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‘A hot and savage strength’: The female

masculinity of C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry

Eileen Donaldson

To cite this article: Eileen Donaldson (2018) ‘A hot and savage strength’: The female
masculinity of C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry, English Academy Review, 35:1, 48-60, DOI:
10.1080/10131752.2018.1464222

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 ‘A hot and savage strength’:
The female masculinity of C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry

Eileen Donaldson
Department of English Studies
University of South Africa
donale@unisa.ac.za

C. L. Moore is considered a trailblazer of feminist SF because of the short stories she

published in the 1930s and 1940s. Her tales ‘Shambleau’ (1933) and ‘No Woman Born’
(1944) have attracted some scholarly attention, but the stories that follow the medieval
female warrior, Jirel of Joiry (1934–1939), have yet to be addressed in any depth. In this
article I therefore focus attention on Jirel who is, arguably, the first female warrior to appear
in SF. Using Judith Halberstam’s work (1998. Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University
Press), as well as recent studies on the female action hero as my theoretical framework, I
argue that Jirel presents the reader with a performance of female masculinity. I demonstrate
that her performance of masculinity is channelled by the warrior role she plays into traits
such as physical strength, authority, sexual agency and an enjoyment of violence. Her
performance of masculinity is significant because of the era in which the Jirel tales were
published, and may well constitute the first appearance of a female masculinity in SF. If this
is the case, the Jirel stories make a central contribution feminist SF and their value should
be acknowledged as equal to that of Moore’s other stories.

Key words: female masculinity; female warrior; feminist SF; Jirel of Joiry; C. L. Moore; SF
of the1930s

Introduction
C. L. (Catherine Lucille) Moore is considered a pioneer of feminist speculative fiction
(SF) (Gubar 1980, 17; Bredehoft 1997, 369; Harvey 2007, 1). The stories she penned for
the SF pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s introduce complex themes and gender
issues that today’s authors continue to explore, and in 1981 her contribution to SF was
recognized with both the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement and the Gandalf
Grand Master Award. Yet her writing has received relatively little scholarly attention
(Bredehoft 1997,3 69), most of which focuses on her short stories ‘Shambleau’ (1933), a
Northwest Smith tale (Moore’s gung-ho, space-faring male hero) and ‘No Woman Born’
(1944), arguably the first feminist cyborg story. Her other stories, such as those that
follow Jirel of Joiry (a female warrior in ‘medieval France’), have garnered little critical

university
of south africa

English Academy Review https://doi.org/10.1080/10131752.2018.1464222

Volume 35 | Number 1 | 2018 pp. 48–60 Print ISSN 1013-1752 | Online 1753-5360
© Unisa Press 2018

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attention. Given Moore’s acclaim, this gap in scholarship is surprising, until one takes
into account Justine Larbalestier’s observation that, although ‘[t]he period from 1926
to 1973 is absolutely crucial to the formation of contemporary feminist science fiction
. . . very little critical work has been undertaken on [it]’ (2002, 2). The brief, focused
discussion of Moore’s Jirel of Joiry that I offer in this article therefore achieves two
aims: it directs scholarly attention to C. L. Moore’s work and contributes to scholarship
on a neglected period in feminist SF.
My objective is to demonstrate that Jirel’s significance lies in her being perhaps
the first representation of a female masculinity in SF. Because of this, she sets a
precedent that offers female characters that follow her ‘healthful alternatives to . . . the
histrionics of conventional femininities’ (Halberstam 1998, 9). To provide a context
for my argument, I briefly discuss the ambivalence Jirel’s performance of masculinity
generates in early critics. Using Judith Halberstam’s work on female masculinities in
conjunction with recent studies on the female action hero as my theoretical framework,
I then assert that developments in contemporary gender studies allow us to revisit Jirel’s
performance of masculinity and acknowledge it as a valid gender choice for a female
character. I contend that C. L. Moore’s Jirel is revolutionary precisely because of her
transgressive performance of masculinity. The fear of early critics that any performance
of masculinity by female characters re-inscribes patriarchal values is unfounded in this
case because Moore writes a Jirel whose performance of the aggressive masculinity of a
warrior is nuanced and complicated by a potent feminine interiority. Moore specifically
avoids essentializing either masculinity or femininity in her Jirel stories so that her
protagonist’s performance of gender remains progressive even today. Certainly, rather
than re-inscribing patriarchal values, Moore’s Jirel tales offer what may well be the first
appearance of an ambivalent, queer gender politics in SF.
Before moving into the argument proper, however, it may be apropos to offer working
definitions of the terms ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’. For the purposes of this article,
‘masculinity’ is understood as encompassing those patterns of thought and behaviour
that are directed outward in an effort to change external reality or affect the public
agora: ‘claiming the right to authority, or displaying strength, courage, assertiveness,
leadership, physicality (and sometimes violence), and very often heroism’ (Goodwill
2011, 10). Femininity, then, is understood as encompassing the patterns of thought and
behaviour that look inwards, focusing on an individual’s inner experiences and those
to do with intimacy and inter-relationship: ‘maternal solicitude and sympathy . . . the
wisdom and spiritual exaltation that transcend reason, any helpful instinct or impulse, all
that is benign, all that cherishes or sustains, that fosters growth and fertility’ (Jung 2003,
125). In the past the behaviours and patterns of thought associated with the performance
of masculinity and femininity may have been perceived as markers of biologically male
or female persons, but today any blend of both is understood as producing a variety
of masculinities and femininities across male and female bodies (Berger, Wallis and
Watson 1995, 3). This has a marked effect on how gendered bodies are read, and, for

