The Silver Heroine Project

Woman Scorned

"Heav'n has no rage, like love to hatred turn'd, Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn'd."— William Congreve, The Mourning Bride (1697)

What's the only type of woman more dangerous than a Mama Bear? A woman who's been dumped, cheated on, or otherwise done wrong by her significant other (or, in some cases, merely thinks she's been). Especially if she's been hiding some sanity problems, and especially if she was a Clingy Jealous Girl. Otherwise Self-Explanatory.

A villainess — particularly a queen — may react in this manner when she has very little claim on the other person. After all, It's All About Me. If the woman in question is part of an evil organisation, this may be her cue to pull a High-Heel–Face Turn.

Often referred to as a "bunny boiler," after the infamous scene with Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. Almost Always Female, but male examples do exist.

By Haley Thurston

What are women afraid of? Why do women matter? How are women useful? Do these questions have gender-specific answers?

In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell says that a hero is “someone who has found or achieved or done something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience. A hero properly is someone who has given his life to something bigger than himself or other than himself.” He goes on to distinguish between physical heroes, those who do deeds, and spiritual heroes, those who “[have] learned or found a mode of experiencing the supernormal range of human spiritual life, and then come back and communicated it.”

This is a grand and beautiful model. And especially when we just leave it at “someone who has achieved something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience,” it works very well for a hero of any gender. But when Campbell gets into the specifics of what counts or is celebrated as an unusual achievement, or how that achievement goes about getting done, I start thinking “well those are pretty unambiguously good achievements, but they’re also pretty male.”

That’s because there’s another element to heroism, which is where it interacts with social values, and gives us a mythology about what we should care about achieving. If we tell stories that laud a person for being unusually sacrificial, then we’re communicating that selflessness is a value of our community. Even when a story isn’t explicitly or intentionally communicating information about what is socially and morally good, we can retro-engineer a lot from the text to determine what its underlying values are.

While stories in general can be about any number of things beyond telling the reader what kind of person they should be (thank goodness), it’s important to remember that the genre of hero stories really is fundamentally about what makes a remarkable and laudable human. Even when a character is simply coded as a protagonist, hero stories have primed us to expect, justified or not, to learn something about what it means to be a good human from that character. So while I don’t want to go down some alarmist road that ends with “exposing children to Harry Potter means they will become Satanists,” and as obvious to the point of pedantic this might sound, the whole point of heroes is that we admire and emulate them, and it’s worth talking about what the consequences of being told we should emulate some trait actually are.

So to bring this back to the Heroine’s Journey, if we look at something like the Odyssey, we have two different kinds of heroes: Odysseus and Penelope. Odysseus is a pretty Campbellian hero. He leaves home, he does deeds, and returns home, having earned some kind of mantle of authority. Penelope, on the other hand, is left at home with the challenge of figuring out what to do with herself. She waits for Odysseus and she fends off a series of suitors. In the story itself she isn’t as perfectly virtuous as she’s made out to be by various pro-chastity ideologues. But she does, nonetheless, “achieve something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience” if you care about achieving fidelity. But this is a very different kind of heroism.

The Heroine’s Journey is about learning to suffer, endure, and be subjected to indignity while maintaining grace, composure, and patience. While most heroic stories involve some element of perseverance and strength of will, what makes Heroine’s Journey stories different is that a heroine’s perseverance is tested not to see whether she can persevere to achieve a separate goal, but rather simply to see if she can persevere, period. When you lay it out like that, it’s pretty hard to see the Heroine’s Journey as fundamentally heroic, to which I say: well yeah.

I suppose I’m interested in the Heroine’s Journey because I’m interested in the cognitive dissonances women experience; what creates them, what the consequences of them are, and what to do about them. In Heroine’s Journey stories, for example, women are told that their entire social role and contribution to society is contingent on them being really really good at being graceful martyrs. Yet at the same time, women are told that being a martyr is a weak thing to be; ie, the opposite of heroism. And even without being told that, most women can figure out in their heads that the Heroine’s Journey 1) doesn’t feel good and 2) is flawed heroism.

So the story of the Heroine’s Journey, the meta-Heroine’s Journey, if you will, is the story of being told a dissonant truth, and then attempting to disentangle it. In order to chart that story, we need to look at both the original, traditional Heroine’s Journey and then the modern Heroine’s Journey, troubled in its own way, that developed as a result of grappling with the traditional one.

The traditional Heroine’s Journey goes something like this:

The heroine is yet undeveloped. She may be wild and undignified, she may be mild and unremarkable, or she may be seemingly already virtuous.

Her worth is threatened. That is, her ability to persevere is threatened. The threat may be an assault on her virtue, an undignified circumstance, or random misfortune.

She endures, gracefully. She suffers, but her dignity isn’t undermined. If anything, her dignity is antifragile, she becomes more dignified the more she suffers.  Her perseverance then makes her previously undefined nature snap into place. Her dignity gives her strength.

Thankfully, it’s not 1850 anymore. The modern Heroine’s Journey is more like:

The heroine is yet undeveloped. She is often highly confused about where virtue is located.

Her dignity, composure and grace, ie, her worth in the “traditional” sense are threatened. Additionally, and perversely, her ability to defend traditional worth is tested.

She proves her value by either transcending or invalidating the test (“fuck it, this is a bad metric”) — or by transcending/invalidating the test, but stillpassing it (“having it all”). The modern Heroine’s Journey is about defining one’s worth anew.

A traditional Heroine’s Journey looks like the women from Les Miserables: the rejected Eponine, the destitute Fantine. Cosette never seems like much of a hero, but she certainly starts out from rags. The Victorian era was probably the height of the Heroine’s Journey, and you can see it in things like Dracula. As many horror stories would go on to mimic, two women, Mina and Lucy, are tested with seduction, but only the former resists and therefore gets to survive for her trouble. Jane Austen’s women teeter on the edge between the traditional and modern journey, each tasked with seeing through the cads and settling on the moral, pragmatic partner. Once you know this narrative, you see it in all kinds of romance stories: the triumphant woman is the one who rises above (or outsmarts) the men who would degrade her.

The modern heroine looks like Kristen Wiig in Bridesmaids, a movie that pulls indignity rugs out from under its protagonist for two hours. She lost her business! Her ego is dependent on a guy who makes her hate herself! Her friend has a new best friend, one who’s richer, prettier and thinner! The movie is not so much critical as lovingly satirical towards female preoccupation with indignity, coming to the conclusion “indignity is bad, but not so bad in the end.” The modern heroine also looks like Sylvia Plath, who has both become a symbol of female suffering (trite, traditional), and of an interpreter of suffering that is female in a human sense. She is a symbol, in other words, of not wearing suffering easily, or of having suffering that is serious and legitimate. The modern Heroine’s Journey has no better description than Leslie Jamison’s “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” which describes contemporary women as “post-wounded.” The post-wounded woman is one who is never suffering in the present, but is instead always contextualizing and nervously proving ownership over that suffering. Jamison’s piece is one of the best (and perhaps only) articulations of the Heroine’s Journey, and I will continue to refer to it.

How did we get from the traditional to the modern? And where do we go afterwards?

You could argue, perhaps, that maybe there was a time in which Heroine’s Journey values were once constructive. Say, stability and self-sacrifice are good for childrearing; female work frees up men to be creative/accomplished; it’s to an oppressive group’s advantage to feed the oppressed group a heroic narrative about grunt work, shame, and putting up with crap.

But regardless of why, precisely, Heroine’s Journey values became socially useful, it’s clear that they became less useful over time. Increasing wealth, public health, safety and opportunity meant that whatever division-of-labor benefits enforced gender roles might have had, both women and men could suddenly not participate in various “duties” and they and human civilization would still survive. Such upheaval necessitates a series of grappling questions.

1. “Does this quality I’m told is good actually contribute to human flourishing?”

Stage one is destructive. It tends to involve a certain amount of hatred, either directed inward, or directed by one against another. Stage one amounts to smashing a social value, and smashing is usually crude. Smashing is like a person pacing back and forth and muttering “This thing is WRONG. I don’t know quite what it IS or what it MEANS but I know that it is WRONG.”

In practice, stage one is mostly torture porn. I’m thinking about Andy Kaufmann’s tape Andy and His Grandmother, which (as described in a Grantland article) made an art form of ribbing women. His questions sound almost earnestly direct, but because women are unaccustomed to responding to such directness, and he knows it (or else he wouldn’t make comedy of it) there is something disingenuously torturous about them as well.

