The Heroine with 1001 Faces

by Maria Tatar

  Is there redemption for Harriet? Does she learn anything at all, beyond following Ole Golly’s advice to apologize and to conceal the contempt she feels for others with “little lies”? In the novel’s last chapter, Harriet watches her two friends, Janie and Sport, from a distance, and it is then that she can finally get in touch, not with her feelings, but with theirs. “She made herself walk in Sport’s shoes, feeling the holes in his socks rubbing against his ankles. She pretended she had an itchy nose when Janie put one abstracted hand up to scratch. She felt what it would feel like to have freckles and yellow hair like Janie, then funny ears and skinny shoulders like Sport.” This may not yet be empathy, but it is a transformative moment for Harriet, turning her from callous observer in search of autonomy and fame into someone who can walk in someone else’s shoes.

  Like Harriet the Spy, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) lets us see the world through the eyes of a girl, though in this case Scout tells the story of her childhood as an adult. Scout slips back with ease into the consciousness of her experiencing self, then seamlessly moves back to the older and wiser adult, who adds information and clarifies the child’s account. The double consciousness and double identity on display (the young Scout and the older and wiser narrating self) explains much about the audience the book found. To Kill a Mockingbird is a crossover book, appealing as much to adults as to the young, perhaps more so to adults. Harper Lee enabled grown-ups to return to childhood and immerse themselves in all the felt perils of that time—the keen sense of injustice in the world, the hypocrisy of adults, and a sense of acute defenselessness. But we can also immerse ourselves in the pleasures of childhood, aided by small Proustian nudges that help us remember what it was like to be as unknowing yet also as sensitive to the tremors in the world as Scout is.

  To Kill a Mockingbird takes us inside a child’s mind, but it also self-reflexively sends a powerful message about the importance of perspective, identification, and empathy. “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it,” Atticus tells Scout. And then there is the golden moment near the end of the novel, when Scout’s voice shifts into the third person and, standing on Boo Radley’s porch (“I had never seen our neighborhood from this angle”), she describes the events in her story from Boo Radley’s point of view. Suddenly we realize that she has internalized her father’s wisdom and is standing in the shoes of her neighbor. In some ways, To Kill a Mockingbird is the book that inaugurated a turn toward empathy as the highest social good in what the publishing trade now calls books for young adult audiences. It is the exact opposite of the cruelty we witness in Harriet’s notebooks.56

  We know that Scout’s conversion experience, seeing things from a new angle through the eyes of another, changes her, for what does she do but tell a powerful story about race and injustice in the Deep South during the Great Depression. Her story is now in a book, and she has written herself into a history, a history that reminds us of the production of meaning through storytelling. As for Harriet, it is something of a challenge to speculate on the effects of Ole Golly’s advice on her after her notebook is made public. But as Harriet the Spy continues to pursue her dream of becoming a writer, it is hard not to imagine that she will allow her innate curiosity to conquer incuriosity and that compassion will vanquish compulsion and cruelty.

  Saying Their Name: Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give

  To Kill a Mockingbird was the book that opened the eyes of many readers in the United States to anti-Black racism and racial injustice. It is a landmark work in its advocacy of understanding and empathy. But, ironically, that empathy is trained not on Tom Robinson, an innocent Black man falsely accused of rape and shot by the police while trying to escape imprisonment, but on Boo Radley, a man who remains free after murdering another man for physically assaulting two children.

  It took Toni Morrison to readjust our perspective on novels like To Kill a Mockingbird, a book that ranks high among those assigned to high school students in the United States. In 1990, writing about whiteness and the literary imagination, she referred to the “strategic use of black characters to define the goals and enhance the qualities of white characters.”57 This riskless way of constructing heroism is deeply problematic for many reasons, and it remains a stubbornly persistent problem in our collective literary and cinematic imagination, with a stereotype that has devolved into what Spike Lee called the “Magical Negro”—a humble, low-status figure who selflessly helps white people secure their personal salvation. What the filmmaker had in mind were characters ranging from Jim in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Uncle Remus in Disney’s Song of the South to Red in The Shawshank Redemption and John Coffey in The Green Mile. They generously build the platform for the white hero’s redemption in self-effacing acts that are rarely acknowledged as heroic.

