The Infinite Gamut of Female Protagonists

Kari wrote a post about female heroines a while back and mentioned how the characters we have been reading about are not really strong or heroic except for Juliet. I disagreed--I think most of the women we have seen have been strong in many different ways. Not all of them are agressive, and some of them deal with their problems in unconventional ways. But Juliet, Penelope, Addie, and Dewy Dell all have similarities in that they are living in a man's world and are carving out places for themselves. I decided to discuss a few different stories with female protagonists because there are many different kinds, and they do not all have to be like Juliet to be powerful.

Hua Mulan: Mulan is the stereotypical powerful heroine, and she is, like Juliet, a "bad-ass" girl who will fight for what she wants. Like Juliet, she has good motives for what she is doing and is pretty selfless, choosing to sacrifice her own life for her father's much as Juliet sacrificed her life for knowledge. Ballad of Mulan. She is working out of a sense of duty, not out of a dream for freedom.
Strength as a female protagonist: selflessly courageous and willing to fight with men
Weakness: not really doing it because she is following her own dream

Katniss Everdeen: Katniss Everdeen is also very similar to Juliet and Mulan, since she can use a bow and arrow and is willing to fight anyone to protect her family and her people. She does not like violence, but she is willing to do what she has to and ultimately becomes the leader of the rebellion that frees the people under the capitol rule. She is similarly clever and cunning, but her story is complicated by the love triangle between Peeta, Gale, and herself
Stength: strong fighter with courage and love for her family that drives her to save them
Weakness: indecisiveness that interferes with her strength, doesn't really even want to lead the rebellion

Scheherazade: Scheherazade is brave because she volunteers to marry the king who kills maidens after spending only one night with them. She is clever. telling the kings stories that are so interesting that he falls in love with her. She is standing up to the king, saving other women, and eventually earning a place in the king's heart and a role as his queen.
Strength: uses her cleverness and skills to make the best of a bad situation
Weakness: life is driven by the king's decision, eventually becomes his queen (story ends in marriage and love)

Jo March: Lives a fairly typical life for a girl in America in the 1800s, but breaks boundaries by becoming an author, acting in family plays as a boy, and eventually pursuing a life as the owner of a home for boys. She marries the man she loves. She is determined, persistent, unrepressable, and kind.
Strength: carves out her success as an author with hard work and is unwilling to sacrifice her own personality to fit in better in the time in which she lives
Weakness: life is focused around domesticity and eventually marrying and setting up house, worries about things like whether her dresses are nice or not

Clearly, there are many different types of strong women in literature, and all of them have different strengths and flaws. Because the number of women in literature has historically been low, we now seem to want to see heroines who are strong in every single way, who reject love and concerns with appearance, and who are able to make decisions and to jump into physical or metaphorical battle immediately. But male characters are complex and there are many different types of male heroes. We should embrace the variety of female protagonists, understanding that they are going to have flaws and that those flaws are not necessarily a comment on female strength.

The Many Facets of Love in A Memory of Running

Today in class, Isaak made a very interesting comment about love and its complications. It is true that the English language has only one word for love while  some other languages have many, many different ways of expressing love. In terms of sheer number of terms, the ancient languages are the winners: Sanskrit has 96 different terms for love, and ancient Persian has 80. From Sanskrit, bhakti is related to divine love, while karuna refers to compassion, mitrasneha and mihr refer to friendship, and kama refers to sexual attraction. Apparently, English speakers have boiled down the infinite variety of feelings related to love into one confusing word that does nothing to tell us about the relationships between people.

Smithy and his sister do seem to have an intimate relationship. Bethany seems to be Smithy's only real friend and companion, and Bethany does not seem to have that much of a social life either (the only social situation we see her in does not end particularly well. Smithy and Bethany share the kind of understanding that occurs only between siblings because they are about the same age and are living and growing up together. Additionally, Smithy knows just about everything about his sister--even if he doesn't entirely understand the voice, he has seen what it makes her do and understands her situation much better than the doctor. It seems like he might understand Bethany better even than their parents because he has often been the one to find her.

Thinking that the love that exists between Smithy and Bethany is "creepy" or semi-incestuous would sort of ruin the book for me, because I want to like Smithy and I do like him for allowing himself to change. I think that Smithy is innately good at heart, and the whole journey in the book hinges on that assumption. If that assumption is false, it kind of ruins the journey. Additionally, I think many of the ways that people used to act towards one another are now branded as "creepy" by the younger generation; many people are very quick to use negative labels to describe things. We should let Smithy love Bethany however he wants to, and Donna should love Carl however she wants to even if he is gay, and we should be careful not to judge their love with limiting terms.


For fun--more words related to love that we don't have in English:

• Forelsket: Norwegian word for the feeling you have while falling in love, opposed to the feeling of actually being in love
• Tokimeki: Japanese word for the bubbly feeling of falling in love
• Gezelligheid: Dutch word for the feeling of comfort felt when at home and among loved ones
• Kilig: Filipino for the feeling of butterflies in the stomach in response to something romantic
• Razlubit: Romanized Russian for the bittersweet feeling of falling out of love
• Mamihlapinatapei: Yagan word for the feeling between two people who are interested in one another but who are afraid to start anything