Posted on

Men writing about women: how male authors have depicted female characters

Lydia (Year 11) investigates the portrayal of women in literature, a field that has largely been controlled by the male voice, and how this has changed throughout the centuries.

The literary world has always been (and remains) dominated by men. As male writers create their female characters, they often fall short of capturing the interesting, vivid complexity of womanhood which we, as women, know to be reality. Since Shakespeare’s heyday, it’s fair to say that the role of women in society has changed significantly; but how has this change affected how male writers portray women in literature, if it has at all?

When Shakespeare’s Macbeth was performed (circa. 1602), women were expected to be submissive to their husbands, punished for being ‘scolds’ or ‘nags’. Fear of women’s speech was prevalent, spread by imperious treatises. The extremely popular treatise, Anatomy of a Woman’s Tongue, claimed

“A woman’s tongue it is the devil’s seat;

and that it is a most pernicious lyar,

a backbiter and a consuming fire”

summing up misogynistic attitudes of the Jacobeans with a catchy rhyme. And, of course, there were the witch burnings, vast numbers of women executed for being transgressive, reclusive or powerful.

This attitude towards women is noticeable in Shakespeare’s work as he links the powerful women in Macbeth to the world of spirits and demons. Through studying Macbeth and watching various productions, such as that performed at the National Theatre, it is easy to be struck by how Shakespeare presents women as a manipulative force, blaming them for the immoral actions of men. The misogynistic attitude behind this becomes obvious when compared to how Shakespeare presents Macbeth himself, murderer of the sleeping king and his own close friend, as a basically good, if slightly unhinged, man.

Another greatly beloved male writer is Charles Dickens. By the time Great Expectations was published in 1860, the Jacobeans and their witches were centuries dead, though reductive attitudes towards women lived on. The continued ownership of women by men and the surprising lack of social progress in the centuries between Macbeth and Great Expectations is revealed by similarities between Dickens’ and Shakespeare’s portrayal of women.

In Macbeth, Shakespeare portrays Lady Macbeth’s desire for power as unnatural and dangerous as she orders spirits to remove remorse and conscience from her body and replace her breast-milk with acid. Dickens uses uncannily similar imagery of mutilation and hardening in Great Expectations as the proud Estella claims “I have no heart … I have no softness there, no—sympathy—sentiment—nonsense” and Miss Havisham echoes “I stole her heart away and put ice in its place.” This idea that all women who transgress the role of tender, servile femininity must be unnatural perversions of nature is used by both Shakespeare and Dickens, revealing that, despite the centuries passed, men continued to hold the same views regarding the role of women in society.

Dickens is famed for his portrayal of meek, simpering virgins (often paired with epithets such as ‘dear’ and ‘little’). In Great Expectations this trope manifests itself in Clara Barley. Clara is a paradigm of servility, tending constantly to her abusive father yet still managing to appear “natural and winning” and well as “confiding, loving and innocent”.  Dickens reveals Victorian attitudes that women should be submissive, praising Clara’s “modest manner of yielding herself to Herbert’s embracing arm.” The anti-Estella, Clara is just as two-dimensional, a figment of the imagination of the imperious male.

The 20th Century saw great change in how women were viewed in society, earning the vote in Britain in 1918. The end of the 1920s saw the Equal Franchise Act passed, granting equal voting rights to women. Did this rapid progress, and the surging momentum of the feminist movement, pave the way for a parade of wonderful heroines written by men?

It seems not, if John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, best-seller of the 1930s, is anything to go by, featuring not one named female character, only ‘Curley’s wife’, the self-absorbed, cruel and teasing caricature of female shallowness and naivety. Steinbeck punishes this woman for her crimes of promiscuity and stupidity with a broken neck, echoing the methods of past writers; Shakespeare delivers Lady Macbeth a grizzly suicide and Estella is condemned to a life of abuse at the hands of Drummel. Though Steinbeck sticks fast to the well-trodden tropes of two-dimensional femininity, the literary world has a growing female voice in this decade as Daphne du Morier, Agatha Christie and Virginia Woolf begin penning novels of their own, featuring swathes of heroines.

However, men have, on occasion, written brilliant female characters: for example Shakespeare’s Juliet and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, but these are exceptions to a centuries old pattern in which women are written as either fantastical paragons of innocence or cruel monsters. The recent twitter trend, which inspired this article, asserts that this pattern marches onwards to the present day. So as far as writing funny, interesting, realistic women goes, I guess it’s down to us.

