Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

  It’s possible if we want it. But what do we want? What would you want—what desires, what forms of insubordination, would you be able to access—if you had succeeded in becoming an ideal woman, gratified and beloved, proof of the efficiency of a system that magnifies and diminishes you every day?

  Pure Heroines

  If you were a girl, and you were imagining your life through literature, you would go from innocence in childhood to sadness in adolescence to bitterness in adulthood—at which point, if you hadn’t killed yourself already, you would simply disappear.

  The stories we live and the stories we read are to some degree inseparable. But let’s say we’re just talking about books here: for a while, everything is really great. Merely being alive is an adventure for Laura Ingalls, for Anne Shirley, for Anastasia Krupnik, for Betsy Ray; when you’re a girl in a book, each day is spring-loaded with pleasure and thrills. Then either the world sours or you do. Teenage heroines in fiction are desired and tragic, overwhelmed with ambiguous destiny: take Esther Greenwood, or Lux Lisbon, or the characters that have drawn adults to YA—Katniss Everdeen, that stoic instrument of love triangles and revolution, or Bella Swan from Twilight, or her erotic doppelgänger, Anastasia Steele. Then, in adulthood, things get even darker. Love and money, or the lack of them, calcify a life. Fate falls like a hammer. Emma Bovary uses arsenic; Anna Karenina the train; Edna Pontellier drowns herself. Lila has vanished at the beginning of My Brilliant Friend, and Lenu is as worn-down as a soldier returned from war. The earnest and resilient descendants of Elizabeth Bennet and the other marriage-plot heroines—the major exception—have vanished from literary fiction altogether.

  In life, I like the stakes of adulthood, and would not revisit my (delightful) childhood for the world. But literary children are the only characters I’ve ever really identified with. Possibly this is because, when I was a kid in the Houston suburbs, riding my tiny bicycle around a brand-new development in a pack of friends whose blond hair all bleached to white in the sun, I didn’t yet understand that there was any meaningful difference between me or them or the heroines I loved. We all played street hockey and Mario Kart; we loved trees and freeze tag and spying—we were all the same. My parents were Filipino-Canadian immigrants who kept a rice cooker on the counter, and when they argued, they did so in Tagalog. But they also took us out on Sundays to Cracker Barrel after church. They wore their simultaneous identities easily, at least in my childhood vision, as did the small handful of other immigrant families at my school.

  It wasn’t until third grade or so that I grasped the fact that identity could govern our relationship to what we saw and what we read. It happened on one afternoon in particular, when I was sitting on the floor of my dim pink room, next to my pink polka-dot curtains, playing Power Rangers with my friend Allison, who insisted, over and over, that I had to play the Yellow Ranger. I didn’t want to, but she said there was no other way we could play. When I realized she wasn’t kidding—that she genuinely believed this to be something like a natural law—the anger that hit me was almost hallucinatory. She was saying, in effect, that I had failed to understand my own limits. I couldn’t be the Pink Ranger, which meant I couldn’t be Baby Spice. I couldn’t be Laura Ingalls, rocking her bench until she got kicked out of the classroom; I couldn’t be Claudia Kincaid, taking baths in the fountain at the Met. A chasm opened up between us. I told Allison I didn’t want to play anymore. She left, and I sat still, shimmering with rage.

  That day marked either the beginning of a period of self-delusion or an end of one. Afterward, I still identified with girls in books, but things were different. And surely part of what I love about childhood literary heroines is the way they remind me of that bygone stretch of real innocence—the ability to experience myself however I wanted to; the long heavenly summers spent reading books on the floor, trapped in a slice of burning Texas daylight; the time when I, already a complicated female character, wouldn’t hear the phrase “complicated female character” for years. Those girls are all so brave, where adult heroines are all so bitter, and I so strongly dislike what has become clear since childhood: the facts of visibility and exclusion in these stories, and the way bravery and bitterness get so concentrated in literature, for women, because there’s not enough space for them in the real world.

