Eighteenth-Century Echoes: Strong Female Protagonists Then & Now

“Be sure don’t let people’s telling you, you are pretty, puff you up; for you did not make yourself, and so can have no praise due to you for it. It is virtue and goodness only, that make the true beauty.”

--Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded

Mr. B & Pamela

Many of the most famous novels of the eighteenth century recount the tumultuous story of a young woman’s first entry into society. Pamela, by Richardson, often considered a turning point in the rise of the modern novel, is in many ways the prototype for this type of narrative. Pamela, and others like it, all deal with a young woman’s entry into society, her search for a suitable mate, her development into a virtuous woman, and the many obstacles that stand in her way.Works like Eliza Haywood’s  The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, Frances Sheridan’s The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biduloph (as well as its Continuation), Frances Burney’s Evelina or Camilla, and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, are all variations on a theme. A young woman without a suitable mentor or guide must navigate the treacherous social scene (often in a “debauched” place like London or Bath) in which she is constantly pressured to spend money, flirt freely, and associate with villains and rakes. She is put into situations out of her control, asked to make important life decisions, and influenced by those who want to gain by her naivete. A single wrong decision can dog the heroine throughout life (as in Sidney Bidulph) or it can be resolved through the help of friends and newly-discovered family connections (as in Evelina).

What these novels have in common with more recent young adult fiction is the focus on a young teen-aged girl as the protagonist. Having read the Hunger Games series, Ally Condie’s Matched series, watched the Twilight films (I couldn’t make myself get through the books), and more recently finished Veronica Roth’s Divergent, I was struck by the recent prominence of strong female protagonists both now and in the eighteenth century. (How strong they are is, of course, up for debate.)

Contemporary YA fiction has broken spectacularly into mainstream culture, starting most obviously (and pathetically) with Twilight. Twilight’s Bella is not much to write home about in terms of agency, but the series’s love triangle, which leads Bella to follow her heart and make some difficult decisions, has subsequently morphed into a popular trope in recent teen dystopian fiction. The Hunger Games’s Katniss is smarter, more interesting, and much stronger (at least physically) than Bella; she kicks ass, takes names, and has serious doubts about pursuing a romantic attachment during times of war—but the novel insists on throwing her into a love triangle situation. (Jennifer Lawrence’s rendering of Katniss has only increased her appeal, something Lionsgate undoubtedly hopes to repeat by casting Shailene Woodley in their adaptation of Roth’s Divergent, out in the spring.)

"J-Law" as Katniss in The Hunger Games film adaptation.

The idea of a female heroine put to various tests, thrown into a dangerous setting, unsure of whom she can trust, asked to choose between factions (quite literally in the Divergent and Matched series), given a makeover, and put in a situation where she must choose an appropriate (male) mate is strikingly similar to the Pamela trajectory. The stakes have not been raised, necessarily; they have merely been updated. Running away with Wickham was social death for Pride and Prejudice’s Lydia; for many of Austen’s contemporaries, social death was as bad if not worse than actual death. (…and in Clarissa, actually does end in death.)

It’s easy to guess why a teen-aged girl is such a titillating choice of protagonist both then and now. She is old enough to be sexy, but young enough to be virginal; her story is that of development but also of romance. Richardson’s Pamela and its various literary off-spring were meant as texts that taught young women how to behave, think, and feel. (Though it is worth mentioning that read today, Pamela seems rather voyeuristic, as we are asked to imagine Richardson penning various scenes in which Pamela is abused, undressed, and groped in the dark.)

Many of the novels by female novelists like Haywood, Edgeworth and Burney functioned not only to warn and teach young women (Edgeworth’s father was the author of various works on female and young person’s education and she collaborated with him on some of the projects), but also to expose and criticize the society that gave rise to the problems these young women would have to face. The novels function as social criticism as they illustrate the many ways in which society works against young women, forcing them to make difficult decisions that will affect their whole lives.

A Twilight publicity image
illustrating the love triangle that
split female viewers into "Team
Edward" and "Team Jacob"

Today’s dystopian YA novels have an element of social commentary, as is usual with dystopian fiction in general, but few of them challenge social expectations of women or gender norms in any real way. The love triangle set up by Twilight as the “standard” for YA girls’ fiction is so lucrative, that any author with visions of movie options would be stupid not to write one in. The romantic plot in these works often overshadows the more transgressive dystopian elements of the novels. The dystopian setting becomes merely a catalyst for love; the love story becomes the focal point of the narrative, as important if not more important than bringing down an evil government. In fact, in a series like Matched, the main character might never have joined the rebellion against the government if it weren’t because she fell in love with a social misfit.

On the other hand, today’s YA novels seem to encourage qualities like self-reliance, a high threshold for pain, sacrifice for the benefit of others, and self-confidence. Little girls around the U.S. are begging their parents for archery lessons so they can be like Katniss. Similarly, like many classic novels of growing up, YA dystopian fiction emphasizes the process of “self-discovery” and understanding what it means to be “true to oneself” and one’s core values—it’s just a shame that the biggest part of this self-discovery is figuring out which boy you prefer.

