Posts Tagged ‘heroines’

Whenever I’m asked which heroines The Heroine’s Bookshelf includes, I try to go through the list and inevitably miss one or two authors.  Humiliation!  Shame!  Anyway, a lot of you have asked me who I talk about and in what context, and I figured I’d just tease you with the TOC for good measure:

Introduction
Self: Lizzy Bennet, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Faith: Janie Crawford, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Happiness: Anne Shirley, Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Dignity: Celie, The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Family Ties: Francie Nolan, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
Indulgence: Claudine, The Claudine Novels by Colette
Fight: Scarlett O’Hara, Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Compassion: Scout Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Simplicity: Laura Ingalls, The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Steadfastness: Jane Eyre, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Ambition: Jo March, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Magic: Mary Lenox, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Epilogue & Acknowledgments

One of the most painful parts of writing this book was realizing who I couldn’t include…The Betsy-Tacy books of Maud Hart Lovelace, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Anne Frank, and about 2353252525235 others.  But what a list!

Which chapter are you most excited about?  Which heroines do you wish I’d been able to cover?

I could probably write three books on crappy mothers in literature (not to mention the angelic ones like Caroline Ingalls or Marmee), but a simple blog post will have to suffice as I reflect on a few of literature’s most insufficient, yet appealing, moms.  Who would you add to this  list?

Scarlett O’Hara, Gone With the Wind:  Scarlett is not beautiful, nor is she a good mother at all.  We can barely chasten Rhett Butler for telling her a cat is a better mother than she, for Mrs. Hamilton/Kennedy/Butler extravagantly neglects the sheepish son and the ugly daughter who precede lovely little Bonnie Blue.  (Side note:  Margaret Mitchell’s portrayal of Wade Hampton Hamilton’s reaction to the events of the siege of Atlanta are brilliant and well worth rereading for anyone looking to learn a great lesson about conveying terror, the sweep of historical events, and the plot intricacies of main characters)  Though Scarlett gets punished for her neglectful motherhood in the end, we can’t help but wonder how her own angelic mom’s lessons never managed to wear off on her…and somehow manage to identify with her all the same.

Joan Crawford, Mommie Dearest: Okay, so Joan isn’t exactly a fictional character, though God only knows how fictitious her daughter’s famous tell-all memoir really is.  One fact, however, is abundantly clear:  JOAN CRAWFORD WAS AN EVIL MOTHER.  Attempted stranglings?  Throwing her daughter’s adopted status in her face?  Wire-hangered beatings?  Yeah.  Chalk it up to old Joan, who really knew how to bring the drama to her trainwreck family.

Mrs. Bennet, Pride and Prejudice: Our next selection is not so much a terrible mother as a very…misguided one.  Burdened with the cross of five daughters to marry off, Mrs. Bennet has many pressing worries.  But worse than her bumbling around all matrimonial affairs is a complete disregard of her daughters’ feelings that we have to admit seems excessive, even for the turn of the nineteenth century.  Mrs. Bennet is also…clueless.  “My poor nerves, you tear them to pieces! But I never complain.”

Ingrid Magnussen, White Oleander: Cruelty, neglect, abandonment, and even murder are all on good old Ingrid’s plate at some point, but once again the emotional aspects of the relationship between this anti-heroine and her daughter are of the most interest to me.  It isn’t that Ingrid is evil (she is)…it’s that she is utterly unable to identify with the daughter she gave birth to, and Janet Fitch explores the fallout of a mother’s failure in a pulpy, poignant read.

(Not to be confused with Sweatin’ to the Oldies!)  I’m in Writing Mode, which for my long-suffering boyfriend means having to deal with someone who is clumsier, more preoccupied, and spacier than ever.  But spewing out the world’s most terrible first draft isn’t always (or ever) a cakewalk, and I have reason to call upon “my heroines” for moral support on the way.  Bear with me as I give myself a pep talk and point to five ways my literary heroines, both fictional and real-life, motivate my writing:

• Writing as fun:  Who can forget the image of Jo March scribbling in her attic, cap on head, pillow at the ready, rats scurrying all around?  Though I know that Louisa May Alcott’s experience of the writing “vortex” was a bit more painful, her character’s no-holds-barred approach to writing reminds me to have some fun with the process.  After all, what other profession includes dreaming, crying, even eavesdropping in its description?
• Writing as salvation:  The story of the Brontës is all I need to remember that I am lucky to have the outlet of writing.  I may not pace around a table at Haworth, but like Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, I try to pour my relief and anxiety into my work.  It helps.
• Writing as rebellion:  She may have written a century ago, but I still consider Colette to be the ultimate literary rebel (and writing about her literary declaration of independence was one of the highlights of The Heroine’s Bookshelf).  Sometimes I find myself continuing work just to prove to myself that I can…that I have something to say, after all.  And I usually do.
• Writing as legacy:  I recently treated myself both to Francine Prose’s excellent new Anne Frank book and the Revised Critical Edition of Anne’s timeless diary.  I didn’t get a chance to include Anne in my book, but I am touched by her awareness that her legacy in the world was a written one.  I won’t ever presume to be an Anne, but thoughts of a literary legacy of some kind are a nice reminder when the going gets tough (and a push to revise the hell out of my terrible first drafts so that nobody reads them when I’m gone!).
• Writing as reading:  As an unabashed bookworm, I can say that there’s nothing so tantalizing as the thought of showing my work to others, no matter how painful that process might be.  The wit, spunk, and sass of my favorite heroines reminds me that I can’t have readers unless I write.  Talk about motivation!