  * * *

  —

  The draw of children’s literature may lie in the language as much as anything. These books have a total limpidity—a close, clean material attention that makes you feel like you’re reading a catalog description of a world to be entered at will. The stylistic combination of economy and indulgence accrues into something addictive, a cognitive equivalent of salty and sweet: think of Laura Ingalls’s pioneer snow globe full of calico and petticoats, horses and cornfields; the butter mold with a strawberry pattern, the maple-syrup candy, the hair ribbons, the corncob doll, the pig’s tail. We remember her childhood possessions and mishaps as well as, if not better than, our own.

  Every book has its own palette. Betsy-Tacy and Tib (1941) opens with this description from Maud Hart Lovelace: “It was June, and the world smelled like roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside.” As Betsy and Tacy get older, the series revisits a set of motifs: cups of cocoa, piano sing-alongs, school orations, mock weddings. For Anne of Green Gables (1908), it’s bluebells and cordial and slates and puffed sleeves. Objects and settings are especially inextricable from plot and character. One of my favorite opening paragraphs in any novel is in E. L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1967):

  Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away. That is, running away in the heat of anger with a knapsack on her back. She didn’t like discomfort; even picnics were untidy and inconvenient: all those insects and the sun melting the icing on the cupcakes. Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not be just running from somewhere but would be running to somewhere. To a large place, a comfortable place, an indoor place, and preferably a beautiful place. And that’s why she decided upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

  We know everything we need to know about twelve-year-old Claudia from this accumulation of nouns: no to the insects and the sun and the cupcake icing; yes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Off Claudia goes, with little brother Jamie and his “boodle” of change, stuffing their clothes in their band-instrument cases and getting on a train to New York City, where they take up residence among the treasures of the Met.

  One of the best things about From the Mixed-Up Files is that our protagonists don’t get scared during their adventure. They don’t even miss home. Childhood heroines aren’t always fearless, but they are intrinsically resilient. The stories are episodic rather than accumulative, and so sadness and fear are rooms to be passed through, existing alongside mishap and indulgence and joy. Mandy, the protagonist of the 1971 novel by the same name, written by Julie Andrews Edwards—her married name, long after The Sound of Music—is a neglected Irish orphan, frequently overwhelmed by loneliness, who nonetheless possesses a native sense of hope and adventure. Francie Nolan of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) gets flashed by a predator, watches her father drink himself to death, and is almost always hungry. Her life is a stretch of devastating disappointments studded with moments of wonder—and yet Francie remains solid, tenacious, herself. Is that fantastical, the idea of a selfhood undiminished by circumstance? Is it incomplete, naïve? In children’s literature, young female characters are self-evidently important, and their traumas, whatever they may be, are secondary. In adult fiction, if a girl is important to the narrative, trauma often comes first. Girls are raped, over and over, to drive the narrative of adult fiction—as in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), or V. C. Andrews’s My Sweet Audrina (1982), or John Grisham’s A Time to Kill (1989), or Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991), or Joyce Carol Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys (1996), or Stephen King’s The Green Mile (
1996), or Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), or Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002), or Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! (2011), or Gabriel Tallent’s My Absolute Darling (2017).

  * * *

  —

  We like our young heroines, feel as close to them as if they’d been our best friends. Plenty of these girls are sweet, self-aware, conventionally likable. But we like them even when they’re not. Ramona Quimby, from Beverly Cleary’s Beezus and Ramona series, is most frequently—even in the title of one of the books—described as a pest. In Ramona and Her Mother (1979) she squeezes an entire tube of toothpaste into the sink just to see what it feels like. In Ramona Forever (1984) she “began to dread being good because being good was boring.” Harriet, from Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy (1964), is an irritable, awkward Upper East Side gossip with a superiority complex. She slaps one of her classmates when she’s caught spying; she observes, about one of her teachers, “Miss Elson is one of those people you don’t bother to think about twice.” But we love her because she is prickly and off-putting. When she asks her friend Sport what he’s going to be when he grows up, she barely listens to his answer. “Well, I’m going to be a writer,” she says. “And when I say that’s a mountain, that’s a mountain.”