Though I’ll say more in a second about why horror is actually one of the best genres for women, the reason that people can look askance at that idea, is because a lot of the time, for a long time, anti-female-composure stories have been for the amusement of people (largely men) who want to punish women. Take a hot girl, who thinks she’s hot shit, and put her through hell–that will teach you to be hot!!! Horror is catharsis, and it makes some sense to me that it would be a realm of catharsis, however essentially misogynistic, for sexual rejection and desire. When I described this piece to a friend, he replied: “So isn’t like 90% of porn the Heroine’s Journey then?” Well…perhaps so. If the graceful negotiation of composure and things that threaten composure is the essence of female value, and fetishes originate in the secret and taboo, then well, of course the destruction of female composure would become deeply, repeatedly fetishized.

The potentially brutal treatment of women in stories is also complicated by the idea that the way men become symbols for corrupt authority, women become symbols for corrupt social values and contracts. When you smash one of them in a story, often enough that’s what you’re symbolically smashing. But I think it would be disingenuous to say that all virulence directed at female characters is simply thematically motivated.

So that’s two kinds of composure-destruction by men. But you’ll notice that early female comedians got their start by challenging femininity too, people like Lucille Ball (who juxtaposed the ideals of homemaking with relentless physical and situational indignity) and Joan Rivers, people that were willing to look ridiculous and self-deprecating (“A man can sleep around, no questions asked, but if a woman makes nineteen or twenty mistakes she’s a tramp.”).  That’s because comedy comes from the same place as horror, that place of essential fears and need for catharsis. Was there any other place for female comedy to go? Lucille Ball took a lovingly destructive angle, one that’s maybe more stage three (below) than one. As for Joan Rivers, I don’t know if she ever liked being a woman much, but she was good at hating herself for it. And laughing, more importantly, at the ridiculousness of that hatred. This strain in female comedy has stuck around: think of Liz Lemon under a blanket eating cheese or Amy Schumer’s “I’m a sad slut” schtick.

2. “If it doesn’t, or if I could better contribute in another way, then do I care about having status in a hierarchy that says it does?” (“Do I really care about human flourishing?”)

Female comedy verges into stage two. Stage two is conflict. Stage two stories aren’t made by people that want to punish women/society, they’re composure stories made (usually) by women and for women in order to grapple, rather, with the fear of punishment. Imagine our muttering person suddenly standing up and shouting “I DON’T care about the hierarchy. I’ll do what I LIKE.” Defiance. And then imagine them becoming fearful. “Doing what I like has the best chance of making everyone happy right? So why do I feel miserable? Wasn’t misery the trope I was trying to destroy?”

Bridesmaids (which had the honor of newly convincing us that women can be funny), again, is this. Girls traffics in it as well, as Leslie Jamison describes:

“These days we have a TV show called Girls, about young women who hurt but constantly disclaim their hurting. They fight about rent and boys and betrayal, stolen yogurt and the ways self-​pity structures their lives. ‘You’re a big, ugly wound!’ one yells. The other yells back: ‘No, you’re the wound!’ And so they volley, back and forth: You’re the wound; no, you’re the wound. They know women like to claim monopolies on woundedness, and they call each other out on it.”

Girls, both the characters and the writing itself, are stabbing at being crass, at being superficially elegant, and at being “transcendent,” and seeing what will stick. Girls gets at that intersection of feeling a duty to exorcise fears of being gross, but still wanting to be liked and wanted, and also thinking both of those are such small and unimportant goals in the end.

Caroline Knapp’s famous anorexia memoir Appetites uses the framework of disordered eating to discuss the female relationship to pleasure, denial, and suffering in general. Knapp sums up the twisted heroism of self-denial early on: “Other women might struggle with hunger; I could transcend it”; as in, become more than human in the classic Campbell-ian sense. Because glorifying suffering is seen as poisonous, having control over that suffering feels good, even though it also creates further suffering. Appetites represents how women struggle just before they realize they must “man up.” Writes Jamison: “We want our wounds to speak for themselves, Knapp seems to be saying, but usually we end up having to speak for them.”

People like Beyonce because she is a fantasy of stage two being resolved. Her persona is a fantasy of being sexual/human/regal and yet she feels beyond “having it all” even though she does, in fact, have it all. That’s because Beyonce is charismatic and that is how charismatic people make you feel (liked and okay!), but it is significant that the thing she makes you feel okay about is this modern quandary. You feel permission to partake in the resolution her persona offers. You don’t feel competitive with Beyonce.

Stage two is also where intersectionality becomes thematically salient. The dilemmas of the Heroine’s Journey universalize fairly well, but people (including women) participate in more than one social hierarchy at any given time. It might be hard to justify suffering for the sake of itself, but suffering for the sake of justiceis pretty much the easiest thing to justify there is. The details of one woman’s dilemma will not be the same as another’s; her suffering has different origins and flavors.

3. “If I do care about human flourishing, and I’m going the wrong way about it, then what do I do about that?”

So what do post-Heroine’s Journey stories look like? Stage three is constructive. As Jamison asks “How do we talk about these wounds without glamorizing them? Without corroborating an old mythos that turns female trauma into celestial constellations worthy of worship?” There have been many many stories about women throughout the history of stories that have been much more complex than the Heroine’s Journey, stories where female agency and/or grossness aren’t questioned (I think about classic female “trickster” stories like Scheherazade)…yet as Jamison’s piece and Appetites and all the works I’ve referenced so far demonstrate, somehow the Heroine’s Journey’s values still seem to underlie the choices of women constantly. What this means is that if a story with and about women and heroism doesn’t somehow admit the fear of loss of composure or come to grips with it or feel some way about it, I sometimes wonder if it’s about women at all. Moreover, that task in the third stage of the modern Heroine’s Journey, the task of defining worth, is huge and fascinating. And it is under-utilized.

In a great interview on Playing D&D with Porn Stars, Sarah Horrocks explains why, perhaps unexpectedly, the horror genre is actually one of the greatest genres for female heroism.

“S: Getting pushed to your limits, to the point of hysteria, but still surviving—that you’ve taken this huge weight of the world on you, and like Marilyn Burns in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you’re covered in blood and screaming and laughing—but you’ve somehow come out on top.  I don’t think other genres allow women to be strong, tough, and vulnerable in this way. And I mean there’s just way more movies in the horror genre where the perspective is that of a woman’s.  The slasher flick is not through the killer’s point of view after all, it’s through the woman’s.”

In other words, there’s no room for composure in horror movies. Which means that in them, a female character has the opportunity to be immediately exempt from having to prove that she is some conventional version of dignified in order to be heroic, and is instead forced to admit what she’s made of when that’s stripped away and no one’s looking.

One of the reasons I adore Lyra’s heroic journey in His Dark Materials, is that in spite of it being a very Campbell-style story (mysterious origins, a call to adventure, ad nauseum), Lyra’s girl-ness remains inherent throughout. One of the main arcs of the book begins with her being suspicious of femininity and only trusting male figureheads, and concludes with her accepting that she values wisdom, that the acquisition of wisdom is slow and difficult and that the unflashy female wisdom-seekers she once derided have things to teach her. We don’t want our heroes to be blandly competent, we want them to exist in the same world of difficulty that we exist in, so that they may give us a map for dealing with it. Lyra doesn’t do the Heroine’s Journey, exactly, but perhaps more importantly: she resolves it.

Understanding the Heroine’s Journey is not a replacement for or an improvement on the general writing prescription to “just write women like people.” It’s a hopefully helpful explanation, rather, of one (very important, complex) element of female people-hood. If you want to talk about how a person grapples with their society, look to the cognitive dissonance produced by what society tells them is heroic.

Kate Zambreno’s Heroines is a hard book to read. Every page is a reckoning with the unbearable phallocentrism of Writing as An Institution, and for the reader who’s also a marginalised, struggling writer and/or female, it’s a memory trigger. There’s a thread running through Heroines that memory-work is political. That the literary canon is “a memory campaign that verges on propaganda, that the books remembered are the only ones worth reading.” It’s impossible to review the book dispassionately. Zambreno’s style invites personal recollection; it’s affecting, and in order to get what she’s doing with this book one has to be able to feel it.

Heroines is part literary criticism, part literary history, part memoir, part feminist polemic. In its form and in its writing, Heroines is what the author is trying to rescue and reclaim: to use Zambreno’s favourite words, it's messy, girly, and excessive. It’s also sharp, finely-structured, and meticulously (voraciously) researched. Heroines grew out of Zambreno’s blog, Frances Farmer is My Sister, or more precisely, the blog grew out of ideas for a book. In an interview with The Rumpus, Zambreno talks about her earlier plans to write a fictionalised notebook titled “Mad Wife”—and is comprised of many things, but is most clearly made up of equal parts rage and reflection.

