The third chapter of Reinventing Womanhood is called “Women Writers and Female Characters: The Failure of Imagination”. Here Heilbrun discusses the gravitation of female authors towards masculine characters and narrators. Although her argument is a little dated there are some interesting ideas that are worth pointing out.
Heilbrun suggests that woman writers, though autonomous females themselves, often project their autonomy onto a male character who is free to enact such behavior with less ridicule. This mirrors the earlier discussion of women who live vicariously through their sons:
The belief, clearly enough, is that true enthusiasm is so nonpassive a gift, that it must belong, properly, in a male body. Rather than watch their daughters suffer with such enthusiasm, or live without it, women long for sons.
Like Hennig’s Managerial Woman, however, female characters have been breaking ground, in many cases acting like men in male adventures. On the dust jacket of Labyrinth, author Kate Moss writes:
The Grail Legends are usually about men with swords and women getting rescued. I thought, ‘You know, I want the women to have the swords.’ It’s all about them doing their things, they get lots of sex, and they fall in love, but that’s not the point of the story for them. They are the heroes.
Heilbrun also suggests that female authors often use male narrators or incorporate a more masculine voice in an effort to avoid the stigma of writing “chic lit”. Some even attempt to conceal their gender using initials and anomalous pen names:
E. Nesbit (she always used the initial) was flattered to be thought a man, an impression she tried to confirm by writing all first-person stories in the masculine character.
Finally, when women writers have the courage to pen a female protagonist, they are faced with the issue of defining what is to be female. Heilbrun insists that:
Woman’s most persistent problem has been to discover for herself an identity not limited by custom or defined by attachment to some man. Remarkably, her search for identity has been even less successful within the world of fiction that outside it, leaving us until recently with a situation largely unchanged for more than two millenia: men writers have created women characters with autonomy, with a self that is not ancillary, not described by a relationship–wife, mother, daughter, mistress, chief assistant.
However, in one of the earliest examples, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flander’s, we are presented with female protagonist who, although marvelously liberated for her time, seems rather two demensional in character. She lacks the ability to maintain any sort of relationship.
The idea that male authors do strive to present independent female characters is to be appreciated, however, it is not a task that should be left to men. The question of what it means to be a woman needs to be undertaken by women, who best understand the power of their own value systems. Heilbrun at least acknowledges that:
Men in our male-centered culture consistently ignore, the perspective of female experience . . . Women who have entered the male-dominated world of work or the professions unaware of their womanhood . . . [are] convinced that all knowledge is gender neutral.
The best way to undermine the stigma of “chic lit” is not to avoid the female narratvie but to elevate the unique experiences of women (as well as the knowledge gained from those experiences) to a more honored position within the human experience.
