Last semester, I was privileged to take a fiction workshop with Marilynne Robinson, the author of Housekeeping and Gilead. In one of our later class sessions, we were looking at a beautiful story by one of my favorite writers in the workshop, Jill Wohlgemuth. The story was in the form of an informal essay about kissing, written by a thirteen-year-old girl who wandered away from her academic thesis to meditate on her own impressions of love and desire, framed around her burgeoning sexual attraction to a boy named Theo who she described several times as being incredibly smart — which is ironic, because of course any thirteen-year-old girl who could write an essay as beautiful as this story was would have to be a prodigy herself.
Marilynne watched patiently as we students gave our opinions of and reactions to the piece. Then she sat back and said, “I’ve noticed a problem in the writing of young women.”
Instead of giving character traits to their female characters, Marilynne argued, young women writers give those traits to male secondary characters — in this case, repeatedly describing Theo as intelligent when it was the narrator who was brilliant.
I’ve been thinking about that comment a lot lately.
Now, I don’t think that the particular story we were looking at was actually a black and white case of this happening. There are a lot of reasons why a particularly smart thirteen-year-old girl would fixate on describing the object of her affection as “so smart” — I did that a lot as a kid, particularly with boys I had crushes on, because I had swallowed some line that men needed to be smarter than their female partners. Still, I think that Marilynne’s observation is keen and insightful. Looking at broader media trends, it’s definitely possible to uncover cases where a female character’s personality is rendered through male characters, or not rendered at all.
Girl Detective talks about one such case in her review of Jonathan Lethem’s latest novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet. The plot of the novel literally revolves around the female main character, Lucinda. She acts as a middleman, conveying McGuffins (sought-after objects) and witnessing plot points. However, the story is happening to other people. Her characterization — personality and praxis — are deferred onto male characters.
Girl Detective writes, “Although Lucinda’s consciousness is what binds the novel together, her actual place in the story is minimal; her only motivation is superficial attachment and lust, and she spends the entire story either having sex, wanting sex, or masturbating while wanting sex. All the male characters in the story have traits, interests, and personalities… Lucinda, however, is completely devoid of any desires, aspirations, thoughts, or goals that don’t involve finding a penis to put into her vagina.”
“What’s really sad,” Girl Detective continues, “is that our culture is so ignorant of women’s inner lives (50% of the population, people! Seriously!) that this substitution of sex for psychology still very often passes for legitimate characterization in even the highest ranks of literature.”
And now that I’ve discussed a high brow example, you know what this reminds me of? Lost.
First things first: I’m a couple seasons behind in watching Lost. I rented the first few seasons on Netflix with my fiance and my parents last summer, and I’m not sure whether I’m a year behind, or two, or three. The last series of episodes I saw had to do with them finding the survivors on the other side of the island. So if brilliant twists have hence ensued, I can’t comment on them.
I also have to confess that Lost drives me kind of nuts. I mean, it’s really entertaining, and I’ll probably watch the rest of the series, but there are times when I want to throw things at the television screen. It’s damn *shiny* writing, but I’d also make the argument that it’s poor writing, too. (Tension is successfully created, but relies on what I as a writer feel are a series of cheap manipulations and reversals that stand in the place of substance.)
But — all that aside — I think Kate is a perfect example of a character whose own personality has been vitiated in favor of developing the men around her, Jack and Sawyer.
Up until the last episode I saw, Kate’s main action in the present revolved around her atraction to both Jack (representing the “good”) and Sawyer (representing the “bad”). Kate’s character doesn’t so much evolve as it does swing back and forth between these extremes. Her inner life is textually represented by which of these two men she’s attracted to, or allied with, in any given episode. We see Kate as torn and ambiguous because we understand who Sawyer and Jack are. We watch Kate move between the two of them and understand her as somewhere in between Sawyer and Jack. Yet she doesn’t have character development of her own; her good traits are displaced onto Jack (who fosters in her altruistic behavior) and her negative traits are expressed through Sawyer (who periodically lures her away, all sexy-like).
As I’ve written about before, I believe that literature reflects the narratives that we, as a culture, tell ourselves about ourselves — both overtly, as in art, but also covertly, as when we meet someone and create a framework and story around that person. When writers sit down to create a world from their imaginations — which is a damn hard thing to do — their personal assumptions and prejudices come out clearly. You can’t necessarily analyze each individual manifestation as meaningful, but when you detect a trend, either in an individual author’s work or in literature at large, I believe that it is a significant tool for figuring out how we as a society are thinking about people and the world.