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my purposes, may retrogressively redeem a character like Jirel, who has been criticized
in the past for performing a masculinity considered ‘abnormal’ in female characters and
counterintuitive to the (gynocentric) feminist project.

Jirel’s early critics

In 1984, Marion Zimmer Bradley dedicated the short story collection Sword and Sorceress
to C. L. Moore ‘who gave us Jirel of Joiry, the first woman to take up her sword against
sorcery’ (in Harvey 2007, 1). This dedication encapsulates how most critics quantify
Jirel’s contribution to feminist SF: she is the first female character to claim the role of
the warrior hero (Clute and Nicholls [1993] 1999, 827). Violent, furious and prone to
reckless action, she is the equal of any Conan at a time when ‘good’ female characters
in SF usually play either the male protagonist’s love-interest or a victim-to-be-rescued
(Russ 1972, 83). Those female characters who wield power are (out)cast as villains
and monsters (Lefanu 1989, 26). As a warrior, Moore’s Jirel destabilizes stereotypes
that were a staple of the genre, challenging readers to imagine that women could be
physically and sexually aggressive, independent and also emotional and compassionate.
And yet Jirel is mentioned rarely, and often only in passing, in scholarly studies
that focus on Moore’s other tales (Gubar 1980; Bredehoft 1997; Wilson 2014) or that
treat the female warrior in feminist SF (Lefanu 1989, Barr 1987, Innes 2004). On the
one occasion when Jirel comes briefly into focus, feminist SF critic Sarah Lefanu is
unsure what to make of her because of her performance of masculinity. Lefanu’s book
Feminism and Science Fiction boasts a chapter entitled ‘Amazons: Feminist Heroines
or Men in Disguise?’ in which she finds Jirel more a ‘man in disguise’ than a feminist
hero. For Lefanu,

CL Moore’s ‘Jirel Meets Magic’ [does not] challenge the ‘space opera’ conventions of much
of the writing of the 1930s and 1940s, in which the protagonist may be a woman but, as
Joanna Russ points out . . . ‘the he-man ethos of the world does not change, nor do the
stereotyped personalities assigned to secondary characters, particularly female ones’. (1989,
16)

Lefanu criticizes Jirel, and characters like her, because ‘they do not necessarily challenge
the gender stereotypes they have reversed’ (p. 35). She writes Jirel off as perpetuating
the ‘“over-masculinised society” of sword-and-sorcery’ (p. 182) because she plays a
‘male role’ without challenging the socio-cultural power structures the role maintains.
Effectively, she criticizes Jirel for performing the masculinity usually associated with
the male action hero; for Lefanu, this makes Jirel complicit with a patriarchal system
and ideology in which masculinity (and thus men) are considered superior to femininity
(and thus women). Lefanu maintains that a feminist character should subvert this
superiority and assert an alternative, feminine way of living, rather than merely claiming
masculine authority for herself as an individual. Lefanu’s mistrust of masculinity seems

