What gaps are there in Hergé’s representations of women?
Tintin is inarguably a male dominated series, with all the reoccurring characters being men. The biggest gap in Hergés representation of women is including one that is not a background or minor character. Any women seen in the Tintin comics are delegated to being mothers, wives of male characters, caretakers, or simply just standing around in the background. In fact, in the first ever comic, Tintin in the land of the Soviets, there are no women in the comic, with them simply being in the background.
Hergé was once quoted as saying that “women have nothing to do in a world like Tintin’s. I like women far too much to caricature them…” (Cited in Sadoul, 1989, p.93) This is blatantly false as any female characters, when his comics do feature speaking women, are very caricatured and stereotyped. They are the wives, mothers, and housekeepers of Tintin’s world. Not only that but “tears are an exclusively female predilection in the Adventures, reproducing nineteenth-century clichés of women as the psychologically ‘weaker sex’.” (Mountford, 2020) Only the female characters are ever seen crying, such as the Congolese woman in Tintin in the Congo who is crying for her sick husband. The women are also depicted as being in distress, for example in Cigars of the Pharaoh (1955) a woman is depicted as being in trouble and Tintin swoops in just in time to catch her as she faints. And, in The Crab with the Golden Claw (1943) Mrs Finch, Tintin’s housekeeper, is clearly distressed as she recalls to Tintin watching a man being kidnapped. This is an event that would likely not have caused Tintin much distress and Tintin would likely have chased after the kidnappers as he is the hero of the stories.
The only female character to have a seemingly fleshed out personality is Bianca Castafiore. She is loud, spontaneous, consistently interrupts conversations, and is quite materialistic. In this way she is a caricature of a typical celebrity. While she is one of the most fleshed out female character’s in Hergé’s work, she is far from the ideal feminist representation. Her character has been criticised for being reduced to a sexual symbol or object. Especially in The Castafiore Emerald in which she is the main character. There are multiple references to sexuality within the comic, McCarthy (2006) discusses the emerald as being one of the most obvious references to sexuality. Another reference is seen on page 24 where Castafiore has Haddock smell a rose and when he is stung by a bee she places the rose’s petal on top of his nose. Flowers are common symbols of female sexuality and this is a very obvious reference to that.
Tintin is a man’s world, and Hergé has shown this to his audience by creating female characters with little to no influence on the plot. They sit in the background or exist to cry and give Tintin the chance to be the hero. In the rare case of Castafiore they are comic relief with sexual undertones. Despite his claims of not caricaturing women, Hergé’s ladies are not representations of real women.
Reference List:
McCarthy, T. 2006. Tintin and the Secret of Literature. London: Granta.
Mountford, P. (2020): ‘Tintin, gender and desire’, Journal of Graphic Novels
and Comics, DOI: 10.1080/21504857.2020.1729829
Sadoul, N. [1975] 1989. Tintin et Moi: entretiens avec Hergé (Tintin and Me: Interviews with Hergé). Tournai: Casterman
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