How to be a Heroine: Or, What
I’ve Learned from Reading Too Much by Samantha Ellis
After an argument over which Brontë sister (Charlotte or Emily) wrote
the best novels, Samantha Ellis decides to revisit all the novels she read in
which she found the heroines from her younger days. Approaching them as an
adult she asks who has the better heroines, and to what are they teaching girls
to aspire? It transpires the answer is mainly marriage and motherhood. “All the
heroines’ stories seemed to end in death or marriage.”
As a child she read fairytales, in which the heroines are usually
passive princesses waiting to be rescued by a man. In these stories mothers are
evil, jealous harridans, and mature women are bitter, ugly old crones. Angela
Carter delightfully subverts these themes in her re-imagining of the tales in The Bloody Chamber, which Ellis read
with glee.
She intersperses the literary critiques with anecdotes
from her family history, outlining her feelings of displacement and her
struggles to fit in. She notes that the stories from her childhood were no
longer satisfactory as she grew up. Whereas she identified with the feisty
heroines, many of whom were creative types, she was horrified to find that Anne
of Green Gables and Jo March (Little
Women) both give up their writing when they eventually get married to
devote themselves to ‘family life’. Instead she found herself attracted to
Shakespeare’s characters, who resisted their families and broke society’s
rules.
Her undergraduate reading reintroduced the notion of female passivity
and that suffering had value – all the heroines did it, and it ennobled them.
From Clarissa by Samuel Richardson to
Miss Julie by August Strindberg or Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas
Hardy, all these noble women suffered terribly for their dignity, and it
doesn’t go unnoticed that all these beatific portraits are written by men. Once
again she turned to theatre and its inherent vitality. She loved her theatrical
heroines and their environment in which there was a lot of superficiality, but
also “people who were open about their ambitions, ready to live with thin skins
and open hearts”.
It seems that Ellis has fallen out of love with Cathy, and has changed
her mind about her heroine. “Back then, I wanted my heroines to show me new
ways to be, like heedless, selfish Cathy. I didn’t want heroines who mirrored
my own anxieties too accurately. But maybe I’ve changed. Or at least: maybe I’m
changing.” She concludes that our tastes change as we grow older, which is
natural and perfectly acceptable. “I’m beginning to think all readings are
provisional, and that maybe we read heroines for what we need from them at the
time.”
Maybe we read to learn things; maybe we read to escape; maybe we read to
find new characters and role models; maybe we just read. And if our reasons to
do so, and the characters we admire change from time to time, that seems
perfectly understandable too.
