I’ve been thinking about the differences between Elizabeth von Arnim’s Vera and Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women.
The most admirable, dignified and memorable character in Vera is a 50-year-old spinster Miss Entwhistle. She doesn’t see herself as useless or rejected like Pym’s heroine. She’s a person of great dignity and quiet but unbreakable inner strength. Miss Entwhistle chose not to get married because she decided she was better off single. It’s clear that for her it was the right choice. You can feel anything but pity for her because she’s not in the least pathetic. But her admirable character isn’t written in a deliberate, pointed way, either. Von Arnim doesn’t try to prove anything or make a point. She creates a character whose dignity is revealed as something normal and expected. Pym, on the other hand, tries to make a point out of everything and comes off as fake.
It’s interesting to me that von Arnim could write about an unmarried middle-aged woman as an admirable, interesting person in 1921 but 30 years later Pym couldn’t. This tracks with something I long observed in Spanish literature. As we get farther away from the oppressive, patriarchal 19th and early 20th century, the more weepy, whiny, self-infantilizing and pouty do female characters become.
Something killed off interesting female characters in mid-twentieth century. It’s like there was a virus that wiped them off.
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