I’ve been mulling over an editorial on female characters in literature for a while. Since I ripped on author Joe Abercrombie yesterday for his female characters in Before They Are Hanged, it’s high time I got down to business on this.
I’ve only read a few books that are generally classified as chick lit
. The Devil Wears Prada recently and a few years ago I read Bridget Jones’ Diary and Good In Bed. I did not like them. I had a perception of the female characters in chick lit that I got from reviews and book covers, an admittedly shallow knowledge.
My perception was that chick lit is full of naive, shallow women. That these were women whose image was attached to who they were with, not who they were themselves. That these were women that did not take charge of their own lives. My chick lit reading has generally confirmed the perception of characters in the genre.
Other reading seems to slot female characters into certain roles as well: motherhood, prostitution, concubine, and mistress. Roles that are primarily defined by both tradition and vagina. When there is little else, I start to get irritated. For whatever reason, for hundreds of years our real-life societies have pushed women into these roles, roles that ill-fit the potential for half our population. I don’t agree with Betty Friedan’s assessment that there is little fulfillment as a mother. But I do agree that when it is a limitation, it is artificial.
Authors don’t have a responsibility by virtue of their vocation to combat our cultural foibles. I sure do appreciate it when they do, however. And it can even be done without making the writing into a feminist position paper. Take a look at the characters in Karl Schroeder’s Queen of Candesce, Venera Fanning in particular. A woman runs the secret police in The Lies of Locke Lamora. In Ian McEwan’s Atonement, the women participate in their own lives, despite the fact that a major portion of the text is all about their relationship with men. They make their own decisions, and do not flutter eyelashes as their only means of achievement.
I don’t judge these books by a numerical count or quota. My objection isn’t related to the number of characters or whether they are represented in proportion to women in the population. It’s not about correcting for past misdeeds or perceptions of our culture. I’m not keeping score, though often I will go back and score things to check my own subjective response against what’s actually been written. Sometimes the balance is so lopsided that it intrudes on a story. Perhaps I am too sensitive to it, perhaps I am not sensitive enough. But when I notice it, it hurts a story for me, and makes it so I do not want the character to be in my story.
When a writer falls back on typical whore roles such as Joe Abercrombie or female as victim as Lauren Weisberger did, I think it reflects either laziness or a lack of imagination. Even if the character is a strong one such as Ferro is, when her strength is based on a reaction to common abused roles of women, there isn’t much stretching involved. Sometimes there’s a point needing to be made about women, their roles, or abuse, and sometimes these roles just work best in a story. But too often it just feels like a paint-by-numbers scene. That irritates me, especially in these cases. Do I know that’s what Joe Abercrombie did? No. Another reader might easily have a different take on these characters.
I guess this is my message: Don’t write women badly because it’s easy or because your culture retards your perception of them. Literature is creation! These positions are copies. Even worse, they are copies of a lie. I think they come across as intellectually lazy or stunted and makes for worse reading.
Image Riding Side Saddle (version two) taken by Flickr user Sherlock77 (James) used under a Creative Commons By-Nc-Nd 2.0 license.
