In a speech called “Spotty-Handed Villainesses: Problems of Female Bad Behaviour in the Creation of Literature,” Margaret Atwood talks about the importance of creating characters who are “disruptive to the static order.”This makes perfect sense because, of course, a conflict-free story is not really a story. Plot in fiction often works best when an author gives her audience a protagonist who makes bad choices.Atwood was talking, as her title suggests, about villainous characters, and in this list I’m not interested in evil female characters as much as I am in the depiction of female decision-making: the options available to fictional women and the ways they choose. The decisions a character makes—and that she is and is not permitted to make—can be, as Atwood says, “explorations of moral freedom -- because everyone's choices are limited, and women's choices have been more limited than men's.”The authors on this list afford their protagonists the burden of making their own choices, and each character in her own way shows how, frequently, circumstances both self-created and beyond our control militate against our having whatever it is we most desire.
House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (1905)I’m in a book club here in Chicago that’s been around for about 20 years now and I have it to thank for getting me to read this book. Unexpectedly—given that Lily Bart is a spoiled, social-climbing woman whose primary talent is manipulating those closest to her so she can have her way—I got really emotionally invested in her fate. I couldn't read the novel before bed because I got too upset both at the horrible capitalist game that Lily, as an aging (in her late 20s), unmarried, and relatively powerless woman seeking respectability was forced to play, as well as at her own ineptitude in playing it. Several times during the course of the story Lily arrives at the brink of making a “successful” marriage, but she seems to sabotage herself in each instance, primarily because of her love for the dashing and authentic and unwealthy Lawrence Selden. Yet even as she prevents herself from becoming secure by doing so, so too does she exclude herself from the ranks of what Wharton calls “poor, miserable, marriageable girls.” As Lily’s fortunes continually rise and fall—from sought-after socialite to drug-addicted ex-milliner’s assistant—before irreparably hitting bottom, Wharton makes a powerful argument about what happens to girls who have been raised to be “ornamental,” but who rebelliously crave a more satisfying existence. Lily says of herself that she is really “a very useless person,” and that “I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else,” but so too is she a tragic hero.Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys (1934)I could have listed just about all of Rhys’ work here, but this short novel is uniquely rife with poor decision-making on the part of Anna Morgan, sent from her beloved Caribbean to England by her cruel bourgeois stepmother following the death of her father. With few other options available, Anna tries to earn a living as a chorus girl, eventually catching the eye of a wealthy older gentleman named Walter. At the outset of this arrangement—Anna becomes Walter’s mistress—her fellow chorus girl Maudie advises her, “The thing with men is to get everything you can out of them and not care a damn,” but Anna chooses to ignore this advice, letting herself dream of love and permanence, because she does not want to live in a world where, as Maudie continues, “You can get a very nice girl for five pounds […] people are much cheaper than things.” She tells Maudie to shut up and does what she wants to anyway, resulting in a precipitous descent into a shadowy demimonde following the inevitable jilting. Over and over Anna refuses to accommodate her behavior to other people’s expectations, either to make them like her or to manipulate them as coldly as they do her. Another of her fellow “tarts” tells Anna at one point, “I think you’re a bit of a fool, that’s all. And I think you’ll never get on, because you don’t know how to take people […] you always look half-asleep and people don’t like that.” But Anna’s refusal is heroic in its own stubborn, passive way for its suggestion that she’s actually wise not to participate in a system that’s so unwinnably rigged against women. When, at the end of the book, she nearly dies from a botched abortion and the doctor says “you girls are too naïve to live,” Rhys has made it clear that it’s not naïveté but clear-eyed despair that has left Anna with the need to start her life “all over again.”The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford (1947)I don’t want to ruin this book for you (and I’d also recommend you not ruin it for yourself: skip Jean Stafford’s spoiler introduction) so I’ll try not to say too much. Molly Fawcett, the protagonist of this sharp, dry novel, is eight years old when we meet her in California and twelve when last we see her in Colorado, but she is a committed misanthrope for the duration. Stafford presents her oppositional attitude toward the hypocrisy and unearned authority of the adults around her as justified. Molly is a burgeoning writer who composes mysterious poems that confound her brother Ralph, her only ally (and eventual bitterest enemy). One of them, “Gravel,” reads:
Gravel, gravel on the groundLying there so safe and sound,Why is it you look so dead?Is it because you have no head?
