#literary heroines

[marejadilla]

Fernando Vicente, “Lucretia”, from "Literary heroines", acrylic on board. “Tondos”, 2023 exhibition. Fernando Vicente Sánchez (Madrid, 1963), Spanish self-taught painter and illustrator.

[crazycatsiren]

Jane Eyre, Catherine Earnshaw, and Helen Graham walk into a bar...

[plainselfraisingflour]

I am obsessed with wanting my hair cut short again. I recently read a blog where someone was bemoaning being one of those 'weird people' who are a bit too old and a bit too young all at once for a pixie cut. And it has really started messing with me wanting my pixie cut. First world problems I know. But I am really feeling like I am not living my best life - the life of a heroine.

I will therefore make a list of some of my favourite heroines who get their hair cut. Could be a fan fuc one day.

Put anne Shirley, Jo march, alanna of trebond in a room together and see what happens.

[laurapetrie]

Her yearning for splendour and glitter was only a part of her vague longing for the beautiful; she wanted to be amongst beautiful things, made beautiful herself by their influence. She only wanted the vague poetry of life, the mystic beauty of romance infused somehow into her existence.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife (1864)

[english-history-trip]

Just opened Northanger Abbey for the first time, and I'm loving the tone it sets, but goddamn:

"[Catherine's father was] a very respectable man, though his name was Richard..."

[whilereadingandwalking]

The Heroine with 1,001 Faces by Maria Tatar is a powerful book of literary analysis seeking to do for heroines what Joseph Campbell famously did with "the hero's journey" (in which he dismissed female characters as having much purpose at all).

I really enjoyed most of the literary analysis in this book! I particularly loved the monomyth of woman as weaver/truth-teller/spider/spinner. Charlotte and her web, Arachne punished by Athena, Philomena exposing her assault through tapestry. Women and girls are silenced, limited in their creativity, but they use it. Women use their supposed invisibility to find ways around silencing. Telling truth, exposing story, seemed to be women's fundamental purpose in myth and folklore, broadcasting injury and harm to change the world or impose justice, even when their good work is then punished.

Increasingly over the years, the stories that women used to pass on knowledge became vilified in our culture, dismissed as 'old wives' tales' as women became gossipers, storytellers but of stories with little to no value. Yet even as this disdain for women's speech grew, women authors wrote characters who used their curiosity, nosy-ness, gossip, to succeed. And then they wrote heroines who learned to fly under the radar to investigate and expose the truth, from Nancy Drew to Marple to Katniss Everdeen.

So much of the analysis by Tatar was fascinating and brilliant. I did sometimes struggle with the writing however. In academic fashion, she brings in many examples where she'll analyze without a concluding statement or point. Sometimes I was desperate for a sentence at the end of an analysis or even a chapter that summed up a bit, connected it back to the larger thesis. I could have used a more conclusive tone, in other words, throughout a lot of the book, to keep me as a reader on track with the heroine's journey she was showing us.

Still, I loved a lot of this, and will take a ton of it with me moving forward as a reader and writer. I especially loved her point that myth is still evolving, that the women retelling old fairytales and myths right now are doing the work that was always needed, because those stories were never meant to be written, cemented fixtures, but ever-changing stories that shift to fit their times and listeners. Altogether, an interesting if sometimes difficult read.

[uwkhj]

i need someone to save my ass

[catboyrescue]

rereading sense and sensibility and just marveling at how absolutely ruthless jane austen could be sometimes. aspirational.

"Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition."

like wow okay

[britneyshakespeare]

The gaslighting Duke of Vienna

[biathelstan]

hey does anyone remember the second heta musical. it was so goofy haha. like how america played the role of the narrative heroine because he was young and was an object to be desired and protected and so he wanted to forge his own path but his future was dependent on older more powerful men who wanted to use him for their own rank and status. lol

[razorsadness]

We didn’t see heroin as a dead end. Not then, anyway. It was more of a release, of inhibitions and euphoria, an elegant method to strip away everything that came between the ego and the will, allowing us to move through the world unencumbered by emotion and anxiety. Like LSD, it made you feel as if you were reaching a part of yourself that wasn’t immediately accessible. We thought we were far-reaching—intrepid travelers of inner space. We were looking to people like William Burroughs who had trodden that path before us. We were a very well-read bunch. Our decadence had literary roots.

Another figure who was very much on our radar was Harry Crosby, the dissolute bohemian playboy poet and mystic who founded Black Sun Press and published Hemingway, Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Edgar Allan Poe, among others. Geoffrey Wolff’s biography of him, Black Sun, had recently come out, and if there was one book on every punk rocker’s bookshelf, that was it. We always used to joke that everyone had a copy, but how many of them had actually read it?

Crosby died aged thirty-one, as part of an apparent suicide pact. Fitzgerald at forty-four, from the effects of chronic alcoholism. This seemed innately glamorous and quixotic to us. To be young, decadent, and reckless, to live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse and an undeniable body of work. We were driven by the idea of decadence as its own reward, of attaining nirvana through drugs. Or else falling into an abyss. And most of us, myself included, would have embraced either of those fates, salvation or destruction, wholeheartedly.

—Kid Congo Powers, from Some New Kind of Kick

[spookyscribe]

To people smarter than I am, what is the archetype of a Scarlet Witch-type character in mythology/literature? Is there an archetypal figure or name for a female character with these immensely powerful, reality-changing abilities who is unstable?

