Marie Monday

I finally got the motivation to revive this journal from its Christmas vacation hiatus, because the talk about books today made me have thoughts which I want to ramble about. So something a little different:

The Victorian Heroine, sorted into neat, arbitrary categories by Marie according to her whims

I love Victorian novels, especially those written by women, and the main reason for that is the female protagonists. In her most classic form the Victorian heroine is kind, too smart for her own good, fierce, and witty. Some classic female characters are already (partly) discarded when we stick to this class of character:

- The meek little lambs: a prime example is Mina from Dracula, who is otherwise a good character and ticks the other boxes of the Female Victorian Heroine™. Dickens’ books are also full of meek ladies, but they’re usually not even intelligent*. One could argue that Fanny from Mansfield Park falls into this category, but I don’t think that’s fair; she’s shy, but not really meek. Neither is Jane Eyre when she opens up to people: her interaction with Rochester is by far the greatest part of the book to me.
- The ones that are not really a heroine, simply because they’re not a good person. The classic example is Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair. She’s definitely clever and fierce, but she’s also a bad bitch. Let’s call this type the Witch.
- Then there’s good old Cathy from Wuthering Heights, who’s basically a category of her own. Who needs smart and complicated characters (or a sensible plot, or realism, or…) when you can have MORBID PASSION and GOTH DRAMA. We could classify her as a Witch though, I guess. A spooky goth witch in a red dress.

So having done away with that, let’s move on to the ones that do fit into my category. I’d like to classify them by their main personal issues: the part of their character which gets in the way, causes all the ****, and needs to be resolved through character development. For the Victorian heroine, there are two main ones:

Naïveté.
Examples: Most of Jane Austen's heroines (Emma and Marianne being the best ones), George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Molly Gibson (the most charmingly innocent of all heroines). Emma stands out because she’s the only naïve heroine here who actually thinks she’s the opposite. Molly Gibson (apart from being the most endearing one) has the good fortune of having her naïveté juxtaposed with her streetwise stepsister Cynthia (more about her later), with great results. Jane Eyre can be in this list too, but she barely resolves any inner issue. Too much woe-is-me to leave room for introspection: her troubles are pretty much purely those of a harsh, unfair outside world.** To be fair to Charlotte Brontë, the outside world was pretty harsh to her. I like Jane Eyre.

Pride and stubbornness.
In case you didn’t know already, this category is my favourite. Examples: George Eliot’s Mary Garth (bless her stubborn head), Anthony Trollope’s Mary Thorne (who could be Mary Garth’s little sister, with a bit less depth but more superficial charms, because, well, she was written by Trollope instead of Eliot. No hate on Trollope though, he’s awesome), and Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett of course. Wilkie Collins’ Marian Halcombe barely fits in here because she doesn’t really have flaws (literally her only flaw is being ugly lol, a point is made of that in a way which shows it was written by a man of yore), but I include her because the villain of the book plays into her frustration about not being taken seriously as a woman. Respect for Wilkie Collins for having an eye for that. George Eliot's Dinah Morris would also fit in here for being a stubbornly devout Christian, but she doesn't have the sass.

And then there’s Cynthia from Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters. I don’t put her in any category, because she transcends all of them. She’s the greatest character mentioned in this post, and one of the greatest characters ever written. I’m not kidding. She’s definitely not a heroine, she’s much too flawed for that, but she’s certainly not a witch either. She has a good heart, but lacks moral strength and discipline, which is the reason most of us do wrong obviously. She’s the opposite of naïve, but she’s morally too feeble to be proud. But first and foremost she’s great because she has the exact same effect on the reader as on all the characters in the book: when it comes to allure, charisma and fascination she has no equal.

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*Even Dickens himself gets frustrated by them, yeeting David Copperfield’s poor silly first wife Dora out of the book by killing her off, because she’s just too vapid and uninteresting to do anything more than take up valuable character space. Maybe you should have picked your women more carefully so you don’t have to hurt them later. Dick.

**Which is why I like Virginia Woolf’s commentary on Jane Eyre so much (actually all her takes on the female Victorians are incredibly insightful):

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