How To Be A Heroine

by Samantha Ellis

  And what was the point, anyway, of liberation that was purely sexual? Predictably, Isadora’s biggest fans are men. Like Henry Miller, who said the book would spark a revolution. Of course men love the idea of the zipless fuck.

  I think I envied Isadora. She seemed liberated already, with her frustrated-artist mother urging her to write, and her analysts and her lovers, and everybody talking about books and sex all the time. She’s madly self-aware, she sees herself as a heroine, and ruefully realises she’s hamstrung by guilt. ‘I feel guilty for writing poems when I should be cooking . . . Show me a woman who doesn’t feel guilty and I’ll show you a man’. Reading Fear of Flying now, I recognise how much I’ve internalised this voice – guilty, self-conscious, self-deprecating, capricious, extravagantly candid, struggling to be hopeful.

  Now I’m more aware of how women flee in guilt and anxiety from their own pleasure, I’ve got a lot more time for Isadora. What a headlong, unblushing libertine she is. She’s not tormented like the old adulteresses of fiction – and when Goodlove leaves, she doesn’t throw herself under a train like Anna Karenina or poison herself like Madame Bovary. Instead, she tracks down her husband to a hotel and runs herself a bath. She looks at her body (including, because she has not lost her sense of humour, ‘the Tampax string fishing the water like a Hemingway hero’ – how Hemingway would have hated that line), and realises she no longer feels scared. Goodlove has been her Rhett. He’s helped her be adventurous and brave and she’s not going to stop now.

  Mira Ward, the heroine of Marilyn French’s novel The Women’s Room, is even harder to like. The book came out four years after Jong’s, in 1977, at the height of the Struggle, and it feels uncompromising and endless. Actually at 516 pages it is almost half as long as Riders, but instead of larks and frolics and frisky horses, French is committed to exposing the grinding tedium of being a 1950s housewife. I would still give the page where she describes Mira’s cleaning routine to anyone who styles herself a ‘domestic goddess’. The Women’s Room shored up my determination never to have a traditional marriage.

  It might seem odd that I was reading all these books about how to put down your dishcloth and leave your husband. I didn’t have a husband. It was my mother’s life I was trying to leave. I should have given her the books and got on with studying for my A levels. But as I was fighting for the right to leave home, it helped to have my choices reinforced. Later, I would be ready for postfeminist heroines like Fevvers, the loud, earthy high wire artiste in Nights at the Circus, six foot two in her stockings, with a mouth like a shark and wings (God, I love Angela Carter for literally giving her heroine wings. The chutzpah of it! The nerve!). Later still, I would fall for Virginia Woolf’s shape-shifting hero(ine) Orlando. But then, I needed to read about women who struggled to evade the same fate I was struggling to evade. I wanted to learn how not to become a housewife and mother: it helped to read about women who had tried it and wished they hadn’t. Watching Nora in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, being patronised by her husband, forced to pretend to be a featherbrain and an angel, a lark and a squirrel, while all the time she’d saved his life, I thought nothing was as satisfying as her slamming the door to leave him at the end of the play.

  Mira has already left her husband at the start of The Women’s Room and is hiding in ‘the ladies’ room’. French never lets the story get in the way of the consciousness-raising, so Mira immediately notices someone’s crossed out ‘ladies’ and written ‘women’s’ instead. It’s 1968 and Mira is 38, a student at Harvard, and my struggle to get to university is peanuts next to hers. We appraise Mira via a narrator who sounds much more cool. Mira hides in bathrooms, talks in a high, brittle voice, totters about on heels and sprays her hair till it’s as stiff as a helmet. The narrator teaches literature in Maine and walks the beach in jeans splashed with paint from decorating her flat, an embroidered poncho a friend brought from Mexico and, in the winter, a heavy nylon jacket. People call her mad, but she doesn’t care. She sounded free and fun to me. ‘All of the women I know feel a little bit like outlaws,’ she says. It made me want to be an outlaw too.

