This was the topic of a marital conversation yesterday: which books of the Bible would pass the famous Bechdel test? The test itself originates from a conversation between two characters in Alison Bechdel's famous comic Dykes to Watch Out For, about films:Over the years it has acquired a minor additional tweak: a book or film etc passes the test if:

1. There are at least two named women characters


2. who have a conversation


3. about something other than a man.

Obviously the Bible was not made for the Bechdel test, or vice versa. But it is an interesting exercise to apply the one to the other, and see what comes up. Pro-Bible commentators claim that there are four books of the Bible that actually pass it; in my view only one of these is sound. That one is:

1. The Book of Ruth
   
   In case you don't know it, the Book of Ruth is a short Old Testament book which starts with a woman called Naomi, who is an immigrant in Moab and whose two sons both die leaving young widows, Orpah and Ruth. Naomi decides to go back to her original home, Bethlehem. Orpah decides not to come with her, but Ruth is a different matter.

   1:15 So she said, "See, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods; return after your sister-in-law."
   1:16 But Ruth said, "Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.
   1:17 Where you die, I will die— there will I be buried. May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!"
   1:18 When Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more to her.
   1:19 So the two of them went on until they came to Bethlehem. When they came to Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them; and the women said, "Is this Naomi?"
   1:20 She said to them, "Call me no longer Naomi, call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt bitterly with me.
   1:21 I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty; why call me Naomi when the Lord has dealt harshly with me, and the Almighty has brought calamity upon me?"
   1:22 So Naomi returned together with Ruth the Moabite, her daughter-in-law, who came back with her from the country of Moab. They came to Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest.

   Men are barely even mentioned here; it's a conversation about where you want to live your life after Plan A didn't work out. A clear Bechdel pass.
   
   The dynamic between Naomi and her two daughters-in-law has captured the attention of a number of artists. Here’s William Blake’s take.
   

However, there are another three cases where it is argued (in my view wrongly) that the Bechdel test is passed. They are:

2. The Book of Tobit
   
   There is a debate about whether the Book of Tobit belongs in the Bible at all - as a school-going Catholic, it was in my version, but the Protestant kids didn't have it in theirs. There are two segments of Tobit that are invoked as potential Bechdel passes. The first is in Chapter 3:

   3:7 On the same day, at Ecbatana in Media, it also happened that Sarah, the daughter of Raguel, was reproached by one of her father’s maids.
   3:8 For she had been married to seven husbands, and the wicked demon Asmodeus had killed each of them before they had been with her as is customary for wives. So the maid said to her, “You are the one who kills your husbands! See, you have already been married to seven husbands and have not borne the name of a single one of them.
   3:9 Why do you beat us? Because your husbands are dead? Go with them! May we never see a son or daughter of yours!”

   I'm afraid this seems to me to fail all three legs of the Bechdel test. First off, the maid (in some translations, plural maids) is not named (granted, that's a later wrinkle to the original form of the test, but I think an important one); second, we don't get Sarah's response, so it's a rant not a conversation (the next section contain's Sarah's solitary reflections); and third, it's about her dead husbands who were all, er, men.
   
   The second bit of Tobit which some claim clears the Bechdel test is later in Chapter 7, when Sarah marries Tobit's son Tobias, her parents certain that he is doomed like the previous seven unlucky chaps:

   7:15 Raguel called his wife Edna and said to her, “Sister, get the other room ready, and take her there.”
   7:16 So she went and made the bed in the room as he had told her, and brought Sarah there. She wept for her daughter. Then, wiping away the tears, she said to her, “Take courage, my daughter; the Lord of heaven grant you joy in place of your sorrow. Take courage, my daughter.” Then she went out.

   This would actually pass if we got Sarah's response, which would probably make it a conversation about marriage. But we don't even hear if she replies.
   
   Rembrandt was a huge fan of the Book of Tobit, but sadly did not pick either of these scenes to illustrate. However, here is his take on Sarah anticipating her new husband Tobias.
   


