About Eli´s gender

[SJackson57]

So Ash, is this our "Star Trek" moment went you tell everyone to get a life? To everyone great book end of discuss.

[lombano]

Now nine pages discussing Eli's gender, but I think the issue as seen from JAL's POV is that it is of no actual importance to the story.
The fact that Oskar was dealing with a vampire, makes gender pale into complete insignificance. Are we unable to see the wood for the trees?
Oskar's decision to run off with a mass-murdering vampire, and fall in love with it, transcends Eli's gender. If he couldn't care less, why should we?

Ultimately, for me at least, canon is what is actually written in the book. And according to the book, Oskar certainly does care at the beginning - he notes that he finds it easier to accept that Eli is a vampire than that Eli is a boy, and thus the issue of gender is relevant to a discussion of the book. Eli isn't indifferent to his own gender, either - his actions in this regard can't all be explained by pure pragmatism.
Interestingly - and I don't think this has been discussed before - the only time Oskar asks any third party anything related to Eli, he asks his teacher about the nature of love, about hermaphroditism, and briefly about homosexuality. He never asks if a person can be evil, for example.

Eli never gave us no hint which sex she prefer we know she like Oskar who is boy, but she never look at that other girl or boy and said that is nice.
I think Eli is vampire first and person second. Eli see people first as food and gender second. I believe Eli could have fallen in love with a girl, if they could have survive the interview process.

My gut feeling is the same, that Eli wouldn't have cared if Oskar were an Oskarina.

[sauvin]

Now nine pages discussing Eli's gender, but I think the issue as seen from JAL's POV is that it is of no actual importance to the story.
The fact that Oskar was dealing with a vampire, makes gender pale into complete insignificance. Are we unable to see the wood for the trees?
Oskar's decision to run off with a mass-murdering vampire, and fall in love with it, transcends Eli's gender. If he couldn't care less, why should we?

Ultimately, for me at least, canon is what is actually written in the book. And according to the book, Oskar certainly does care at the beginning - he notes that he finds it easier to accept that Eli is a vampire than that Eli is a boy, and thus the issue of gender is relevant to a discussion of the book. Eli isn't indifferent to his own gender, either - his actions in this regard can't all be explained by pure pragmatism.
Interestingly - and I don't think this has been discussed before - the only time Oskar asks any third party anything related to Eli, he asks his teacher about the nature of love, about hermaphroditism, and briefly about homosexuality. He never asks if a person can be evil, for example.

Wasn't the teacher he asked a woman? I do seem to remember Oskar spending more than a couple of pages in the novel wrestling with sexual disorientation, and even more interestingly, the novel is set in the early 1980's when - at least in the US - homosexuality was coming more and more out of the closet, and it was getting to be less and less "politically correct" to bash gay people for being gay. I was in my early twenties, then, and have no idea what a twelve or thirteen year old of the time would have made of that. Oskar's conflict within seems to mirror American society's conflict without.

Eli never gave us no hint which sex she prefer we know she like Oskar who is boy, but she never look at that other girl or boy and said that is nice.
I think Eli is vampire first and person second. Eli see people first as food and gender second. I believe Eli could have fallen in love with a girl, if they could have survive the interview process.

My gut feeling is the same, that Eli wouldn't have cared if Oskar were an Oskarina.

Not a boy. Not a girl. Not old. Not young. Eli is nothing. This is what Eli tells Oskar as they shared a bed. Eli isn't looking for a boyfriend. In fact, I don't get that Eli could actually be said to have been "looking" for anything. She's just playing along and seeing what kinds of opportunities life might bring, same way she seems to do a lot of her hunting. If she's actually actively "looking" for anything, it's just simple friendship. Effectively genderless and presumably unable to experience sexual desire, what more could she have been looking for?

The only reason it's a "good thing" I can see that it was Oskar she found, and not Oskarina, is that girls bully differently from boys. It tends to be more in the vein of emotional cruelty, and this kind of thing doesn't lend itself to the dramatic Steven Seagal scale retribution that punches us all in the stomach with its rough street justice and showcases so perfectly Eli's moral undecidability.

Otherwise, as far as their relationship is concerned, my gut feeling agrees: Oskar's gender is irrelevant to Eli.

[drakkar]

Now nine pages discussing Eli's gender, but I think the issue as seen from JAL's POV is that it is of no actual importance to the story.
The fact that Oskar was dealing with a vampire, makes gender pale into complete insignificance. Are we unable to see the wood for the trees?
Oskar's decision to run off with a mass-murdering vampire, and fall in love with it, transcends Eli's gender. If he couldn't care less, why should we?

I also think the gender had been discussed a bit "over the top", but I do not agree it isn't important. Eli being a castrated boy adds greatly to my sympathy for Eli, because it increases Eli's misery and the depth of the character. It also poses a problem for Oskar, but here John makes this twist this is just as much (if not more) due to conformity problems than anything else.

[lombano]

Wasn't the teacher he asked a woman?

Yes, Jeanne Louise or something similar.

the novel is set in the early 1980's when - at least in the US - homosexuality was coming more and more out of the closet, and it was getting to be less and less "politically correct" to bash gay people for being gay. I was in my early twenties, then, and have no idea what a twelve or thirteen year old of the time would have made of that. Oskar's conflict within seems to mirror American society's conflict without.

Maybe the Swedish infected could help us out on this one - when did attitudes towards homosexuality change in Stockholm? It may have been somewhat earlier than in the US. Most of my schooling also took place before changes in attitudes towards homsoexuality here - I was struck by Oskar asking 'how do they do it?' it's hard to imagine a schoolboy of my generation here asking that.

