Readers have always been overly critical of female characters and too forgiving of their male counterparts.
Centring a story around misunderstood male narrators who female characters guide and support through transitional periods of their lives whilst maintaining no desires or purposes of their own has become a recurring and very successful plotline. So pervasive is this trope that the term “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” girl was recently popularised in both film and literature. It describes female characters whose only purpose is to teach their love interests life lessons. Perhaps authors—inadvertently or otherwise—have come to the realisation that cultivating a female character that their audience connects with is too tiresome; it is easier to give them no personality at all and hope that the readership is too engrossed by the mediocre, tortured male protagonist to notice.
Haruki Murakami has been the recipient of much criticism for his representation of women in his novels. Yet, I have encountered countless women who are avid supporters of his. Some find the melancholic tone and unreliable narrators in much of his work engrossing enough that they could forgive the wanton use of manic pixie dream girls such as Midori Kobayashi in Norwegian Wood to drive the plot forward.
This raises the question: If we are willing to forgo multidimensional women in literature to enjoy an otherwise brilliant book, how infrequently are we presented with literature centred around female characters who intrigue the audience in much the way Toru does? If readers could choose from an abundance of stories featuring well-rounded, dynamic or even morally grey women, would we be less likely to overlook how authors such as Murakami treat their female characters?
More sinisterly, others could not identify these traits in the female characters and found no issue with how Murakami portrays women. Is the problem then not that we do not care when female characters are found lacking in dimension, but instead that the male gaze has shaped literature to the extent where we are taught to expect, tolerate, or even prefer literature in which female characters are used as plot devices in place of characters of substance.
Even Lolita, the now infamous character study of a paedophile, which some argue intended only to demonstrate how the most villainous members of society can still believe themselves to be victims whilst they are actively abusing others, sparked a debate over whether the character Lolita, a 12-year-old, was at fault by attempting to ‘seduce’ her parental figure. Evidently, the modern reader practically itches to forgive the most heinous crimes in the name of ‘misunderstood men’ and places blame instead on their female counterparts. Thus, an argument can be made, and I will make it here, that the male gaze has shaped literature unforgivably, and the main casualties of this phenomenon have been well-developed female characters.
Featured image: Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami