Fictional Heroines and Feminist Critics

Abstract

For contemporary feminist critics reading a novel may arouse more pain than pleasure. Paradoxically, the literary form which has been in the last two hundred years the chief source of entertainment and escape-especially for women readers-has also been the literary form most closely tied to actual social conditions. We have learned that the rise of the novel coincided with the triumph of philosophical realism,' but not so commonly understood are the consequences of this fact for novel-readers who happen also to be in revolt against the very social conditions which those novels reflect. Torn between her potential delight in a novel and her newly awakened sense of the restrictive world which it mirrors, the feminist critic frequently responds by rejecting the problem altogether-or, even more seriously, by rejecting the novel itself. Feminist literary criticism has yet to teach us how to read the fiction of the past with pleasure, or to offer us an account of why, whatever our ideological leanings, we nevertheless catch ourselves doing so. Although recent critics have understandably hesitated to define what woman really is, they have been eager and willing to confront the issue of what she is not. One of the favorite activities of contemporary feminist criticism has been to uncover the pervasive feminine stereotypes with which novelists have populated their fictional worlds. American novels prove especially rich in this connection-offering us some distinctively national variations on the perennial Fair and Dark Ladies: both the virginal and eager American Girl, for example, and the American Girl grown up, deflowered, and turned nastythe Great American Bitch. Of course as the counterpoint between Fair and Dark, innocent girl and castrating bitch, makes quite clear, such stereotypes are not noted for their consistency. Critics discover new types these days with some of the zeal old-fashioned biologists must have exhibited upon isolating a new species or phylum; but the more new categories appear, the more bewilderingly various and self-contradictory becomes the composite picture of Woman. After the Sentimental and the Gothic heroines, the Dewdrops, the Galateas, the sensuous women and the liberated ones have all been identified and described,2 the only consistent pattern which emerges is the act of stereotyping itself. Novels have tended, the feminists argue, to identify the fully human with the male-to see women as flat embodiments of a particular force or theme, to see them mythically, allegorically, symbolically, but never realistically -as fully rounded, complex human beings. Sometimes idealized, sometimes denigrated, woman is repeatedly the Other-her personality and her life's plot