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| I loved this book when I was younger |
| because of the double identity. I mostly ignored |
| the heroine. Now, I find her a tad irritating. |
* * *
The passive heroine has made a come-back! This is good and bad.
Fiction is filled with passive heroines. Arguably, there is reason for this; until the last 200 years or so, women in history had relatively few rights. But then, for most of history, most men had relatively few rights. This didn't stop authors from creating powerful female and male characters who took charge of their lives. Legalities aside, women throughout history have lived to the fullness of their personalities and situations, not to the fullness of their lives compared to our lives.
Still, I think it is safe to say that just as the nineteenth century saw a preponderance of "good child" fiction where sweet, well-behaved kiddies overcame their faults and got a pat on the head, much of history has seen a preponderance of passive fictional heroines.
Until contemporary feminism made this a big no-no. All heroines were supposed to be tough and heroic and outspoken, etc. etc. Romances of the pre-70s and 80s got criticized for making their heroines too quick to fall at the feet of domineering men. Romance literature rushed to correct this flaw.
And I have to admit some pre-70s/80s romances can be rather grating, partly for the female passivity and partly because the characters are so darn humorless. (I am naturally not including Austen or Heyer in this assessment.)
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| Jane Austen heroines are not this demure. |
And the passive heroine made a come-back anyway. A great many fictional heroines these days are not interested in jobs or education or self-knowledge (for its own sake); like good eighteenth and nineteenth-century heroines, they focus on marriage. (To justify this, modern writers often trap their heroines in situations beyond their control: historical time frames, relationships with vampires, situations where they are unable to change their circumstances. The plot is about survival, not social progress.)
Passivity also rears its head because women, to an extent, still feel somewhat trapped by biology. (And possibly men do to0, but this post is about women.) When Camille Paglia points to modern medicine as the ultimate instrument of equality, she has a point. There's a reason my grandmother told my mother that "birth control is a gift from God." However, Phyllis Schlafly also had a point that telling women to cut out aspects of their biology (such as child-bearing) is a fairly unrealistic solution to the problems of patriarchy and paternalism. Pretending not to inhabit a female mammal body when one does is silly and even self-destructive.
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| Anne Bradstreet to me is a great example of a woman |
| who made her own way without screaming at the world |
The downside, from my perspective, is that passive heroines can be very boring. Good fiction is about people acting on the world--or at least taking action with their lives (not much of a narrative arc otherwise). Passivity for the sake of passivity, not as a form of clever maneuvering creates heroines like, well, the heroine of Twilight where the heroine is more passive than toast and consequently, more boring than spam.
Where is the line lies between the interesting passive heroine and the boring-as-dirt passive heroine? The first I admire; the second I detest.
To be continued...