  Many childhood heroines are little writers, perceptive and verbose. (They are often younger versions of their authors, whether literally, as in the Little House series, or in essence, as in Betsy-Tacy or Little Women.) Lucy Maud Montgomery introduces eleven-year-old Anne Shirley—who later starts a short-story club with her girlfriends—through a series of run-on monologues: “How do you know but that it hurts a geranium’s feelings just to be called a geranium and nothing else? You wouldn’t like to be called nothing but a woman all the time. Yes, I shall call it Bonny. I named that cherry tree outside my bedroom window this morning. I called it Snow Queen because it was so white. Of course, it won’t always be in blossom, but one can imagine that it is, can’t one?” Montgomery’s other writer heroine is the slightly goth Emily Starr, of the Emily of New Moon series, who explains, at age thirteen, that she intends to become famous and rich through her writing—and that even if she couldn’t, she would still write. “I’ve just got to,” she says. When she’s struck by creative inspiration, she calls it “the flash.”

  In Lois Lowry’s Anastasia Krupnik (1979), the first book in the series, ten-year-old Anastasia—eager, neurotic, incredibly funny—is given an assignment to write a poem. Words start “appearing in her own head, floating there and arranging themselves into groups, into lines, into poems. There were so many poems being born in Anastasia’s head that she ran all the way home from school to find a private place to write them down.” She spends eight nights writing and revising. At school, a classmate recites a poem that begins, “I have a dog whose name is Spot / He likes to eat and drink a lot.” He gets an A. Then Anastasia reads hers:

  hush hush the sea-soft night is aswim

  with wrinklesquirm creatures

  listen (!)

  to them move smooth in the moistly dark

  here in the whisperwarm wet

  Her real bitch of a teacher, confused at the lack of a rhyme scheme, gives her an F. (Later that night, her father, Myron, a poet himself, changes the big red F to “Fabulous.”)

  Betsy Ray is another writer, an unusual type—happy, popular, and easygoing. At twelve, she spends her time sitting in a maple tree, her “private office,” writing stories and poems. Maud Hart Lovelace modeled Betsy after herself, just as Jo March, the paradigmatic childhood writer-heroine, is a stand-in for Louisa May Alcott. In Little Women (1869), Jo writes plays for her sisters to act in, sits by the window for hours reading and eating apples, and edits the newspaper that she and her sisters produce with Laurie, which is called The Pickwick Portfolio. She “did not think herself a genius by any means,” writes Alcott, “but when the writing fit came on, she gave herself up to it with entire abandon, and led a blissful life, unconscious of want, care, or bad weather.” Arguably, the book’s biggest conflict comes when Amy burns Jo’s notebook, which contained short stories Jo had been working on for a harrowing “several years.” Later on, Jo starts writing pulp fiction to support the family. In the sequel, Little Men (1871), she starts working on a manuscript about her sisters’ lives.

  Young heroines work hard, often out of economic necessity, as well as the child labor practices of their bygone eras. In her early teens, Laura Ingalls takes a job as a seamstress. At age fifteen, she gets a teaching certificate and goes off to live with strangers so that her blind sister, Mary, can afford to stay in school. The orphaned Mandy, who’s just ten years old, works at a grocery store. (She, too, has literary instincts: Robinson Crusoe and Alice in Wonderland were “very real to her and offered far more excitement than the reality of her life could ever provide.”) In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Francie sells junk, then works at a bar, then assembles fake flowers in a factory; her money allows her mother to bury her father and keep her brother, who is nice enough but definitely doesn’t deserve it, in school. But these characters are industrious even when survival isn’t part of the question. Anne Shirley, on the side from her first teaching gig, gets up a local beautification society. Hermione Granger acquires a magical time machine to take more credits at Hogwarts. Anastasia Krupnik goes to charm school, works as a personal assistant, and helps the elderly neighbor (whom she briefly mistakes for the author Gertrude Stein) reclaim her groove. Mandy discovers a dilapidated cottage and draws a transcendent, near-erotic pleasure from weeding, planting flowers, and mending the fence. Harriet diligently goes on her spy route every day after school. Sustained, constant, enterprising activity is what these girls consider fun.