  She goes back to chart Mira’s journey from being ‘an independent baby, fond of removing her clothes’ to a repressed unhappy woman. Her mother tied her up to stop her stripping off, and ‘It worked. Mira had trouble removing all her clothes on her wedding night.’ Her mother is also firmly against Mira’s crossing her legs at the knee, climbing trees with boys, playing tag, raising her voice, wearing more than three pieces of jewellery at a time, and mixing silver with gold. My mother was teaching me never to mix blue and black, or brown and black or brown and grey, and not to wear grey anyway before I was 40. Like Mira, I felt stifled.

  Mira acquires a freethinking boyfriend, but he and his friends nearly gang-rape her. Defeated, she marries Norm, who is as boring as his name. He’s also smug, and a bully. He won’t teach her to drive. He says it’s fine not to use condoms (he’s a medical student!) then blames her for getting pregnant. Slowly, her identity is eroded. In a notorious paragraph, the narrator says it’s easy ‘to destroy a woman. You don’t have to rape or kill her; you don’t even have to beat her. You can just marry her.’ Mira finds pregnancy hard, childbirth terrifying, housework a drag, and sex a chore. Her female friends live similar gruelling, endless soap-operatic lives. Even the narrator says she’s bored with writing about domesticity – but it’s a great strength of the novel that she doesn’t stop.

  The Women’s Room made me respect the hard work of bringing up children and making a home that ‘hummed and sparkled’ the way Mira’s did, the way my mother’s did. It also made me sure I didn’t want that. Reading it now, I look around my messy flat and feel like a slattern. I’d like my home to hum and sparkle, but I want other things more. Mira’s clean house is her defence against the pain and chaos of her friends’ lives. Their husbands beat them, betray them, ignore them, commit them to asylums. Mira thinks her trouble is nothing, in comparison; at least she’s not banged up having ECT. But when Norm won’t let her lend money to a friend of hers who is in need, she realises she’s just as oppressed as her friends. By the way, the narrator knows it’s unfair to call him ‘Norm’, and that she hasn’t really given him a character, but she says he has no character. Or at least, his behaviour is incomprehensible to her because he’s a man, and maybe that’s the root of the problem.

  The lack of understanding between the sexes is what makes The Women’s Room pure tragedy. After Norm divorces Mira so he can marry his mistress, she presents him with a bill for her work during their marriage (including cooking, cleaning and childcare but also prostitution). She survives a suicide attempt, goes to Harvard, befriends empowered women and falls in love with a male feminist, but she still doesn’t find happiness. Because her new boyfriend wants her to follow him round the world and have his babies too. In this novel, society is too broken for a feminist to be happy; the battle of the sexes always gets in the way. The toughest woman, Val, a woman given to pages and pages of clunky vitriol, goes mad after her strong, beautiful daughter is raped, and ends up killed in a hail of gunfire by police. There is almost no light in this novel. Mira’s consciousness has been raised – but to what end?

  For years I pushed The Women’s Room on women I knew. I thought it told the unpalatable truth and we should all confront it. Then in my twenties, I got my book group to read it. We were all women, all feminists, but they didn’t love it like I did. They found it too despairing, too bleak. They said the men were cardboard cut-outs and the politics were glib. Brought up in more liberated homes than me, they didn’t understand why I was so moved by Mira overcoming her inhibitions or why I was so exhilarated by the revelation that Mira is the narrator: she has become the woman on the beach in the poncho, independent and free (if a little lonely). I didn’t read it again for years, but coming back to it now, I don’t know if it is too bleak. Now I’ve seen women I know get married to men who seem lovely but still think they can get away with barely contribu
ting to housework or looking after their children. I don’t think the double standard ever went away. Reading it now, it still feels hopeful that Mira has at least left behind her parents’ house and Norm’s house and has stopped hiding in the ladies’ or even the women’s room. French was surely playing on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own with her title, and she gets Mira that room. Mira ends the novel able to enjoy her own company and earn her own living, walk on that beach, wear what she likes and tell her own story.