Zambreno began blogging after her partner took up a university job in Akron, Ohio, and the early sections of Heroines record much of what Zambreno finds stultifying and destabilising about being The Wife in a new place: “I have become used to wearing, it seems, the constant pose of the foreigner.” Like Helene Cixous in “Coming to Writing”, Zambreno begins to form an invisible community—communing with the women writers and the “mad wives of modernism”—a community borne out of invention, yes, but also need. The brutal honesty with which Zambreno recognises her particular condition—“I am realising you become a wife, despite the mutual attempt at an egalitarian partnership, once you agree to move for him”—is both disruptive and comforting to the reader. Here is a truth alongside other truths and someone is finally speaking it, but here is the truth and we must now face it.

At the end of reading Heroines, I had accumulated about 17 pages of handwritten notes. Heroines brought into clear view for me names that had only circulated vaguely around my head from an undergraduate survey course in Modernism in Literature. Perhaps my professors had mentioned Zelda Fitzgerald and Vivien(ne) Eliot’s writing, but then why didn’t I remember any of it? The result is that I read the early sections of Heroines with a kind of numb shock. As Maggie Nelson writes in her blurb for the book, “if you didn’t know much [about the “wives” of modernism], your mouth will fall open in enraged amazement.” Vivien(ne) and Tom’s troubled and troubling marriage; Vivien(ne)’s writing cast aside, T.S. Eliot the writer winning the Nobel Prize a year after her death—after he left her, after he hid in bathrooms allowing his secretaries to calm his “mad” wife, after using her lines, her typing services, and disregarding her worth as her writer. Vivien(ne) with her female maladies, staining the bedsheet red. Zambreno tells us of what Vivien(ne)’s brother said to Michael Hastings, the British playwright who wrote Tom & Viv: “Viv’s sanitary towels always put a man off.”

Dear reader, I read that and saw red.

These “wives” of modernism didn’t just suffer at the hands of various men, including their husbands, but were also negated or ignored, made invisible or an object of derision by other women, particularly women writers like Virginia Woolf who had to slay their own demons both in life and on the page. Woolf, who so memorably and wittily describes Vivien(ne) as “this bag of ferrets … Tom wears around his neck”. Zambreno writes: “I think of Viv as the mad double Virginia both identifies with and wants to disassociate herself from.” And this is perhaps also something that infuses Elizabeth Hardwick’s critical writings of other women writers.

Hardwick’s essay on Zelda Fitzgerald in Seduction and Betrayal is curiously committed to omitting the recognition of gender and patriarchal norms; she talks of Zelda and Scott as being twins, and how “only one of the twins is the real artist”, seemingly complacent in her acceptance of the accepted notion that F. Scott Fitzgerald was the real artist while his wife was merely mildly talented, but more of a dilettante. It seems like a neverending senseless loop, this question of artistry, genius, and legitimacy: only a real artist like F. Scott Fitzgerald would be acclaimed; thus, because F. Scott is acclaimed, he is the real artist. Nowhere in this interrogation does Hardwick devote much attention to how phallocentrism structures the creative output of men and women, and how it structures how those works are received. As Zambreno points out, even while Hardwick seems sympathetic to Zelda’s situation, she seems keen to distance herself from that kind of “mess”, to render a particular form of female experience as sick, perhaps, and dysfunctional, and therefore something to be pitied but not common or predictable or in any way relatable.

But then I think of Linda Wagner-Martin’s biography of Zelda, and how she writes that “Zelda’s crack-up gave [Scott] both alibi and cover.” If men’s wives are officially mad—diagnosis confirms it!—then men are never to blame. Badly-behaving, outright misogynist husbands can be forgiven, excused, comforted, and indulged. But as Zambreno points out through all her meticulous research of these ignored and sidelined women, all Zelda wanted to do was whatever she needed to do at the time: write, using her own life—herself—as the material. This made the Real Writer of the marriage, the husband, really, really angry. Scott tells Zelda, “You were going crazy and calling it genius.” Hardwick seems to buy this assessment in her essay. Zambreno explains: “In a way, Hardwick’s essay reads as an elaborate defense of the supreme rights of (male) artist.” Wagner-Martin, in her biography: “The irony of the Scott-Zelda relationship from the start, however, was that Scott regularly usurped Zelda’s story.”

Heroines is thus also a meditation on writing and the act of creation: whose lives count as “material”, and who gets to use and shape the material into the story? Whose hand guides the words? When it’s women who are mining their own lives for both material and meaning, it’s all-too easily seen as easy, lazy, unreflective, unworthy work. “The self-portrait, as written by a woman, is read as somehow dangerous and indulgent,” Zambreno writes, and asks, “Why is self-expression, the relentless self-portrait, not a potentially legitimate form of art?” For me, these questions bring up attendant questions about writing and accountability, about how the need to create can be an almost-parasitical hunger that feeds on people’s lives, even (or perhaps especially) their own.

Zambreno takes exception to Toril Moi’s aversion to a certain type of women’s confessional writing in Sexual/Textual Politics, where Moi dismisses it as a kind of “narcisstic delving into one’s own self”. Yet these are questions that trouble me, and I can’t oppose them as clearly as Zambreno does, to see all objection to narcissism (or even the use of the term narcissism) as a form of censorship that attempts to silence women’s writing. Clearly the fact of sexism structures how writing and publishing operate as an institution, and Zambreno certainly makes a fine case about just how openly and covertly patriarchy attempts to silence women’s voices that do not fit its image of “good woman”.

But I also wonder about the dangers of looking inward, the idea of the self that might harden and become its own kind of hegemony. The danger when one starts to believe that one’s condition doesn’t reveal a particular human condition, but is the human condition. Can looking inward feed upon itself so thoroughly that it, does, in fact, become a form of narcissism? Where you’re so attuned to your own pain that you’re unable to recognise the pain of others, or worse, imagine that your pain is the pain of others?

I recognise that a big part of Zambreno’s project in Heroines is its effort of reclamation: as such, she tells the stories of the neglected, abandoned, derided writers and writer-wives of literary history in order to project a different, erased history. As such, her perspective is clear and focus is sharp: these women are rescued from formerly patriarchal narratives and given new forms of being in the pages of Heroines. Still, all of these women are white, and most of them come from a background with roots in bourgeois respectability, and so I recognise that while another story is being told, the whole story is, perhaps, still unclear.

Heroines is a record of how these women were wronged, and it’s a necessary intervention into both literary history and criticism, but we don’t hear anything about how these women may have used their class and social position and their whiteness in order to get ahead, how they may have exploited other people, people who were economically, politically, and socially positioned as middle and upper class white women’s lesser others. (I think of Toni Morrison’s 1989 interview in Time magazine, quoted in Nina Power’s One Dimensional Woman, where Morrison talks about the old-boys network and the “shared bounty of class.” Although many of the women writers Zambreno writes about were often deprived of independent income, and some even fell into poverty, I still wonder about the class networks and social connections that may have worked in their favour, even when patriarchy stood in the way.)

As such, these women tend to come off uniformly victimised, wholly victims of patriarchy and nothing else. And while I recognise Zambreno’s need to record instances of “girl-on-girl” crime, it also makes me somewhat uncomfortable—as though all writing by women, then, is somehow necessarily above criticism. This is a grey and complex area, obviously, but I can’t help but wonder if this lets women writers off the hook a little too easily. Criticism from other women critics can often stem from internalised sexism, no doubt, but other forms of criticism take to task certain forms of confessional writing by women writers because it stays silent on issues of race, class, and sexuality, or worse, considers those issues unimportant in relation to one’s own work. Zambreno writes:

"This idea that one must control oneself and stop being so FULL of self remains a dominating theory around mental illness, and, perhaps tellingly, around other patriarchal laws and narratives, including the ones governing and disciplining literature."

This is certainly true, but I would rather not see it as an either/or option: either write, FULL of self, or suppress the self and suffer. The problem of writing the self is that the self can become all-encompassing, preventing the writer from hearing the stories of others. Being full of self can work as a form of self-care and self-preservation, and this is necessary, but sometimes the self needs to be shattered open into recognising and accepting other possibilities. So there is a danger, perhaps, in not interrogating statements like “The subaltern condition of being a literary wife,” when literary wives may at least get a stab at writing and giving voice to their thoughts on the page, while the true subaltern (may speak, write, shout, scream) and remain unheard by ears that are trained only to listen to the voice of the self or voices that sound similar to the self. There is a form of power in writing, despite how it’s received—and perhaps this is a power that is all too conveniently ignored by those of us who do write.

And Zambreno does exhort her girl readers/writers to write—“to write and refuse erasure while we’re living at least”—and is ecstatic about the proliferation of Tumblrs, blogs, and Livejournals by girls and young women that are at turns “emo, promiscuous, gorgeous, dizzying, jarring, irreverent, cinephilic, consumed, consuming, wanting, wiity, violent, self-loathing or self-doubting”, to quote just some of her adjectives, I’m also wondering about the attendant tyranny of these forms of social media and blog platforms that demand and require the personal. If we’re writing on the internet we’re using some if not most of this technology, and all of us are daily exhorted to share, divulge, like, favourite, promote, or take a gpoy or a selfie.