Although Molly’s ultimate fate comes about by apparent accident, her friendlessness and isolation are partly of her own creation, and it’s hard not to imagine that maybe if she had chosen to be more forgiving of herself and others, and if she had been able to find someone to love and trust, things could have turned out differently. The book is flawless, and Molly is a perfect proto-punk, in her rage at the world of middle-class politeness, pretention, and falsehoodPlay it as it Lays by Joan Didion (1970)Maria Wyeth, the arguably washed-up 30-year-old actress protagonist of this compact, feel-bad novel has what her agent refers to as “a very self-destructive personality structure.” Given the litany of terrible decisions that Maria makes—from letting her bullying film director ex-husband coerce her into getting an abortion to having a humiliating one-night stand with a minor movie star that ends her up in jail for drug possession and automobile theft—the agent is correct. Yet even worse than her self-destruction seems to be the purposelessness that underlies it. Submissive to a maddening extent, the only thing Maria seems capable of doing with any intent is driving aimlessly around the endless freeways of Los Angeles because she dreams of “driving into the hard white empty core of the world.” If I had any way to get a book recommendation to Britney Spears, this would be the title that I’d suggest; I think she could really relate to the driftless nihilism that seems to thwart Maria from gaining anything that resembles control over her own life and creative output.The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark (1970)No one writes malevolent discomfort as vividly as Muriel Spark. Her cold, calculated treatment of Lise, the novella’s protagonist makes the whole book feel unpleasant but in a pleasant way. Or at least I thought so. Sam Jordison, in a review of the novel for The Guardian in 2010, the year it was up for the Lost Man Booker Prize, damns it, writing that, “With its excruciating heroine, bleak mood and unconvincing plot, Muriel Spark's unlovable The Driver's Seat could struggle to win the author new fans.” But all the aspects that he says make it unlovable are the things that made me unable to put it down. The experience of reading it—which I did in a single afternoon—felt trashy, flashy, and enormously stylish, like The Postman Always Rings Twice (which I also admire for being about amoral characters who are difficult to identify with, but fascinating to spend time in the presence of). We know early on that Lise, who has left her home in the north for a vacation in an unnamed city in Southern Europe, “will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man's necktie." But as the novel unfolds, we realize that this appalling outcome is exactly what Lise has been seeking; she has deliberately chosen to look for death the way a woman in a different novel might choose to look for love. Her murder is the fulfillment of her decision to abandon a safe but stifling and absurd existence in which almost every detail is out of her control. Lise is without a doubt unhinged and desperate, but I have to respectfully disagree with Jordison and say that her madness and despair are what make this novel as attractive as it is repellent.Sula by Toni Morrison (1973)This is an entry where the title character could be placed in the “spotty-handed” category set forth by Atwood, but even if you consider Sula a villainess, her appeal is undeniable. One of the things I love most about this novel is that while Sula is depicted as the antagonist, and Nel, her demure and socially orthodox best friend(and subsequent irrevocable enemy) is the protagonist, they are essentially opposing halves of one full person. Although Sula is the one who commits the seemingly unforgivable transgression of sleeping with Nel’s husband, it is their stubbornnes that ruins their friendship and keeps both of them from ever being sustainably happy. Also working against them is the fact that many of their best options have been foreclosed by outside forces. As Morrison writes, “Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had to set about creating something else.” Together they add up to a rounded, tragic, and sympathetic character.Ghost World by Dan Clowes (1997)I love Ghost World for a lot of reasons, but particularly for the way this graphic novel depicts female friendship in the form of the funny, fraught, and alternately supportive and competitive relationship between protagonist Enid Coleslaw and her best friend Rebecca Doppelmeyer. Because they are high-schoolers, neither Enid’s nor Rebecca’s personality is fully formed, and both of them make questionable choices, but Enid is by far the worse decision-maker, choosing to associate herself with the self-consciously “offensive” John Ellis (forever talking about Nazis, child porn, and serial killers), to follow a pair of Satanists around a grocery store, to sell her most beloved childhood possessions in a pointless yard sale, and to play cruel pranks on lonely people just because it gives her something to do. Her worst decision, though—because of her fatal combination of misplaced pride in her intellectual abilities and crushing insecurity—is to alienate Rebecca and find herself radically alone at the story’s end.Veronica by Mary Gaitskill (2005)I sometimes teach a class whose heading is “Literature and Identity,” and the theme I use is “The Dishonored Woman in Literature.” One of the movies we watch to supplement the books is BUtterfield 8, whose screenwriters (including John O’Hara, author of the novel on which it is based) go to hamfisted lengths to explain why their “bad” female protagonist, played by Elizabeth Taylor, behaves the way she does. In Taylor’s case, her character’s “sluttiness” (at one point she proclaims, “I’m the slut of the world!”) is attributed to her lack of a father and her sexual abuse by a much older man when she was 13. In Veronica, Mary Gaitskill pointedly refrains from giving her protagonist Alison any such background or opportunity to rationalize her behavior, which includes an incapacity for long-term thinking, as well as the tendency to let herself be taken advantage of and to take advantage of others for no apparent reason other than it is possible to do so. Partly because of this absence of an explanation, half the class usually hates Alison and hates the book. This makes for excellent discussions and also is part of what makes Veronica so memorable: Gaitskill’s refusal to justify or excuse her character’s arguably “bad” / “slutty” / “heartless” behavior makes Alison more realistic, sympathetic, and human.____Kathleen Rooney's debut novel, O, Democracy!, was published last month. Follow her @KathleenMRooney
