Feminist Sundays: Books with Openly Feminist Characters

Hello and welcome to our very first Feminist Sunday! Feminist Sundays is a weekly meme started by Elena of Books and Reviews. It is supposed to be a space where we can discuss all sorts of things that might fall under the larger umbrella of feminism: from important female figures in history to the portrayal of women in fiction, and everything in between. We're very excited to join and we hope to participate every week (and perhaps have some of you join us as well). For now we thought we'd kick off this series by discussing - and hopefully getting some recommendations for - books with openly feminist characters.

What counts as an openly feminist character? 

We are not great readers of contemporary literary fiction. (And yes, that is a thing we are trying to fix.) We do know our media, though, and we are somewhat familiar with contemporary romance novels, too. Openly feminist characters are rarer in them than you might think, considering that feminism did change the world and in some cases made the plot of said books or movies possible. And much too often, when a feminist character does appear, she turns out to be a stereotype - the man-hating workaholic that needs to be tamed/defeated/abandoned by the hero or some variation thereof. (We say "she turns out to be" because there doesn't seem to be a parallel trope for male allies/feminist men.) So what are the features we are looking for in an openly feminist character?

On Beauty and Objectification

What's this?

Here's a thing I found interesting about On Beauty. As it is made clear at various points throughout the text, the novel owes some of its ideas to Elaine Scarry's essay, On Beauty and Being Just (an essay I discussed at length in these two posts). The connection between fiction and a theory that might inform it is interesting and horribly complicated, and I don't really want to go into that here. But what I do want to point out is one way in which Smith departs from this theoretical framework, namely the fact that she engages more seriously with the idea that there is a darker side to beauty than Scarry does. This is especially true when it comes to the way we treat people based on their physical beauty.

You might remember that this was a sensitive point with Scarry, because she felt that Objectification as a buzzword turns academics away from honest discussions of beauty. She pushed instead for the idea that the beholder has long been understood (and should be still) as more vulnerable than the person beheld, because the beholder is in a way bewitched and helpless before beauty. Scarry then argues that this first reaction (this "pleasure-filled tumult") is a catalyst for our bringing more beauty into the world, in the form of art, fair laws etc.

You first get a sense that that might not be the case in Zadie Smith's world from the poem she quotes as belonging to one of her characters, Claire Malcolm, and which functions as a sort of second, intra-textual source for the novel's title. (On Beauty (the poem) was actually written by Nick Laird, and I think its title is also derived from Scarry's essay, which does sort of plunge us into Title Inception.) Here's the first stanza (and here is the rest of the poem):

Review: On Beauty by Zadie Smith

The Oulipo poet Jacques Roubaud says that the poet is a rat who builds his own maze and then must find his way out. I'm afraid too often poets don't build mazes at all; they build corridors with well-marked entrances and exits; they proceed through the doors as quickly as possible and assume they've accomplished something.

D.A. Powell, (Mis)Adventures in Poetry 

I read that quote and suddenly I had the key to this review. It's not that On Beauty is not a good or clever book. It's that it is a book of painfully well-marked entrances and exits, a book that is not willing to trust its readers with a single idea without having about ten neon signs pointing at it. This way to The Idea. The first few times it happened it was fun. "Ooh, I see what you did there!" is one of the nicest feelings you can get as a reader. "Yes, yes, we all see what you did there," though? Not so much.

One may as well take Howard Belsey for an example. On Beauty is fashioned after E.M. Forster's Howards End, so it's built around the opposition between two families: one liberal, biracial, American - the Belseys; the other conservative, black, British/Trinidadian - the Kippses. Howard, a white Englishman married to an African-American woman and living in Boston, is the head of the liberal family. He teaches at the (fictional) Wellington College and He Rejects Beauty. The latter point is impressed upon us less and less subtly, as the book progresses.

The first stage of imparting this message is when we learn that Howard's academic work is in the "deconstructing beauty and showing that Rembrandt painted for money" vein, and also that the original 19th century windows of the Belsey house are too precious to be used as windows, so they are kept in a safe in the basement. This is not too bad as far as standard novel characterizations go. The second stage is when we learn that Howard accepts nothing but abstract art in the house, because of his "representational art ban," that he falls asleep at Mozart concerts, and that he denies his children even nominal Christmas traditions (most of the family being atheist). This is already veering into caricature, but then the novel does have a comic undertone to it. The third stage is when basically ALL of the main characters comment or otherwise reflect on Howard's inability to like things. This is too much.