- What gaps are there in Hergé’s representations of women?
The adventures of Tintin see women take a backseat throughout Herge’s work with very little female characters and when there are females withing the works, the are depicted as oblivious, fragile things in a foolish way.
One way to look at the lack of female representation in Tintin is to understand the times at which the works were created. Even as time continued however it became apparent that Herge would do nothing to change the way women were seen in both his work and to him. At one stage Herge claimed that ‘’Women have nothing to do in a world like Tintin’s” (Mountfort, 2020). When women do feature in Herge’s work they are always seen as wives or houseworkers aiming at being a subtle nod that Herge himself did not have much if any respect for women.
Herge paints Tintin as the hero in ‘The adventures of Tintin’ to give the idea that Tintin lived in a man’s world, by always making the women seem as if they were the damsels in distress when featuring them.
Herge does not have a representation of real women in his work, he has a representation of what he believed at the time women should be like and how they should behave, and how men were the dominant sex during ‘The Adventures of Tintin’. So the gap of women’s representation within Herge’s work is that there are no proper representations at all.
References
Mountfort, P. (2020). Tintin, gender and desire. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. https://doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2020.172982
Pop Genres 2020 