Re-read review: ‘Monstrous Regiment’ by Terry Pratchett (Discworld Part 4)
This story takes place in Borogravia, a small but belligerent nation somewhere near Uberwald. Polly Perks put on boy’s clothes and joins the army as "Oliver"1 to find her missing brother. She gets signed up by the loud, rotund, generally cheery Sergeant Jackrum and his rat-like colleague Corporal Strappi. Other recruits show up, including a troll (“Now, now, none of that, Corporal,” said Sergeant Jackrum. “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” “Don’t ask? Don’t ask? It’s a troll, Sarge! It’s got crags! There’s grass growing under its fingernails! It’s a troll!”), an Igor, and a vampire (“Yeah, but s’posin’ he wants to suck all my blood out in the middle of the night?” said Stappi. “Well, he’ll just have to wait until Private Igor’s finished looking for your brain, won’t he?” snapped the sergeant). The other human recruits include “Tonker” and “Lofty” (who seem oddly close), “Wazzer” (highly religious and vibrates faintly all the time), and “Shufti” (who brings unusual skill to camp cooking).
But as they march on it starts to dawn on the squad that things are probably not going well for Borogravia in the war. They pass crowds of refugees and bands of gravely wounded soldiers. The weapons and uniforms depot is filled with dented armor and bloodstained tunics, and is manned by "Threeparts" Scallot, an old soldier with no legs and only one arm who tells them tales of swapping legs to eat during a siege (“Well, it’s not on, is it, eating your own leg? You’d probably go blind”). Their commanding officer, Lieutenant Blouse, was recently promoted out of a desk job and somehow manages to cut his own sword hand while practicing. And they are about to be sent straight to the front without the usual training!
Commander Vimes, Sergeant Angua, and Reg Shoe make an appearance, as does William DeWorde, a newspaperman who had his own Discworld book, ‘The Truth’. Ankh Morepork is ostensibly on the side of the Zlobenians, but Vimes’ goal, as usual, is to keep the peace. This is made somewhat difficult by Borogravia’s history (they have a single word that means "The sun has risen! Let us make war!") and the fact their god, Nuggan, has kind of gone off his rocker. He’s just an echo at this point, issuing ever more insane "Abominantions" – such common things as root vegetables and the color blue being apparently now abominable, so most Borogravians pray to the Duchess…who is probably dead.
Mr. DeWorde mainly wants to get a good story, and he finds this in Sergeant Jackrum’s squad. A troop of Zlobenian cavalrymen, including the Zlobenian prince in disguise, make a raid on the training camp, planning on capturing the recruits to show off the sorry state of the Borogravian military. But the recruits manage to capture them instead! This becomes a popular "human interest story", with the squad dubbed the Monstrous Regiment due to their unusual species composition. However, the squad is hiding a set of secrets – or rather one collective secret – that would make it seem even more "monstrous" to many.
This book does a lot. It pulls no punches in pointing out the costs and general stupidity of nationalism and militarism, while also showing respect to the men and women in uniform who truly believe they are serving their country. It does a similar thing with religion, illustrating the damage that uncritically following a holy book that focuses on "abominations" can do, but also having Wazzer’s faith be central to resolving the main conflict. Although I stated earlier that a systemic treatment of sexism was lacking in Discworld, that isn’t actually true of this book. We see the laws and the religious and cultural beliefs that limit women’s lives in Borogravia, the way that system of oppression gets upheld by the actions of women as well as men, and how parts of that oppression can be invisible even to those affected by it until they have the opportunity to step outside it. Finally, it is the only book in the Discworld series to have at least two, possibly up to four, queer characters as part of the central cast. That part is…probably handled mostly OK, considering the book was published in 2003 and is evoking a “historical-ish” cultural setting. Why the uncertainty regarding the numbers and the handling? Well, I’ll get into that in the spoilers section.
Overall
recommendation: A funny and
thought-provoking book, even by the high standards of Discworld.
Could be awkward in
places if you are sensitive to potential misgendering.
1. Both inside and outside the story this name is inspired by the song ‘Sweet Polly Oliver’
** Spoilers below! **
Gender identity in ‘Monstrous Regiment’ and in historical settings:
It rather quickly becomes evident that every single one of the new recruits is a girl (or at least “assigned female” - more on that in a minute). Shufti is pregnant and joined up to try and find her sort-of fiancé. Igorina wants to prove herself as a battlefield medic, since women are barred from the more complex surgical jobs at the center of Igor culture.
“Wi’ trolls, we ain’t allowed to carry clubs,” said Jade. “Only large rocks…I’m nat’rally craggy…I don’t see why I should polish.”
Tonker and Lofty escaped from the Discworld equivalent of the Magdalene laundries. So did Wazzer, but she believes she’s been commanded by the Duchess to save Borogravia. And so on. As they play these roles, even those who took them on for purely practical reasons notice some benefits:
“Have you noticed men talk to you differently?” said Lofty shyly. “Talk?” said Polly. “They listen to you differently, too.” “They don’t keep looking at you all the time,” said Shufti. “You know what I mean. You’re just a…another person.”
Now, I should say right here that I think the TERF2 notion that trans men are just women trying to escape misogyny is absurd. As a cis woman who has lived in America and Europe, I can say that, yes, the sexism that remains there sucks…but not enough to cancel out the benefits of being yourself, or to make it worth taking on the worse problem of transphobia3. In western countries (and in quite a few other places) there are now a lot of different socially acceptable ways to be a woman. I can be a scientist AND bake pies, sometimes wear pants and sometimes wear dresses…and it’s fine. I’m married to a man, but had I married a woman my whole inner social circle and more than half the country would have been fine with that too. It seems to me that masculinity is more constraining than femininity at this point – some guys would get frostbite rather than borrow a pair of pink gloves - and it would be doubly so if it wasn’t what felt true to yourself. Sure, if you bump up against a sexism-related problem you might think briefly: “Arrgh, I wouldn’t have to deal with this shit if I were a man!” But I seriously doubt there are many cis women who would commit to living as a man for the rest of their life even if what they got was proper male privilege instead of worse oppression as a presumed trans person4.
