Womanhood is complicated. It is a challenge to produce a female character as captivating and profound as the women we see in the world around us. Many have tried, from Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth to Plath’s Esther Greenwood. But how have female characters changed with both time and culture?
The medieval era frequently showcased a binary of two female tropes; the virtuous wife and the distressed hysterical lady. The virtuous housewife was often neglected as unnecessary for the focal plot. Who remembers the Guinevere’s and Desdemonia’s of medieval fiction? Instead, we recall Lady Macbeth; an evil, but colourfully crafted figure. Here, I find evidence of Ulrich’s statement that ‘well-behaved women seldom make history’, as literature should exist to limn the lives of devoted mothers just as much as extraordinary and radical women.
Into the 19th and 20th centuries, the emergence of feminist writing produced groundbreaking female characters. The Bronte’s plunged us into a world of wild and adventurous women who transgressed the puritanical boundaries of their era. Catherine Earnshaw unveils the truth of life in a society that restricts your autonomy, and how it feels to be ‘wearying to escape into [the] glorious world’. Equally, the myriad of female experiences uncovered in Little Women reveal the differing ways that women endure the expectations of their time. Female readers may find comfort in the domesticity of Meg’s story while Jo’s rebellious spirit illuminates others. Despite these changes, it’s undeniable that male writers persisted in constructing female characters as superficial objects of desire; what would Daisy’s story have been without Gatsby’s love for her? It’s tough not to be dissatisfied with the depthless women of these tales, continually existing in the shadow of a male protagonist.
Entering the modern age, many women have felt inferior to the impressive, bold women of Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf’s worlds and turned to characters in whom they see themselves. Here arrives the sad-woman archetype. While becoming hyper-aware of structures of power much greater than them, white western female characters are no longer depicted as attempting to overcome their victimhood but instead succumb to it, internalising existential sadness and angst. This disassociative feminism is inescapable. Marianne Sheridan, Esther Greenwood and Maria Wyeth all surrender to this period of melancholy womanhood. It’s as though for the modern woman, living as sad or angry feels like a revolutionary act; a powerful protest against the previous cage of pleasant, maternal womanhood. But where do these characters take us? It seems that many female readers have transitioned from seeking inspiration in literature to instead looking for comforting depictions of their everyday grievances. And who can blame them? We can’t all be Jane Eyre, some of us need a Year of Rest and Relaxation.
There is no linear evolution of female characters, and it is both problematic and impossible to funnel them into narrow tropes or homogenise all women of a given era. The beauty of literature has always been the space for writers to explore the very core of human behaviour and experiences, which is different for each woman. Like the women of reality, fictional women offer a diverse range of personalities and stories, each worthy of acknowledgement in their own right.
“Johan Krouthen «Three reading women in a summer landscape», 1908 г.” by Gostya is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0