A Few Favourite Female Characters

Or, perhaps, a few least not-favourite female characters.

See, I tend to have this love-hate relationship with female characters. I want to like them – I really, really want to like them, often because they’re one of only a handful of women or girls in their story (sometimes, seemingly, in their entire fictional universe). But so often, they fall short of my expectations, not necessarily because they as “people” are bad but because at some point their creator(s) forgot that women are still regular human beings.

So would I hang out with these four women if they were real? Probably. (Although some of them probably wouldn’t hang out with me.) Do I think they’re great role models for women and girls and/or people in general? … Sometimes. In the context of their stories, often*. When applied to real life… not so often. Do I wish I could re-write their stories to make their universes more conducive to them being completely awesome? Heck yeah.

Sophie Hatter (Howl’s Moving Castle) – I do like Sophie. I love Diana Wynne Jones’s work, and would happily read a paraphrase of the phone book if she was the one who’d written it, but even if Sophie was from someone else’s stories, I’d still have her on this list.

True, Sophie veers a little into the I Love Lucy side of things. She’s mainly concerned with traditional “womanly” things, like cleaning the house, and when she tries to interfere in her eventual husband’s work, things tend to work out badly. But she doesn’t let his refusal to explain things stop her. She’s smart, vivacious, and talented in her own right, doing things the male magicians cannot and complementing their approach with her own. She doesn’t put up with any of Howl’s drama-queen nonsense, and, although she sometimes ends up playing a mother-figure to him, she is more often his equal and partner. And she’s strong enough to simply buck up and work through an ordeal like getting bespelled during the final weeks of her pregnancy.

More awesomely, she has human flaws – she’s got low self-esteem that hides her stubborn streak until the Witch of the Waste transforms her into an old woman. When she’s got confidence, she sometimes gets carried away and doesn’t stop to think. She’s afraid to feel strongly about other people but super-possessive once she’s decided she loves them. Those all sound pretty human to me.

Lisa Cuddy (House, M. D.) – I’m a Cuddy fan in part by process of elimination. I really, really want to like one of the women on House but: I haven’t seen the seasons with Amber or Stacey; Cameron, while involved in interesting plot arcs, seems to me to embody SO MANY of the most persistent female stereotypes (emotional, intuitive, kind, impulsive, has a mothering-rescue instinct) that I can’t take it, even when I agree with her character’s standpoint**; and, as for Thirteen, well, unfortunately, she screams “Poochy” to me: an added character the creators want to sell to the audience so badly that it’s harder and harder to actually be interested in what she does.

The other part is that I find Cuddy interesting and sympathetic. However, of all the characters on this list, I freely admit that she’s the one who most often makes me alternate between “Yeah!” and “GAH!!!” She’s funny, smart, attractive, and a match for House (Yeah!)… except when she’s not because the plot requires it (GAH!!!). She’s Jewish and has a committment to her faith (Yeah!)… except for the 99% of the time when the show isn’t trying to make some kind of point about the rationality of religion (GAH!!!). She’s a competent and effective woman in a position of power (Yeah!)… except when she’s not because the narrative requires crazy stuff, and someone must be letting all of it happen (GAH!!!). She’s confident and stands up for herself (Yeah!)… except when she’s not so that House can make boob jokes (GAH!!!). She lives her own life (Yeah!)… except when all her personal decisions are actually about House and how he reacts to them (GAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

…

You know, I don’t care for shows like Will and Grace or Friends, but can we transplant some characters from them into House? Because Cuddy’s character could be so much less GAH!!! and so much more Yeah! if she just had a friend to talk to who wasn’t a) a dude who wants to be her boyfriend; b) a dude who’s best friends with a dude who wants to be her boyfriend; or c) her employees who all respect the dude who wants to be her boyfriend more than they respect her. At least Grace has Will, Jack, and Karen, and Monica, Phoebe, and Rachel have each other***!

Dana Scully (The X Files) – Oh, Scully. Sometimes, it seems like your (fictional) life should be set to the 1812 Overture. And, like Cuddy, after season one, you have no friends except your romantic interest and the constellation of people who surround him. Maybe there’s some fictional-ladies’ club where the two of you can hang out and talk about how much it sucks when the guys you work with are tools who never listen to you and you really want to have a baby but don’t****.