  None of them are caricatures of goodness: Anne is ridiculous, Jo clumsy and obstinate, Anastasia dorky, Betsy flighty, Harriet unmodulated, Laura undisciplined. They have ordinary longings to be pretty and well-liked. But their self-interest doesn’t curdle, doesn’t turn on them. They live in the world as the people they are. In The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir writes that a girl is a “human being before becoming a woman,” and she “knows already that to accept herself as a woman is to become resigned and to mutilate herself.” This is part of the reason these childhood characters are all so independent, so eager to make the most of whatever presents itself: they—or, more to the point, their creators—understand that adulthood is always looming, which means marriage and children, which means, in effect, the end.

  * * *

  —

  In literary stories and plenty of real-life ones, a wedding signifies the end of individual desire. “I always hated it when my heroines got married,” writes Rebecca Traister, in the opening of her book All the Single Ladies (2016). In Little Women, Jo “corks up her inkstand,” acquiescing to Professor Bhaer’s wishes that she stop writing trashy short stories; in Little Men, she becomes not just a mother but a full-time foster parent to the gaggle of boys that move into the Bhaer school. With Betsy Ray and Laura Ingalls, their stories simply end after marriage. Anne Shirley has five kids and then passes the narrative to her daughter, in the lovely series-ender Rilla of Ingleside (1921).

  These characters are aware of the trajectory they’re stepping into. A few years ago, when I interviewed Traister about her book, she pointed me to a passage from By the Shores of Silver Lake (1939), the fifth in the Little House series, in which twelve-year-old Laura and her cousin Lena go off on horseback to deliver some laundry. A homesteader’s wife greets them, announcing proudly that her thirteen-year-old daughter Lizzie got married the previous day.

  On the way back to camp [Laura and Lena] did not say anything for some time. Then they both spoke at once. “She was only a little older than I am,” said Laura, and Lena said, “I’m a year older than she was.” They looked at each other again, an almost scared look. Then Lena tossed her curly black head. “She’s silly! Now she can’t ever have any more good ti
mes.”

  Laura said soberly, “No, she can’t play anymore now.” Even the ponies trotted gravely.

  After a while, Lena said she supposed that Lizzie did not have to work any harder than before. “Anyway, now she’s doing her own work in her own house, and she’ll have babies.”

  …“May I drive now?” Laura asked. She wanted to forget about growing up.

  In the first chapter of Little Women, Meg, the eldest, tells Jo, “You are old enough to leave off boyish tricks, and to behave better, Josephine…you should remember that you are a young lady.” Meg is sixteen. Jo, who is fifteen, replies:

  “I’m not!…I hate to think I’ve got to grow up, and be Miss March, and wear long gowns, and look as prim as a China aster! It’s bad enough to be a girl, anyway, when I like boys’ games and work and manners!…and it’s worse than ever now, for I’m dying to go and fight with Papa, and I can only stay home and knit, like a poky old woman!”

  In more recent books, there’s much more space around this question. Girls don’t feel the same instinctive trepidation about adulthood when its norms are less constrictive. In Anastasia at This Address (1991), the second-to-last book in Lowry’s series, Anastasia does worry about marriage—not that it will curtail her freedom, but rather that she might end up marrying the first person who’s really interested in her. “First of all,” her mother tells her, cracking a beer, “what makes you so sure you want to get married at all? Lots of women never do and are perfectly happy.”

  But the instinctive aversion that our childhood heroines feel about the future dissolves eventually. When we see them grow up, they do so according to the tidy, wholesome logic of children’s literature. Laura Ingalls, Betsy Ray, and Anne Shirley all find husbands that respect them. Their desires evolve to fit their life.