I recently had the pleasure of having coffee with the well-spoken and fascinating Nava Atlas, a writer, vegan cook, and visual artist whose popular Dear Literary Ladies blog is currently being turned into a book.  We were talking about the way the Internet has revolutionized the idea of being a fan, allowing readers of all cultures, ages, and locations to converge around their favorite authors and books.

Ever since then, I’ve been thinking about another set of conversations I started having when I arrived at Smith College as a confused seventeen-year-old ready to take on the world.  Inevitably, I’d feel uncomfortable as I started to converse with young women whose backgrounds and socioeconomic histories couldn’t have been more different than mine…until heroine magic happened and we were talking like old friends about The Babysitters Club or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or Jane Eyre.

And it occurred to me:  in a way, heroines are glue.  They bind together different generations that can find common ground in the pages of timeless books.  They connect people of wildly different backgrounds, ethnicities, and daily lives in a shared and common experience that is interpreted through a million different lenses.  They’ve allowed me to reach a lifelong dream (publishing my first book), and they’ve also formed the foundation of what I know will be lifelong friendships and connections as I move into an ever-widening world of fandom, readalongs, book blogs, conferences, and conversations.

Here are a few current and upcoming events that will feature heroines as glue…and that I’m super excited to share with all of you.

• ~ BronteAlong:  This awesome initiative is the brainchild of Melissa Averinos and Beth Dunn, two kindred spirits and the founders of Eggplantia, in order to bring together lovers of all things Brontë.  I’ve heard rumors of an AustenAlong and maybe even (eeee) an AlcottAlong rearing their literary heads in the future, and meanwhile I’m so enjoying people’s insightful posts, tweets, and musings about what makes Brontë books so very compelling and special, almost 200 years later.
• ~ LauraPalooza 2010:  I can’t even express how insanely excited my childhood self and my adult one are about participating in the first-ever multi-day academic conference/fan convergence surrounding Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House on the Prairie books.  The fact that going with my mom after a semi-epic roadtrip makes it even more awesome and thrilling and terrifying…I’ll also be presenting a panel with Wendy McClure and Sandra Hume that I’m all fired up about.  My people!  The people who wore bonnets as children!
• ~ Dewey’s Read-a-Thon:  This event is just cool.  For 24 hours on April 10, readers and book bloggers everywhere will challenge themselves to read for one day straight, blog about it, and participate in mini-challenges.  This event has grown to twice a year and I’m so looking forward to this April’s results!
• ~ The Classics Circuit:  This blog has been arranging blog tours for famous authors…with a leetle twist.  They’re all classic authors (i.e. dead).  Heyer.  Wharton.  This is as good as it gets!

So tell me…what heroines bind you to other people?  And what upcoming literary events are exciting you these days?

I got the pretty, pretty page proofs for The Heroine’s Bookshelf over the weekend and have been rereading the book for the 2325632262368236th time (isn’t rereading a book about rereading that you yourself wrote so very meta?).  And, surprise, I’ve been thinking even more about literary heroines and the place they occupy in my life and the life of my friends and fellow readers.  Part of what motivated me to write the book was a sense that none of the books on reading I had come across really managed to convey the power literary heroines have had for me.  But I never expected to tap into a bit of my own resilience and (dare I say it?) heroism while writing a book about heroines.

When you think about it, the idea of heroism is a bit hard to wrap your mind around.  The definition I prefer goes something like this:

expansive: of behavior that is impressive and ambitious in scale or scope; “an expansive lifestyle”; “in the grand manner”; “collecting on a grand scale”; “heroic undertakings”

It’s hard to live your life in a grand manner, especially in times that aren’t exactly expansive.  So often, I’ve seen ambition rewarded with failure, high hopes with blah realities.  As someone who always seemed a bit off-kilter and out of place in her childhood home, I spent a lot of time looking outside myself for role models, people to emulate or call upon when I felt down.  I found many of my heroines in between the pages of the books I love; I found even more in history and some in my own personal life.

In my travels around the blogosphere I recently ran across this sentence by debut author Sonia Gensler, who writes in this blog post:

To the left of the bulletin board is my framed poster of the Brontë sisters. When I’m feeling whiny and pathetic, I think of the Brontës and how isolated they were, how many loved ones they lost, and what a crazy mess their brother was. So many sorrows and distractions threatened their creativity, and yet they managed to be quite prolific. One glance at that poster and I straighten my spine and get back to work.

I’m like Sonia:  after spending a year plus thinking about heroines, I love to invoke the idea of a heroine when, say, I am crampy and cranky and want to crawl into a cave for a year and cut off all contact with humanity.  I invoke the idea before a business meeting that scares the bejeezus out of me.   And I cut myself a bit more slack because I can see the ways in which my miniscule, pitiful daily struggles really speak to something heroic.  I am, after all, the girl who went to Germany knowing two words in the language and survived for a long exchange year at the tender age of fifteen.  I’m the girl who somehow got herself through college, who played roller derby and sung in an indie rock band and has started two successful businesses thus far.  And I’m the girl who, despite my wildest fears and reservations, keeps returning to the page even when nothing comes out right.

I bet you’re a heroine, too.  So…what personal heroism do you have to celebrate these days?  And who are the heroines you call on when you feel like quitting?