While it’s true that many subvert the rules of engagement on social media and blog platforms—by posting deliberately unappealing selfies, for example, or selfies of the ungroomed self—the internet is also run by corporations who try to exploit, in increasingly covert and “creative” ways, users’ personal information. And the young, pretty, wayward girl is now profitable data in a still (still!) sexist society. So much of girls’ writing online, like in the case of Marie Calloway, is (still!) used against them. One thinks about the problem of encouraging girls to write and also to be responsible and accountable to themselves and to each other; the problem of how to use oneself and one’s loved ones as material or content with care in a culture of increased surveillance, especially when the technology we use for writing and performing is also the technology that enables the surveillance and scrutiny.

In her earlier works of fiction O Fallen Angel and Green Girl, Zambreno gave us devastating yet finely-wrought portraits of girls in distress—portraits of acute suffering, where the girl in question (Maggie in O Fallen Angel, Ruth in Green Girl) is unable to consider the world outside of her because she is, in some ways, trapped inside. This, I think, is a testament to Zambreno’s intelligence and artistry—and a cultivated sense of empathy—and also a searing portrait of the fractious and unstable female self and its relation to mental illness. An important theme in Heroines is the institutionalisation and medicalisation of women—how the same misogyny that brings about or catalyses the splits in self in the female subject is the same misogyny that is applied to treat and “cure” it, and it is in these passages that Zambreno is particularly acute, sensitive, and moving. As she points out, language is itself complicit: “I’ve always found the language of borderline personality diagnosis, a label assigned to women almost entirely, compelling in that it’s an identity disorder which is defined almost exclusively by not actually having an identity.” Zambreno writes about always having had a “tremendous fear of being institutionalised”—and relates this to how works and canonised:

"(She was institutionalized, as Mad Woman, as Bad Wife, and he was institutionalized, as the Great American Author.)"

Institutionalisation is also a memory campaign, where the man-artist is generalised and the woman-artist individualised. I’d like to think of Heroines as a cure for this wilful, institutionalised amnesia. It’s a book that has lodged itself in my mind and likely to stay there for a long time, despite, or maybe even because of some of my problems with certain sections of the book. It seems fitting to let Zambreno have the last word:

The monomyth known as

the Hero’s Journey

has become widely popular. Unfortunately,

the original

was clearly intended for men and not women. In response, some feminists have created their own, female-centered version, called the Heroine’s Journey. Lucky for us storytellers, both can be abstracted into a structure that works for a wide array of stories.

I’ll take you through a tour of The Heroine’s Journey by Maureen Murdock. She created this journey to help real women through life’s hardships, but it has a lot to offer as a story structure. In honor of its feminist roots, I will refer to the central character as the heroine, with female pronouns. However, it applies to male characters just as well.

To show you how it might work in a story, I’m going to develop an ongoing example. I’ll name my heroine Mara. As we go through the steps of the structure, she’ll ride beside us.

Why Use the Heroine’s Journey?

Like other mythic structures, you should use the Heroine’s Journey if it fits the story you want to tell. The structure of the Heroine’s Journey is particularly well suited for:

Character arcs: The stages of the original framework correlate with how the heroine feels, not what she is doing. I’ve externalized this framework, but it’s still a strong choice for a story about an internal struggle.

Quests for identity: The heroine may battle dragons and claim treasure, but the real core of the story is her struggle to find herself.

Themes of privilege and oppression: The heroine taking the journey must triumph despite living in a society that undervalues who she is. You don’t have to include privilege and oppression in your story, but if you want it, this framework will help you bring it out.

Most of all, the Heroine’s Journey is about a heroine who must find balanceas she struggles between the sides of a duality.

Finding Your Duality

First, identify the duality that lives within your heroine. It might be obvious. If you have a half elf, half human caught between those races, that’s clearly your duality. It can also be abstract concepts – perhaps your heroine’s caught between membership in a group and following her individual path. Or between the excitement of travel and the comforts of home. Whatever it is, both sides must be essential to her wellbeing. If you use the light side and the dark side of the Force, you’ll need to portray the dark side as constructive when used in moderation.

The structure refers to one side of the duality as the feminine, and the other as the masculine. Your next step is to pick which side of your duality is which. Use your discretion, but in general:

The feminine is the side of the duality that your heroine identified with as a small child. However, society undervalues the feminine. The story begins as the heroine chooses to reject it.

The masculine is the side of the duality that your heroine adopts as she comes of age. Society prizes the masculine, but in many tales it has been poisoned, misinterpreted, or taken to such extremes that it has become harmful. The heroine sets out on her journey by embracing it.

Example

Mara is a war orphan who was raised by the Sali people. They’re a peaceful farming culture that meditates every day and values quiet and contemplation. However, they’re a minority in the nation they live in. Their culture and society will be Mara’s feminine. Though they raised her, Mara is actually descended from a warrior culture, called the Barock. Once nomads, they’re now the ruling class. They will be her masculine.

The Eight Stages of the Heroine’s Journey

Here’s an overview of the stages of the journey. I lightly modified the stages from Murdock’s original structure to create a version that was easier for writers to follow.

1. Shift from Feminine to Masculine

During stage one, the heroine rejects the feminine in favor of the masculine. She may still be tied to the feminine, but she increasingly resents that attachment.

The Mother

She could have any number of reasons for rejecting the feminine, but a unhappy relationship with a feminine role model, known as the mother, is chief among them. To the heroine, the mother represents the worst of the feminine end of her duality. She might be powerless, unhappy, flawed, or just interpreted that way. The mother is threatening to the heroine because she’s afraid of becoming her, just as Luke Skywalker fears becoming Darth Vader.

Alternatively, the mother may be intimidating in her strength and perfection, particularly if you decide to make the feminine more privileged than the masculine in your story. The heroine may reject her to avoid feeling inadequate next to her.

The Father

As she rejects the mother, the heroine will embrace a metaphorical father. The father represents whatever the heroine admires in the masculine. He may have a dark side, or be a despicable person altogether, but she isn’t aware of that yet. He opens to the door to a path that leads away from the mother, and makes the heroine feel like she could succeed on that path. In turn, she does her best to gain his attention and approval.

He offers an escape from the mother, but at the same time he might rub in that the heroine is tied to the lowly feminine. He could praise her strength and brilliance as he tells her the feminine makes her weak and stupid. This will only spur her harder to prove herself in his eyes.

As a result of this dynamic, the heroine discards the feminine, and any part of herself tied to it.

Example

Mara has no memory of before she came to live with the Sali. She is content to live with them until she turns twelve, and is allowed to go into town to trade at the market. There she learns that everyone thinks of the Sali as cowards, because they hide behind their walls when the swarm comes, instead of helping to protect everyone. She also meets the Barock. They look like her, and they appear powerful and confident. She’s curious about them; the older warriors humor her by showing her how to handle their weapons.

But her Sali guardian doesn’t approve of the way Mara has begun to prize possessions she gained in the marketplace, or how she runs off to the market when she has nothing to trade. He forbids her from going to the market for a month, instead mandating regular meditation. This only makes her more determined to leave the Sali and join the Barock.

2. The Road of Trials

In stage two, the heroine sets off on a journey, departing the ordinary of the feminine and fully embracing the masculine. This might mean she actually leaves home, sword in hand, or it could just mean that she abandons sewing classes and goes fishing instead.

Regardless, she has something to prove to herself and others. In her new journey, she is surrounded by masculine allies. They still think she is less, or at least not one of them. In her heart, she believes they’re right. But that doesn’t mean she’ll give up. She’s fixated on showing everyone that they’re wrong.

For that, she needs big victories. She wants something to show others, like a trophy or treasure. In pursuit of her prize she will face threshold guardianswho try to deter her, and battle real or metaphorical monsters.

In her enthusiastic pursuit of the masculine, she forgets to stay in touch with her inner self. All her actions are designed to make her look better to her masculine allies; she never does anything because she simply wants to do it. She’s always compensating for the feminine lurking within her.

Example

At sixteen Mara finally comes of age. She forgoes the Sali coming of age ceremony, and abruptly leaves to join a band of Barock warriors. She wants to help them protect others against the swarm. The group agreed to take her, but not all of them think it was wise. They’ve been training with weapons their entire lives, and their skill is superior to hers.

So she trains day and night. Whenever there is a fight, she is out in front; no one can call her a coward. The mark of a great Barock warrior is the stinger of a swarm queen. She’s determined to capture one of her own.

3. The Illusion of Success

By stage three, the heroine has faced great trials and emerged victorious. She feels the thrill of success, and her confidence is bolstered by the applause of others. She has built an impressive, masculine reputation.