3. The Gospel of Mark
   
   Here the potentially Bechdel-passing section is from immediately after the Crucifixion, in the very last chapter of the Gospel, Chapter 16:

   16:1 When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him.
   16:2 And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb.
   16:3 They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?”

   Now, I will grant that the three women in the conversation are named. On the other hand, (once again) it's not a conversation, it's a single line; there is no dialogue here. And while apologists may argue that the conversation is about a stone, it's not; it's about the person who will move the stone.

   τίς ἀποκυλίσει ἡμῖν τὸν λίθον ἐκ τῆς θύρας τοῦ μνημείου;

   (In New Testament Greek, the semi-colon is a question mark.) It's implied pretty clearly that the person who might move the stone will be a man, by the word ἡμῖν, "for us" - because they are women who (in the view of the Gospel writer) couldn't do it for themselves. So I don't think Mark passes either. (True, the spirit of the Bechdel test is to eliminate conversations where women are presenting themselves only as romantic partners for men. But I think there's something important here also about gender roles.)
   
   There are many paintings of the women at the tomb, but few explicitly show the scene from the Gospel of Mark, with the three identified as two Marys and Salome. One of the rare exceptions is this by twentieth-century Danish artist Kamma Svensson.
   


4. The Gospel of Luke
   
   Here the potentially Bechdel-passing section is in the very first chapter:

   1:39 In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country,
   1:40 where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth.
   1:41 When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit
   1:42 and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.
   1:43 And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?
   1:44 For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy.
   1:45 And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”
   
   1:46 And Mary said,
   
   “My soul magnifies the Lord,
   1:47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
   1:48 for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
          Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
   1:49 for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
          and holy is his name.
   1:50 His mercy is for those who fear him
          from generation to generation.
   1:51 He has shown strength with his arm;
          he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
   1:52 He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
          and lifted up the lowly;
   1:53 he has filled the hungry with good things,
          and sent the rich away empty.
   1:54 He has helped his servant Israel,
          in remembrance of his mercy,
   1:55 according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
          to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”
   
   1:56 And Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home.

   I admit that this is the judgement I am most uncertain about. Mary and Elizabeth are both named women characters. There is a definite conversational exchange (even if Mary's response is effectively to break into song, I would accept that for a Hollywood musical, so I think I have to accept it here). The conversation is about pregnancy, which generally regarded as a women's issue. However, I cannot get away from the fact that both unborn children - Jesus Christ and John the Baptist - are men.
   
   The Visitation (which as a child I learned as one of the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary) has been a pretty popular topic for artists over the centuries. I’ve chosen a patriotic Belgian nod to Rogier van der Weyden, because he just shows the two women talking - a lot of the others are very crowded.
   

Reasonable people can disagree about all of this. The Bechdel test is not itself gospel, it's just a useful indicator of the extent to which a writer is treating women as people rather than romantic adjuncts to the men in the story. Large chunks of the Bible are not narrative in form and the Bechdel test cannot be reasonably applied. If the Book of Ruth passes, the Bible as a whole passes.

And yet, even on the optimistic viewpoint that all four of the above passages do pass the Bechdel test, that still leaves vast chunks of the Bible where women's voices are simply not heard. (See a book-by-book analysis here.)

The last (so far) of the six two-in-one books featuring the Eleventh Doctor, Amy and Rory, and aimed at younger readers.

Extra Time, by Richard Dungworth

Syd watched the group of youngsters move off along the street. He shook his head and tutted.
‘Look at ’em, officer,’ he muttered. ‘Right bunch of peacocks, these young ’uns, ain’t they? My missis don’t approve of them new “miniskirts”. Says they’re not decent.’

The Doctor and friends arrive in 1966 at the World Cup Final, to find emotion-sucking aliens threatening invasion. the Doctor and Amy deal with them while Rory substitutes for linesman Tofik Bahranov, who is indisposed. This is really a bit lightweight, struggling to fill its 200 pages, and not very original, and the scene-setting bits are a bit gor-blimey. I guess the kids will love it as long as they take the 1966 World Cup Final seriously. (Fails Bechdel at the first hurdle as Amy is the only named female character.)

