Trigger warning: misogyny.
I’ve been trying to read more, and I’ve found a strategy that works more than it doesn’t: reading before I retire to bed for the evening. This gives me a solid half hour or longer where I don’t feel I should be doing anything else, and can relax into a book. In this way I finished a re-read-through of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. I then cast about for another novel, and happened upon an old favorite, the novelization of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. I’ve probably not picked up that book in over a decade, and was excited to dive into Star Wars and rediscover another old friend.
I was disappointed by what I found.
For the most part, the story was as I remembered, a commendable re-framing of the film from something that is vaguely a mess into something a bit more epic and coherent and a story worth telling. As I began to read, however, cracks appeared in the prose almost immediately, to my eye, making the narrative melodramatic and grandiose. That by itself wouldn’t have caused me to stop reading, after all, that is part of the grand space opera that is Star Wars. What did stop me in my tracks was the following passage about Padme, in relation to Anakin:
This is Padme Amidala: She is an astonishingly accomplished young woman, who in her short life has been already the youngest-elected Queen of her planet, a daring partisan guerrilla, and a measured, articulate, and persuasive voice of reason in the Republic Senate. But she is, at this moment, non of these things. She can still play at them – she pretends to be a Senator, she still wields the moral authority of a former Queen, and she is not shy about using her reputation for fierce physical courage to her advantage in political debate – but her inmost reality, the most fundamental, unbreakable core of her being, is something entirely different. She is Anakin Skywalker’s wife…for Padme Amidala, saying “I am Anakin Skywalker’s wife” is saying neither more or less than “I am alive”. Her life before Anakin belonged to someone else, some lesser being to be pitied, some poor impoverished spirit who could never suspect how profoundly life should be lived. Her real life began the first time she looked into Anakin Skywalker’s eyes…
Revenge of the Sith by Matthew Stover
The rest of the passage passes into an adulation of who and what Anakin Skywalker is, this being that Padme is “privileged” to love. I am trying to find another word to describe this than disgusting, but I must call it what it is: misogyny.
The first part of what I quote is all true, and really is a recap of Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. But where this description of a powerful and magnificent woman truly goes off the rails is when it describes all of Padme’s accomplishments as belonging to “some lesser being to be pitied” and that she “pretends to be” what she is. As if this woman doesn’t matter, and all her accomplishments are/were worthless until/because she met Anakin and married him and became his property. That is how this really reads: as a description of something that belongs to Anakin, like Padme is no more than R2-D2 or his lightsaber. A magnificent thing that only has meaning because of who it is connected to: a man. And really, the rest of what I don’t quote is a lavish description of Anakin’s man-ness, but it is even more sickening than the defimination of Padme because it is so adulatory. It’s gross.
I’ve never met Matthew Stover and I don’t want to engage in character assassination, but what he writes here is horrible. Maybe he is trying to do some subtle thing where he is describing the truly dark nature of Anakin through this violation of everything that Padme is, but nothing about the preceding parts of the book are subtle at all. In fact, Stover hits the reader over the head with his flowery, verbose, and at times outrageous descriptions of Anakin, Obi-Wan, Dooku, and what happens between them. This bit that I quote and describe is set just after the “rescue” of Palpatine and Anakin murdering Count Dooku. It is hard to miss that Anakin decides to kill the Count in cold blood, Stover even makes that clear, and then the reader almost immediately arrives at this statement that Padme was nothing before Anakin, and that she only matters as his wife.
I couldn’t read any more. I have already read this book a few times, but this go round I had to stop. Look, I am not virtue signaling here. I have a long way to go in my treatment of women and how I regard others outside myself. But I think it personal progress that before I would read this part and keep reading to finish the book. That before I didn’t pause, that I accepted this description of Padme as consistent and approvable, but now I couldn’t not and would not move past it.
I think Dave Filoni’s animated Clone Wars, created after Revenge of the Sith (movie and book), bears out that Padme never stopped being every inch Padme. If I recall properly, Padme and Anakin do not see eye to eye about the politics and waging of the Clone Wars, and that she is not cowed by him or subservient to him, as described in this book. Maybe Filoni was trying to counter this passage, or maybe he simply has a better grasp of the characters of Star Wars than does Matthew Stover. Either way, what Stover does here is unforgivable.
No woman is given meaning through the man she is married to, or engaged to, or chooses to hang around. A woman’s being and personhood are hers alone, and everything she accomplishes, and does, and achieves are hers forever and part of her forever. They are not swept away by marriage or association. I happen to believe women are stronger by far than men, in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons, one of which is the continued unconscionable way that men treat women worldwide. We have made them into the stronger gender. Like the Barbie movie showed a glimpse of, women are strong in ways that men cannot even comprehend. I don’t believe for one second that Padme only matters because she married Anakin, and that her roles of Queen, Senator, and Woman are meaningless because she wasn’t yet married to this man. That is, quite frankly, misogynistic excrement.
Believe me when I say that Padme neither receives nor is given anything better throughout the rest of the book. Some of that probably comes from George Lucas’ treatment of Padme in the script, an early version of which Matthew Stover no doubt worked from, and that Stover could only do so much to change. After all, Padme dies of broken heart at the end of the story, which is itself a dumb and weird thing to do. But Stover probably had the freedom to describe Padme how he wished in his own book, and he chose to do as I have quoted. It is bewildering to me that he did so, but not surprising beyond the fact that men are misogynistic and get away with it so boldly.
I could say more, but that might risk taking this critique down into diatribe. I will end by simply saying that I wish the novelization of Revenge of the Sith was better than it is, but I will no longer own a copy or read it. Life is too short to allow thoughts and ideas into my head that don’t advance an equal and uplifting view of all my fellow humans. I hope to always advance in my personal growth, and trust that will include how I view and treat others every day.
for Padme Amidala, Hero of the Old Republic
a simple man 