  Which is more than Scarlett can do. She can’t be alone; she needs admirers and haters, people around her she can use as her mirrors, to avoid having to look at and get to know herself. I was too late for those Seventies consciousness-raising groups where women went round the circle, telling their stories and being listened to. If I ever tried to take Scarlett to such a group, she’d be bored out of her mind and probably cause a riot, but sometimes I think she and Melanie and Greer and Isadora and Mira are my group, my circle. They helped me, anyway, see that part of being able to, as Nora Ephron so brilliantly put it, ‘be the heroine of your life, not the victim’ is not allowing anyone else to define you, which means coming up with your own definition. Which means knowing yourself. As Melanie does, and Scarlett doesn’t: that’s her sorrow.

  Yet I feel that more heroines now are Scarletts than Melanies. Melanie’s quieter virtues have got a bit lost, and many heroines now seem to be defined mainly by their strength. They’re warriors, not worriers. They avenge abused women, like Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, or shoot crossbows like Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games. If she were writing Gone With The Wind now, Mitchell might make her heroine Grandma Fontaine, Scarlett’s tough old neighbour who has no fear since, when she was young, she saw her house burned and her family scalped. ‘I don’t like hard females, barring myself,’ she tells Scarlett. ‘But I do like the way you meet things! . . . You take your fences cleanly, like a good hunter.’ I would love to be told I take my fences cleanly like a good hunter. Yet I also like Grandma Fontaine’s other bit of advice, that Scarlett should ‘always save something to fear – even as you save something to love’; Scarlett only really becomes brave when she lets herself feel vulnerable, and allows herself to risk her heart.

  In the seven seasons of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon (who became something of a feminist hero when he was asked why he writes strong female characters, and replied, ‘Because you’re still asking me that question’) investigates how heroines can be strong but not heartless from every possible angle. Buffy is a tough, kickboxing superheroine, but that’s not how she defeats the forces of evil. She believes that slayers are stronger if they know how to love. So in the final season, when she is offered more strength, at the cost of becoming more demonic and less human, she refuses. She wants to keep being able to rely on (and love) her lover, her mentor, her sister and her friends. And she gets more strength by breaking the rule, instituted long ago by men, that there can only ever be one slayer. She turns other girls and women into slayers: she shares her power. Watching the very moving final episode reminds me of Scarlett and makes me sad that she doesn’t truly value Melanie until she’s lost her; if she and Melanie had been a team, Scarlett might have been so much happier.

  In The Taming of the Shrew, Kate chooses to be shrewish in a society that buys and sells women. And maybe she’s lucky to find, in Petruchio, someone who, as Greer puts it (she got there way before me), ‘is man enough to know what he wants and how to get it. He wants her spirit and her energy . . . and she rewards him with strong sexual love and fierce loyalty.’ Kate stops rebelliously ramming her head against walls, becomes softer, more graceful, more open to joy; in her word, she becomes less froward. While I was trying to leave home, I argued vehemently with my parents, yelling and sulking and glowering about the house. Then my teachers suggested that I apply to Cambridge, and my parents agreed that if I got in there, it would be an exception: I could go. If not, I would stay in London. I settled down to work hard and see if I could make it. And with that battle over for the time being, I stopped having to be so froward, and I fell in love.

  5

  FRANNY GLASS

  HE WAS TALL, dark and handsome but not inscrutable. He had very long eyelashes. He was amazingly clever. And he was not Iraqi; his family were Ashkenazi Jews. It wasn’t much of a rebellion but he was thrillingly different.

  Our first kiss was awkward – all clashing glasses and bumping chins. Our subsequent kisses were not much more abandoned. I was absurdly naïve for seventeen. We went for walks in Golders Hill Park, round the pergola and the petting zoo. We watched the flamingos. At parties we danced shyly, or talked in corners. We curled up on his parents’ sofa and watched Cinema Paradiso. I drove us around, with my brand new licence. We had our first row in that car, in a storm, and I was so unhappy (and so melodramatic) that I couldn’t tell the difference between my tears and the rain lashing the windscreen.

  It was only meant to last three months. He was about to ace his A levels and go to Israel for a year of travelling, studying and picking oranges. But we fell in love. And anyway, I wasn’t the kind of girl who could have a casual relationship, and he wasn’t the kind of boy. We were both yearning for something bigger. It turned out he was mostly yearning for God.