Follow @English_WHS on Twitter

Posted on

Twilight vs Jane Eyre: what separates the two?

Claire (Y11) investigates the relationship between Twilight and two classic novels, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, to discover what makes them similar but more importantly what divides them.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that books written about vampires are almost exclusively terrible, and in no case is this truer than in that of Twilight. Widely considered to be one of the worst books ever written, it is generally believed to have absolutely no literary merit whatsoever, despite the story itself being age-old and popular under many other circumstances. Among those circumstances is Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and to a lesser extent, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. What is interesting is that both of those books are hailed as literary classics and taught on many school curriculums, despite the fact that in terms of storyline, there is very little that actually separates them from Twilight. So why is it that the Brontë sisters’ novels are deemed masterful works of literature, whilst Twilight is relegated to the trash pile?

In many ways, the books are very similar. All three have a brooding, Byronic male protagonist – Edward Cullen, Edward Rochester, and Heathcliff – who falls in love with a female protagonist – Bella Swan, Jane Eyre, and Catherine Earnshaw. There are definitely some differences in the traits of these female protagonists, but at a basic level, they are addicted to their counterparts in a ‘passionate’ love which actually seems more like an abusive relationship. Catherine says, “I am Heathcliff”, a sentiment very similar to Bella’s expression that “(her) life was about (Edward)” and although Jane famously states that she is a “free human being with an independent will”, apparently marking her out as not being as addictively in love as Catherine and Bella, she does eventually fall prey to the same obsession.

All three stories are also set in isolated locations, cut off from society and rendering the romance central to the plot as there is very little outside influence. Bella finds herself in the small American town of Forks, where Edward and his family take centre stage as local curiosities. Jane is relegated to Ferndean Manor, which itself is located deep within the forest, and the other characters have little influence on her relationship with Mr Rochester. And Wuthering Heights, of course, is set in the iconic Yorkshire moors, where the surroundings seem to reflect the dynamic of the relationship – harsh, inhospitable, and inexplicably alluring. This feeling of isolation, this detachment from the outside world is what allows all three romances to blossom into the obsessive and damaging relationships they ultimately become.

There are other similarities, of course. All three female protagonists are ‘othered’ by society, be it by virtue of simply being a teenage girl or by their feminist principles. All three are ceaselessly self-obsessed; Jane dwells on herself endlessly, Bella is conscious of her every flaw, and although Catherine seems far less self-deprecating, that does not mean she is not selfish. And throughout all three novels runs a feeling of the scandalous, the inappropriate and the exciting. Edward is, of course, a vampire, and over 100 years older than Bella is. Mr Rochester is Jane’s employer, and there is a gap in class and age. Heathcliff is Catherine’s adopted brother, and implied to be Romani in origin – certainly, he is not white. These factors tie common threads between the stories, linking their characters.

What is it that renders Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights simply better novels than Twilight?

So if the characters are essentially the same, the setting is essentially the same, and the basic storyline is essentially the same, what is it that renders Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights simply better novels than Twilight? One of the most obvious factors is the context. The Brontës were women writing books at a time when women generally didn’t, and although their novels were published under pseudonyms, it does not detract from the fact that they rebelled against the norm and published works of fiction which went on to become classics. It would have taken extraordinary courage and talent to write and then attempt to publish such literature, and it shows in the novels themselves. By contrast, Meyer was able to sit down and simply write, and then have her book published with relative ease. This means Twilight, although not altogether terrible, is simply very boring. It is not a novel of challenge and struggle, and that too shows in the writing.

Another thing that marks the Brontë sisters’ works from Meyer’s is the fact that Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre are, objectively, better-written. The prose style of Twilight is simple, bland and unremarkable – the descriptions are extremely mundane and Bella’s simpering first-person style is insipid at best and exasperating at worst. In contrast, both Brontë sisters offer rich and interesting writing, replete with elegant descriptions of landscape and emotion, and when Jane narrates, her first-person voice is, although occasionally irritating, undoubtedly compelling. Wuthering Heights is also a much more complex story, spanning generations of characters without losing track of the development of any, and although it is not the polished masterpiece that Jane Eyre is, it is certainly a triumph. Twilight is, to put it kindly, not.

None of this is to say that Twilight isn’t worth reading. All literature has an inherent anthropological value, in that it teaches us about the culture of the time, and Twilight does a very good job of informing readers that in the mid-2000s, people were obsessed by vampires. The undeniable fact, however, is that it is not a particularly good book, and that for all its similarities to the Brontë sisters’ masterpieces, it does not hold up well in comparison.

@English_WHS