But that does not dull her appetite for adventure and victory in masculine pursuits. On the contrary, as soon as she finds success on one quest, she immediately sets out on another. Her victories are never enough, so she tries to do more and more to distract herself. She must maintain the outside validation and applause that makes her feel justified as a person.

Somewhere inside, she begins to realize that something is missing from her life. She feels stretched thin. She looks in the mirror, and isn’t sure she knows the person looking back. Even her victories seem empty. She counsels the great and powerful, but does not feel great and powerful herself.

Example

Mara collects her first queen stinger, and then another, and yet more. In her twentieth year, she destroys an entire swarm with a fire trap, and is hailed as the savior of the town. The Barock remark that she is remarkable despite her Sali upbringing, and she’s given a pass to watch as the High Council deliberates.

But the stingers and praise feel small and trivial to her. They were too long in coming and too hard won. Mara spends her spare time pouring over her battle maps, devising new strategies to try against the swarm. She never stops to rest, because she doesn’t know what she would do with herself if she did. She is nothing without her endless hunt of the swarm.

4. The Descent

In stage four, tragedy strikes. It could be a cataclysm that shakes the world, or a private matter that no one else knows of. Regardless, she is suddenly made aware of what’s really important to her. When her allies come to usher her along on the next adventure, she turns them down.

They tell her she is a coward. Or perhaps that she is selfish, impulsive, or whatever despised quality the masculine attributes to the feminine. But she doesn’t hear them. She is already far away, undergoing her own inner turmoil.

She begins a period of voluntary isolation, descending into a metaphorical cave. There time passes slowly. It’s dark; there are no sights or sounds to distract her. There she searches for herself.

She may have to sift through a maelstrom of emotions. Anger, remorse, and grief may all set upon her. She might be afraid to follow her thoughts and feelings to their conclusion, but she knows she must.

Example

Mara and her warriors are battling against a large swarm that is precariously close to a village. A lookout catches sight of the queen in the distance. There is just the barest of openings to pursue her. Mara takes it, leading a group after the queen.

She succeeds, but on her return, Mara finds her departure opened a breach in the defense. As a result, a nearby Sali settlement was overrun, killing everyone inside. The old memories of being in the Sali come back to her and she weeps over the fallen. She tells her warriors to move on, but she stays to bury every one of them. The Barock think she’s lost her nerve, but they eventually leave. She continues her work alone.

5. Meeting With the Goddess

The heroine begins stage five in her darkest hour. But she is rewarded for her struggle when she encounters the goddess.

The goddess symbolizes the true nature of the feminine, and the best of what the heroine left behind. The goddess imparts a great truth to the heroine about herself and the feminine.

When the heroine parts with the goddess, she feels reborn.

Example

Mara spends weeks burying the fallen. She leaves the destroyed settlement, but does not return to the Barock. Instead she wanders aimlessly.

Then Mara sees an old Sali city, abandoned since the invasion of the Barock long ago. She goes there and walks through what’s left of the ancient Sali temples and streets. Everything is familiar from her childhood, yet greater than it. She is filled with nostalgia and wonder. She remembers the happy days in her Sali settlement, and begins to miss it.

She is perplexed by how open the city is. It has no walls to block out the swarm. The only thing marking the city borders are enormous braziers. She can only conclude that before the Barock came, the Sali did not struggle against the swarm like they do now.

6. Reconciliation With the Feminine

In stage 6, the heroine heads back to the familiar surroundings she left behind. She finds and nurtures her inner child, the part of her left from before she rejected the feminine. She may seek to bond with the mother, and to gain new understanding about her.

She spends her time on simple tasks of a feminine nature. She receives no glory for her toil. Former allies find her and try to convince her to return to the way she was before her descent. Even the mother or others of the feminine may not welcome her back, remembering her rejection of them with bitterness.

But she continues her humble work. She maintains hope that if she continues down the path that feels right to her, she will be redeemed. She waits patiently for improvement.

Example

Mara returns to the settlement she was raised in. They tell her she is not a member of the Sali, because she did not undergo the coming of age rite of their people. But she refuses to go. She sits on their steps and fasts until they allow her to work the land beside them. She speaks with childhood friends, but they hesitate to socialize with her.

Her Barock warriors find her there. They tell her to get herself together and come back with them. She refuses. They warn her there is a swarm that is coming soon. She says she has other, more important work. Slowly, the Sali begin to trust her again. She undergoes the coming of age ceremony she missed.

7. Reincorporation of the Masculine

In stage seven, a crisis erupts in the realm of the feminine. In dealing with this crisis, the heroine once again faces the masculine side of herself, ready to emerge and dominate. She now understands the inner need that the masculine fulfills, and why she lost herself in it before. She recognizes that while the masculine was not her true goal, it was an important part of her journey.

And she refuses to let it take control. Instead, she channels her masculine impulses to positive ends. She solves the crisis with serenity and grace. When it is over, she asks for no rewards.

Example

There is a weakness in the wall around the Sali settlement. When the swarm comes it breaks and they leak through. Mara does not have her sword, so she grabs a staff and runs out to fight them. She blocks the opening in the wall, allowing the Sali to fall back and reach safety. She is tempted to continuing fighting, to see if she can outlast the swarm. But the Sali call her to retreat behind the next wall. They will survive without the crops the swarm will destroy. She listens, and retreats.8. The Union

By stage 8, the heroine has found balance between the feminine and the masculine. But she is not finished until she helps others find that balance as well. She uses her synergy of the feminine and masculine to bring everyone, on either side, together. If they are embattled by a great enemy, her leadership guides them to victory.

If it fits your story, this is also the time to discard your duality altogether. The heroine could reveal that it is false, arbitrary, or destructive.

Example

With permission from the Sali leaders, Mara acquires a new set of weapons. They are not flashy, but functional. However, she does not think that simply cutting down the swarm is the answer. The Sali traditionally burn a special incense when the swarm comes, but only inside because it’s not allowed elsewhere. She thinks this incense repels the swarm, and that is how the Sali used to survive before the Barock came. Mara convinces the Barock leaders of the town to try it.

The Sali gather the ingredients for the incense in large quantities, and prepare bonfires. Because there are no large and protected braziers to burn it in, Barock warriors must protect the fires from the swarm when it comes, or the creatures might put them out too quickly to have an effect. The swarm comes, grouping together and rushing at the fires. The warriors stay firm. Soon, the whole area is filled with the fumes from the incense. The swarm weakens and retreats. The town is completely undamaged.

The town leaders mandate the construction of large braziers immediately afterwards. The Sali and Barock design and build them together.

The Union With the Hero’s Journey

If you’re a structure-phile who’s been wondering this whole time whether your story could be both a hero’s and a heroine’s journey, your answer is “yes!” Mara just did it.

Here’s how the stages of these two structures match up:

Heroine’s JourneyHero’s Journey

Shift From Feminine to MasculineOrdinary World; Call to Adventure

The Road of TrialsCrossing the Threshold; Tests, Allies & Enemies

The Illusion of SuccessThe Approach

The DescentThe Ordeal

Meeting With the GoddessThe Reward

Reconciliation With the FeminineThe Road Back

Reincorporation of the MasculineThe Resurrection

The UnionThe Return with the Elixir

Because the hero’s journey focuses on external struggle, and the heroine’s journey focuses on internal struggle, they have a lot to offer each other.

Applying the Structure to Your Story

The title of the rant explains itself, I think. I’ve put “more” in there because I’ve written rants in the past about different ways to diversify female characters, and slashed heroines/female protagonists because of the unfortunate connotation that “heroine” sometimes has.

1) A life in thought.

One thing missing from a lot of fantasy novels is philosophy—not morality, since there’s often a clear sense of right and wrong, but the exploration of abstract questions. What is truth like in that world? How is beauty regarded? Knowledge? Wisdom? (Is there a difference between knowledge and wisdom?) Is there a purpose to existence for your invented culture(s), and what is it? What is the philosophy of art?

Even in a society where philosophers don’t exist as a separate profession, class, or guild, I bet there are people doing some thinking about these things. And some of them can be women. Or should be women, since female philosophers are rarely, if ever, central characters in fantasy novels.

Want to use a noblewoman character as your protagonist but have absolutely no idea what to do with her if she’s not involved in a marriage plot? Make her a philosopher! She’ll certainly have time to think that a working-class character probably won’t have, and curiosity makes for a good way to show off the fantasy world. And if she gets into intellectual debates or is forced to defend her ideas, she’ll develop as a thinker in a way that many female protagonists don’t get to.

2) Friendship, complicated and complex.

