Herge’s representations of Women were prejudiced, he constantly reinforced the statement that Women have no place in the world of Tintin by subjecting them to sexist stereotypes or by completely wiping off their mere existence.

Mountfort, P. (2020). Tintin, gender and desire. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. https://doi-org.ezproxy.aut.ac.nz/10.1080/21504857.2020.1729829