[a_contemplative_life]

I do think that Eli's gender was an important feature for the reasons mentioned by Lombano. It added an element of realism, that Oskar would have some difficulty coming to terms with it. And the fact that in the end, he overcame whatever reluctance he had, deepened the love story for me.

I would also venture to say that I think Eli could experience romantic love, not mere friendship, with Oskar despite his sexlessness. I think there are aspects of a romantic bond that transcend sexuality, and in a way, I think E & O leapfrogged right over all the sex and into that realm.

[Ash]

So Ash, is this our "Star Trek" moment went you tell everyone to get a life?

NO, I didn't mean that.
It's just when JAL visits here, he states that he never gave much thought to all the "hidden meaning" that we read into so much of LTROI.
I think his decision on Eli's gender was to make the story more interesting, and it does.
JAL explains how his novel evolved. Not much significance is placed on Eli's gender beyond the fact that it makes Eli a more interesting character-
”A vampire story. That takes place in Blackeberg..."
"The following day I make the decision that the vampire is going to be androgynous."
"Also, I tend to be interested in androgynous .. characters, and Eli was my first one. I wanted Eli to act as an in-between.
Girlish sometimes, boyish sometimes. He can be anything, and he suprised me many times while writing the novel."

[drakkar]

Could be a cultural thing, I notice I at least, put less symbolism into the gender thing than many others do. For me it added complexity to Eli, and it increased my symphaty for him. All in all a twist naking the story better and more interesting.
I dont see where homosexual issues comes in - this is kids.
Furthermore, when Oskar asks his teacher about love, the answer is very general, in the direction of describing true love without boundaries, and IIRC gender was not mentioned until Oskar asked.

[sauvin]

Could be a cultural thing, I notice I at least, put less symbolism into the gender thing than many others do. For me it added complexity to Eli, and it increased my symphaty for him. All in all a twist naking the story better and more interesting.
I dont see where homosexual issues comes in - this is kids.
Furthermore, when Oskar asks his teacher about love, the answer is very general, in the direction of describing true love without boundaries, and IIRC gender was not mentioned until Oskar asked.

I wrote in some other topic, think it was under LMI, that when we're dealing with the kids and their relationships, we were dealing with a greater count of relationships than is readily apparent to the casual reader. In the case of Oskar and Eli, we're dealing not just with Oskar's relationship with Eli, we're also dealing with our own relationship with Oskar, our own relationship with Eli, and our own relationship with Oskar's relationship with Eli. At the time, I'd been concerned (if I recall properly) with making a bit clearer how our relationships with Eli and Oskar might differ from ours with Abby and Owen.

In any event, much of what any of us will see individually in either Oskar or Eli, or either of the other two kids, is necessarily shaped by how we remember ourselves being that age. For those of us old enough now to have children that age, we may also be influenced considerably by how we'd like (or not like) to see our own kids fitting into such a relationship.

Imagine, just for a moment, a society in which paedophilia isn't recognised as criminal, somehow just plain "wrong" and nearly ubiquitous. Furthermore imagine that this society isn't dripping with conflicted sexuality the way present-day North America is. In other words, a society in which child sexuality is neither frowned upon nor encouraged. In such a society, Hakan's relative subjective importance would diminish significantly by contrast to the POV of an American - and so would the bedroom scenes between the kids. If said society values it children and its future, it'd still view Hakan as a hasard of some kind, but it wouldn't cause some church society to demand the novel be banned, and the bedroom scenes wouldn't add fuel to this fire. I have a strong impression most Americans would attach a sexual element to the bedroom scenes, claiming that the "real" stuff just happened "out of narrative" (they got out of bed and put their clothes on) - many posts in this forum from Swedes say flatly that Swedes would just want to know if Eli's parents know where she is - and, by the way, would she like some milk and cookies?

There is sex in the novel, and violence. Lots of things are in the novel, and while Americans get their knickers all in a bunch about some of the "implied" sexual elements between the kids, I'll bet a great many Europeans would be more concerned with the violence.

Even the mere fact of Eli's androgyny, which seems to have just been some kind of plot point to make the story more interesting for JAL (nothing more than that; she wears filthy scavenged T-shirts, wonders why she can't have anything, and oh, by the way, happens to be neither boy nor girl almost as an afterthought), with no intentional meaning or symbolism behind it, can't be comfortably shoehorned into an American backwoods traditionalist's black-and-white view that you're either a girl or a boy, ain't no in-between.

And so, I could make the case that while we're interacting with the kids' relationship, and our various meta-relationships with them, we're also interacting with JAL's interactions with the kids, individually and together. It could easily be argued, though, that his (and TA's just to add a few orders of complexity) interactions with the kids, now that they're done and published, take a back seat to our primary impressions - we tend to be more concerned with how we react to the kids and their world than with JAL's; we are many, and from many different places, and so as we interact with eachother in this forum in discussing the kids, we're also interacting with gadzillions of Elis, and bazillions of Oskars, and gigagoogalillions of Eli and Oskar relationships.

[mackousko]

There is sex in the novel, and violence. Lots of things are in the novel, and while Americans get their knickers all in a bunch about some of the "implied" sexual elements between the kids, I'll bet a great many Europeans would be more concerned with the violence. :

I can speak only for central Europe. But we are not too concerned about sex and violence in fictional space. There is strong border between fiction and reality and everyone take it as a fact. (Maybe less abstract thinking?) . But i have this feeling people in USA have problems to distinguish fact from fiction sometimes.