If you are a person who reads about media on the Internet, you’re probably familiar with the Bechdel Test. Taking its name from Alison Bechdel
a Gilmore Girls actress (ETA: or not. Yeah, I’m an idiot. It’s actually named after MacArthur Genius Grant winner Alison Bechdel, whose graphic novel Fun Home is way super awesome. I’m going to leave this error here so we can all laugh at my silliness, which is legend), the Bechdel Test grades books/movies/TV shows/etc. on the basis of whether they include two or more named female characters talking about something besides men. It is astonishing how much media, and specifically media targeted at women, fails to meet this standard. Even within genre romance, in which female friendships are frequently represented, not every book passes the Bechdel Test.
Over the weekend, I read Erin Satie’s excellent historical romance The Secret Heart. One of the things I liked about the book was not just that it passed the Bechdel Test–the heroine, Caro, and her close friend, Daphne, discuss art and paint–but that the hero and heroine have conversations about things other than each other and their relationship.
For example, early in the book Caro and Adam talk about their respective (and suspect) passions, ballet and boxing. Caro explains,
“Dancing makes me feel powerful. In control. Like— I don’t know— a watchmaker— and my body is the watch— and some people say God is like a watchmaker—”
“So dancing makes you feel like God?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know, maybe a little.” She folded her arms beneath her breasts and hunched her shoulders, tipping her chin into her chest. “I don’t mean it like that.”
“Like what?” Adam snorted. “Blasphemy?”
“It’s just. So, God the watchmaker.” She raised her arms and let her hands illustrate her words as she spoke, enthusiastic despite herself. “He builds the whole universe”— she mimed a child stacking blocks—“ and he winds it up”— the fingers of one hand twisted while the other held her imaginary watch steady—“ and lets it go, and then…” She flicked her fingers wide, miming a starburst. “Everything works!”
She glanced in his direction, something sad and solemn in her expression. “Except that the universe is nothing like a watch. It can’t be. It’s full of living things.”
As good passages tend to be, it’s wonderful on several levels, but for the moment, I want to focus on how the conversation reveals the characters’ philosophies about the world. Caro and Adam pursue their arts for disparate reasons, seeing the relationship between their bodies and their human-ness differently, which is part of how we know even before they do that they will understand each other better than anyone else in their world and would thus be good together. These ideas come out of their backstory, but I don’t think Satie could have substituted any other conversation here that would have as concisely or effectively shown us who the characters are, why they are different, and why they are similar. Sure they’re talking about deism in a way that reveals their education, the early Victorian world in which they live, etc., but this is all about character development. And it’s a way of doing that development that doesn’t feature in every romance.
I proposed on Twitter yesterday that we need a new test to capture this quality, namely a way to celebrate when the hero and heroine (or hero/hero, heroine/heroine, etc.) have a conversation about something other than their respective personal histories or romantic relationships.
I suggested calling this the Dashwood Rule. I was thinking about a scene in a Sense and Sensibility adaptation in which Margaret Dashwood defends her mother’s cousin and his mother-in-law, saying, “I like them. They talk about things. We never talk about things.” But Miranda Neville pointed out that the “things” Margaret likes are the characters talking about people, love, scandal, gossip, and so on, which is sort of the opposite of what I mean. So perhaps it needs a different name.
But regardless I think we should recognize and celebrate romance in which characters talk, really talk, about art, music, philosophy, history, sports, beliefs, and ideas of all kinds–in which, in other words, all the things that we love about our partners in real life get represented on the page.