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to be contingent on the equation of masculinity with men and patriarchal culture, and
femininity with women and a ‘women’s culture’, a point I will return to shortly.
Marleen Barr’s chapter on ‘Heroic Fantastic Femininity: Woman Warriors’ (1987)
deals more generally with the female warrior and, by extension, with Jirel. While Barr
shares Lefanu’s wariness of the female warrior’s performance of masculinity, she does
allow for the possibility that the appearance in fiction of a woman who is dominant rather
than submissive, hero rather than victim, can be valuable to female readers, offering
‘power fantasies for women’ (p. 85). Thus, at the very least, ‘[t]he female hero imparts
some merit to a mediocre text (because) she is a positive role-model for the subgenre’s
readers’ (p. 96). Like Lefanu, however, Barr is sceptical when it comes to quantifying
precisely what sort of ‘value’ the masculinity of the female warrior may offer readers
and feminists when feminist SF specifically sets out to challenge masculinist culture.
For Barr, the single progressive feature of the ‘woman’s angle to sword and sorcery’ is
that its ‛new female heroes are free to be women, not merely sword-swinging men with
female bodies and female names’ (p. 85). Barr identifies this ‘womanliness’ in feminine
characteristics such as emotionally-close relationships with other women, a non-
competitive attitude, and motherhood (pp. 86–87). Barr’s mistrust of masculinity, like
Lefanu’s, therefore seems to be founded on the equation of men with the performance
of masculinity, and both with masculinist, patriarchal culture. Naturally, this would
encourage wariness because, as Judith Halberstam suggests, ‘in this society masculinity
inevitably conjures up notions of power and legitimacy and privilege’ (1998, 2), to
which feminists are opposed.
It is possible to understand Barr and Lefanu’s sceptical response to the female warrior’s
performance of masculinity if one considers the context of 70s and 80s feminism, during
which a gynocentric perspective became influential. Empowering women through the
validation of their experiences as women, gynocentrism championed the re-evaluation
of a femininity ‘natural’ to all women. Where liberal feminism challenged the conflation
of men with masculinity and women with femininity, gynocentric feminism adopted
the polarization and concentrated on the reappraisal of feminine traits as positive
(Stansell 2010, 244). The goal, then, was to have empowered women unseat masculine
authority and assert a better, feminine way of living. At the time, feminist SF critics
would therefore have expected authors to challenge and subvert the ‘He-Man ethos’
of the masculinist system, a trend reflected in much feminist SF of the 70s and 80s –
Charlotte Perkins-Gilman’s Herland ([1915] 1979, Suzy McKee-Charnas’s Walk to the
End of the World (1974), Sally Miller Gearheart’s The Wanderground (1978). Although
Barr, and a few others (such as Jessica Salmonson, 1979), acknowledge that there may
be some value in the female hero’s performance of masculinity, most feminist critics
would have required this to be balanced or subsumed by the hero’s performance of
femininity. As Carol Pearson and Katherine Pope write, ideally these feminist female
heroes would offer readers a ‘nonpatriarchal image of women as whole beings [who

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effect] the reintegration of nurturance, intuition, and compassion into the alienating,
competitive, patriarchal world’ (1981, 185).
I foreground the context during which Barr and Lefanu write because this is the first
time Moore’s Jirel appears in scholarly critiques. It is thus essential to acknowledge the
wariness of masculinity that permeates 70s and 80s feminist SF scholarship and fiction
because this is why Jirel is dismissed, ‘pigeonholed’ as merely a ‘female Conan’ with
nothing much to offer (Harvey 2007, 3).

