Feminist fable
As The Handmade’s Tale comes to TV, we look at literature’s toughest women
THE Handmaid’s Tale arrives on TV tonight – portraying a world in which women have been subjugated beneath the heel of a male-dominated theocracy based in a ruined America. Imagine the worst excesses of America’s Conservative Christian movement coupled with the mullahs of revolutionary Iran, and you are pretty much in the right ballpark for this mix of horror, thriller and dystopia. Based on the novel of the same name by the acclaimed feminist novelist Margaret Atwood, the book stars one of the most powerful female characters of all time – Offred (played by Elisabeth Moss from Mad Men), a woman effectively enslaved by the men who rule but intent on rebellion. Here as a warm-up act, we explore the strongest female characters throughout the history of literature; our pick of the boldest women in books.
MEDEA Medea by Euripides
One of the first and certainly most fearsome women in literature, Medea is a woman wronged ... and she’s looking for retribution. In short, her story is this: married to Jason, of Jason and the Argonauts fame, her hero husband leaves her for another princess. She takes vengeance by killing his new wife and her own children.
ROSALIND As You Like It by William Shakespeare
She’s the star of a Shakespeare comedy so Rosalind is a queen of wordplay. Banished by her uncle, she finds sanctuary in the Forest of Arden and falls in love with two things: freedom and the handsome youth Orlando. Queue much confusion with men dressed as women dressing as men (well, it is Shakespeare). It ends with a wedding and Rosalind has been written into the history of literature as one of the most intelligent and strong women.
MOLL FLANDERS The Fortunes And Misfortunes Of The Famous Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
Let’s put this as plainly as a restoration dandy: Moll was a whore. In fact, she’s probably the original “tart with a heart”. Born in Newgate prison, her life seems doomed for failure. However, thanks to a mix of beauty, brains, greed and good luck, Moll strikes out in life on her own terms – even if it means a life of crime. Her picaresque adventure involves infidelity, larceny and prison. She wasn’t the most virtuous of heroines, but she did what she could to survive.
ELIZABETH BENNET Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen
The five Bennet sisters, including strong-willed Elizabeth, are raised by their mother with one purpose: finding a husband. When Mr Darcy, a wealthy bachelor, takes up residence nearby, a classic battle of the sexes develops in this comedy of manners. Elizabeth remains a role model for women – thanks to her beauty, brains, integrity and talent. Refusing to refrain from speaking her mind this stubborn and witty protagonist is expected to marry for money and status, not love. Staying true to her convictions she decides to remain single until finding love.
CATHY EARNSHAW (CATHY) Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Cathy is the archetypal Gothic heroine. Fresh from the moors, she is wild, dark, rebellious, and in love with the ultimate Byronic hero Heathcliff. Nothing matters to her apart from her love for Heathcliff – to the point that even death cannot keep them apart. Cathy’s ghost clawing at the window of a distraught Healthcliff remains one of the classic moments in English literature. Their love affair has reverberated down the centuries – from Bonnie and Clyde to the lyrics of Kate Bush.
JANE EYRE Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Jane Eyre becomes a governess to the child of the enigmatic Mr Rochester. He and Jane soon fall in love, but Jane finds out he is already married ... and what’s more his wife is a crazy woman living in the attic. Jane is complex and self-aware, defying Victorian convention as an independent and strongwilled feminist. Pushing the boundaries between social classes, as a young orphan she excels at school and grows in strength despite the expectations of a hateful foster family. Readers soon forgive her blinding love for Rochester as she subversively explores sexuality, love and morality well ahead of her time – not to mention the creepy goings-on up in the attic.
EMMA BOVARY Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Emma Bovary should have been born in the era of Sex and the City, but instead she wound up marrying a provincial French doctor in the mid19th century.
In place of a life of style, sex and salons, she has to make do reading romantic novels in the French countryside, until a dashing aristocrat happens by and the rest is literary history. Romps in carriages, screaming matches, scandal and a really nasty suicide all lie in wait for a woman who was born ahead of her time.
JOSEPHINE MARCH Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Alcott’s novel is a classic “coming of age” drama following the lives of four sisters during the American Civil War. The family struggle to make ends meet as the children grow into “little women”. Beneath the still waters of Alcott’s calm New England there stirs a rebellion in the unlikely form of 15-year-old Jo. Unlike her sisters, she is outspoken and refuses to abide by the principles of her time. She dreams of fighting in the Civil War like her father as she struggles to reconcile herself to the life expected from a 19th-century young woman. Shaking off the Victorian chains, when she does eventually marry it is an amicable union with a man whom she loves and views as her equal.
ANNA KARENINA Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Despairing sex, misery and death – it can only be Russian literature. Anna, the bored wife of a Russian imperial minister, begins a high-society scandal thanks to an affair with Count Vronsky. Her husband offers her a choice: exile with Vronsky but without her son, or a return to her conventional life.
