Women In Literature

Taking a look at the feminist view of women in literature, Annette Kolodny says in an excerpt from her essay "Dancing Through the Minefield": "For those of us who studied literature, a previously unspoken sense of exclusion from authorship, and a painfully personal distress at discovering whores, bitches, muses, and heroines dead in childbirth where we had hoped to discover ourselves, could - for the first time - begin to be understood as more than a 'set of disconnected, unrealized private emotions'. With a renewed courage to make public our otherwise private discontents, what had once been 'felt individually as personal insecurity' came at last to be 'viewed collectively as structural inconsistency' within the very disciplines we studied."

This quote basically means that feminists are discontent with the portrayal of women in literature as they feel that the heroines in literature are too stereotypical, and now, united, they have the courage to say so. Given that, one might ask, why not? Why couldn't a woman identify herself with a "whore"?

Perhaps it is because of the immediate connotations behind the term "whore". While I'm not promoting women idolizing whores under any circumstance, I am arguing that a woman who undergoes hardships simply because she is a woman who should be able to identify with a fictional woman who undergoes hardships also because she is a woman, despite whatever title she may have or role she may play in society. Even as a negative role model for women, someone who is a bitch or a whore could be seen as a positive, as the character's presence could provide a hidden role model for women as someone not to become. Someone to take pity upon, as the feminist could look at that as society shaping, molding, and labeling her to the point of despair through promiscuity. Someone that the feminist would fight for simply because she is a woman who is suffering like the feminist herself.