Gender-bending for the love of science in Catherine Haustein's NATURAL ATTRACTION

My guest today is Catherine Haustein, author of Natural Attraction, a science-based historical romance. She shares her book's complex background.

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Science, Sexuality, and Classification

by Catherine Haustein

I’ve been a chemist for over thirty years and it’s a stimulating and often amusing career—in other words, good novel material. Like Clementine in Natural Attraction, I’ve frequently imagined that things would have gone more smoothly had I been a man. Setting Natural Attraction in a time of strict gender roles illustrates how far we’ve come and what still needs to be done.

I chose to place Natural Attraction in 1871 because it was a time of great social change. The theory of evolution and the discovery of sperm and egg cells were quietly ushering in ideas of social equality. Science was a train riding the rails of certainty and classification. And in the hometown of my ancestors, Singapore, Michigan, USA, ecological disaster was brewing. These coalesce in Natural Attraction.

Picking the best genre for the story was a challenge. I decided to write it as romance, not sci-fi. My family was involved in a Shakespeare Festival for a while and I appreciated the complexity of the comedies and the required happy ending, fitting with a romance. Science is filled with passion, curiosity, and the unknown just like romance and the two are very compatible. I also thought it would be fun to give a scientist a romantic liaison with a preacher to let them explore what they had in common.

Another challenge was giving Natural Attraction a Victorian feel without being weighed down by flowery language. I had Clementine be from a family of recent immigrants from the Netherlands, as my ancestors were. I had some characters use Victorian idiomatic expressions. I enjoyed incorporating a Victorian melodrama and theater into the manuscript and included patent medicines and the use of poisonous dyes in clothing as important Victorian touches.

One aspect I wrestled with was how to address sexuality and the transformation of Clementine into a man. I work in a male dominated field and had an inkling of the isolation she might feel as a woman who didn’t really fit in anywhere. I had help from men, particularly those at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, who offered suggestions on what it takes to be a man and the privilege and culpability that come with masculinity. This book is a romance pitched towards women but the comic look at gender roles should appeal to everyone who’s ever felt stuck in them.

Blurb: Clementine dreams of being a naturalist—a career that leaves no time for romance. To sneak on an adventurous prospecting expedition, Clementine will have to convince everyone she’s a man. A mysterious tonic offers her just that disguise.
But “Calvin,” as she calls herself now, had no idea what she was giving up. When Wesley, the expedition’s gentle preacher, catches her eye, she can’t get him out of her head; not his lush lips, wide brown eyes…or broad chest. Dare she reveal her secret to him? Can she keep her career if she does?

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Natural Attraction is available from Penner Publishing, Lybrary, and other major booksellers.

Find the author at catherinehaustein.com and on Facebook

Blair MacGregor on writing gender equality in the fantasy genre

Traditional gender roles are hard to combat for the fiction-writer, especially in a genre like fantasy which has a long tradition of distressed damsels being captured and needing saving. Even for a writer who is aware of this problem and wants to defy it, knowing how to let the females drive the story takes a lot of thought and practice. Today's guest, Blair MacGregor, generously shares her advice.

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I've always wanted to write epic, sword and sorcery, and dark fantasy stories with female characters as central players in the plot, but my younger self lacked the greater perspective to do so with depth. I didn't understand how to build a society that permitted female characters to get on with the story rather than be sidetracked to prove relevance and competency. I lacked the experience to create characters able to interact without the trappings of gender inequality.

The Bechdel Test is a baseline, but was never meant to be more. After all, I wanted my characters to inhabit a culture that didn't use gender as its guiding measure of value, competency, and ability. In my novel-length works, I chose to focus on three primary aspects of character and culture creation to reach that goal. They aren't exclusive or exhaustive, but provided me a foundation upon which to build.

First, one woman is not enough. The solitary woman operating in a male-dominated setting often spends time and energy struggling to gain and keep respect, and the cost is often a separation (physical and/or social) from other women. It also reinforces the notion that female influencers are Rare and Special—quite the opposite of what I wanted. I needed many female characters—primary, secondary, and beyond—to balance my created world.

Second, I didn't want my female characters to need a mentor to convince them they were both worthy of their goals and able to attain them. Instead, the culture itself should be one that didn't set gender-based limits to begin with. That doesn't mean the characters don't encounter mentors. Quite the opposite. But the decisions wrestled with center on moral choices rather than barriers to acceptance. Guidance focuses on the best way to achieve goals, not whether women are deserving and capable of pursuing them.

Third, I wanted to take a step beyond character agency—that ability to make decisions and take action. Agency (and its partner, competency) are critical in the creation of likeable and robust characters, but agency and competency can be practiced in isolation. My characters had to have influence, too—the accepted and expected power to change the course of events, lead others, and face consequences. Agency alone is hollow if not coupled with influence.

So could my novels still "pass" the Bechdel Test? Ayup. A goddess and a chieftain discuss waging war. A soldier and an outcast debate the morality of power. A pair of dead warriors struggle to help an ambitious ruler. Two powerful women can't decide if they should be allies or enemies.

But—and this is just as important—the men also have conversations that aren't about men. And men and women together have conversations about men and women. Certainly the characters sometimes talk about sex and desire and relationships because that's part of the human condition. No one, however, treats them as defining parts.

Best of all, I didn't have to deliberately include those conversations because the created culture itself—filled with both women and men of agency and influence—requires them to take place.

We absolutely still need fiction that splashes glaring spotlights on gender inequality—work that provides women and girls pathways to achieve their own agency and influence in real life, and provides men and boys an understanding of the positive roles they can play in the process. But as a writer who tells stories within created worlds, I opted for a culture in which questioning gender equality would be the odd conversation rather than the norm.

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Learn more about Blair MacGregor on her website and her Amazon author page.