I haven’t had time to fully consider all the ramifications of this particular phenomenon, but my instincts are that it reflects the limited number of roles available to women in our society. If women are seen to be limited to a certain number of stereotypes, such as mother, Madonna, whore, and so on, then when a writer wants to create a female character who is more complicated, they end up posed with a problem. They have to think their way around how to make up a woman, out of whole cloth, who defies the well-worn ways they are used to thinking about women.
If they were considering this consciously, it’s possible that they could figure out a logical way out of the situation, or self-correct their tendencies toward cliche. But if it’s happening on the unconscious level — and I believe it almost always is — then the subconscious offers a pretty easy solution. If it’s hard to think of a woman outside roles A, B, and C, and you need to create one who is in role G, H or I, then create a male character who embodies G and H and let that character stand in for the female one via identification. This can create a kind of mirror character who reflects the complicated people around her (like Kate and Lucinda), or it may create a lot of slices of people, none of whom are fully developed.
It’s not uncommon to find the latter situation in literature that was written before there was a popular concept of the subconscious. The Monk, by Matthew Lewis, features several different characters, all of whom can be easily interpreted in a post-Freud era to reflect various parts of the pscyhe.* Now that more people understand that individuals are a complicated mass of conscious and subconscious yearnings, played out in ways that are not always under their conscious control, characterization like that which appears in The Monk seems quaint and out-dated. Our narratives about men have advanced further.
Unfortunately, our narratives about women have not come as far as fast.**
As for Marilynne’s claim that she finds this phenomenon specifically in the writing of young women — well, I don’t know what to say about that. Most of the examples I can think of are male-authored. I suspect that it may be possible to find a lot of what she’s talking about in, for instance, the romance genre where heroines are typically passive or plucky, but I haven’t read widely enough to be able to substantiate that (and I sincerely doubt that’s where she’s drawing her examples from). To the extent that it is happening more often with young women writers than with men writers, I wonder if it’s because women are trained to view themselves as transparent and passive, and map those traits onto their characters. But I really couldn’t say what leads Marilynne to that conclusion, because it doesn’t match with my observations.
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*I’m not endorsing Freud, just citing him as the founder of psychology.
**When I get involved in talking about poorly written female characters with other writers, it frequently happens that they (usually male) will bring up the fact that poorly written female characters (or poorly written minorities) are often written by people who write insubstantial white male characters, too. I don’t think that anyone would make the argument that this is the case in Letham’s writing — at any rate, given his plaudits in the writing world, he seems to be acknowledged as at least a competent writer of character. I think there is some merit to this theory in regard to Lost (like I said, the show drives me nuts) since most of the characterization relies on established stereotypes with carefully placed “Gotcha!” reversals. (Though I should say I feel that most of the actors are able to cover for the poor writing by successfully hinting at an inner life that isn’t present textually.) Still, I think the male characters in Lost have considerably more development than the female ones, with the possible exception of Ana Lucia who the writers seem to have generally dealt with by making her as masculine as possible and then giving her some pregnancy issues, in case we, the audience, should forget she had a vagina. The writers of Lost seem to be good with masculinity. Femininity seems to baffle them, so that the feminine characters come across as some variety of inscrutable (the French woman), passive (Sun, Claire), or non-present (Kate — who is much more vital during the flashbacks in which she has access to violence and stereotypically masculine behaviors).
Elkins told me that in the original conception, Jack was going to die at the end of the first episode of Lost. That was going to be the twist, you see; they were going to set things up for Jack to be the hero, but then it would suddenly turn out that Kate was the hero after all. (Kind of like how Sara Conner turned out to be the hero of the first Terminator movie). But at some point, they decided it would be better to keep Jack around to be the hero, which is a shame in several ways.
I also have a specific complaint about the most recent Lost plotline, but I’ll refrain from mentioning it in this thread. :-)
“Elkins told me that in the original conception, Jack was going to die at the end of the first episode of Lost. That was going to be the twist, you see; they were going to set things up for Jack to be the hero, but then it would suddenly turn out that Kate was the hero after all. ”
Ha. I was waiting for that twist through the whole pilot, actually. I was damn sure it was going to happen.
I can usually guess the reversals on that show… now I know I was cuing off *something* anyway. ;)
It’s funny, well, sad really, that I’m so excited that there are actually a variety of women on a TV show that I’m willing to overlook the way they hang on the men in one way or another. But it always bothered me that all the guys seem to hang out in a group, but the women don’t connect at all. How realistic is that? (Not that this is particularly realistic show, but still.) Each woman necessarily is paired with a guy, or being fought over between two guys. You’d think just trying to find a good substitute for tampons would bring a few of them together. Surely they have something they can talk about together.
