This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
There are bad and good female characters all throughout literary history, whether it be the evil villainesses we love to hate – those like Abigail Williams from The Crucible, or Lady Macbeth – or the beloved heroines that fill the pages of classic literature: Josephine March, Jean Louise Finch, Anne Shirley, and so on.
Sadly, for me at least, it often seems as though the good girls of literature are harder to remember than the bad, that their good deeds and charming personas are often surpassed by the plotting, scheming, and downright wicked behavior of literary rogues. After all, who can possibly forget the hysteria created by Abigail Williams as she accused men and women of witchcraft, sending many to their deaths? There are times the good deeds of the most beloved female characters are overshadowed by the wickedness of their evil counterparts.
But why? I wonder. Is it that I have trouble believing anyone could possibly be as good as our favorite good girls are? Maybe. Or maybe it’s that there are times I secretly think I’d like to say and do the wicked things our favorite bad girls say and do with ease. That could be it too.
And then, of course, there are those who walk a fine line in between good and bad, women such as Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter, a defiant woman who has been condemned by society for her dishonorable actions, and yet, can we really think that she is bad? She strikes me instead as a woman of incredible strength, a place where many of my favorite characters of all time reside: on the cusp between good and bad, those girls who have had a rough lot in life and are trying desperately turn things around, to transform from bad to good, from villain to heroine.
The bad and good girls of literature continue into modern times. The good girls remain, those like Skeeter Phelan in Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, girls who are nothing but endearing, the ones you can’t help but fall in love with. They are kind, enjoyable, enchanting, and we find ourselves rooting for their happiness from page one until the very end. They are the characters we often long to be, and they possess the qualities we crave for in a friend. They are loyal, honest, caring, and entirely virtuous.
And yet there are still those characters we love to hate, women such as Dina, Molly Ayers’ unkind, uncompromising foster mother in Christina Baker Kline’s Orphan Train, or nearly all members of the Magpies, an exclusive secret society of mean girls which Amelia joins in Kimberly McCreight’s debut Reconstructing Amelia, shortly before plummeting to her death from the roof of her private school building. And still there are others gracing the pages of today’s latest and greatest psychological thrillers, some of the most evil villains of all, the kind that concoct elaborate plots, characters so conniving and ruthless they must be classified as the greatest bad girls of all time, the type of evil reprobates that spark great debates amongst book club members, and stay with us long after we’ve finished the last page. They’re evil, completely evil, but also a little bit fun.
But stuck in the middle somewhere are the girls like Hester Prynne who walk the fine line between good and bad, villain and heroine, and this is often where I find my favorite literary characters. They are flawed and genuine, the ones we’re likely to relate to, even if it’s our very worst traits or fears that we see in them. Like Victoria Jones in Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s The Language of Flowers, or Lisbeth Salander in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, these women often emerge from an unhappy childhood, and feel isolated and alienated from society in more ways than one. They make copious mistakes in their particular novels – some criminal, some immoral, some naïve, or some just downright dumb – so that we want to scream at them through the pages of the book. Every time we feel so hopeful that they will make a change for the better and finally, finally succeed in life, they let us down again. But are they bad? In my opinion: absolutely not. They are good girls doing the best with what life has given them. Unlike their ruthless and conniving counterparts, their actions are simply the best they can do given their lot in life. They’re damaged, yes, and entirely real.
As an author, these are the characters I love to explore, to dig deeper into the good girls and the bad girls, and find that average human being who lies somewhere in between.
There are two main female characters in The Good Girl: Mia Dennett and her mother, Eve. Both women have encountered obstacles in their lives, and both live with regret in one form or more. As the black sheep of the Dennett family, Mia struggles to find independence outside of her well-to-do family, making decisions, at times, that are looked down upon. Her mother, Eve, lives with great regret from the poor choices she made during Mia’s childhood. Like the rest of us, they’re blemished. They’re imperfect. They feel guilty about decisions they’ve made, both in the past and in the pages of the book, decisions that may force the reader to decide if Mia and Eve are good, bad, or, like some of my favorite literary characters of all time, if they lie somewhere in between.