Your mention of the difficulty of men writing realistic fictional female characters reminds me very much of a passage from Virginia Woolfe’s A Room of One’s Own that is the most insightful exploration of the issue I have ever read:
‘Chloe liked Olivia,’ I read. And then it struck me how immense a change
was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature.
Cleopatra did not like Octavia. And how completely ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
would have been altered had she done so! As it is, I thought, letting
my mind, I am afraid, wander a little from LIFE’S ADVENTURE, the whole
thing is simplified, conventionalized, if one dared say it, absurdly.
Cleopatra’s only feeling about Octavia is one of jealousy. Is she taller
than I am? How does she do her hair? The play, perhaps, required no
more. But how interesting it would have been if the relationship between
the two women had been more complicated. All these relationships between
women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious
women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. And I
tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women
are represented as friends. There is an attempt at it in DIANA OF THE
CROSSWAYS. They are confidantes, of course, in Racine and the Greek
tragedies. They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost
without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was
strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane
Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation
to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that; and
how little can a man know even of that when he observes it through the
black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose. Hence, perhaps,
the peculiar nature of woman in fiction; the astonishing extremes of her
beauty and horror; her alternations between heavenly goodness and
hellish depravity—for so a lover would see her as his love rose or
sank, was prosperous or unhappy. This is not so true of the
nineteenth-century novelists, of course. Woman becomes much more various
and complicated there. Indeed it was the desire to write about women
perhaps that led men by degrees to abandon the poetic drama which, with
its violence, could make so little use of them, and to devise the novel
as a more fitting receptacle. Even so it remains obvious, even in the
writing of Proust, that a man is terribly hampered and partial in his
knowledge of women, as a woman in her knowledge of men.
Ever since I read this, I have taken notice of the relationships between female characters in books I read, and I do think its a rare male author who captures them well.
A more recent instantiation of the same idea is the Bechdel Test or Mo Movie Measure (it’s named after a character called Mo in Alison Bechdel’s comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For), which a movie passes if it
1. has at least two women in it 2. who talk to one another 3. about something other than a man.
Depressingly few movies pass this test. Of course it can be applied to things other than movies.
It is none the less sometimes called the MMM, and the name does come from that character even though in the strip the test has nothing to do with her. See this blog entry for a confession for the person who named it the MMM.
Your mention of the difficulty of men writing realistic fictional female characters reminds me very much of a passage from Virginia Woolfe’s A Room of One’s Own that is the most insightful exploration of the issue I have ever read:
Ever since I read this, I have taken notice of the relationships between female characters in books I read, and I do think its a rare male author who captures them well.
A more recent instantiation of the same idea is the Bechdel Test or Mo Movie Measure (it’s named after a character called Mo in Alison Bechdel’s comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For), which a movie passes if it
1. has at least two women in it
2. who talk to one another
3. about something other than a man.
Depressingly few movies pass this test. Of course it can be applied to things other than movies.
Ludicrously minor nitpick: that strip appeared in DTWOF before Mo or any regular characters were introduced.
(Fun Home highly recommended btw)
It is none the less sometimes called the MMM, and the name does come from that character even though in the strip the test has nothing to do with her. See this blog entry for a confession for the person who named it the MMM.