Female masculinity and the ‘new’ female warrior/action hero

Surprisingly, however, Judith Halberstam’s relatively recent work on female
masculinities suggests that this womanist mistrust of masculinity continues to limit the
gender identities available to women today. Her point is corroborated by the research of
Elizabeth Hills (1999, 51), Jeffrey Brown (2004, 47) and Martha McCaughey and Neal
King (2001, 2). According to Halberstam, female masculinity continues to be vilified
because it is read as ‘trying to be a man’, that is, claiming the power and privilege
of (white, heterosexual) men. In order to counteract this, Halberstam suggests that
‘masculinity must not and cannot and should not reduce down to the male body and its
effects’ (1998, 1) because this blinds culture and scholars to the various masculinities
available to men and women. She writes that ‘[f]emale masculinity is a particularly
fruitful site of investigation because it has been vilified by heterosexist and feminist/
womanist programs alike . . . as a longing to have a power that is just out of reach’ (p.
9). Disputing this, Halberstam suggests that rather than ‘being an imitation of maleness,
female masculinity actually affords us a glimpse of how masculinity is constructed as
masculinity’ (p. 1). When the female body, which is expected to perform femininity,
performs masculinity, it undermines univalent notions of masculinity and femininity
and encourages the emergence of multiple masculinities and femininities (Goodwill
2011, 8).
There is, therefore, a certain irony-in-hindsight in Lefanu’s dismissal of the
masculinity of the female warrior on the basis that a female protagonist is feminist only
if she ‘interrogate[s] the social and literary construction of women as gendered subjects’
(1989, 24). As Halberstam argues, and as recent studies of the female action hero
contend, the female warrior does this precisely because of the masculinity she performs.
In fact, for Halberstam, the female warrior in popular culture is often not masculine
enough. Nevertheless, because the female warrior does challenge conventional gender
norms she is recognized as an agent for change (Halberstam, p. 28), forcing readers
(and viewers) to re-evaluate their assumptions about the construction of ‘masculine
Man’ and ‘feminine Woman’ as heteronormative ideals. The female warrior dons the
stereotypical trappings of masculine power and agency associated with the male warrior
hero: physical strength, aggression, initiative, prowess with weapons and independence.
Male and female readers then expect her to be powerful and dominant because they

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recognize that she has stepped into the well-established, and quintessentially masculine,
pattern of the warrior. The moment she brandishes her sword, she compels readers and
scholars to acknowledge that ‘what we understand as heroic masculinity [is] produced
by and across both male and female bodies’ (Halberstam, p. 2).
If one reads Jirel as kin to the female action heroes of late-twentieth-century pop-
culture, her performance of masculinity is thus no longer the outlier Lefanu finds it. In
fact, Jirel’s assertion of female masculinity as early as the 1930s may be her primary
contribution to early feminist SF. Some recent female warriors with whom one might
compare her are (in film) Aliens’s Ellen Ripley (1979), Terminator’s Sarah Connor (1984),
Kill Bill’s various killer women (2003), Mad Max: Fury Road’s Furiosa (2015) and (in
fiction) George R. R. Martin’s Brienne of Tarth and Arya Stark (A Song of Ice and Fire,
1996), Suzanne Collins’s Katniss Everdeen (The Hunger Games, 2008) and Alethea
Kontis’s Saturday (Hero, 2013). The salient feature of these female warriors is that they
span the divide between masculinity and femininity, performing behaviours that belong
to both categories. Recent incarnations of the female action hero are, however, more
fortunate than Jirel because they entered a western world different from the one into
which she stormed in 1934. Despite Halberstam’s contention that female masculinities
still generate unease, for these latter-day warriors post-1990 gender studies had begun to
shift the way western culture conceives of gender, fostering an openness to the idea that
masculinity and femininity may be performed by either biological sex (an idea widely
disseminated after the publication of Judith Butler’s ground-breaking Gender Trouble
in 1990). This encouraged the development of a more nuanced language through which
gender identity is conceptualized and explored. The result is that recent studies of the
female action hero, such as those undertaken by Elizabeth Hills (1999), Sherrie Innes
(2004) and Joe Goodwill (2011), take advantage of a conceptual framework that reads
the female action hero more positively and with greater insight. If one applies this
framework to Jirel today, her performance of masculinity may thus be recognized as
merely one of a number of expressions of ‘authentic’ female masculinity.