Whatever. (head shake)
This post is reminiscent of Ilyka’s post on Kirsten Dunst’s incredible acting range in the Spiderman series. She’s allowed to giggle or be depressed, and she’s just tossed back and forth between the two guys in her life. Can’t she help kick ass in some way?
Obscure spoiler follows:
(And Amp, wouldn’t it have been so much better if it turned out Ben was just a complete psychopath?)
I’ve noticed this as well. But when I did, I came at it froma different angle (It’s all here in this FSF blog post). Lost bugs me for so many reasons, and jack is cheif among them, and his relationship with Kate is cheif among the things that annoy me about Jack.
There was one episode is the season you’re watching (I think) where some of the women go off and have an adventure all their own, but it’s only happened that once, and it was notable FOR that fact. Grr. This is one of the reason i had to stop watching.
(That and the crap writing)
Just to provide some counterexamples – Mieville’s Un Lun Dun does not have this particular young girl character problem. It’s one of the best books with young girls in the lead that I’ve read for a long time.
Excellent post.
I do see a lot of what Robinson suggests in the writing of new female writers and less in new male writers. This is largely because in my experience with fiction workshops, beginning male writers quite often write stories where all the characters are male. Actually, this is true with more experienced male writers as well. There are few examples I can think of where a story has only female characters and is not relegated to “chick lit” status.
Hi there. I lurk here a lot!
I was thinking about this very matter last night, while remembering all the children’s ensemble shows where there’s the Smart One, the Irresponsible One, the Leader One, the Weird One and the Girl. Also while thinking of certain kinds of science fiction as described in that Joanna Russ essay about male writers of “there are no men on this planet! Augggh!” science fiction. Also while thinking about how I sometimes find it hard to tell the girlfriends of my more conventional male acquaintances apart.
There’s a cultural fantasy about women where it’s both desired that they are interchangeable and their interchangeability is a subject of horror. (I’m not saying that this is the only cultural narrative about women; it’s one of many) On the one hand, interchangeable women make it easy to dispose of them–they get old, they get dull, they make demands, and since they’re all the same anyway it’s easy to throw them away. More, since they don’t actually have any significant interior life, it’s not wrong to throw them away. A pretty girl is, after all, like a melody–and a melody doesn’t care if no one sings it.
But there’s also this horror of interchangeability–the women are all alike and yet they’re all different from men. Maybe they have superior numbers; maybe they are secretly plotting things. Maybe they’re….not human at all. And if they’re all the same and all interchangeable, then they have no loyalty to any particular man. This is the stuff of various science fiction stories and the revisionist “Houston, Houston Do You Read?”.
And this in turn relates to why I can’t tell the girlfriends apart–not because they really are interchangeable, but because in order to date the conventionally successful, conventionally good-looking, political nullities that they do date, they have to pretend to interchangeability, at least when performing gender in public. When I meet them on public occasions, they are all dressed in similar clothes with similarly flattened hair and similarly made-up faces. They say uninteresting polite things and listen politely when their boyfriends talk. They intentionally obscure their interior lives in order to perform femininity. (I emphasize that I meet these women only on public occasions; if I knew them better, it would be different. It’s not that they are interchangeable, and they’re probably not actually very similar; it’s that they need to seem similar.)
…now that I think about it, when I was a little girl I always identified with boys precisely because I felt that girlhood was about flattening and about becoming identical. I never found girls interesting. I seldom found my mother interesting, because she was always yielding and never expressing opinions. This, of course, had various depressing consequences later on.
In what was (even for me) one of the most convoluted trains of thought in my personal history, this AM I was reading Jerry Mander’s “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television” (recommended), and thinking about the time I saw White Christmas on a full-size movie screen, and comparing it to the TV version. That got me to musing on the fatbashing in “I Wish I Was Back in the Army,” and that lead to me thinking about how the guys’ verses are about USO shows and food and uniforms, but the one womens’ verse is only about dating all those lonely army guys. Not the epitome of evil, really, and the song actually makes a good point about the grass on the other side of the fence always being greener, but, there, yet again, the women are there only as reflections of their involvements with men.
To bring this full circle, in Argument Three, Mander addresses specifically this point. To update the discussion, we’d have to add “porn star” to the list next to “blushing bride”, but otherwise it holds up.