  “An Empathetic, Nuanced Portrait of a Teen’s Political Awakening.” That was the headline given to Richard Brody’s New Yorker review of the film The Hate U Give. Interestingly, the young adult book on which it was based, Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give (2017), received far less media coverage than the film. Empathy becomes the controlling affect, according to the reviewer of the film, as if suddenly, out of the blue, audiences can finally feel what those affected by police brutality can feel.

  What took so long? is the question that comes to mind. And why did we have to wait such a long time for a Black girl as heroine in YA fiction? To be sure, there are some other examples, and they are forty years apart: Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976) and Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming (2014). Thomas’s book hit a nerve with readers, young and old, sounding full chords in ways that few YA novels have. The Hate U Give draws readers into the complexities of the Black Lives Matter movement with a fictional memoir that captures the truth of a historical moment. Its emotionally charged personal perspective on Black communities and political action connects with the #SayTheirNames movement and the effort to remember victims, protest their murders, and demand an end to police violence.

  The novel begins with the piercing screams of Starr Carter, a Black teenager, who has just witnessed the shooting of her friend Khalil by a white officer. “Officer One-Fifteen” mistook Khalil’s hairbrush for a gun. “No, no, no, is all I can say,” Starr writes in her first-person account of the events of that night. Caught between threats from local drug dealers to keep silent and the pleas of an activist lawyer to speak out and testify, Starr struggles to find her voice and to speak up, both in the courtroom and at a public protest unleashed by the failure to indict Officer Brian Cruise Jr. in the shooting death of Khalil Harris.

  Just Us for Justice represents Starr pro bono, and its attorney, Ms. Ofrah, urges Starr to speak out: “You matter and your voice matters,” she tells Starr. What Starr discovers in the aftermath of the shooting is the importance of breaking silence: “What’s the point of having a voice if you’re gonna be silent in those moments you shouldn’t be.”58 An unwilling heroine who feels “un-brave” much of the time, she summons “the tiny brave part” of herself and speaks, telling the story as it happened to the grand jury. Her testimony fails to make a difference, but at a protest rally that turns violent, ending in destructive fires and looting, Starr deploys her “biggest weapon” and speaks out. “Forget trigger happy,” she thinks to herself, “speaker happy is more my thing,” affirming the truism about pens being mightier than swords.

  The novel ends with the promise of rebuilding and making things right. After telling her story in the present tense, plunging us in medias res, into the thick of things, Starr begins to speak in the cadences of the bards, griots, and storytellers, reaching back to tell the story of Khalil and memorialize her friend, endowing him with the immortality once conferred on heroes from the ancient past. She is to Khalil as Homer was to Achilles. “Once upon a time there was a hazel-eyed boy with dimples. I called him Khalil. The world called him a thug. He
lived, but not nearly long enough, and for the rest of my life I’ll remember how he died. Fairy tale? No. But I am not giving up on a better ending.” And with that she recites the names of victims of police shootings, moving backward in time to “that little boy in 1955 who nobody recognized at first—Emmett.” Starr invokes Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 and whose brutal murder made him a powerful catalyst for action in the civil rights movement. And she closes her memoir with a promise: “I’ll never be quiet.”

  “My biggest literary influences are rappers,” Angie Thomas declared in an interview published in Time magazine. The neighborhood in which she grew up did not have successful doctors and lawyers, or writers for that matter, but the rappers were doing well, and she could connect with their lyrics. (She used Tupac Shakur’s album Thug Life as the inspiration for her title The Hate U Give.) When she was a teenager, Twilight and The Hunger Games were the two big franchises in books and films for young audiences, but Thomas was not able to relate to either one. She was in touch not only with rappers but also with #BlackLivesMatter, which, like #MeToo, spawned a movement. It had been back in 2013 that Alicia Garza, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, and Opal Tometi created a hashtag that led to recognition of the struggles of Black people in the face of police brutality.