Jirel today: the female warrior’s masculinity vindicated

C.L. Moore wrote six stories that feature Jirel of Joiry: ‘Black God’s Kiss’ (October
1934); ‘Black God’s Shadow’ (December 1934); ‘Jirel Meets Magic’ (July 1935);
‘The Dark Land’ (January 1936); the novel Quest of the Starstone (November 1937);
and ‘Hellesgarde’ (April 1939): all page references to Moore’s stories are to the 2002
collection Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams.1 All but Quest of the Starstone were
originally published in the pulp SF magazine Weird Tales and I exclude the novel
from my discussion because it was co-authored by Moore’s husband, Henry Kuttner.
The short stories are stand-alone adventures, apart from ‘Black God’s Shadow’ which
follows ‘Black God’s Kiss’. For the rest there is no specific development of character or
linear progression of plot that might enable readers to manufacture a timeline from these

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tales; instead the reader is offered almost pointedly atemporal moments out of Jirel’s
life. These glimpses, like shards of a broken mirror, reflect bright pieces of some greater
whole that Moore refuses to solder together, and which consequently leave the reader
staring beyond Jirel into the void against which she stands. The effect seems conscious
and works in strange concert with the flashes of acute emotion – psychological anguish,
bright fury – and the surreal landscapes of the tales, to leave the reader unsettled.
Because linear plot is secondary, Jirel’s character stands as the centrepiece of these short
stories; the reader therefore focuses on her choices and actions and, for my purposes, on
her performance of gender.
Goodwill suggests that ‘female masculinity is a particular expression or performance
of masculinity . . . that consists in female-bodied persons engaging in ways of thought
and behaviour that have traditionally been considered masculine’ (2011, 10). Given the
variety of traits considered ‘masculine’, and the fact that a woman might adopt any
combination of them, countless expressions of female masculinity become possible.
The female warrior performs a masculinity proscribed by the role ‘warrior’ which
foregrounds aggression, the ability to take initiative and act independently, authority,
physical strength and the willingness to engage in violence (sometimes for a just cause).
Jirel’s performance of masculinity therefore centres on these traits.
The first time Jirel appears in print, Moore pointedly leaves her sex a mystery. In
‘Black God’s Kiss’, she is brought before her captor and announced as ‘fallen Joiry’s
Lord’ and ‘Joiry’s tall commander, struggling between two men at arms’ (p. 39).
Guillaume assumes she is male, as do the guardsmen who have taken Joiry; the reader
has no reason to think differently. Her body is tall and muscular enough that two male
guards struggle to hold her and her behaviour is that of a soldier: rough and aggressive.
The word ‘Lord’ is masculine and ‘commander’ is gender neutral so that the reader is
specifically presented with an unfeminine character. Although her femaleness is quickly
revealed, it remains something against which Moore offsets Jirel’s masculinity, which
is shocking and liberating precisely because it is unexpected in a female body in the
medieval setting (Bloch 1991, 10). The narrator tells us that Jirel is as ‘tall as most
men, and as savage as the wildest of them’ (p. 40), ‘as strong as many men’ (p. 45) and
‘commander of the strongest fortress in the kingdom’ (p. 69). The reader is told that
‘there was not a man for miles who did not fear and respect Joiry’s commander’ (p. 72).
The equal of any man, Jirel’s authoritative masculinity (particularly when combined
with her prowess with a sword) is easily read as an ‘appropriation of the phallus’
(Brown 2004, 56). Barr uses the term ‘phallic femininity’ (1987, 98) to describe the
action of female characters who assert masculine agency, and the opening scene of ‘Jirel
Meets Magic’ is an almost perfect example of this: ‘Over Guischard’s fallen drawbridge
thundered Joiry’s warrior lady . . . Straight into the massed defenders at the gate she
plunged . . . the weight of her mighty warhorse opening up a gap for the men at her heels
to widen’ (p. 3). This scene evokes an aggressive, phallic motion: the warhorse between
Jirel’s legs is an animalistic virility with which she thrusts into the men, forcing open a

