Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff in 1939
This reflects what is happening to women’s concerns as they are overwhelmed and even blotted out by the more dramatic and immediately important concerns of black lives and other mistreated and marginalized groups. But our need to recognize and praise women in all our variety remains, and the stubborn insistence of our culture on “great men” is a barrier to both.
Creating heroes, or heroines, is not the aim of what we call great literature; but that is not my concern here. I am concerned that my friend, as in centuries past, is still searching for heroes.
Where are our heroines?
A generation of younger women is producing a quantity of heroines in the realms of social justice and planet-saving conservation; not so much those of my generation, many of whom seem again to be crippled by conventions promulgated by our class and its preoccupation with “niceness”—at lease for women. Niceness and class conventions prevent curiosity, let alone challenges, about and of the status quo which is as it always was male-dominated.
We writers are attempting in some cases to create heroines on the page, and I welcome this attempt. Everything I’ve written in the long decades of my literary career has attempted the same feat. Even when I’ve written from the point of view of a man as in my novel, Straight Man and several of my short stories, I have aimed to show, by contrast, what strong good women do or can do. I continue along this path with my latest, The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke—I read for the first time in two years to an enthusiastic crowd yesterday evening here—and although my biography published in 2020, was swallowed by Covid, I hope to begin to promote it before my attention turns to my next book, my memoir, Little Brother, to be published by Sarabande Books in Mary 2022.
But back to the issue of creating heroines. We read about them on every page of every newspaper. And, recently, several well-liked writers have made the attempt to center a novel on a woman who is a heroine. Sometimes the effort seems forced, as in the recent Klara and the Sun. The male author creates a heroine, but she is a robot…
My skepticism may be the result of my own limitations rather than the limitations of the literature produced currently. We all might wonder, as I do, whether I’ve ever known a woman I considered a heroine, or read about one in a book. Immediately Jane Eyre comes to mind in Charlotte Brontë’s novel of that name, one of the books I listed as having read in my “A Page a Day Journal” (Eyre spelled Eyar) written when I was nine years old. Perhaps in fact I was a little older—but in any event, Jane was a heroine I recognized, perhaps partly because she was so small and so meek, hardly disturbing as a model in the nineteenth century or now. But she battled enemies and managed to capture Heathcliffe, always a rather dubious outcome.
Can I or any other writer create a heroine whose main triumph is NOT the capture and civilizing of some attractive but unworthy man?
Last night a woman eating at a nearby table in a restaurant last night overheard me when I mentioned to a new friend that I am attracted to macho men.
My friend replied with great amiability, “Then I don’t know why you put up with me!”
The woman, overhearing, burst out laughing and said, “I heart that!”
It’s another topic worth exploring. How many possible heroines in literature and in life have been sidetracked by trying to convert macho men?
You make an excellent point. However I consider many women as heroes and I think the word is becoming gender blind like the word actor.
Yes, we (everyone) need many, many female heroines in every facet of life who are made known to the public as a whole and celebrated, but I agree equally with K. R.’s comment that “ordinary” women are heroines in their/our daily lives and they/we so need to be brought into the light of everyone’s day, in every aspect of society. So what’s new. We know this already. Yep.