  Thomas gives a remarkably even-handed account of deeply internalized biases on both sides of the racial divide, and her call for activism, “to keep fighting the good fight,” is meant not as a call to arms but as an appeal for conversation, with words as tools rather than guns as weapons. If Thomas, who came close to committing suicide as a bullied adolescent, insists that she is more interested in “instilling empathy” in her readers than in imposing on them a “political agenda,” she also shows that with empathy comes political awakening.59 Her portrait of Starr Carter’s resilience and strength, how she moves from intimidated silence to spirited speech, suggests that this coming-of-age story is about more than feelings and caring. Its vivid portrayal of the two worlds Starr Carter straddles—one in her run-down, gang-ridden neighborhood, one at her posh school—turns it into a clarion call for social justice. Growing up in a culture that had relied on oral traditions to transmit wisdom from one generation to the next and that had also developed a literary style that spoke from the heart in the vernacular, Angie Thomas used her voice to convey why the lives of her characters matter and what we can all do to combat state-sanctioned violence against Black Americans. When Starr Carter finally speaks out, everyone in her social orbit is animated and transformed by her words.

  CHAPTER 5

  DETECTIVE WORK

  From Nancy Drew to Wonder Woman

  I came to believe that being a private detective was the work I was meant to do.

  —SHIRLEY JACKSON

  I doubt that a writer can be a hero. I doubt that a hero can be a writer.

  —VIRGINIA WOOLF, “Professions for Women”

  WHEN BILL MOYERS recalled his conversations with Joseph Campbell at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch and later at the Museum of Natural History in New York, he spoke of Campbell’s great erudition. But what really impressed him about the American guru of mythological wisdom was that he was a “man with a thousand stories.” Those stories, from cultures all over the world, captured not just the meaning of life but also the “rapture” of being alive. Rapture takes different forms for men and for women. The ecstasies of the woman’s journey take her down a path from maiden to mother, a “big change, involving many dangers.” Both Campbell and Moyers believed that women could become true heroes by giving birth. Childbirth was the equivalent of the hero’s ordeal. “What is a woman? A woman is a vehicle of life. . . . Woman is what it is all about—the giving of birth and the giving of nourishment.” Boys, by contrast, deprived of the opportunity to give birth, turn into “servants of something greater” once they grow up.1

  More than two decades earlier, Betty Friedan had dismantled and undone the myth of what she called the “Happy Housewife Heroine.” The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, was the book that dared to address the problem with no name and that launched a major social movement, reaching into the lives of its readers and transforming them in ways that childbirth had not.2 The real-life women of postwar U.S. culture, Friedan declared, kept having babies “because the feminine mystique says there is no other way for a woman to be a heroine.” In stories printed in women’s magazines of the 1950s, Friedan discovered, only one in a hundred included a heroine with a job, and the feature articles had titles along the lines of “Have Babies While You’re Young,” “Are You Training Your Daughter to Become a Wife?,” and “Cooking to Me Is Poetry.” One of the titles Friedan mentions rang a bell with me as I read through that sad list, and I feel sure that I read it back in the day: “Why GI’s Prefer Those German Girls.” And the answer was of course the cult of Kinder, Küche, und Kirche (Children, Kitchen, and Church) that continued to flourish in postwar Germany and was embodied in the German Hausfrau.