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gap through which her soldiers stream. Jirel is female, but her gender is unequivocally
masculine in these images and descriptions.
Moore contrasts Jirel’s performance of masculinity with that of the men in these
stories, measuring hers against their ‘valid’, male masculinities. The effect is that Jirel’s
is read as credible, particularly because she is more strident and aggressive than they are.
Her ‘reckless courage’ (p. 72) is contrasted with the human frailty of the male soldiers
who ‘[follow] reluctantly at her heels’ (p. 5), her action a counterpoint to ‘the shuffle of
the scared men behind her’ (p. 7). Jirel is more masculine than the slinking, duplicitous
male wizard, Guischard, in ‘Jirel Meets Magic’, and her masculinity is a match for those
of the alpha-males Guillaume in ‘Black God’s Kiss’ and Guy of Garlot in ‘Hellesgarde’.
These comparisons remove any doubt: Moore’s Jirel asserts a forceful masculinity. The
ultimate assertion of this masculinity is her oft-repeated statement that ‘I am Joiry!’
(p. 102). Given the medieval belief that land and king are linked, and that the king’s
authority is divine in origin, when Jirel says she ‘is Joiry’ she asserts absolute authority:
she is King, which is qualitatively different from being Queen. Feminine authority is
uncertain in these stories: in ‘The Dark Land’ the white witch Queen is scorned and
becomes a wraith when the regent turns his desiring gaze upon Jirel; in ‘Jirel Meets
Magic’ Jirel defeats and kills Jarisme, the seductive sorceress-ruler. Claiming masculine
authority, Jirel thus asserts a dominant position in the economy of gendered power that
runs through these stories.
Jirel’s willingness to engage in violence is also a marker of her performance of
masculinity. As Charlene Tung writes,

One of the hallmarks of the new heroine is her ability to utilize her body to effectively kick,
punch, maim and kill others, particularly men. This kind of physicality inherently involves
violence. To the extent that violence is considered integral to the construction of masculinity,
and hence antithetical to femininity, the existence of (violent) heroines is in and of itself
transgressive. (2004, 100)

Jirel certainly transgresses the gender codes of the 1930s in that she not only engages
in violence, she relishes it. It beckons and the narrator reveals that ‘hatred bubbled up
hotly within her and broke from her lips in a little savage laugh of anticipation’ (p. 56)
and, in another such moment, that ‘[e]xultation surged up in her (and) strength like wine
boiled up through her body’ (p. 122). At various points in the series we are also told that
Jirel has ‘killed more men than one’ (p. 74), that she ‘cracks skulls’ and has ‘murder
in her heart’ (p. 42), and that her ‘eyes were yellow with blood-lust’ (p. 3). At times,
Moore likens Jirel’s violence to animal savagery in which, as Jirel herself says ‘Joiry
[is] ever the predator, not the prey!’ (p. 136). Jirel ‘[grins] wolfishly’ (p. 42) and has a
‘hawk-yellow gaze’ (p. 102). Her ‘lion-yellow eyes [are] ablaze’ (p. 39) and, on another
occasion, ‘she darted her head sideways, like a serpent striking, and sank her teeth into
his neck’ (p. 41). These images suggest that violence is natural to Jirel, a savage reflex
she falls back on without thinking, as any threatened predator would.