However, looking at the past, things get a bit more complicated. A woman who can’t vote, can’t own property (and might be considered property herself), can’t pursue a career, can’t dress in certain practical ways because they are seen as “man-ish”, has few to no legal recourses if threatened with sexual violence, has no access to birth control, and who would face severe consequences if it were discovered that she were in love with another woman…well, she might see a benefit in living as a man even if she would rather live as a woman with rights. And in the days before birth certificates and such it was possible to reinvent yourself with just a change of name and costume. That’s why it can be hard to tell for sure which of the “female bodied” people of the past who lived as men were what we would today call trans men. Most of those who did so full time5 probably were, but without the concept of “transgender” being part of the culture even the ways they described themselves can be unclear. For instance, Catalina de Erauso/Francisco de Loyola fought, gambled, and womanized through conquistador-era South America before finally landing in such deep trouble that the best way out was “confess to being a woman”. This worked better than expected, with an intact hymen apparently outweighing 35 years of murder and mayhem. Pope Urban VIII even gave them special dispensation to resume life in men’s clothing. The writer of the linked post notes that he went with “she” following most historians; however, I’d tend to say that even if Catalina/Francisco claimed to be “really” a woman, “he” is probably more appropriate since Francisco was the preferred persona. This language issue also applies in the other direction: Stonewall heroine Marsha P. Johnson, today lauded as a trans icon, often described herself as a gay man or drag queen because the categories we use today had not yet solidified in the 1960s and ‘70s. Gender being a social construction, it periodically undergoes renovations!
I bring this up, because it turns out that not only the members of the ‘Monstrous Regiment’ but a full third of the Borogravian high command AND Sergeant Jackrum would be “assigned female” based on anatomy. But how many stayed in the army not just because they felt it was their duty or because it would be hard to go back6, but because living as a man felt more natural? We don’t get to know most of them well enough that I’d feel comfortable making a call, but let’s talk about those 2-4 members of the central cast.
Lofty and Tonker are almost certainly meant to be read as a lesbian couple. I say “almost certainly” because their top priorities are clearly being free and being together; They will do whatever it takes to make that happen, and don’t seem to give a damn about gender presentation. Maledict(a) to me comes off as possibly genderfluid or non-binary, though that could be because vampires often have an androgynous quality. In fact, several characters say something along the lines of: “who really knows or cares, with vampires?” Mal’s explanation that they were tired of the femme-fatale role expected of female vampires is similar to Jade and Igorina’s complaints, but while the latter two join in the secret sister solidarity almost immediately, the vampire waits until almost the very end of the book to reveal their birth name. Of course, that could have just been a challenge to herself, Discworld vampires not needing blood so much as they need control. And then we have Sergeant Jackrum…
Jackrum may have joined the army to follow a sweetheart, and may have given birth to a son, but he does not betray a hint of femininity throughout the entire book and refuses to join the team’s “sneak into the castle as washerwomen” plan by declaring “you’ll never get me in petticoats”. He does have a private joke: He likes to make declarations like “upon my oath, I am not a violent man” just before threatening to punch someone, or “I am not a dishonest man” just before lying, and so on. But he has no plans to be a woman even in retirement, and he never says what his birthname/deadname was. When Polly suggests that he might be able to reunite with his son not as “some fat ol’ biddy…gobbing baccy juice all over the place” but as “a distinguished-looking sergeant major…loaded with medals” - “You could show him the locket7. You could tell him about the girl you left behind you” - he jumps at the chance. So I would suggest that Jackrum, at least, is living his true self as a man.
Was that Pratchett’s intention? I wish I could say I was sure that it was. The discourse around She Who Shall Not Be Named has certainly revealed a deeper strain of transphobia in the UK than I had previously suspected, and the idea of men dressing as women is kind of played for laughs in the book. But I’d like to think Pratchett was at least edging toward a recognition of transness and slipped that into this story. The characters default to referring to each other as women but, as the historical examples above indicate, that is likely what Borogravians would do even if that isn’t the most accurate way of thinking about it. At the very least, the book DOES acknowledge that gender is complicated! And, in a touch that I like, Polly goes back to referring to Jackrum as "he" after their conversation about his origins (which is the correct modern etiquette).
2. Trans
Exclusionary Radical Feminist… Though I consider the last two words of that
phrase a misnomer. It's not very radical or very feminist to be a jerk to people suffering similar or worse problems to yourself.
3. For instance, you can still be legally fired or lose your housing for being trans in many places; doing the same to a cis woman because she is a cis woman would be illegal.
4. And of course trans women are subjected to both misogyny AND transphobia, so that is definitely not something you would sign yourself up for on a whim!
5. Rather than doing so temporarily to, for example, fight in a specific war, stay with a lover in a supposedly all-male space, or to avoid coming to the attention of rapists when traveling. Or as opposed to just wearing male clothing for convenience or to make a political or fashion statement without actually claiming to be male (like Joan of Arc, the swashbuckling 17th century bisexual Julie d’Aubigny, or author George Sand...though there is some ambiguity in that case).
6. Both psychologically difficult – because once you have greater status and power it hurts to give it up – and just logistically difficult. A short-haired, middle-aged, unmarried female stranger randomly showing up in some Borogravian village would have some explaining to do.
7. Jackrum wears a locket containing tiny paintings of himself as a girl and his lover…but, as Polly points out, Jackrum has changed so much it would be easy to switch the tale of which is which!
