I'm in the middle of Who do You Think You Are? by Alice Munro. I have read quite a few affluent Canadian authoresses over that last year or so. Excluding the apparently immortal Margaret Atwood. A purposeful omission.
But now I have strayed from my point. And maybe my point can spread quite broadly throughout all modern female writing. But it seems to me we've swung towards a trend of dismal "realist" female based novels that do anything but inspire and, indeed, seem to strive towards another outcome. Love affairs that neither excite nor have you cheering for the couple. Career pursuit that seem far from fulfilling. A life span of dreary, striving and anti-climatic failure of endings.
Every novel seems a study in depressed feminism. After slogging through 500 pages of overweight heroines and dull colours I'm anything but enlivened.
I'm actually not quite sure what they're trying to do. Create characters I might associate with? Prove that they're anything but silly romantic women? Cause sufficient scandal to get published and reviewed?
I have also discovered Ayn Rand this last year. What and excellent, intelligent, enlightening middle ground. Depressing in type, but absolutely non-pointless.
Why can't we have more of this? Why the swap from heroines wearing flimsy white muslin and torn between charming lovers to ones in wearing clumpy mascara and stuck in droomy marriages?
I'm tired of it, myself. I'm sure publishing houses get in funny, thought provoking, or uplifting material. And maybe some of it is more then that paperback fluff they publish once in a while. I know we, as women, are capable of writing better. Why do we esteem the heavy extreme? If we want to bring women to the forefront we would be wise to leave our malfunctioning liberated types behind, and embrace a woman with actual struggles, joys, and accomplishments. And, you know, maybe she could be happy once in a while.
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