Subverting tradition, Anna leaves her dull husband, spitting in the face of polite society. Despite her flaws Anna exhibits an eternal goodness and beauty, placing her as one of literatures most relatable and empathetic heroines.
ANNE SHIRLEY Anne Of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Matthew Cuthbert and his sister Marilla need help with farm work, and decide to adopt an orphan boy. They get an unexpected surprise when they’re accidentally sent a girl: Anne Shirley. She’s a dreamer, she can’t keep out of trouble, but she changes the life of everyone she meets. With her ambition burning as bright as her red hair, this orphan lives life on her terms. She loves reading and writing, is imaginative and competitive, and makes the best of her many bad situations.
REBECCA Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
In life, Rebecca was the beautiful, loved, accomplished wife of Maxim
A corrupt version of the biblical Eve, she embodies destruction, killing her parents and attempting to kill her unborn children
de Winter and the mistress of Manderley. Now a ghost, she haunts the mansion, her relentless presence tormenting Winter’s new wife and driving her mad with jealousy and fear.
A ghost story originally dismissed as “women’s fiction”, Rebecca is now regarded as one of the most intense psychological thrillers of the 20th century – and it all features another giant when it comes to female characters: the monstrously creepy Mrs Danvers, the housekeeper.
CATHY AMES East Of Eden by John Steinbeck
Probably the most villainous woman in literature. Steinbeck’s novel tells of two sons who meet a girl, Cathy. One son, Adam, thinks she’s perfect and falls in love with her. His brother Charles, however, can tell something is seriously amiss.
Believed to be based on Steinbeck’s ex-wife, Cathy is an unfaltering symbol of evil. She is parasitic, manipulative, murderous and perverse.
A corrupt version of the biblical Eve, she embodies destruction, killing her parents and attempting to kill her unborn children.
She marries Adam while simultaneously seducing his brother – casting a curse over the two young men. She believes there is only evil in the world.
JEAN LOUISE ‘SCOUT’ FINCH To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Can six-year-olds be role models? Absolutely. Scout’s growth throughout Harper Lee’s dark but beautiful masterpiece has won the hearts of millions of readers the world over. Fighting for her father’s honour as he defends a black man in court in the segregated south, she symbolises all that is good and decent in the face of hate and prejudice. Wise beyond her years, tom-boyishly outspoken, she’s able to see the truth about the neighbourhood bogeyman, the tragic Boo Radley.
JEAN BRODIE The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
Jean Brodie: the fascist, unorthodox and eccentric teacher at the Marcia Blaine school for girls in Spark’s classic Scottish novel. While her contemporaries teach their girls history and mathematics, this flawed feminist talks poetry, makeup tips and the romantic virtues of fascism. She is a horror who ruins the lives of those around her – but a tragic horror.
NURSE RATCHED One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
This former army nurse maintains order by exercising absolute authority over her unruly psychiatric patients. With her totalitarian rule, she manipulates patients and staff alike to ensure everything meets her rigid, often brutal, expectations. She is the ultimate, and emasculating, foil to the lead male character McMurphy – the quintessential rebel without a cause with sex on the brain. The very definition of a smiling assassin, she feels zero guilt when it comes to quite literally destroying lives and minds. Nurse Ratched is the “man” despite being a woman.
SOFIA The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Rural Georgia in the early 20th century wasn’t the ideal time to be black, or female. Sofia combats the world around her by being a fiercely independent woman. Setting an example for the novel’s young heroine Celie, Sofia refuses to submit to whites, men, or anyone else. After standing for her civil rights by defying the town mayor she is sentenced to 12 years in jail. Her unfaltering endurance serves as a symbol of the civil rights struggle and the unavoidable costs of resistance.
DR ELLIE ARROWAY Contact by Carl Sagan
Ellie defies tired old gender expectations by becoming an astrophysicist. She then defies traditional scientific expectations by hunting for ETs amid the galactic radio waves. Stoic and determined, she makes contact with aliens, deciphers the complex blueprints they send and uses her sheer stubbornness and impassioned belief in science to convince world governments to follow the diagrams and build a machine for space travel. Confronting prejudices for her identity as a woman and atheist, she relentlessly questions the world.
CLARICE STARLING Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris, 1988
Nice bag, shame about the shoes. Clarice is the ballsy FBI agent – intelligent, ambitious, but haunted by events in her childhood, she is the perfect ingénue to face off against the demon with the doctor’s degree, Hannibal Lecter. Despite unflappable in a dungeon, she is still vulnerable enough to make even Hannibal the Cannibal fall in love with her a little bit.
LISBETH SALANDER Millennium series by Stieg Larsson
She’s got a dragon tattoo, she kicked a hornets’ nest and she played with fire. Lisbeth is a zealous, unhinged, super-smart computer hacker with a photographic memory and more strength than most of her male literary counterparts combined. Overcoming a traumatic childhood, the dark secrets of the books would never be uncovered without Lisbeth, a woman who abides by her own moral code – which is a little twisted, to be fair. An outsider, she’s one of the great rebel women in literature.