Time for some thinking! Just about halfway through this “Year of Reading Women,” let’s take a step back. Anything learned thus far? Observations? Surprises? Insights? None of the above?
First of all, although this is not at all fair to each individual book (THEY didn’t ask to be included in this dumb project), I have to take a look at this group of work through a somewhat “feminist” lens. It is, after all, why I’m doing the project. What’s a “feminist lens” I hear you ask? Well, for my idiotic purposes let’s just say it’s to examine how these books portray female characters, and the extent to which those characters have agency.
What’s interesting throughout all these books is the relative paucity of female agency. Not that a female novelist writing a novel has to use that space as an opportunity for wish-fulfillment or to redress social wrongs, but I remain just a teeny bit surprised at how, well, male-dominated and/or male-validated a lot of these books are.
The eponymous Olive Kitteridge (from Olive Kitteridge natch) and Hanna Heath from People of the Book are probably the two most independent, powerful “heroines” (term used very loosely) I’ve encountered. Although Olive relies more on her husband and son than perhaps she would like to admit. Hanna Heath, for her part, is a single women, an accomplished PhD, and renowned expert in books who travels the globe taking on high-profile projects. She also has a somewhat progressive sexual attitude that puts her more or less on equal footing with a couple different men she encounters romantically. This kind of independence and accomplishment for a female character really stands out in this crowd of characters across all these books. That I’m accidentally making her sound like James Bond is a testament to how lackluster so many of the other female characters have been when it comes to independence and agency.
I suppose that Amy Dunne from Gone Girl [SPOILER ALERT] should also probably be counted as independent and powerful, even if she’s also a legitimate and terrifying psychopath. And I suppose the characters in Arcadia are fairly balanced on the whole, though the book is dominated by its male protagonist, and features a commune/cult leader-type (male, obv) who uses his position of authority to take sexual advantage of much younger girls.
But many of these books -- most recently and notably in The Flamethrowers -- tend to be male-validated if not actually male-dominated...to a surprising degree! The protagonist and narrator of 2/3rds of The Flamethrowers we know only as “Reno” -- that’s where she’s from, not her actual name. And her entree into the heady world of avant-garde art comes only as a result of her attractiveness and the (sexual, imbalanced) relationships she forges with older, more powerful, more successful men. She’s not utterly without agency, but she’s also not using these men in the same way that they are using her. Perhaps (Probably?) this is a legitimate and accurate portrayal of the 1970s New York art scene, but it doesn’t paint women in the best (or most powerful) light; most of the relationships between women center only around who’s sleeping with whom at any given time. In the sexual merry-go-round that occupies all the characters in the book, it’s the women who are the painted horses and the men who are making the decisions, moving from seat to seat (as it were?). The women powerlessly cycle up and down, weathering the vicissitudes of time, while the men take what they want when they desire it. Partially this female powerlessness IS the point of the novel -- the story is a kind of bildungsroman for Reno, who gets swept up in many different forces beyond her control -- but it’s still a pretty grim portrayal, not celebrating the sexist world of art, but also not acknowledging much in the way of female power, or even foreshadowing much in the way of female power. That is, I didn’t get the impression that Reno was on her way to assuming all sorts of agency in her own life as a result of the events of the book.
Maybe worst (saddest?) is Ava in Swamplandia! who seems like a real Huck Finn-esque girl, spunky and self-reliant and willing to take tricky matters into her own hands. Until [SPOILER ALERT] the narrative lens twists and what was once a plucky rescue mission becomes reframed as an abduction complete with terrifying preadolescent sexual violence. Of course, Ava remains spirited and independent -- external forces violently taking advantage of her doesn’t take that away from her -- but she is essentially punished in the novel for having an innocent and adventurous spirit.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell featured virtually no female characters of any importance, and those that were perhaps most important were unalloyed damsels-in-distress. In The Accidental Tourist, the world of the book essentially pivots around the decisions of one man. He’s the decider, nobody else. The Interestings, like Arcadia, has nuanced and balanced characters. I’d still argue there’s a general lack of female power in the book, although it probably does the best job of all these books by allowing a certain measure of female power to exist, allowing women to make their own choices, and punishing purveyors of sexual violence.
But. As I’ve already mentioned, this project is just an exercise in reading books written by women, not finding books by women that have a particular type of female protagonist. Or immersing myself in literature with a specific feminist agenda. So this is an unfair analysis for sure, which is why I guess I should say that it isn’t even analysis. It’s just one particular man’s impressions based on one particular way of looking at these books at one particular time. I’m sure you could just as easily mount a defense of “The Interestings” as a brilliant look at complex female relationships and the way women cannily navigate through a male-dominated world.
In fact, I suspect that these books really suffer from nothing other than “realism” in portraying their female characters. In some ways this reminds me of the recent little flap over Claire Messud being asked whether the narrator of her most recent novel is likeable enough. Just as Messud argues that “likeability” isn’t the point of her characterization, so too is it undoubtedly a function of my own limited imagination to assume that female authors would imbue their characters with more “agency” than a male author might. Yet I confess to feeling just a slight bit of surprise that I have not encountered more “powerful” female characters in this random little group of novels by women.
Books Thus Far
The Flamethrowers
People of the Book
Linda Ronstadt
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
The Interestings
Swamplandia!
Arcadia
Gone Girl
The Accidental Tourist
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Olive Kitteridge
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