“In Myth America, Carol Wald and Judith Papachristou detail a history of the images of women from 1865 to 1945, as presented in – print media. They argue that the images, created exclusively by men, formed the operative visual myths about women in America and that as the images spread and entered people’s minds, they became mirrors of reality. Men wanted their women to be that way; women, seeing only those images, attempted to and eventually did become like the images. It was a kind of alchemy in which the image finally produced the reality.
“‘To the degree that pictures seeam real, people were inclined to accept what the [male] artist saw in good faith…. Through such an arrangement, the myth becomes apparent…. Myths prevail. Here, all the expected roles of women are illustrated, from romantic elopement, blushing bride, and honeymoon to household drudge and nagging wife…. All are expressions of [male] feeling made visible through art. . .’
“The authors are careful to point out that the images of women had little to do with the reality of women’s lives, which were filled with hardship, and the need to solve problems against enormous odds, many times on their own. Nonetheless, because the images were everywhere, they began to dominate the reality, making women wish to be like men’s images of women, encouraging men to perceive women in those terms and helping institute a power arrangement between the sexes.”
No spoilers here, but oh, Mandolin, if Lost is driving you crazy now, I’m sorry to warn you that it’s probably just going to get worse and worse. Amp and I just did a marathon of the episodes we’d let build up unwatched on the DVR, so my agitation over all of the things that I find exasperating about this show’s writing — including the treatment of women — are quite fresh in my mind right now. It is the only television show I’ve ever watched that has had me regularly yelling back at the screen. Which would be fine, except that it’s never the characters I’m yelling at. It’s the writers.
Good call!
It really is a pity, though. Think how the meaning of that “learning to keep calm by counting” sequence in the pilot was changed by keeping Jack around as the annoying alpha male hero. Instead of it being a sequence about a woman learning how to become the action hero that her community needs, it instead turned into just the first in a long line of scenes designed to display Kate’s inferiority, her role as a person who always needs to be “taught lessons” by virtuous men. Blech.
Woman as mirror, woman as object, woman as cipher, woman as the guardian and bestower of the Sacred McGuffin… Woman as Muse. They’re literary roles with such an ancient and established pedigree that I guess it’s unsurprising, if also saddening, that even women adopt them when we sit down to write. We’re part of the culture too, influenced by what we read, and women who want to write may be even more strongly influenced by the extant canon of literature than others. Writers are usually intense readers, after all. They read in part to learn the craft and by reading, absorb tons of useful information on how to structure a narrative, how to delineate character, how to establish voice, how to use dialogue. But with all that good info also comes a crash course in how women are “used” in fiction.
The claim that young women do this more often than young men does surprise me, though. That doesn’t match with my observations either.
When I was young and used to write stories, I always made my protagonists male, and for just that reason. I didn’t like the sort of stories that I thought female characters had to have. In fact, I liked them so little that I rarely wrote in any female characters at all. My stories took place in strangely homosocial worlds: all men, no women to be found. I think that this was probably my weird subconscious attempt to degender the fictive universe entirely. After all, if there are no women at all, then the troubling and upsetting expectations of gender can be temporarily laid aside: it’s okay for anyone to identify solely with the male characters if that’s all there is on offer. (Or maybe I was just corrupted by Tolkien. Who can say?)
It wasn’t until I was fifteen or so that I think it occurred to me that since there was nothing intrinsic to girls and women that restricted them to certain narrative roles, therefore I as writer was empowered to write them differently than I always saw them written in other books. That it took me until high school to realize this is…well, a bit depressing, yes, and also vaguely embarrassing. But probably not all that unusual.
great post. I think I’ve probably given up, in that I think Lethem should just stick to writin men. hes good at that. His books with women as main characters are totally unmemorable, even though Girl in the Landscape struck me as actively engaged with feminist theory and as a feminist text: it was just kind of bad.
That said, i lethem is among my top 3 favorite writers of all time for fortress adn motherless brooklyn.
Woman as mirror, woman as object, woman as cipher, woman as the guardian and bestower of the Sacred McGuffin…
A-ha! Thank you for that: something just clicked about what I’ve been doing with the characters in my novel, and why I’ve been doing it.
Specifically, two of the main protagonists are female, so most of the mirror/object/cipher/McGuffin-guardians are male. There’s one protagonist who’s male (and one side character who I don’t know has enough agency to be a protagonist) and one McGuffin-guardian who’s female. I was worried that by making all these men show up with random McGuffins I was diminishing the agency of the protagonists, but I don’t know that’s true. No one character has to do everything.