“I tend to write characters who are roughly as articulate and insightful as I am about what they think and feel,” Sally Rooney in conversation with ‘The New Yorker’ in 2019.
The ‘waif’ girl in literature can be defined as a tormented young woman who can’t help but question why anyone bothers with anything at all—think Bella Swan from Twilight, Marianne from Normal People and Ana Steele from Fifty Shades of Grey. This existentially pessimistic woman expresses little faith in her worthiness and value to her society, a trait born of her unfortunate upbringing and furthered through the neglect of her emotional well-being.
The ‘waif’ girl, however, has manifested in the modern age not only in the literary world, but also in the wider cultural sphere, from film to modelling to online media, as generations upon generations of women have found comfort in this albeit self-indulgent ,process of pitying oneself.
Whilst much discourse about this female archetype stems from contemporary literature from the ’90s onwards, the ‘waif’ girl emerged in the canon way before the term was ever coined. In classic literature of the 19th century, the trope of the female character born into estranged and orphaned families was popularised in fiction. It was this childhood strife that formed the motivations of these female characters, as women were driven to achieve emancipation despite the unfortunate
circumstances of their birth—Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre strives for her independence in her navigation of her selfhood and voice in this first-person narrative, whilst the author’s sister’s novel Wuthering Heights features the impetuous Cathy Earnshaw who challenges her broken upbringing in her free-spirited and desire-driven nature.
The portrayal of the ‘waif’ girl in literature thus did not hinder female expression for these authors, but rather encouraged it as they navigated the expansive capabilities of the novel form. So how did this archetype come to manifest as the problematic female trope that we now see today in contemporary literature? Much of this can be traced back to the explosion of the ‘waif’ girl in literature from the literary world into the wider cultural sphere. The ‘waif’ girl came to represent someone much more three-dimensional than the girl on the page of the novel; she embodied herself physically in the form of the waif-ish figure of female models of the ’60s (think Twiggy’s youthful, boyish appearance), and emotionally in the dreamy, melancholy music of Mazzy Star and Courtney Love of ‘Hole.’ The ‘waif’ lifestyle was something that could be lived, not just read, consuming and characterising every facet of women’s lives.
It is not easy to ignore the privilege of the women experiencing these ‘waif’-like sufferings; they are usually from privileged social groups, typically being white, cis, wealthy, conventionally attractive and straight. Their suffering is born of no plight of their position in society, but rather from their (typically heterosexual) romantic relationships, aligning the female experience once again with male-focused narratives. Marianne herself admits in Normal People that she didn’t see her life as starting until she met Connell;
“She has never believed herself fit to be loved by any person. But now she has a new life, of which this is the first moment” … “she will still think: Yes, that was it, the beginning of my life.”
Whilst we should recognise the power and comfort that such expressions of female emotion offer for female readers, it is important to note the problems archetypes such as the ‘waif’ girl pose to the advancement of women’s liberation. The danger of these narratives reveals the problematic truth of our wider society—our obsession with categorisation and compartmentalisation of female identity into the archetype of the emotionally ‘wrecked’ female character serves to perpetuate patriarchal
understandings of women, rather than challenge them.
Photo by kevin laminto on Unsplash