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Moore’s treatment of violence in these tales is significant, not just because Jirel would
have been revolutionary to SF readers of the 1930s, but because of the ambivalence
female violence arouses even today. Although readers and film-goers of the last two
decades have become used to seeing the ‘kicking and punching’ action heroes Tung
describes, generally women are violent only under extraordinary circumstances;
violence is seldom something they choose because they enjoy it, or because it’s ‘in their
blood’ as it is for Jirel. In their study on women’s violence, Laura Sjoberg and Caron
Gentry state outright that, globally, the consensus remains that ‘women are not supposed
to be violent’ (2007, 2; original emphasis). Moore’s exploration of female violence in
these tales is thus as progressive as it is rare. She commits Jirel to the warrior role to
such a degree that there are times when Jirel is no longer human, let alone female,
when ‘She [is] not flesh and blood but a white-hot incandescence of pure rage’ (p.
105) for whom ‘the steady flame of hatred [is] a torch to light the way’ (p. 44). In ‘The
Dark Land’ Pav says that ‘there is in [Jirel] a hot and savage strength which no other
woman in any land I know possesses’ (p. 101); this ‘savage strength’ sets her apart from
female characters of the 1930s, and is a fundamental marker of her performance of the
warrior’s masculinity.
Moore’s descriptions of Jirel’s looks also foreground the centrality of masculinity
to her identity as a warrior. She is, first and foremost, a weapon: her face has ‘a biting,
sword-edge beauty as keen as the flash of blades’ (p. 40) and in armour she is a ‘battle
machine’ (p. 3). Guillaume kisses Jirel and finds it ‘like kissing a sword-blade’ (p. 41).
Jirel’s beauty is no passive object to be admired at the viewer’s leisure; it is dangerous.
However, physical attractiveness becomes complicated when a warrior is female
because, as Brown suggests, there is always the question of whether tough women are
‘being allowed access to a position of empowerment, or . . . merely being fetishized
as dangerous sex objects’ (2004, 47). He offers an answer, contending that even if
some fetishization occurs ‘[a]t a fundamental level every action heroine, not just those
who are explicitly sexualized, mobilises the specter of the dominatrix’ (2004, 50), so
that the female warrior is always the dominant, masculine aggressor. This position is
fundamentally different from the one conventionally occupied by the sexualized woman
who is the passive, vulnerable object of the male gaze.
Jirel knows she is ‘a figure on which a man’s eyes must linger’ (p. 134); in ‘The
Dark Land’ she sees that the ‘stranger’s eyes [are] eager upon the long, lithe lines of
her’ (p. 100) and, in ‘Hellesgarde’, that the doorkeeper’s ‘eyes [slide] very quickly, yet
very comprehensively, from her tanned and red-lipped face downward over the lifting
curves of her’ (p. 132). Significantly, however, she too enjoys ‘her own long, lovely
body’, taking ‘sensuous delight’, for example, in the ‘the dark caress of [velvet] upon
her flesh’ (p. 103). Jirel’s sensuality dovetails with Brown’s point: conjuring the spectre
of the dominatrix, the female warrior is a sexual agent. Jirel is both sexually experienced
and capable of sexual aggression. She also practices the desiring ‘male’ gaze in ‘Jirel
Meets Magic’. In this tale, Moore queers Jirel’s gaze: the sorceress, Jarisme, is ‘a

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magnet for Jirel’s fascinated eyes’. Jirel’s performance of masculinity is emphasized

here because the object of her desire is almost exaggeratedly feminine: Jirel notices
that Jarisme is ‘generously-curved [and] sleepy-eyed’, that ‘her skin [is] like rich, dark,
creamy velvet’ (p. 9), and she has a ‘sensual face (and a) red mouth’ (p. 25). There is
an ‘Almost physical impact . . . in that first meeting of their eyes’ (p. 10) and, later
‘Jirel’s pulses hammer with the desire to smash [Jarisme’s smile] down the woman’s
lush, creamy throat’ (p. 15). Jarisme’s body prompts Jirel to violence, which is the
same reaction she has to Guillaume – a response she only later recognizes as romantic
passion. Jirel’s response to (the female) Jarisme, is thus the same as her response to (the
male) Guillaume: passionate violence. In ‘Black God’s Kiss’, Jirel finally realizes ‘why
such heady violence had flooded her whenever she thought of [Guillaume]’: she loves
him and, having killed him, there is now ‘no light anywhere in the world’ (p. 68). One
of the things that seems to attract Jirel to both Jarisme and Guillaume is their power.
They are her equals, but her response to their power is to destroy it. Moore thus allows
Jirel a breadth of sexual desire unusual in mainstream SF of the 1930s and at the same
time establishes that her sexuality and desire are ‘indistinguishable from the deadly
danger she represents’ (Herbst, 2004, 31). This is a key feature of the dominatrix. Jirel’s
sexuality thus communicates masculine agency rather than feminine passivity.
There can be no doubt that Moore intends to foreground Jirel’s masculinity throughout
the stories. There is, however, one feminine trait whose significance equals that of
Jirel’s masculine physicality, violence, and sexual agency – she experiences moments
of acute emotional sensitivity. If femininity is understood as that which is interior, to do
with inter-relationship and emotional acuity, then Jirel’s moments of intense emotion
speak to her femininity, nuancing her performance of masculinity. Significantly, while
her masculine traits enable her to defeat human foes in the public agora, her emotions
enable her to defeat supernatural foes on a psycho-spiritual battlefield. As Ryan Harvey
suggests, in these cases Jirel’s ‘ultimate success usually depends not on her fighting
prowess but a combination of her fortitude and emotional receptivity’ (2007, 3).
Because Moore characterizes evil as an emotional vacuum in these tales, every moment
of acute emotion Jirel experiences is crucial and may be weaponized. Her emotions are
constantly in flux: she is moved to tears of compassion more than once (pp. 48, 57, 63,
81); she feels remorse (pp. 61, 83); fear (pp. 43, 63); fury (pp. 5, 48); hatred (pp. 42,
44, 56); and love (p. 70). When she fights the demon-god in ‘Black God’s Shadow’ Jirel
‘[feels] those waves of warmth and humanity beating insistently against the hovering
chill which was the black god’s presence . . . And [knows] that she, armored in the
warmth of her aliveness, was the black god’s equal, and a worthy foe’ (p. 83). Later, she
recognizes that ‘perhaps one who had lived less violently than herself and had lesser
stores of passions to recall might never be able to combat the god’s death chill’ (p. 94).
This same force of emotion enables her to defeat Jarisme’s enchantment, Pav in ‘The
Dark Land’ and the vengeful spirit in ‘Hellesgarde’.

