How Do You Solve a Problem Like Eliza

Given the extensive discussions we had about gender in Neal Stephenson’s work in Cryptonomicon, and the thinking I’ve been doing about the interior lives of women in fiction created by men, you would think I might have formulated about Eliza given that I’m nearly done with Quicksilver. You would be wrong. Spoilers avast, with my apologies to everyone else.I’m trying to weigh everything everyone said about Stephenson and how he sort of puts women in a separate category. I’m trying to evaluate my own tendency to like female characters who are flinty, maybe even to the point of behaving badly. And I can’t decide what I feel.I loved her flight with Jack across Europe, and Stephenson’s twist on the Arabian Nights with Eliza desperately trying to keep herself out of a nunnery. I sort of generally like her resourcefulness. But Eliza seems at a distance from the horrors of her own experience in a way that feels suspiciously like an authorial inability to comprehend what it must be like to be a slave, or to be a rape victim.In fact, for a novel that’s supposed to have as one-third of its animating moral concerns a deep revulsion against slavery, Stephenson keeps that concern oddly at the edges of the novel. The story of Eliza’s captivity is presented as an entertaining fantasy, one that builds Jack’s sympathy for her while also allowing her to recast her experience in a way that creates a gap between her and her experience. When Jack is taken prisoner as a galley slave, there’s a sense that slavery is awful because it’s happening to him, but the only other slave we see as an individual is raping one of his castmates. We’re supposed to believe that Jack both loves Eliza and respects her and is stupid enough to accidentally end up in the slave-trading business. I can see an interpretation that shows that Jack doesn’t actually love or respect Eliza as much as he thinks he does, given how careless his quest is, but I think that wipes out the cockeyed gallantry of one character at the expense of another, something I don’t really think Stephenson intends.I’m also not sure how I feel about Eliza and sex. Obviously it’s interesting to see her reappropriate sex as transactional when it suits her to do so, having had the odd experience of being trained to be a commodity and then never actually consumed. And again, there’s something boundary-breaking about the way she decides to have sex when she decides she actually wants to have penetrative sex with someone: unsentimentally, as the aggressor, to prove a point, and with a man who is the inverse of the one she actually cares for. It’s an act of selfish fulfillment and of self-punishment all at once.I think my irritation with Eliza stems from a lingering sense that she’s been so precisely engineered to be the kind of woman a kind of woman reader like me ought to like that I’m miffed about it. I feel manipulated, rather than charmed. And it’s a bit exhausting. I wouldn’t mind if Eliza had some more conventional wiles, and just deployed them in unconventional ways or towards unconventional ends.