The Water Thief, by Jacqueline Rayner

[Amy said] "I suppose it's different if you're a thousand years old. all these human lives must seem like mayflies to you."
For a moment the Doctor didn't answer. He was staring into the distance. Without looking at her he said, "Is that how you see me? Is that how I appear to you?"

This is a different matter. Rayner consistently has good ideas for her Who stories, and on a good day she delivers them too - I think her Winner Takes All, about computer games, is the best of the (sadly few) Ninth Doctor novels. Here she has the Doctor and friends landing in Egypt as the Oxyrhynchus papyri are being unearthed, with Amy and the Doctor then needing to visit ancient Egypt to sort out the inevitable alien invasion (though the water-slurping alien is a very nice touch). Contains gruesome details of the mummification process, but also a murder mystery and lots of nice character moments for our protagonists. Great stuff. (Bechdel pass: Amy befriends an ancient Egyptian woman and they talk about many things.)

I heard his voice exclaim, 'Listen to the noisy sods.' And a female voice, husky with love, said, 'Never mind them, darling. Come back here.' And I thought another thought, except this one was even more stupid. I actually recognised her voice, until I corrected myself. It couldn't be, never in a million years.

This is the most recent Lovejoy book, published in 2008, and since the author turns 80 this year I guess it may well be the last. (Though not for me; eleven down, thirteen to go.) It is a rather confused affair; an older Lovejoy, more narcissistic than ever, gets swept up in a massively weird conspiracy by the stranded dregs of colonialism (who of course tend to have retained fantastically valuable antiques). As well as Lovejoy's East Anglia base, we get taken to various parts of England with a climactic scene off the coast of Blackpool. Lovejoy turns out to have a son who has inherited his gift of divvying (the supernatural ability to detect genuine antiques) and is the most memorable new character in the book; also, remarkably, his long-suffering apprentice Lydia develops a sudden burst of characterisation, not that it does her much good. And Lovejoy manages to bed pretty much every female character over the age of consent, though not very explicitly. I won't recommend this as a book to start reading the series with; though it seems that this is where it finishes.

Fails the Bechdel test at the third hurdle. There are many women characters, who frequently talk to each other, but Lovejoy himself is invariably the topic of conversation.

This is the second of a trilogy by Burns which started with X'ed Out, and leaps between three different storylines: Doug's memories of his life in our world, in particular his enigmatic girlfriend Sarah (who has a fascination with Louise Bourgeois); the adventures of Doug's alter ego Nitnit in the alternative insectoid world of The Hive; and the romance comics which are common to both worlds. It seems almost as if Burns is interrogating the medium of comics from two different directions, Bourgeois' startling and disturbing images and the conventionally fluffy romance stories. There is also clearly a deep revelation to come in the third and final volume about what happened between Douglas and Sarah, and I find myself rather hoping that it is something sufficiently disturbing to justify the emotional energy of the story rather than some relatively generic story about growing up.

Bechdel fail at the second step - it is a tight narrative of a male viewpoint character (or characters), and while there are numerous female characters, none of them talk to each other.

This is a collection of 50 short stories by Anton Chekhov, dating from the 1881-1886 period before he hit the big time, none of them apparently published in English before 1999. I have not read any Chekhov (I tried one of the plays as a teenager, but bounced off the dramatis personæ) so this was fairly new territory. The stories are all very short - the total length of the book is only 234 pages; even so they are interesting enough, reflecting contemporary Russian urban lifestyles, especially if you happen to be a young doctor. A number of them take interesting narrative forms - telegrams, diary entries, dreams. Most of them are meant to be funny, but some of the humour has definitely faded over the centuries. An introduction to a Great Writer previously unknown to me, which has done me no harm at all.

None of the stories passes the Bechdel test; I think I spotted two occasions where a female character addressed a group of people including another female character, but in both cases talking about a man.

