That depends what you mean by "conventionally feminine". For ****'s sake don't turn them into girly stereotypes as a reaction to what we've been saying here! It's about taking a slightly different, less confrontational approach to problem-solving, not about falling back on gender binaries.
Don't worry, I wasn't talking of doing that. When I said making them more 'conventionally feminine' I didn't so much mean how they dressed, spoke, or what they thought but rather how they would act, and that I should only deploy them in certain roles (which doesn't change how they speak or think, etc, etc,) I was thinking that female characters would be unsuitable for certain roles, partially because I was really rattled by what you said about 'not having a grasp on the female psyche'. How could I? How could I ever really claim to have? No matter how much evidence I might gather, someone could always tell me that I didn't know what was happening in the black box, and it would be true? (Note, this is true from any person to another, no matter how well you think you know someone, you could still be very wrong).
So, it seemed to me that the only way to write believable female characters would be to stay within the boundaries laid out by others, which would mean making them more 'conventionally feminine'.
But then I asked myself 'Do I have a grasp on the male psyche?' and the answer was 'No'. The men I encounter are far too varied to fit into one definition, and we all know that people we think we know really well still manage to frequently surprise us.
However, this doesn't mean there isn't a female psyche. As society has traditionally allowed men a far greater range of behaviors (from scholar to solider) than women, it might be that the male psyche is a wide, diffuse thing, but the female psyche is clearly defined by the limited roles imposed on their gender.
But this brings us to another point, which is that the female psyche is (largely, I admit probably not entirely) the internalization of the gender roles that society imposes. Most men do not want to be seen acting in a feminine manner, and most women don't want to appear 'too masculine'. Thus both groups try to fit to the expectations of the society they live in, and this is 90% of what the 'psyche' is, I think. In which case, should we be promoting that? If we limit female characters to their traditional behaviors.... well, it's not something I can quite put into words, but I'm not sure it's a good thing. One of the reasons why female characters are so often victims in literature might be that they are ruled out for many other roles because it's not considered realistic if female characters act in certain ways.
And then I realised that fiction isn't supposed to be realistic. It's fiction. People in fiction don't act like real people, for one thing fiction has to make sense, whereas a lot that happens in real life is just down to chaos. How often do you see people making stupid mistakes in fiction? Not often, because making a stupid mistake is rarely a satisfying plot point (though it can be if the mistake grows out of who the character is, say it's down to inherent prejudices within them). But how often have you seen people make stupid mistakes in the real world? Mistakes that don't come from anything meaningful, other than that someone was thinking about what they were going to have for tea, when they should have been focused on driving?
Also there is the matter that sometimes an act of violence is the only suitable way of depicting something. In the story I mentioned I needed someone to stick up for a character that others are claiming doesn't exist, is nothing more than a delusion. I needed the reader to see that this person is just as real to those who know her as the MC is to the reader (the reader can never see both). How to do this? Well, Caroline can make an impassioned speech, or burst into tears, or any number of those things, but when she crosses the line to using violence (and even making threats with a knife) you know she's serious. I honestly don't think there's anything else that she could have done that would have the same degree of earnestness. I even think that, if we take the point that women less often use violence, well, this only makes the case stronger, as the higher the bar is set for a character before they will turn to violence, the more important to them the issue must be that throws them over it.
And if there's a scene that requires the use of violence, but all the other scenes perhaps are better suited to a female character (if there are scenes that don't suit them, then there must be scenes that do) then the 'lesser evil' is to use a character who fits most scenes, and have them act a little 'out of expectations' in one scene.
Finally there's the matter that the 'female psyche', even if we agree it exists, is going to vary very much from an 19 year old to an 82 year old, or from a woman from one country or era, to a woman from another country or era. The psyche of Freya Stark or Emelia Erhart, for instance, is likely to be rather different from that of the average housewife in their respective eras. Does this mean that Stark and Erhart are in some way abberations? I'd be uncomfortable with that reading. There's also a flipside to saying that violence isn't part of the feminine psyche, as it implies that the male psyche is uniquely dark and violent. Obviously, I'm somewhat uncomfortable with that idea too, I think everyone's psyche has darkness and light within it, but some of us get to express that more than others, for a host of reasons. It's far easier for someone in a comfortable economic position to express the compassionate side of their nature, for instance, than someone who is desperate. For this reason it's much more meaningful when a desperate person is compassionate, although that in no way undermines the value of the comfortable person being compassionate too.
By the end of all this my brain felt like it needed a bigger heatsink, and I decided that you can either write, or you can worry, you can't do both. So I think that for now I'll keep my female characters as they are, but maybe keep a more watchful eye on them than previously.
Despite all this though, it's still worth asking how often I use violence in my fiction, whether I use it to easily, whether violence in fiction is really such a bad thing, or whether it's only certain types of violence, or 'lazy' violence, etc, etc, etc. These are things I've never really had cause to think about before, and I can see cases in my fiction where I have too readily, perhaps, thrown some violence into the story (though I'm not sure that, as you put it, 'swashbuckling violence is so bad, and I think female characters should be allowed to buckle a swash too. After all, I think some people might read fiction to see 'themselves' doing some stuff that life/society/circumstance wouldn't allow them to do).
For example, I'm not what you'd call "conventionally feminine" - like a lot of geek girls, I'm good with computers, useless with babies, uninterested in stilettos* and handbags
I was more talking about roles than characters, although it is an interesting question "If you change the role, does that change the character too?" After all, character is expressed through the things they do.
I felt, from what you'd said, that female characters would be unbelievable in certain roles. However, most of the male characters we see in fiction are pretty unbelievable when you look at them honestly (Sherlock Holmes, Captain Kirk, Gilgamesh, etc, etc) , so why should females be held to a higher standard?
(* unless we're talking about narrow-bladed Italian daggers)
Madam, it seems to me that you have an unhealthy interest in implements of death! You should probably be on a police register or something!*
I never said I didn't want to write violence, only that it's not the only possible form of conflict in a story
There are lots of other things I love about the Elizabethan era - the plays, the gorgeous clothes, the richness of the language - but yes, I love writing action scenes: chases, fights, etc. I grew up on the swashbuckling Hollywood movies of the 1950s, so that's the kind of thing I like to write. Except with more of a 15 certificate
I agree it's not the only type of conflict one can have, but I want to try and see when violence in fiction is 'okay' and when it's not. Violence occurs more often in fiction than in most people's lives, I feel (though, obviously this depends on when/where you live and whether there's a war on). Why is this, and is it justified? I'm also wondering when a writer should 'substitute' a violent scene for something else, and why? Could it be that we release some of our violent urges in fiction (don't say you don't have them, we all get furious from time to time) and that this helps us to live with our fellow human beings without murdering them, or could it be that in reading/writing violence, we are exercising the violent aspects of our nature, and that interaction with fictional violence might make us more violent, or is this something that varies so much from person to person that it's meaningless to ask such questions?
* Joke! Joke! Okay?
Why even write spy stories, given that they are so violent?