As much as I enjoy reading about and depicting lesbian relationships, I think female friendships (at least, female friendships that are not centered on winning and discussing men) are even rarer in fantasy. They give you all kinds of things to consider. Here are just a few:

How did these women meet?

What drove the initial formation of their friendship? Are those factors still around? If so, how have they developed? If not, what kept them friends when the initial common ground turned to mud?

What wrinkles have their friendships gone through? What really spectacular fights, conflicts of principles, arrival of subjects on which they’ve agreed to disagree?

How hard do they pull on one another? For example, is one friend always supportive of the other no matter what, because support is what she needs most in her life, or does she smack her friend upside the head regularly and tell her not to be an idiot?

What do they talk about most often? (This seems to be especially hard for many authors to write about if they want to ban men as a discussion subject).

I’m probably prejudiced, because all the most complex relationships in my life have been friendships, not love affairs. But they’re also less “regulated,” because of the absence of common models in fiction, than relationships like mother-daughter or sister-sister or lover-lover. I always perk up when I see a pair of fictional female friends, because I feel I’m able to expect more variety from them. (Note that this does not tend to happen if their sole subject of conversation is who likes them and who likes-likes them).

3) A truly equal footing.

What would it take for a woman in a fantasy society that’s not gender-equal to gain freedom and the ability to form equal relationships with other people? Imagine that the solution is not to become male and abandon everything that makes her female. Maybe she likes some of the things that make her female (and, in any case, deciding that to be “free” a woman has to remain a virgin or never have a child is a limited vision).

So. How does she do it?

It’s going to depend on the circumstances of the society you’ve set up, of course, and the individual qualities and flaws of your protagonist. But say you’ve rejected the “substitute male” and “complete runaway” routes (the first for the reason given above, and the second because it insists that the character has to give up all connections to everybody else). How does she win her freedom without paying a price that’s intolerable to her?

4) Asexuality.

By this term, I’m talking about true asexuality, the lack of sexual desire and any longing to engage in a sexual relationship, not a character who’s been scared away from sex by rape or abuse. And yes, male asexual characters are rare, too, but men are more often written as though romantic relationships are unnecessary in their lives—asexuality in practice if not theory. Whereas female characters have to be located in relation to romance the moment they appear on-stage. They’re lesbians, or they’re going to fall in love with the men they’re currently screaming at, or they’re casually bisexual, or she’s had two kids in the past but they’re living with her sister now, or she’s a repressed virgin who just needs to find the right man.

But say that she’s asexual. She just has no interest in any sexual relationships.

Maybe her society has no classification for this, and so other people still try to shove or manipulate her into a sexual category. But this character conceives them all as not mattering to her. She slips out of the categories in her own head, or creates her own. And she doesn’t need to have children or take a lover to be a “real woman.”

Or the author can write her independently of romance whatsoever. If her society is accepting of bisexuality, homosexuality, and polyamory, they could be equally accepting of asexuality. Romance is dispensed with. It does not come up.

Any version of female asexuality could make an interesting story.

5) Changing oneself.

The version of this story that I’m most fascinated with is the human who ventures into a nonhuman culture, absorbing their point-of-view, shifting her own attitudes, mentally becoming the alien. But there are other ways to do it:

The female privileged protagonist who becomes aware of and tries to deal with her own privilege and the consequences of it.

The heroine whose life changes radically later on, rather than with puberty or as a child, and who has to integrate her sudden magic or destiny or binding to another person into the connections she’s already formed.

The oppressed/colonized woman who begins to be able to separate her consciousness from the oppression or colonization, and starts the process of changing what she can.

The woman who’s been hurt and whose life is not suddenly 100% better because a goddess chooses her or a man falls in love with her; she sets her sights on a goal and works towards it, even though complete healing may not be possible.

This requires a lot of introspection, which might be one reason it’s not that popular a plot for fantasy novels. But I think adventure is indeed possible in a story like this; it’s just that it can’t take over and be the sole thing happening.

6) Dealing with human limitations.

Her own and others’, in this case. And no, not in the so-familiar holding pattern in which everyone else’s needs—children’s, male partner’s, siblings’, parents’, random passing men’s—come before the needs of the heroine, who is a selfless (and often spineless) martyr. A woman in this kind of plot would need to choose and act; the difference is that she’s not able to knock down every barrier in her way as if she were a queen or a conquering savior.

What’s her life like if she’s living in the middle of an occupation? A natural disaster? A magical disaster? The sudden appearance of an alien species? A difficult political situation, with necessary compromises and powerful opponents who must be appeased? A personal limitation, such as a disdain for violence in a society where violence is one of the prime ways to advance? A chosen limitation, such as a refusal to go on bailing a rebellious child out of trouble?

This is where I have a lot of frustration with some specific fantasy plot devices, which are designed to destroy all the barriers the protagonist faces. Loopholes are the ones I hate most, but also common are sudden unbeatable power, prophecies, coerced loyalty because of prophecy (“But we have to obey her! She’s the Chosen One!”), and a simple lack of ethics (such as the heroine who has no problem killing other people because they’re The Enemy).

Why waste a beautiful difficult situation by insisting that the difficulties are just an illusion?

7) Work.

If the center of a female protagonist’s life is her work, that’s often a problem. If she has children, of course she’s too busy to be a proper mother to them. If she’s performing a job commonly done by men in her society, then she runs the risk of losing her femaleness (see point 3). If she’s an artist, she turns out not to be as good an artist as she thinks she is, and/or discovers that she wants a man/a family more than her art.

Why not have work be the center of your female protagonist’s story? She can still have a perfectly ordinary life outside work. Many male protagonists in fantasy are presented as having had friends, lovers, training, different jobs, and families in the past before they started saving the world or going on the quest or fighting in the war. A female protagonist can be a dedicated botanist, but that doesn’t mean that she’s automatically a bad mother or a dangerous workaholic.

Bridget at Now Novel 

Gone are the days where female characters in novels tended to be simpering, dependent and virtual cardboard cutouts. To celebrate the strong – but also the not-so-strong, the complex and vivid – women in fiction, this week we’re talking about 7 great females characters and what they can teach you about better character writing.

However, before examining the character development of strong female characters, it’s important to define what is meant by a strong female character. Writers have grappled with this definition and cautioned that it is important to allow a strong female characters to have weaknesses. Developing a strong female character doesn’t simply mean creating a protagonist who defies prescriptive gender expectations. It means developing a character who is well-rounded and real. Most importantly, perhaps, a strong female character is one who acts rather than one who is acted upon by societal and other pressures that revolve around her sex or gender.

The female characters below all exemplify good character development:

Writing characters who have a strong sense of self: Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre

We can reach back to the classics for one of the novel’s earliest strong female characters. Jane Eyre survives an abusive childhood, first in the home of the family charged with caring for her and later at a boarding school, only to find herself working for a man who has his own complex and disturbing relationship to women [no spoilers here].

One of the most remarkable aspects of Jane as a character is that she is, in one sense, a victim of circumstance, of the time and place into which she is born and her station in life, and yet despite that she seizes agency and makes her own choices even when those choices are very limited. This begins with her rebellion against her cruel relatives, continues in her care for her fellow students in the abusive boarding school and culminates in her rejection of Mr. Rochester.

A lesser writer than Charlotte Bronte might have written a similar book in which the same series of incidents unfolded and showed Jane as passive in the face of those incidents. Yet it is her resilience, her determination in the face of suffering and her own sense of self that stands out in this novel. The lesson from Jane Eyre is that your character will be engaging and interesting if she has the agency to choose her response to things even when that response changes little or makes the situation worse, as is often the case for Jane.

Other strong female characters also find a way to thrive in gender-regulated societies:

Isabel Allende’s generations of vibrant women

Critics have described Chilean author Isabel Allende’s novel House of the Spirits as a kind of woman-centred companion or response to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which foregrounds the historical experiences of mainly male characters. Allende’s novel examines the lives of women amid upheaval wrought by men, but it is always the three generations of women that provide the vibrant core of the novel. Clara Trueba is the matriarach of the tale, but her daughter Blanca and granddaughter Alba are just as strong.

Unlike some of the other female characters discussed here, all three of the Trueba women are strong characters and strong women who defy oppressors in more traditional ways. However, their commitment to causes such as education and health care are shown to be ultimately more effective in securing change than the revolutions the men carry out.

The lesson from the Trueba women is that strong female characters do not necessarily have to refuse or abandon all characteristics or roles seen as traditionally ‘female’ or ‘feminine’. For these women, these roles actually turn out to be the most effective ways for them to remain strong and bear up under the suffering they endure.

The heroine’s journey: Lauren Olamina and Octavia Butler’s Parable novels

In her classic science fiction novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, author Octavia Butler gave her character a disability. Because of a drug her mother took when she was pregnant, Lauren Olamina suffers from a condition known as hyperempathy in which she feels whatever a living thing near her is also feeling. However, in most other ways, Lauren’s character arc follows one that is traditionally depicted as predominantly male. She becomes a leader for her people and founds a new religion.

