So I just rectified a major hole in my reading life and finally read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess Of Mars. As a book snob I simply had to, if only so that I can smugly announce to everyone that The Book Was Better once I’ve watched the movie. And since the movie comes out next Friday…
The book is a hundred years old, and it was actually quite fun to read science fiction left from a time when science itself was a bit more poetic. Burroughs didn’t futz about with long details of getting his guy to Mars and since none of us yet knew that Mars was actually a giant deadspace he was free to populate her with eight legged dinodogs and freaky white apes. Of course any writer can do this now with any planet, real or conjured, but there was a frisson of intrigue to think that all these marvels were right next door.
Things happen constantly in this book. After the intro and a little bit of chasing around in Arizona we get right to Mars and the action never stops. Burroughs is great about having John Carter explain things to the reader–ostensibly this is his journal written ten years after he came back to Earth and so his first person narration is chock full of Wild Kingdom-style explanation. I love that kind of stuff, and after so many books rife with showing it was nice to get a lot of telling done so that the story didn’t take eight thousand pages.
So why am I stuck on giving this book three stars? Why am I stuck on really complaining about what seems to be a minor quibble I have with Burroughs? Two reasons.
The Princess Of Mars
That’s her. That’s one of eleventy million pictures of Dejah Thoris, Princess of Mars, love-interest of John Carter and impetus to a heck of a lot of action in the book. Trust me when I say that every single one of those eleventy million pictures looks pretty much like this, and they’re all going off the book’s description. On Mars everyone is naked save for bits of metal and jewels which signify one’s place in the tribal culture. So there’s a lot of “perfect little” Dejah around. And a lot of her roundness. She has “all the womanly attributes”. Which means breasts. Big breasts, according to the comic book artists.
But there’s one other thing we know about Dejah Thoris. And that is that she is not a mammal. Like all Women of Mars she lays eggs which incubate until the child is ready for solid food, which is about five years. Yes, I know my friends who are mothers probably think that’s a great plan, and it sounds okay to me.
But breasts as we know them are for feeding. Yes, they’re for sex, too, and for complaining about when you’re in a group of other women. They’re for hurting your back or making you feel inadequate. They’re for making you feel aged as they start to slide downward. They’re for making you not buy shirts that button up the front. They’re for Girls Gone Wild.
But biologically, fundamentally, mammals have breasts (mammary glands) to feed their young.
So why does an egg-laying non-mammal have them?!?!
To make me crazy. To make it seem less like the main love interest of the story is a duck or a lizard or a chicken who talks. To sell comic books.
Just Another Pretty Farce 
I decided a few years ago to go back and re-read the Xanth series by Piers Anthony because I loved those books so much when I was in high school. The mythical creatures, the puns…but I ended up chucking the whole series (and I had 23 of them) after re-reading the first two books because I got so tired of all the big, bouncy, exposed breasts. I also attempted a re-read of The Cat Who Walks Through Walls by Robert Heinlein, which I’d also read in high school, but chucked it after tiring of reading about the impressive size of the main character’s manhood.
Guys roll their eyes at romance novels with hunky angels/demons/vampires/whatever, but I say they need to take a look at some of their own books. If men think they are not being shallow, they need to think again. Remember Star Trek Voyager? Seven of Nine? The character that made me turn my back on my long-time love affair with ST because the focus shifted from strong female captain to cyborg vixen. Sigh.
I thought the same thing when I read the book for the first time (about a month ago – for the same reasons). I thought, “well… maybe she’s a monotreme? like some sort of human-shaped platypus?” But then, even monotremes don’t have nipples… they sweat milk instead (appetizing, no?).
And then I realized that this book (being a product of its time) is just one giant, old-school, male fantasy full of adventure, violence, sex, bigotry and daring-do. So OF COURSE she’s got tits and OF COURSE they’re large and exert an unavoidable, gravitational pull on our man Johnny…
I honestly only got through the first three adventures and had to put it down in favor of something a little more… restrained? Something less blatantly chauvinistic? I dunno, I’ll go back to it (love my Kindle for making that easy) but I can only take it in small bits, I think. It’s fun for what it is but it’s also just too over-the-top…
1) That’s what James Cameron did in Avatar, too.
2) The book that made me really hate Heinlein (sorry, Coble, I know you’re a fan) wasn’t even Stranger in a Strange Land, though that was quite sexist and all. No, it was Number of the Beast, which is a weird sort of homage to Burroughs’s Mars book (books?) in a very nasty, “take that, feminists” sort of way.
When I was a typical teen reading ERB for the first time, I rationalized it in this way: if you can suspend disbelief that a man falls asleep in an Arizona cave and wakes on the surface of the Red Planet (and not just once), you can suspend belief that a truly alien beauty has mammalian breasts but does not reproduce through the pain and effort of an mere Earthling female.
I took it that ERB was trying to depict a truly alien humanoid beauty. And given that he was writing so very long ago (in terms of genre tropes), I forgave him for what we now see as a glaring error of logic.
(For the record, I’m a huge fan of Heinlein’s juveniles, but other than Glory Road, didn’t care for anything after Starship Troopers. It was as if he had this huge midlife crisis that he never could get past.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein_bibliography
You’re right — she is alien. Look at the way her various body parts are affected by gravity in different ways!
You know, I had these books read to me and my brother as bedtime stories, so I was first exposed (hurm) to them really young. Then I re-read them a few years ago.
It had NEVER occured to me until your post that her egg-laying and breast-having were in contradiction. Maybe my blindness was just a ho-hum, sci-fi woman with big boobs, yeah, yeah, reaction. But now that you’ve pointed it out, I’ll never be able to forget it.
There’s actually a very simple answer to this seeming dissonance: monotremes. Platypuses and Echidnas are mammals which lactate from their mammary glands to feed their young… and which also lay eggs. So there’s precedent in earth’s animal kingdom for an egg-laying animal which has breasts. The difference is that earthly monotremes don’t have defined nipples, but once you get to the point where bebreasted creatures lay eggs, that’s small stuff. Now, getting to the actual fatty construction of the human breast is a different matter, but currently the thinking is that the breast developed to accomodate the human infant’s flatter (in comparison to other apes’) face, so they wouldn’t suffocate. As such, it’s perfectly reasonable that a humanoid mammalian species on another planet which is like humans in every other way would also have breasts. Obviously it isn’t ideal, you could easily get bogged down in the nature of evolution and the misplaced idea of humanoid form being a “goal” for a species, but suffice to say, egg-laying humans with breasts isn’t implausible at all.
Of more concern to me is that Dejah’s “slender, girlish” physique is frequently exaggerated to a rather more voluptuous, womanly frame, which is against type. Rather irritating, since you’d think any nearly-naked chick would sell comics without needing to turn her into a Russ Meyer pinup. (and I love me some Russ Meyer pinups).