  Although his parents went to a much more liberal synagogue than mine, he was moving towards Orthodox Judaism. He had stopped writing, driving and turning on lights on Shabbat. When we walked through north London on a Friday night, he knew the location of all the movement sensor lights and he’d guide me across the street and back again, to avoid turning them on. It was romantic. And kissing in the dark was easier than it had been in the light. I even liked it when he talked about God. Since Hebrew school, I’d been longing to talk Talmud with the boys, and this was my chance.

  When he took off for Israel, the distance didn’t matter. Having my first relationship was less scary at a distance. We were doing Antony and Cleopatra for A level and I thought Cleopatra, the greatest man-eating vamp in history, had it all wrong, ordering her women to bring her something to help her ‘sleep out this great gap of time / My Antony is away.’ Instead I knuckled down to an epistolary relationship modelled closely on Anne and Gilbert’s in Anne of Windy Willows. Anne said it was impossible to write love letters with a scratchy pen so I got myself a fountain pen. I sprayed the letters with Chanel No. 5, and stuffed the envelopes with love poems (my own, cringeworthy efforts) and clumps of grass (which I thought he’d miss, out in the desert). We made each other mixtapes. There were dark moments – he sent me the entire text of Ecclesiastes (‘all is vanity and vexation of spirit’), and I sent him a poem comparing myself to an empty eggshell – but mostly it was lovely. Soon I had a shoebox full of pale blue aerogrammes, the latest of which I would wear next to my heart (all right, in my bra). Long-distance love was a lot like unrequited love: he was two thousand miles away so our relationship consisted mainly of yearning for each other. Just like Scarlett and Ashley.

  And when he wrote to me about his growing faith, I was fascinated. I felt connected to heroines who believed in something bigger than themselves: heroines like Nanda Grey, the nine-year-old protagonist of Antonia White’s autobiographical 1933 novel Frost in May, whose complex feelings about faith informed all of mine.

  At the start of the novel, Nanda’s father, who has recently converted to Catholicism, taking his wife and daughter with him, is about to enrol Nanda at the Five Wounds convent school. On the horse-drawn bus to the convent, on a fog-shrouded road, they meet an old Irish woman who says it would be wonderful if Nanda became a nun. And although Nanda knows this would be an appropriate, poetically just sacrifice for the daughter of recent converts to make, she doesn’t want to cut off her hair and live in a cell far away from home. The whole novel is powered by her attraction to faith and her terror of what it might ask of her.

  She desperately wants to fit in with the cradle Catholics at Five Wounds who eat bread that’s been dropped on
the floor, dirt and all, as penance (and not even for any particular sins – just in general), sleep with their hair scraped into painful plaits and their hands crossed primly over their chests, put salt instead of sugar on their stewed fruit (to mortify the flesh) and talk knowledgeably about doctrine. She also wants the ecstasy of conviction. But she’s often disappointed. At her first communion, as the wafer touches her tongue, she waits to feel Christ is actually present, in the flesh, inside her, but feels nothing. I sympathised. I’d hoped my bat mitzvah would make me feel certain and connected, but instead it had marked the start of teenage self-consciousness and confusion.

  At least I wasn’t a Catholic. I was petrified of the astringent, sarcastic nuns in Frost in May. They hate life outside the convent. They believe ‘no character is any good in this world unless that will has been broken down completely . . . Broken and re-set in God’s own way’. Nanda’s (very slightly) rebellious nature dooms her. She doesn’t do anything so bad. She starts writing a novel, all about shocking sinners, and of course she plans to redeem them spectacularly at the end. But a nun finds the manuscript and Nanda is expelled. Worse, her father says that ‘if a young girl’s mind is such a sink of filth and impurity, I wish to God that I had never had a daughter’. She bursts into hysterical tears, and the nuns tell her that now she’s been broken, now she’s humble, she’ll become a good Catholic. Nanda accepts this. It’s a dark, dark, ending.