There has been some criticism of Joseph Campbell’s study of the hero’s journey as a distinctly male construct. Lauren’s character arc from a teenage girl to the leader of a new society demonstrates that there are no character arcs or paths of development that need to be reserved exclusively for male or female characters.

When developing your own strong female character, there is no reason she cannot command an army or rise to a high position of influence just as a male character might. It’s always good to remember that you can write the world you want, not merely the world you have.

Some female characters are so memorable that fans feel they should have been the main characters in their books:

Brains over beauty: Hermione Granger

Many readers of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter fantasy series love Hermione even more than Harry. Hermione is probably the smartest pupil in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and she’s also loyal and brave. But she isn’t perfect. She can be a know-it-all. She talks too much. She is sometimes bossy.

Hermione’s negative traits are as essential to her existence as a strong female character as her positive traits are. In a world where girls are often assumed to have the most value if conventionally beautiful and adept at social interactions, Rowling created a girl who is described in the books as somewhat less than beautiful and often socially awkward. Yet Hermione remains one of the most beloved characters of YA literature.

The lesson from Hermione is that it is important make sure your strong female character has flaws, and it is even better if, as is the case with Hermione, some of those flaws are inextricably connected to the characters’ strengths. After all, the reason Hermione is a know-it-all is because she very often is the smartest person in the room or the only one who is correct about something. If Hermione is bossy, it is because sometimes the people around her need to be bossed.

The unlikable heroine: Katniss Everdeen

Some readers find Katniss Everdeen a hard character to like. However, Katniss lives in a hard world that only gets harder as the Hunger Games series goes on, and it is that hardness that saves her. Katniss is also a reluctant heroine. She steps up to fight in the first round of hunger games to save her sister and the second time because she has to. Katniss does try to protect the helpless, but she does so on an individual basis. She has no desire to become to face of the revolution and is pressured into the role.

Katniss possesses many characteristics that are thought of as traditionally male, and to some degree, she was criticised for characteristics that would be much less likely to be singled out if male characters had them. Whether or not Katniss is entirely likeable — and plenty of readers adore her — the lesson for writers here is that they should focus on writing people first and genders second.

Katniss would have been a very different character and the Hunger Games series a very different set of books if their author, Suzanne Collins, had felt pressured to make Katniss worry about her looks or fret about boys. A second lesson is that authors should be unafraid to make their protagonists into characters who are sometimes difficult to relate to, as real can be.

A change of view: Cassie Maddox in Tana French’s The Likeness

Tana French’s character Cassie is a particularly good example. The reader first meets her in the crime writer’s first novel, In the Woods. Cassie is the best friend and colleague of homicide detective Rob Ryan, but the novel is written from Rob’s point of view. When we next meet Cassie in French’s second novel, The Likeness, the story is told from Cassie’s point of view. Therefore, we get a fascinating look at character development from two different angles. A further complication is that Cassie spends much of The Likeness pretending to be someone else.

Cassie is well-developed as well. A policewoman, she exhibits courage and intelligence, but the challenges she faces in The Likeness uncover unexpected vulnerabilities.

The women of speculative fiction: Margaret Atwood and Offred

Margaret Atwood’s unknown narrator in The Handmaid’s Tale is another fascinating example of how a writer can develop a strong female character. Because the dystopian world Offred lives in is so restrictive, Atwood does not have access to many of the usual tools a writer might use to develop character. However, she manages to develop a character who rebels in small ways under oppressive and degrading conditions.

The narrator known as Offred remains nameless and we learn very little about the typical aspects of her life that we do with other characters. From reading her story, we can learn how to develop a strong female character without access to information about things like friends, career and leisure time activities.

Writing strong female characters is a matter of understanding that these characters should have weaknesses as well as strengths. By reading the stories in which the characters listed above appear, you can study the variety of approaches that writers use to develop characters and get a sense of the diversity of fully realized female main characters that exist.

Who is one of your favourite women of fiction?

I Have Brothers

"You see, it's because of her mean older brothers that she is immune to all manners of toilet nastiness. It's really sort of a gift, like playing the violin. Or dancing. Or playing the violin and dancing while Isabella's brothers fart at you."— Jamie Kelly, Dear Dumb Diar #8, "It's Not My Fault I Know Everything"

The tendency of female characters displaying skills in something that is traditionally viewed as being more of a male thing to explain it as being the result of having a number of (usually older) brothers.

Occasionally there is gender reversal (that could be viewed as being equally sexist) with a male character explaining his ability in stereotypically feminine areas such as cooking as being the result of having sisters.

See also Raised by Dudes when the character's testosterone-laden upbringing becomes an impediment in polite society.

Writing Advice by Mette Ivie Harrison

Writing a strong heroine can be a tricky thing, and not just for male writers. The problem is that if you write a heroine exactly like a hero, then it may seem unrealistic or "unfeminine." But you don't want to use stereotypes, either, because those are a cheap shortcut and don't make for a genuine character. I will admit that I tend to prefer the heroines that are written by women, but there are plenty of counter examples. Jim Butcher does a great job with strong heroines, even though Harry is the protagonist of his books. Guy Gavriel Kay. George R.R. Martin. John Scalzi. Orson Scott Card. Joss Whedon. I don't feel like I have a preconceived notion of how a heroine must be strong. It doesn't have to be physically, though it can be if it is explained well enough. I think the problem is more often that there aren't any heroines at all. Now there are books that are going to be about a man's world, but you know what? I'm not going to like it as much as one where there are hints of the women surrounding that man's world.

Mistakes that I see writers make too often:

The heroine's part in the plot is not an important one. Perhaps you will say that it is impossible to make more than one character absolutely essential to the plot, but I think this is untrue. If you are writing a story and you want the hero to be the most important character in the plot, you have every right to do that. But I will like your book more if the heroine also has a big role to play. She might not have to do it in the climax of the book, although she could. But please don't pander to female readers by pretending that she does something important (by having the hero tell her how important she was to his mental well-being or some such crap) when she doesn't.

The heroine's part in the plot is to give up herself. I know that this is a common device in Western Literature. I studied it plenty in grad school. "Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan" was a quote I learned early on, from Goethe. It's from his play Faust, and is about the eternal feminine that leads men to a higher plane. Yeah, only in Faust, Gretchen is abused by Faust and commits suicide. She comes back in spiritual form to help him. Um, this isn't what I would call a strong female character. A woman who throws herself into the well of evil to save all mankind is dramatic, but is there some other way she can destroy the evil? If not, I don't know what to say. I may just not like your story that much, or your world view. There is something noble about giving up one's life for another, but it seems like women do it a lot more than men in novels. Men tend to figure out some other way, or they just are not put in the same position. Women also give up their lives to save their children. Again, I would do this as a mother if I had to. But I would try not to be put in this situation. My children need more than just my giving them birth. They need me to remain alive in order for them to grow up well balanced. And a mother's job is not to be swallowed up completely in her children's lives. At least, that's my belief. Again, your view of the world is going to change what you choose to write in your books.

The heroine is recovering from abuse. I've used this myself. It works on occasion. Unfortunately, the world is full of women who are recovering from abuse as children. But not every heroine needs to have this as her background story. Some women are loved and treated as queens. Some are neglected in other ways, just as terrible.

The heroine sits around a lot, moaning about her fate, waiting for the hero to rescue her. Sure, women are physically weaker than men, and in a realistic novel, there are going to be some realistic limitations for women. But just be careful of this as a device for heroic action. Maybe your heroine can get herself out of that tower and go help the hero fight the evil hordes. Or maybe she isn't going to sit in that room spinning gold just because some king told her to do it and she'll get married.

Which leads me to -- the heroine's reward at the end of the book is marriage. Romances end this way traditionally, and I have no problem with a happily-ever-after ending. But be careful that the marriage is a reward for both the hero and the heroine, and that there are other rewards, as well. One of them being self-esteem, or perhaps some other tangible reward like a sword or a crown or even a big drink of water after a terrible battle with very dry evil.

You may be surprised by this, but I wish there were fewer heroines who disdain all things male. I get tired of this, really. I consider myself a feminist of sorts, but when the heroine has to go out of her way to say that everything she does that is traditionally male is stupid, that is offensive. Let her think some things are stupid, yes. But give some balance.

Heroines who fall in bed with the hero as soon as it is convenient for him. Come on, this is just school boy fantasy, isn't it? It's not the way real life is, and I think it makes for bad plotting, along with the other problems I have with it. It's as if the hero has problems in every other part of his life, and so he deserves (?) to have a little sex thrown his way to give him some relaxation. Need I say how much it offends me when female characters are used merely to be toys for the heroes? They have lives of their own and motivations of their own. I love how in Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind, the hero is always trying to find the heroine and he can't. She is mysterious and has her own motivations, which he can only guess at, and he tends to guess very wrong.

