Women in word

Written glory

From Isabella Swan of ‘Twilight’ series to Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Little Women’, Shinie Antony examines the fairer sex in fiction and culls out an answer to the question — why Elizabeth Bennet will never fade away?

Meet Lisbeth Salander, a computer hacker, Bella Swan, Mrs Vampire, or even Hermione Granger, a sleuth somewhat supernatural; all fictional females who are household names.

They travel from somebody’s imagination into ours with all the unapologetic familiarity of their flesh and blood counterparts. They take up permanent residence in our heads, rustle around in silk, shuffle in starched petticoats or even hop on long bare legs.

Jane Eyre, Rebecca, Scarlett O’ Hara, Lady Chatterley, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Anna Karenina, the Bennet sisters, the Little Women of the March family, and all female figments of Shakespeare’s imagination from Miranda to Lady Macbeth are with us in print as in person.

Prim or promiscuous, looking up archly or dripping with common sense, in spiky heels or sensible pumps, bejewelled all over or hair drawn tightly in a bun, they wield considerable power over mere mortals by first advancing amidst us with all the confidence of a well-etched character and then firmly settling down as reference points, comparison studies and living examples.

Fictional women who made a mark

Made up by male and female writers once upon a time, it takes only a tale for the storybook citizens to turn role models. If Madame Bovary went all out to maintain her flibbertigibbet persona in the past, the Twilight belle makes most of her melancholy in the present. Girls get published plenty: Tracy Chevalier’s The Girl with a Pearl Earring, forced by circumstances to be servile, the spunky Girl With a Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson and the quite hormonal Girl With a One-Track Mind by Abby Lee. The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank, in subversive chick-lit text hints how ‘datey dates’ could be fatal to furthering man-woman contact.

The fairer sex in fiction are enabled to go from synthetic to organic by creators who fashion fables out of facts or the nearest approximation of facts. The detailing, empathy, sometimes minute by minute recording of female reactions, are reminiscent enough of the real to echo back this fidelity to truth.

This is best brought out by Michael Cunningham in The Hours when he writes about Virginia Woolf beginning Mrs Dalloway: “Her mind hums. This morning she may penetrate the obfuscation, the clogged pipes, to reach the gold. She can feel it inside her, an all but indescribable second self, or rather a parallel, purer self. If she were religious, she would call it the soul. It is more than the sum of her intellect and her emotions, more than the sum of her experiences…”

Whether it is Banana Yoshimoto’s magical Kitchen where a young girl copes with her grandmother’s death or Roddy Doyle’s stark The Woman Who Walked into Doors on domestic violence, the stress against falsification, physical as well as spiritual, is what inherently works for the protagonists.

We run into the fragrant Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Margaret Atwood’s Edible Woman, Sylvia Plath’s Esther in Bell Jar, Paulo Coelho’s Veronika who decides to die, the religious Sarah Miles and her promise to herself in Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair or poor Sophie who makes a tragic choice in William Styron’s novel and straight off experience a clairvoyance about them, as if they were people we were meant to meet.

Miss Marple, Harriet Vane and Stephanie Plum see as many corpses as male detectives do in a day’s work. Lasses in literature trek to the screen — Eliza Doolittle from Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion to My Fair Lady, Iranian Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha. If Jane Austen’s Juvenilia collection, Marina Lewycka’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian and Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil amuse, frankness finds its sequencing in books by Erica Jong, Anais Nin, Pauline Reage.

Female perspectives are at play in Elfriede Jelnike’s Women in Love, Doris Lessing’s, The Golden Notebook and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Where Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin or Rajaa Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh challenge our muteness, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones and Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic offer a verbosity entirely to our liking.

Just like sidelined women in mythology meriting a second look, those with a shorter say in books often rise above their ‘minor character’ station. While Susan in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge is auctioned off by a drunk husband, Jenny meets the father of her son most uniquely in John Irving’s The World According to Garp.

And therein lies the magic of authorial jurisdiction. A woman rises, fully created, flaws and all, out of nowhere to belie and mock her own non-existence until that very moment.

Once called forth she cannot be banished. When Saki says at the end of The Open Window, “Romance at short notice was her specialty”, we take away, in that moment of charmed readership, the author’s own specialty in rendering Vera, with that one sentence, immortal.