Scully has a lot of virtues that make her easy to like – she’s smart, physically competent, beautiful, and doesn’t take “no” for an answer. She stands up for what she believes no matter what the consequences. She goes all BAMF on anyone who threatens her or someone she cares about. She reacts to danger by getting angry, not scared. And even after seven years on The X Files, by which point she should surely realize that the universe in which she lives is constructed so that no matter how wacky Mulder’s theory is, it’s always right, she still offers her rational explanations.

Unfortunately, she also gives in to Mulder every two seconds. She’s pretty bad at making the case for science*****. And sometimes her “rational” explanation or attitude is so full of ridiculous assumptions or blatant emotional bias that it’s hard to take her seriously as a scientist. She gets kidnapped and/or attacked every other episode (often because the Monster of the Week is trying to get at Mulder, but then they realize that he’s a man and just going for him directly wouldn’t conform to television conventions. Hey, monsters have standards, too!), often from within her own apartment, and often successfully, despite the fact that even the slightest strange noise makes her grab her gun and start barking orders.

Basically, Scully needs a friend, too, only her friend needs to be a mix of Marie Curie and Samus Aran.

Debra Morgan (Dexter, the TV series) – All right, honesty time. This whole entry was written just so I could write about how awesome a female character Deb is. And she is! She’s written consistently. She has human virtues – smart, stubborn, and ballsy. She has human flaws – workaholic, messy, potty mouth, not dealing with all this emotion stuff very well. She’s more at home with guys than girls and has trouble assessing her own feelings. She’s a true sister to Dexter, a friend to Quinn and Masuka (who’s another awesome character, BTW), a devoted aunt to Cody, Astor, and Harrison, and a heartbreakingly vulnerable lover to the guys she’s with – but, best of all, she’s got a strong and devoted relationship with herself.

Unlike the lives of some of the other women on this list, Deb’s life is clearly first and foremost about Deb, and not in a bad conceited way. The stuff she does (like trying to figure out exactly what sort of guy her dad was or  tracking down the Trinity Killer) winds up being as much about her reacting to the consequences (like having to deal with the fact that Harry Morgan was a douche or gaining closure on her lover”s death) as it is about how her actions affect Dexter, the main character. She makes dumb but human mistakes, like getting all paranoid about her new boyfriend because her last one turned out to be a murderer. When she cries, it’s sometimes real, snot-from-your-nose, undignified crying, not pretty Hollywood one-tear-trickling-down-the-face. Basically, unlike Cuddy and Scully, she lives her life like she doesn’t know she’s in a TV show that features someone else as the main character.

Which is how all characters, male or female, should be.

* e.g. Given that Beauty exists in a world where Beasts really do just need true love to transform, her actions are fine within her fictional universe and a great model for other women who live inside a Disney movie. Given that real women live in a world where romantic partners like Beasts often don’t change and “true love” may or may not exist, they’re not.

** For instance, in the recent episode “Teamwork”, Cameron tells House off. I agreed that he deserved to be told off and was glad she did it. But I still couldn’t get behind her because instead of making the telling-off about what he did and didn’t do and why it was wrong, it turned into a long speech on how she felt about it, and about him, and about everything. There are excellent arguments for why she’s right and House is wrong, but she never gets to say any of them. The main (and often only) justification she’s allowed to offer is, “Because I feel that way!” Because that’s how we women roll!

I’m not saying that there are no primarily emotional women in real life or that they don’t deserve to be seen on TV. But, as of this writing and since at least the Victorian era, they FAR outnumber other kinds of women portrayed. Especially on shows like House where the dominant paradigm is a heavily masculine “rationality” that is shown again and again to compete with and ultimately to be better than the “feminine” intuition embodied in characters like Cameron.

*** And, c’mon, tell me you don’t want to see Jack and Karen wreak havoc at Princeton-Plainsboro. Go on, tell me. You lie.

**** Best. Imaginary. Scene. Ever.
CUDDY: … and, yeah, so then after the fertility treatment fell through, I tried to adopt, but the birth mother decided at the last minute to keep the child, and I didn’t want to try again, but it just happened that one of the cases at the hospital led me to this abandoned baby, so I decided to foster her, and, well, that’s how I became a mom.
SCULLY: Aliens stole my ova.
CUDDY: …

***** To be fair, this is probably because, off-screen on most of the episodes, Mulder is probably telling her, “Look, I saw the teaser before the opening credits rolled, okay? Even though it was poorly lit and kind of confusing, I’m pretty sure I know what happened.” How else could he always jump to exactly the right answer based on ambiguous evidence?