W3

W3

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

The adventure of Tintin (1929-1986) has achieved in popular culture and receive much love more than four decades after the last public album. Women are absent over the entire albums and if they have voices in Tintin is hardly flattering. In the adventure of Tintin, women take a back seat. Herge resits and ignores women in his life and work by treating women less important in his works. Tintin works with funny drawing and exaggerates some of the features which can be comedic. This is shown by Herge’s claim 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’ (quoted in Sadoul [1975] 1989, 93). 

Tintin au pays des Soviets has women but without speaking role, and they like a background in the stories where they don’t have mere figures in the crowd. African women critical Tin tin for the scene that causing a bump to her son’s head, and sad feeling to her husband’s illness. The women in Tintin remind background figures. Chinese women in an album praised by Claude Levi-Strauss depicted three generations depress and practice to reject as a western stereotype whereas in reality women were still suffering a lot in their action 1930s (Keeling 2008, p11-17). In the adventure, female’s tears are particular preferences and reproducing nineteenth-century women input as the psychologically ‘weaker sex’ (Fauvel 2013, p1). Herge depicts the assignation of labour roles in the early 20th century, ‘he ignores female aviators, intellectuals, writers, artists and other barriers breakers’ (Mountfort, 2020). The feminism’s second wave by the 1960s and 70s describe the women role is just like wallpaper in the album such as roles of wives, mothers, housekeepers, maid and nurses. Female labour is housekeepers, housewives, and mothers. Women were described as unidentified, nameless women, their visible agency voices metaphor as ‘absence, exclusion and erasure’ (Parkin and Karpinski 2014, p3). Herge said that he likes women too much to caricature them, but the women are still like a background in his books.

The women sought to free them from effective second class citizenship at the same time challenges to gender stereotypes with no reflection in decades. As Herge tell us, ‘women have nothing to do in a world like Tintin’s’ (Mountfort, 2020). That means women are the absence of useless like a background in Tintin’s stories and have a less supporting role in this. At the very start, Tintin explains how women are so associated with effect in the way they don’t want to live at a consequence depict as an annoy of caricature; Herge’s claim disregard to his opinion. The women status is low, it limits their roles in the family or society, and no career option as well as restricted their jobs.

While reading Tintin, we saw that women are excluded; their voices are covered and block in the way of how the society works at the time. The women have no voices, no place in the world; they are like a supporting role for man, and all women can do is working like a wife, housewife or subordination for a man that is present in last century as well as in Herge’s stories.

References:

Fauvel, A. (2013). “Crazy Brains and the Weaker Sex: The British Case (1860–1900).” Clio: Women, Gender, History 37: 1–25.

Keeling, R. (2008). “The Anti-Foot-binding Movement 1872–1922: A Cause for China Rather than Chinese Women.” Footnotes 1: 11–19.

Mountfort, P. (2020). Tintin, gender and desire. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 1-17.

Parkins, I., and E. C. Karpinski. (2014). “Introduction: In/Visibility: Absences/Presence in Feminist

Theory.” Atlantis 36: 3–7.

Sadoul, N. [1975]. Tintin et Moi: entretiens avec Hergé (Tintin and Me: Interviews with Hergé). Tournai: Casterman.