OK, now some of the things I think I would like to see more of in heroines:

Heroines who have unusual skills. Your heroine doesn't have to disguise herself as a boy and learn how to fence in order to be interesting. But think about the stereotypes you are perpetuating when you choose your heroine's area of expertise. Is she a good seamstress? Does her magic come from tears? Or from dancing? Or from beauty? You might want to choose beekeeping (like in Robin McKinley's Chalice) or reading or filing papers or using a hammer in interesting ways. On the other hand, it is fun to twist around expectations, so that if a villain expects the heroine to make him dinner, she can poison it because she is really good at gardening and recognizes that those mushrooms growing outside his window are not what he thinks they are.

A heroine who refuses marriage. I liked it in the new book Gradelingwhen the heroine decides it isn't for her. I am a married woman with children and have a traditional life, but I like to see other choices offered to young girls, and marriage isn't the only way to happiness.

Heroines who are mothers and go on to become great political powers. I love Bujold's Barrayar because it is about a woman who deals with all the difficult realities of being a mother and giving birth, but still stops a civil war on her planet all by herself. Well, with help. But she is the force behind everything, and she takes her own risks. I love Bujold's women, by the way. Even more than Miles Vorkosigan, who some say is a woman in disguise.

Heroines who think for themselves. Just because someone tells a heroine something doesn't mean she should believe it. Heroes are always bucking authority and get rewarded for it by the plot, but for heroines, it often seems the reverse. They have to be good little girls, obedient, staying in their place, and they can work from there. Yes, that can be done and done well. But it isn't very often.

Heroines who beat the heroes in some area of life. I've read plenty of novels where I see female characters do things that are just unbelievable. That annoys me, too. But I wish there were more of them who out-thought the men, or at least teased them and brought them down to size. I think one of the problems with the Vorkosigan books was when Miles found his beloved Ekaterina, how could Bujold write a romance with anyone equal to Miles? She certainly tried, but I'm not sure it turned out well. Miles runs roughshod over her life and the thing she does best he uses to entrap her. I don't know if that is ever fully forgiven in the books. Miles is Miles, and well, he gets what he wants in the end.

Well, that's a start. There is a difference between good writing, which is clear communication of what you want to say and writing that has something to say that I like. I'm not saying you have to have strong heroines to have a successful book. Clearly, you do not. There are men who won't notice and even some women. But there's no reason you can't do everything, is there?

by Rae Elliott

The “strong” heroine is becoming a cliche, one-dimensional character women can’t relate to or don’t find realistic.

So it’s time we toss the “strong/kick-butt heroine” out and replace it with a more satisfying character: the complex heroine.

Fab fictional femmes like Shuri of Black Panther, Rey of Star Wars, and Eowyn of the Lord of the Rings, have raised the bar high for female characters. And, as writers, it’s time we meet that bar.

So what characteristics should your complex heroine possess in order for readers to freak over her?

Competence

Flaws/weaknesses/failures.

A noble cause she stands for.

Let’s talk about how you can use these traits in your own character crafting process.

Competence

All the ladies I spoke of aren’t strong. No, see, the adjective that better describes them is competent. That means they carry their own, they hold down the fort, and they make use of the beautiful brains God gave ‘em- in brilliant ways. See, being competent allows for strength in multiple areas, not just one.

Just wanting your heroine to be “strong” isn’t enough of a goal for her. Women possess many qualities that make them unique, honorable, and resilient. So focusing on strength alone narrows her possibilities. Focusing on creating a competent heroine, however, gives her more dimension, depth, and allows her a variety of goals and abilities.

Shuri, princess and younger sister to T’Challa, wasn’t just sitting on the sideline as her brother changed Wakandan history. She helped him change it- and not just through fighting, either.

Through the use of her awesome brain, Shuri created gadgets, weapons, and teched-out outfits to help her brother’s goal (really, the nation’s goal). She represented her family, her brother, and her people well by giving to it in valuable ways. And although she’s just teenager, Shuri has focus and direction, thereby producing the best works science has ever seen.

Rey survived on her own as a scavenger for years. She defended herself both mentally and physically against countless attacks, including the most fearsome attack from Mr. Prince Emo bad boy himself. Rey was also a quick learner and intuitive with the Force, which made her an excellent mechanic and pilot.

Eowyn, shieldmaiden of Rohan, burns at the fact that women cannot defend those they love. Yet she teaches herself how to handle a sword and hold her own anyway.

Ultimately moved to pull a Mulan and enter the war undercover, Eowyn successfully makes her way to the front. There, she faces the ultimate test of bravery: a smackdown with the Witch King of Agmar.

After the clapback of the century, Eowyn defeats the Witch King in defense of her mortally wounded uncle.

Notice a pattern here? These ladies are all self-taught in some way. Rey, alone most of her life, learns to fend for herself and scavenge to survive. Eowyn, unable to defend those she loves openly, teaches herself the ways of the sword in secret and enters the front in disguise. And Shuri, although she had the best education Wakanda could offer, created these gadgets on her own- always improving where need be.

So here’s the ultimate goal of a competent heroine:

To be a gal that’s got brains- not just brawn.

To have the opportunity to be self-taught, or a self-starter, in at least one area of her life.

To defy the odds and beat expectations.

Flaws, Failures, and Weaknesses

“But why should my heroine have flaws or failures, Rae? Won’t that just make her appear weak or incompetent?”

No, beautiful unicorn, it won’t.

Why?

Because no one can relate to a perfect heroine, a flawless heroine. I don’t know one woman who hasn’t made a mistake in their life (ahem, I’m looking at you, girl in the mirror).

Although the Force was strong with Rey, she still had weaknesses and honest desires gone unfulfilled. She longed to discover who her parents are and find her place in the world. Even though she had discovered her calling, she felt lost nonetheless and wanted, more than anything, for someone to help her find her place in the war. Those powerful, real desires made Rey a believable, relatable, beloved heroine.

As valiant as Eowyn was, she wasn’t without flaws. Her naivety bears down hard on her when she faces the horrors of war. This flaw also leads her to heartbreak, when Aragorn friendzones her hard. But we feel for Eowyn and relate to her struggle to find love in a world overcome with war.

To give your heroine a desire to find love and be loved is not a weakness, it’s a relatable quality.

Clearly, to bear a significant weakness or to fail in some way only makes heroines more relatable, realistic, and complex. Readers want to connect to characters, to see a bit of themselves in the heroine, so make sure you don’t just show her best side.

The point about flaws/failures/weaknesses is this:

Readers will find your heroine relatable and realistic.

They add depth and dimension to your heroine that readers will appreciate.

Standing for a Noble Cause

What does she stand for? What belief does she live for? Would she die for it?

To be apart of something bigger than ourselves gives us great purpose, gives us a wider worldview and perspective outside our immediate needs. Give your heroine that same purpose. If she doesn’t stand for a cause greater than herself, she’ll flatline.

Rey decidedly threw herself into the fight for the rebellion. Even though she lived on the outskirts as a mere scavenger, when the opportunity “rolled” itself into her life, she made her choice. Rey’s beliefs were greatly tested, yet she came out the other side an even more capable character.

Shuri used her talents for the greater good as well. She helped support T’Challa and bring Wakanda to the level of ingenuity it became legendary for. Her works weren’t just a trophy to hang on the wall-they had real purpose, and as a last resort, she used her weaponry in battle herself.

Eowyn wouldn’t stand idly by as Middle Earth fell into the hands of Sauron. She courageously took on a battle no other woman had before. Fighting for the world of men, and even taking a hard hit from the Witch King in the process, Eowyn took her stand valiantly.

Here’s what you need to take away from heroines who stand for a noble cause:

Readers admire and respect a heroine who stands for something bigger than herself.

Fighting an internal or external battle to defend that belief, no matter the odds, helps cement their identity as a beloved heroine.

Let’s be clear about something real quick: your heroine doesn’t have to fight in a battle to be strong. She doesn’t have to swing a sword or battle ax to be considered worthy of our respect.

(In fact, read more about my belief that we need more diverse female characters here)

There are many types of heroines and that’s okay. But if you want to create a complexheroine readers will appreciate, then remember these three keys:

Make her competent

Allow her to use her brain

Let her be a self-starter or self-taught

2. Give her flaws/failures/weaknesses

She doesn’t always have to win every battle (and she shouldn’t)

Failures make her relatable and more beloved to readers

3. Give her a noble cause to stand for

Standing for something greater than herself gives her a purpose readers appreciate

Defending that belief despite great opposition builds her character