Most of the YA fiction for young women today is written by women; conversely, in the eighteenth century, both men and women put female characters at the center of their stories for the explicit purposes of educating young women (and, maybe a little, fantasizing about them, too). Consider Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana; Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa; Henry Fielding’s Amelia; Diderot’s The Nun; or Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons, all of which contain female protagonists who are fascinating and complex. Now consider some of today’s splashiest, most popular and celebrated literary male writers: Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, John Irving, Stephen King…How many of them have written novels centered around the development of a young woman? It’s a bit funny to think that of all of them, King’s Carrie comes closest to that description. In terms of contemporary “serious” fiction, the teen girl is negligible at best, a joke at worst.

In the end, all of these issues come back to what we, as a society, understand teen-aged girls to be like. Both eighteenth-century and contemporary YA novelists seem to believe that teen girls are searching for a place to fit in, and that this fitting in is intimately tied to finding someone to love and to be loved by in return. While not a terrible conclusion in and of itself, it seems to indicate that our expectations of teen girls and the social construction of teen girlhood has not changed very much in 200 years. If anything, it seems that authors' approaches to these expectations has gotten worse: instead of trying to correct teen girl’s stereotypical behaviors, today’s YA novelists seem to cater to them, providing them with the kind of fantasies that Charlotte Lennox spoofs so tenderly in The Female Quixote.

A Century of Shaving

"God gave men beards for ornaments and to distinguish them from women."
--Carl Linnaeus, Diaeta Naturalis (1733)

Eighteenth-century wig and barber shop.

One of the things that has made studying the eighteenth century (rather than contemporary literature, as was my original specialization when I first entered grad school) absolutely fascinating is all the amazing nuggets of historical information that I've dug up while doing research.

Many people don't know just how many things that we take for granted as modern inventions (like dildos or condoms) actually have long historical roots. The reverse is also true: there are many bizarre historical facts and beliefs that we have forgotten or, perhaps, chosen to forget, because they became outdated (like the practices of using mouse fur to make fake eyebrows or mercury to "cure" syphilis).

America's famously clean-shaven
founding father, George Washington.

While researching concepts of the gendered body in the eighteenth century, I ended up reading up quite a bit on beards, facial and otherwise. It took me some time to realize that although characters mention facial beards in eighteenth-century works (like Moll, in Defoe's  Moll Flanders), the beard itself was unfashionable in the eighteenth century. The more I looked, the more I came to realize that clean-shaved-ness was expected of men for nearly the whole century. Portraits of all the King Georges, the American "Founding Fathers" and many other noted luminaries of the time portray men always clean shaven, though they do, occasionally, include a five o'clock shadow.

Some forms of facial hair, like the mustache, were almost always popular among military men, but overall, even in the military, men were expected to have a razor and keep up with shaving--or to make time to go to a barber. While the beard, as described by historian Will Fisher, was hugely popular in the Renaissance, to the point that it was a defining characteristic of mature masculinity, and mustaches and mutton chops are the calling cards of the Victorian period, the eighteenth century was almost completely facial-hair free.

The ability to grow a facial beard, however, was significant in the eighteenth-century European cultural imaginary, as it came to be thought of as an essential aspect of the white man's supremacy over other races. Eighteenth-century naturalists like Francois Bernier and Richard Bradely used the relative beardedness of different peoples to identify and classify different races. The beard-growing Europeans were "naturally" superior to the beardless Asians and native peoples of the Americas, and their practice of shaving made them superior to the "unkempt" bearded men of the African continent.

In Peter the Great's Russia, Peter himself imposed a "beard tax" on upper-class men who did not shave in hopes of moving Russia further toward the "civilized" West, further associating shaving with being evolved and Enlightened. (Though it is worth noting that both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I also levied beard taxes in England in earlier periods.)

Medieval illustration
of the 4 humors.

Of course, the inability to grow facial hair was also thought of as yet another sign of why women were inferior to men. According to Linnaeus, who came up with this theory based on the theory of the humors, men were "dry and hot," and the excess heat in the body manifested in either sperm or hair. Facial hair was therefore caused by the heat of reabsorbed semen in the male body. Interestingly, bearded women were therefore quite threatening in this hierarchy, as they sported hair that was supposed to belong to the male sex exclusively.

Similarly, women who were independent, powerful, intelligent or self-sufficient were also often thought of as "bearded." Immanuel Kant, for example, invoked the beard in his attach on learned women like the classicist Madame Dacier or the physicist Emilie du Chatelet, citing that women like them "might just as well havea  beard, for that expresses in a more recognizable form the profundity for which she strives." Actual bearded women, however, were dismissed as unfeminine, while the whiskers of postmenopausal women were explained through the Galenic model of reabsorbed bodily fluid--the fluids no longer expelled through menstruation reformed into facial hair.

Also of note, in eighteenth-century narratives of cross-dressing women, many women who tried to pass as men, like the female soldier Hannah Snell, had to figure out how to distract others from their lack of facial hair. Several of them compensated for this lack by soliciting the desires of other women, thus appropriating yet another kind of "beard."