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One might expect the intensity of Jirel’s emotions to be at odds with her performance
of masculinity, encouraging vulnerability or weakness, but Moore specifically makes
them one of Jirel’s strengths. Like her masculine agency, Jirel’s emotions are a
constant feature of her response to stimuli. This balance prevents Jirel’s performance
of masculinity from being two-dimensional, and her emotions from being dismissed
as merely the ‘histrionics of femininity’ (Halberstam, p. 9). This is what makes Jirel
such a fascinating character from the perspective of contemporary gender studies, and
the study of female masculinities in particular: her performance of masculinity is not
the masquerade of a stereotype, but an honest, nuanced response to the world around
her. If one acknowledges this, one cannot dismiss her as Lefanu does. Moore’s Jirel
therefore represents a significant shift in early SF because she introduces an entirely
new performance of gender into the genre.

Conclusion
In this article I draw attention to Jirel’s complexity: she performs the ferocious
masculinity of the warrior as well as surrendering herself to the potent feminine
interiority associated with raw emotion; she is a sexual agent; her desire is queered; and
she takes pleasure in violent action. Each of these traits sets her apart from the norm for
female characters in 1930s SF and, together, they render her remarkable even in 2018.
Moore’s Jirel sets a precedent for the female warriors who follow her: she transgresses
‘genre codes and cultural gender codes which position female characters as the passive,
immobile and peripheral characters’ and she introduces ‘questions about the fluidity
of gendered identities’ (Hills 1999, 38). Although Lester del Rey credits Moore’s
‘Shambleau’ with nothing less than transforming SF, arguing that this tale ‘rewrites,
reconfigures and “retools” [SF’s] largely masculine world’ (in Bredehoft 2007, 76), I
contend that Moore’s Jirel does at least as much as ‘Shambleau’ and ‘No Woman Born’
to reconfigure SF, and it is past time that Jirel’s contribution to the genre is recognized.
Like Harvey, I might argue that Jirel is C. L. Moore’s ‘most significant accomplishment’
(2, 2007), which would make her a crucial character in the history of early feminist SF.

Note
1 This 2002 Gollanzc Fantasy Masterworks collection of C. L. Moore’s short fiction
includes the Jirel short stories ‘Black God’s Kiss’ (1934), ‘Black God’s Shadow’ (1934), ‘Jirel
Meets Magic’ (1935), ‘The Dark Land’ (1936), ‘Hellesgarde’ (1939), and the Northwest Smith
tales ‘Shambleau’ (1933), ‘Black Thirst’ (1934), ‘Scarlet Dream’ (1934), ‘Dust of Gods’ (1934),
‘Julhi’ (1935), ‘The Tree of Life’ (1936), ‘Lost Paradise’ (1936), ‘The Cold Gray God’(1936),
‘Yvala’ (1936) and ‘Song in a Minor Key’ (1940).

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 'A hot and savage strength'

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EILEEN DONALDSON is a Senior Lecturer in the English Studies Department at

UNISA. Her fields are Feminist Science Fiction, Fantasy and Children’s Literature.
She explores various fantastic texts from the perspectives of Gender Studies, Jungian
and Psychoanalytical theory, and Developmental Psychology. She has published work
on Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin and Terry Pratchett. Throughout,
however, her focus remains the hero and what constitutes heroism in a changing
moral and social landscape.

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