I'm afraid I was simply not convinced by Titus Alone. In fact, I was bored and confused by it. Titus, having run away from his home, finds himself in the neighbouring industrialised countryside (where people have never actually heard of Gormenghast, despite its absolute domination of its own hinterland). He becomes the object of obsession - in particular of the two women, Juno, with whom he has a love affair, and Cheeta, who rejects him and then develops a bizarrely elaborate plan to humiliate him by throwing a party at which various aspects of Gormenghast are satirically brought to life, but also of the self-appointed guardians from the Under-River. The imagery was intense, and I suppose it is in some way a spiritual and allegorical journey for Titus growing up, but in the end he ends back exactly where he started, and it did not work for me.

Also fails the Bechdel Test. I had hopes that the mysterious Black Rose would have a conversation with Juno, but she died before waking up.

Having greatly enjoyed the first volume of this manga series, I am glad to say that I thought the second kept up the standard. It is the start of what may be an extended flashback to the 1630s, shortly after the plague that killed most of Japan's men.

The young noble monk Arikoto, presenting his respects to the shōgun, is detained and learns to his horror that he is to become one of the shōgun's catamites; but of course, the shōgun is actually a young woman, her father having died though this has been kept secret. It is an intense tale of sexual violence, secrecy, and intrigue, and of flawed human beings overcoming awful personal histories. I will be interested to see where Yoshinaga takes it in future volumes.

I am slightly disappointed that this revolutionary situation isn't used to examine the broader societal impact of the altered post-plague sexual politics; of course the title of the series is explicitly "Ōoku: The Inner Chambers" so I guess we will continue with the focus on the ruling household. Perhaps the shōgun Yoshimune, introduced in the first volume, will use the knowledge gained from the flashbacks to show us the rest of Japan. Even so, it seems to me odd that the feminisation of the ruling elite is accepted by all (including, so far, the author) as a matter of deep shame, that must be covered up at all costs.

On the other hand, I have been genuinely shocked to see complaints in other reviews about the use of archaic English to translate certain Japanese forms of address. I know little of Japanese, but I know enough to realise that this is a Big Deal, and therefore a big challenge in terms of catching nuance for an English translation. Faced with this problem, the translator, Akemi Wegmüller, has done a fantastic job. It really annoys me when people get this wrong, but she has got it completely right.

I did not take careful note, and an open to correction on this point, but I think that this volume of Ōoku fails the Bechdel test. Arikoto is the central character, and in most of the scenes where he is not present, he is the topic of conversation. But I may be wrong.

Yet again, a Doctor Who annual where the art is rather good for the Doctor but pretty awful for the companion - in this case, the lady on the right is supposed to be Leela, as played by Louise Jameson, but doesn't look in the least like her. Since this came out in September 1978, and she had left the programme several months before, maybe the compilers of the Annual and the BBC were hoping we had forgotten what she looked like. The picture here looks if anything more like Mary Tamm's Romana wearing a wig and a bad bra.

But in general the 1979 annual seems to be continuing the track of improvement on previous years. The fiction again is well-written and actually fairly substantial, the prose stories taking up 35 pages out of 64 and the comic strips another 12; the comic strips seem to have absorbed the spirit of 2000 AD in both style and substance, very flashy and busy but actually telling a story at the same time; and apart from my whine about the artwork the characterisation of Leela and the Doctor is generally (though not consistently) accurate. I was intrigued by one of the prose filler pieces as well, about the 'Skyship', which I hadn't heard of but turns out to be the ancestor of the Skyship 600 airship which is in fact in commercial use today. (So, yes, I was actually educated by the educational bits.)

Most of the stories fail the Bechdel test at the first hurdle, in that there is no female character other than Leela; the sole exception is the first of the comic strips, "The Power", which features a character called Princess Azula, but she and Leela do not have a conversation, so it fails the second hurdle. One can perhaps query whether the Bechdel test is fair on stories where most of the characters are non-human, though I think that if the non-humans are clearly gendered it's not unreasonable.