The Greats' Women

The list of what William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and F. Scott Fitzgerald have in common is substantial, but one could argue that when comparing any four artists of any particular media of a similar era. What is more impressive is the list depicting their dissimilarities, as they do vary largely in style, subject, occupation, geographical familiarity, etcetera; however, they somehow managed to create four uniquely peculiar, unnerving, unpredictable female characters the western canon has ever seen. Due to these women’s strangeness, eccentricism, and literary prowess--unrivaled by all except each other, much like the writers who created them--it’s clear that the success of these writers is due, in part, to their oddest feminine creations in each of their own writing.

A character known only as “The Girl” is not too far off the mark for Ernest Hemingway, who is known for his unnervingly brief and vague descriptions that somehow manage to tell the story differently for every reader. That being said, having the two characters in “Hills Like White Elephants” be named “The Girl” and “The American” is nothing if not deliberate. Two assumptions could be made about Hemingway’s choice: either Hemingway was vulnerable to the time in which he lived and could not acknowledge women beyond what they offered in a binary, gendered, ideal that had been woven for them by society, or “The Girl” is ironically something very special in Hemingway’s short story. Hemingway, ever the fan of the dichotomy he was, likely created this irony intentionally as a separate dimension of description for his story that could be caught by the keenest of eyes. The Girl is completely reliant on The American--her male counterpart--even to the point of needing him to be the one to order the drink for her, and she is indecisive. One could speculate she is characterized as indecisive in general, however; the audience sees this trait play out predominately through her dilemma of carrying her baby to term versus aborting it. When gauging this story through textual surface imagery alone, the girl comes across as ditzy, pitiful, and meek--the perfect over dramatization of young women during this time, but if Hemingway had intended The Girl to stay true to her textual depictions, the controversy surrounding the ending of the short story would not exist, let alone be the driving force that keeps the story relevant to scholars to this day. In this dialogue-heavy short story, the last words are spoken by the girl when she says, “I feel fine. Nothing is wrong with me. I feel fine,”. For that to be the end of a story where two people in an ill-defined relationship are going back and forth about whether or not she is going to get an abortion and whether or not the two will continue their relationship sums up Hemingway’s style of writing perfectly. It has also left scholars and casual readers alike pining for some further information as to the fate of the American and the girl, when there simply isn’t any more information to be had. At the end, the Girl--and Hemingway, perhaps--are the only two that know exactly what is going to happen, making her every bit as powerful as she is waife and allusive.

Emily in William Faulkner’s short story, “A Rose for Emily,” also gains power at the end of Faulkner’s short story, but rather than gaining it from secretive realization, it comes from supposed necrophilia. William Faulkner is known for his notable work in the Southern Gothicism genre of modern American Literature. Much of what characterizes Southern Gothicism as off, and unsettling, is the unpredictable manner in which the characters conduct themselves. Emily Grierson is no exception. Throughout the story, which is not told in chronological order, the audience gathers clues to Emily’s naturally controlling temper. She ostricizes herself from the townspeople, and is considered eccentric by all, which in turn, ends up being a severe understatement. Slowly, the plot unfolds before the audience as we learn the fate of her late presumed lover, Homer. In an astonishingly disturbing conclusion, the man that no one had seen for years was found almost completely decomposed in bed next to a thin gray hair resembling Miss Emily’s. For a woman with the power to turn away local authorities pursuing her for tax evasion, refuse a marked address during the rise of the United States postal service, the logical jump would never be that her power ended with the grotesque desire to overpower a person in death. For Faulkner, making this assertion, and creating a character of wealth, nobility and notoriety who was so completely off-kiltered was deliberate. “A Rose For Emily” so clearly defines Southern Gothicism and made Faulkner as recognizable as he remains to this day.

In literature, there are female characters we despise thoroughly from the very beginning, like Faulkner’s Emily Grierson, and there are female characters that betray their audience so entirely. For F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy Buchanan, it is most surely the latter circumstance. Much of the anguish surrounding this character however is not exactly what she does or does not do in The Great Gatsby but the fact that people commonly mistake Great Gatsby for being a run-of-the-mill tragic romance. Fitzgerald makes it so easy to fall in love with Daisy. She is young, vivacious, flighty and glamorous. She has a soft, feeble side that is quickly assumed to be quirky kindness and we see her genuine affection for her cousin as being indicative of her overall demeanor toward others. That being said, a critical look at the ending of Gatsby shows Daisy ultimately staying with her adulterous, violent, yet wealthy-beyond-accountability husband and fleeing West Egg in secrecy to preserve her precious lifestyle. Because it is made more than clear that Daisy doesn't love Tom Buchanan or her young daughter whom she has ill-affection for, and her actions prove she does not legitimately love Jay Gatsby, it can be assumed that the only thing Daisy could possibly love is the lifestyle in which she has become so reliant on. Even her own cousin, Nick admitted that Daisy was a careless person who, “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into [her] money,”. So much suggests that Daisy is a self-involved character with an ice-cold view of the world, yet popular culture references and many readers have conflated Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy and Daisy’s glamour as being a true love story, that is makes the aura around Daisy all the more confusing and controversial. Considering The Great Gatsby a romance gives Daisy far too much credit because for that to be so, she must ache for the loss of Gatsby, and rue the day she allowed him to take the fall for Myrtle’s death--if she had allowed it at all! However, Daisy’s impudence and the argument either for or against her genuinity aside, there is no question that The Great Gatsby propelled F. Scott’s Fitzgerald to the forefront of American Writers of his time, and due to the nature of her character, there would be no Gatsby if not for Daisy.

After the glamor of the roaring 20s had seemingly packed up for good, tribulations and struggle were left at the forefront of many artistic depictions. One of which was the novel, Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. It isn’t too common a theme to have a secondary character experience their own bildungsroman, yet Rose of Sharon’s shift from a flighty, expectant mother to a saintly, missionary fighting back against the mass-scale suffering of the nation could not rightly be considered anything else. Uniquely, Rose of Sharon’s maturity occurs at warped speed upon the abandonment of her young husband in California and the stillbirth of her baby, but she is the character who goes through the most change in the story. Hindsight being what it is, a modern reader can effortlessly look at Rose of Sharon’s final act of breastfeeding a starving, older man as being a symbolic act of selflessness, but one can only imagine the controversy that may have spawned from this ending in 1936. Perhaps it wouldn’t be a stretch to say the symbolism was lost on some entirely due to the eccentric nature of the ending. However, the message Steinbeck is suggesting is grand, and is responded to as it was intended in modern interpretations. Through the adversity Rose of Sharon and her family faced, the glimmer of hope that comes from a happy and healthy coincidence of her being with milk in a dying man’s true time of need was a perfect metaphor for the perseverance needed to rock this nation back to it’s high point after such a dreary existence prevailed for so long. Having Rose of Sharon being the benefactor of such hope made Grapes of Wrath the unique and poignant novel that it was, and is today. This success can be credited to either the suggestive, curious, manner of depicting hope in a dark time that may have raised the nation’s collective eyebrow, or the fined-tuned characterization Steinbeck is known for; however, the fact remains that Steinbeck earned his infamy, in part, from the quirky and hopeful quasi-heroine from Grapes of Wrath.

#America #death #characterization #women #feministwriters