Finding feminism in the pages of literature
For as long as I can remember, I have been an avid reader. Throughout middle school and high school, my best friend and I bonded over “book-hunting” in the school library, and over the years we fought minotaurs with Percy Jackson, went on undercover spy missions at Cherub, fawned over Artemis Fowl’s criminal mastermind, hated Katniss Everdeen with a passion, and, of course, devoured page after page of Bella’s description of Edward Cullen’s perfect nose. More or less anything I could get my hands on, I read.
In early 2017, I picked up a particularly popular novel by a particularly popular (male) author which changed my entire life. What particularly changed my life was a paragraph of lustful description of the only female character in the book, who just happened to be incredibly sexually appealing in all her intelligence and physique (in a non-threatening way, of course). As I suffered through the unnecessary account of how well she pulled off a white tank top and jean shorts, it dawned upon me that in my almost 20 years of life, I had not read nearly enough novels by female authors. It was at this point that I, utterly disgusted by the one-dimensionality of every female character I could recall in almost every novel I had read (however much I loved it), decided that 2017 would be the year that I would consciously choose to read more books by women.
I am not claiming that every book ever written by a man is inherently sexist or that men, by default, cannot create complex female characters. I am only saying that there is an entire realm of emotions and experiences about being a woman that male writers have never experienced and therefore their writing does not reflect it.
Consciously reading books by women exposed me to a whole new representation of my identity as a woman. There are tiny bits and pieces of the life that only women know sprinkled into the details of each story that I had never before found in literature. It was in Esther’s frustration with everyone around her waiting for her to turn her mind around about not wanting marriage and kids, in Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar’. It was in Scout from ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’s constant battle with her neighbours’ expectations of her to wear more dresses and stay in more as she grew older. It was in Francie’s observation of how women around her shamed other women for their sexuality in ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ — the cold hard reality of how women themselves pose obstacles to other women in a patriarchal society. In Alice Walker’s ‘The Color Purple’, it was the simple remark on how a lot of men talk to women — ‘mansplaining’ — which is sadly still relevant to a lot of our experiences today — “…they listen just long enough to issue instructions. They don’t even look at women when women are speaking.”
The unceasing struggle that I as a woman face against the patriarchal and conventional roles set for me has been experienced not only by women that I personally know but also by women before me — in 1930s Brooklyn, in 1800s England, in pre-Civil War Georgia — this discovery was both painful and wonderful to experience. As if the tiny secrets of survival that I have had to bear my entire life, that I never thought had space in literature, were being spilled out to women from all over the world and all timelines — getting together in solidarity and whispering, confessing, consoling, ‘Me too’. You’ll find traces of it in Austen and Bronte and Woolf and Eliot (forget not that some of these authors had to adopt male pseudonyms to have their work taken seriously, and some, such as George Eliot, are still known by their male pseudonym).
Long before they had the right to vote, these female characters defied sexist social standards in every way, but most of all, by thinking for themselves and being complex, intelligent, independent characters. In a world where women are still struggling to be heard and validated as full persons — through #metoo and #talkaboutit — I think that being a complex and independent person is the epitome of empowerment, and here were such empowered women splattered across the world throughout history, as if in some undisclosed unanimity.
If you are female, reading more books by women will connect you to the unmentioned little struggles as a woman of women who lived lives so vastly different from you. If you are not female, reading them (which I hope you do with the utmost respect to their experiences as women) will give you some crucial understanding of the lives of all the women around you. For the #metoo era, to gain a full understanding and therefore validation of women’s experiences, the effort to consciously read more books by women is one that will move us forward. We must trace back to how the same patriarchal system has been poisoning our lives as long as women have broken silence through the defiant act of writing.