Because I keep seeing unstable yet powerful female characters like this (Scarlet Witch, Imogen from Critical Role, and Dark Phoenix, etc.), and I really want to know the mythic origins of this type of character. What is her arc and purpose in a narrative? Is she always a tragic heroine? Is she present in mythology? What is the purpose of her story?

Any thoughts on this would be great!

[lemonduckisnowawake]

You know what? Confession time

I don't actually dislike the ditzy and clumsy and/or overly pure shojou romance female protagonist. I actually like her quite fine and find her somewhat adorable, if in need of a bit of growing up (even if she's an adult; it's fine. People mature at different rates)

Nooooo, what I do find annoying is when that sweet child is paired up with a male lead that's known for being a flirt or treats her like dirt or makes her blush and flounder so much. Could I be annoyed at the female lead for falling for his tricks? No. Because that, to me, would be akin to blaming the victim, and we don't do that here. Yes, girl, you need to grow up and mature a bit but there's nothing wrong with getting easily flustered and the like or being a bit weak. What's wrong is when that beef jerky of a male lead takes it as encouragement and pushes despite you saying nothing to encourage it. Saying nothing doesn't mean yes and I'm gonna throw hands with this idiot high school boy who thinks it does! Come at me bro and you'll see just how scary an angry duck protective of her fictional women can be!

[aetherictree]

Perhaps my hottest literature take is that the heroine's journey is misunderstood. Wildly so. Like, they're completely off the mark so much if the arrow flew backwards they'd hit the bullseye.

Because the stories I've read with female protagonists *that were written by women* do not involve rejection of the feminine or disilluisionment with the world, they involve a girl (oftena girl, sometimes a woman) who's life is controlled for her by other people finally reaching a point where she has to make a critical decision *that is her decision*. It's about stepping into her own agency, her own power if you will.

I see this most clearly in The Hunger Games. Both in the first book -- it's Katniss who defies the Capitol at the end by threatening suicide, the one little piece of power she has left to herself -- and at the end of the series with her choice of who to shoot. But also with Lessa in The Dragonriders Of Pern, and Feyre in A Court Of Thorns And Roses. Heck, Jupiter Ascending has this too -- Jupiter's life up to that point has been decided by everyone else, until she declines to sign Earth's death warrant.

It even shows up with male characters who are written by women. The Underland Chronicles has a lot of those themes. Harry Potter, even. I think people have gotten confused because they've drawn on female characters that have been written by men, and hence typically from a male perspective.

The heroine's journey is about the heroine coming into her power and being a person in her own right.

[laurapetrie]

Where can a young, witty and beautiful girl find excitement if not in love? She mentally reviewed all the descriptions of passion she had read in Manon Lescaut and La Nouvelle Heloise. There could be no question, of course, of anything less than a grand amour; a trifling love was unworthy of the most envied heiress in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. She wanted a love that would inspire great deeds. What wouldn’t she be capable of with a king at her feet!

Stendhal, The Red and the Black (1830)

[trans-elrond]

THE TERRORRR PLS PLS PLS, also his dark materials 👀👀

omg YES! so the problem with me talking about the terror is that most of the cast is Indistinguishable White Man to me but i do know crozier is played by jared harris and hickey... oh god is his name actually hickey has anyone made the obvious joke yet...??? is played by the guy who was also in gunpowder milkshake (terrible film but i love michelle yeoh and karen gillan so of course i watched it.) and paul ready and ciaran hinds are there too. lots of guys. i’m sure i’m missing a lot. anyway. white men! tumblr lesbians seem to love these white men!

ANYWAY it’s based on the doomed antarctic expedition of, i wanna say the mid to late 1800s, but it adds the element of Giant Fucking Monster to the whole shebang which i think is really sexy. i’m 99% sure the show features cannibalism and mutiny and freezing to fucking death, which i think is super sexy of them all. despite the tumblr fame of this show i have not seen a single episode. mostly because it would be sad to watch it alone, i wanna hoot and holler at these objectifyable men with someone who Gets It, you know? also because i’m a wimp and i need someone to hold my hand :3 i think there’s also an Indigenous woman who shows up but i really don’t know the plot beyond “oh no we’re trapped in the ice boys we’re gonna have to take drastic measures to survive!11!!!” and then they all die. all i know about the characters is that hickey is a jerk and everyone thinks crozier is hot. that is all.

as for his dark materials, i LOVE the lead actress from logan and the actor from the (very bad show but he was great) letter for the king. we also stan whatshername the adult female lead who played cathy in wuthering heights and the lead in true things (2021) what iS her name this is going to haunt me forever. i think lin manuel is also in it? with his polar bear??

and i know the concept of daemons and vaguely that some magical Dust is important, also that james macavoy and cathy from wuthering heights OH HER NAME IS RUTH WILSON YAYYYYY my brain has not failed me--anyway they’re the protagonist’s parents but also fighting each other??? and i know philip pullman was writing these as retorts to CS Lewis’s Narnia/Christianity as a whole so it’s a takedown of Christianity as an institution and canonically lesbian Mary Malone was a big deal because she wasn’t canonically gay in the books? she has something to do with the biblical Garden and man’s fall and how important individual choice is??

i also know that it ends sadly for lyra and will and they’re separated forever :( and i’ve definitely read the tumblr post book excerpt about lyra not being able to use the altheiometer (i am definitely spelling that wrong) anymore at the end but having to learn from scratch. anyway it would absolutely destroy me if i ever chose to watch this show but heyy what’s fiction for if not ripping my heart out!!!!