  In 1962, just one year before the publication of The Feminine Mystique, Helen Gurley Brown, later the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, published Sex and the Single Girl, a book that communicated, with breathless prose, the pleasures of looking your best, having affairs, and snagging the man of your dreams (among other things, keeping a spray atomizer on your desk to make sure you always looked fresh at the office was considered obligatory).3 Brown advised her readers to cook well (“it will serve you faithfully”), get rid of baby fat (it belongs on babies), live alone (even if it meant renting a space above a garage), and “lay a trap” for the “glittery life.” Unconstrained by husband and children, the Cosmo Girl was sexually active, supremely self-confident, and ready to pounce. She was “a potent amalgam of Ragged Dick, Sammy Glick and Holly Golightly,” Margalit Fox wrote in the New York Times obituary for Helen Gurley Brown, adding that the Cosmo Girl always had a good time whether wearing her fabulous clothes or taking them off.4

  Recall the terms of Achilles’ Choice, when Thetis, his mother, confronts her son, the man who will become the hero of the Trojan War, with a decision. He can choose to abandon the battle, have children, and die a happy old man, or continue fighting, become famous, and earn immortality. The choice is between nostos (home) and kleos (glory).

  Women in the postwar era faced a similar divide in the road, since “having it all” seemed an impossible goal. But for them, as Campbell told Moyers, marriages can fall apart, especially once the children leave the house: “Daddy will fall in love with some nubile girl and run off, and Mother will be left with an empty house and heart, and will have to work it out on her own, in her own way.”5 That meant that nostos might in fact not be the best option. But how could women win immortality at a time when they could not possibly go to war? As we have seen, writing, becoming a woman of letters, finding a voice and using it to deliver social justice, became the path to glory. But in contemporary popular culture, that writing is often carried out in tandem with a hunt that demands the focused determination of a bloodhound.

  The trope of the “aspiring writer” can be found in many TV series, from the struggles of Rory Gilmore to become a reporter in Gilmore Girls (2000–2007) to the bitter triumph of Guinevere Beck, who lands a book deal in the first season of You (2017) before dying at the hands of her boyfriend. Beginning with Sex and the City, which aired from 1998 to 2004, and up to Girls, airing from 2012 to 2017, a writing career was something like the holy grail for girls and women, as it had been for Jo March, Anne Shirley, and Francie Nolan. For Carrie Bradshaw, in Sex and the City, that career took a back seat to finding Mr. Right, who manifests himself as Mr. Big (Helen Gurley Brown would have approved). For Hannah Horvath, in Girls, self-actualization takes a different form, as she pursues becoming a writer and unintentionally also ends up with a baby.

  Before turning to teen detectives and women sleuths, it is worth taking a look at what makes Carrie and Hannah run. The two have discarded al
l the trappings of the Feminine Mystique, yet they remain to double duty bound, developing a professional identity as writers while also seeking a romantic connection. Carrie simpers for Mr. Big, flirts with Berger, and has a fling with a jazz soloist, while Hannah gets serious with Adam, indulges in a “sexcapade” with a pal’s underage stepbrother, and has a fling with a surfboarding instructor named Paul-Louis. They are both on the prowl but also bent on self-actualization. What we see in the near decade that separates them is a turn toward investigative work in the service of social justice, a mission shared with the private eyes and sleuths who appear in this chapter. These are women of action, and they lead up to a long-awaited superheroine who can finally take her place among action figures ranging from Superman and Batman to Spider-Man and Thor.

  “Once upon a Time in a City Far Away”: Carrie Bradshaw and Hannah Horvath

  Even those critical of Sex and the City as a featherweight television production will concede that the series channeled and also reshaped our cultural understanding of courtship, dating, and marriage, especially when it came to sex and single women. The women in Sex and the City were grown-ups, but more like gal-pals or girls, in the best senses of those terms, adventurous and uninhibited, ready to do all and tell all. In some ways they seem to have stepped out from the pages of Louisa May Alcott’s “Happy Women,” this time as modern bachelorettes instead of nineteenth-century spinsters (“Why do we get stuck with old maid and spinster and men get to be bachelors and playboys?” an irate Miranda asks her friends).6 They may not have been exactly happy, but they rarely sank into what Freud called neurotic misery (since this is New York City, psychoanalysis is right there to help out). Instead they navigated what the founding father of psychoanalysis called untreatable forms of ordinary human unhappiness.