Rebecca Allen

A worried feminist mother asks, in the Times magazine, What’s Wrong With Cinderella? (via Chaos Theory). A valid question indeed, and one a lot of people have wondered about in the few decades. It seems like a good thing — we want young girls to have strong female role models; Cinderella is the Princess archetype. She’s beautiful and kind, even in the face of adversity, and in the end, those traits raise her up by way of marriage to a handsome Prince. The worry is that girls who grow up on a steady diet of Pricesses will put themselves into that box; that they’ll forego their own interests and talents to become generically sweet and feminine, and their only goal will be marriage. I think that most feminists would concur that, while it’s fine for that to be a woman’s true desire and goal in life, we don’t want girls to be preconditioned to it, or to feel that something is wrong if they don’t want that. It’s a valid concern.

As it goes on, the article touches on the trouble of finding a happy medium to present to girls. The writer in question doesn’t want her daughter to worship Cinderella’s femininity-as-all-important subtext, but instead, the message her daughter got was that Mommy Hates Princesses, and she doesn’t want that to be interpreted as, “Mommy hates girls and I need to be a boy.” Because femininity isn’t bad; forcing it upon girls is bad. So where’s the happy medium, where the little girl will know that Mommy loves her, no matter what she chooses to be, and that she can choose for herself what that is? It’s one of those things that makes me glad I’m not yet a parent; god knows I’ve got no idea how to resolve the dilemma.

But it does strike a cord for me as a writer, particularly a writer of fantasy, who’s tried my hand at more than a couple of Princess characters. I know that when I write, I want to present characters who somehow reflect my feminism. I want to produce dynamic female characters, women who are intelligent and have agency, I want them to be exciting to read about. * And I think there are many writers who would agree with me, and who are trying their damned to create these characters.

But there’s also a problem with these ultra-feminist characters, which is that many of them just aren’t very good. They tend to be characters who are female but are given many traditionally masculine traits; in the attempt to make them ass-kicking girls, they become ultra-strong. But writers don’t dare turn away from tropes which mean these characters are beautiful, because after all, no one wants anyone to equate “strong woman” with “ugly”. And yet somehow, those characters who are both female and intelligent are not the ones with physical strength (I suppose to avoid the character becoming too perfect would be a rational reason for it, though actual people don’t work like that). And the characters who are smart still seem, by and large, to be less attractive (though, of course, they clean right up if they happen to also be a love interest!). But anyway, I’ve already touched on that. I suppose my problem can be summed up with this: due to all of these archetypes and paradigms floating around, even though people are trying to create dynamic female characters, they often fail.

My best example for this would be the Pendragon series by D.J. MacHale. I only read the first two books, as I’d gotten a compilation with both of them, and wasn’t too impressed with them. Though I had a couple of problems other than the female characters, that was the one that had me gritting my teeth he most frequently. There are two semi-important female characters in those two books. The first one is Courtney, the protagonist’s potential love interest. She’s the most popular girl in school, she’s beautiful (without working at it or trying, if I recall — I read them awhile ago), she’s a lauded athlete, and the book begins with her confessing that she has a serious crush on our hero, and making out with him. Our second female character is Loor, one of the mysterious Travelers who travels from world to world, trying to prevent the series villain from taking over. Like Courtney, she’s incredibly beautiful. Like Courtney, she’s graceful and strong. Oh, and one other fun facet they share: neither one is particularly intelligent. Loor is a trained warrior who is most comfortable following orders (and then, despite having been presented as “strong”, in the first novel it’s revealed that she can’t swim and has to be saved by the hero when they’re in the water, and at the climax she’s knocked unconscious and has to be saved by him again, so she’s not even fulfilling the brawn half of a brains-and-brawn duo, she’s just sort of…there. Oh, and she’s written out and replaced with a male character as the sidekick in the second book,) where Courtney is described by one of the protagonist’s other friends as not much of a thinker. He’s worried about the disappeared hero, but she isn’t, because she just hasn’t thought through all the danger that he’s in, and their involvement could put them in, too. Gosh.

So you’ve got two “strong” female characters, both of whom are following along with what the closest male character wants to do. And they’re both so good at everything (except thinking!) that it really screams to an alert reader that MacHale did want them to be role model female characters — particularly, I think, Courtney, who is supposed to be a high school student akin to those who might be reading the series. Like the girls in the Cinderella article, she’s supposed to be good at everything, nice to everyone, and an all-around supergirl, without being too threatening to boys by being smarter than they are. And all of this thrown together means that not only is she falling into unfortunate stereotypes, she’s also incredibly dull. And the root of the problem with her writing might just be that MacHale is just trying too hard.

It suspect that he, and other writers who struggle to present dynamic female characters, want to show her strength by having her be good at so many things. But not only does this show us that “good” means being traditionally masculine (in fact, Courtney is so athletic that she’s removed from the girls’ gym class and put into the boys’, where she still dominates, because she’s just so much like a dude), and not only does it exclude intelligence from the category of “good”, it leads to really dull characters. In fandom, they’d be considered Mary Sue characters: the ones who are so perfect that you hope they choke. And for all those reasons, even though it seems like MacHale tried pretty hard to present that elusive dynamic female character, he fell short. So the question for writers is, how to actually create dynamic female characters?

The answer as I see it is to simultaneously worry about gender balance, and then forget entirely that you’re writing females. As contradictory as that sounds, my reasoning goes like this: a lot of writers have inherent biases towards male characters. Male is the cultural default; it’s usually assumed that the physically stronger characters will be male; it’s usually assumed that the more intelligent characters will be male; it’s usually assumed that people prefer to read about male characters. None of those assumptions are fair, and it’s important that writers realize those biases exist, and are careful to present a somewhat gender balanced book. But once that’s realized, I think the real key is to not g out of your way to develop “strong female characters”. Instead, try to develop female characters the same way you’d develop the males. They develop around the plot, or with a core driving force behind them, or whatever; everyone develops characters differently. But instead of listing all the things they need in order to be strong, let them develop naturally, just like you would for a male character. As long as you’re careful to avoid playing into your own biases, writing females shouldn’t be any harder than writing males. And instead of winding up with a cardboard archetype, like the pink-clad Princess, you might actually wind up with a real dynamic female character

(See? I kind of brought that full circle, there.)

* I call them dynamic female characters rather than strong female characters to avoid conflating the idea of a well fleshed out, well written female character with a female character who is physically strong.