Not in the Middle Ages or at any time since, has there ever existed such an extraordinary number of works of literature whose female protagonists are abjectly, pathetically, and enthusiastically subservient to men as in the 21st-century literature.
Medieval heroines are actually not subservient at all. They have agency, they have willpower, the have their own interests and strategies that they pursue. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century female characters are even more so. It all begins to change in the late twentieth century and explodes completely in the twenty-first. One after another female character enslaves herself eagerly to some dude. And it’s never a dude who offers marriage, children, money, an equal partnership, and respect. No, it’s always and invariably a man who treats her as a child.
This is fascinating to observe. One novel after another. Different authors, countries, generations, writing styles, political beliefs. The characters are poor, rich, mega rich, in the middle. Societies where women have opportunities that Elizabeth Bennett or Jane Eyre couldn’t begin to dream of. Yet these female heroines throw all the opportunities away to pursue infantilization and abasement.
Clarissa's Blog 
LOL, you don’t suppose that given the opportunity that women would instinctively select a mate as superior to herself as possible so that the resultant offspring would have a better chance in life ;-D
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These female characters are unanimously and passionately anti-children. They either have none or drop the ones they have to scuttle after some dumb layabout or even a criminal.
This is definitely not literature where women are oriented towards benefiting their offspring.
It’s not the 19th century. We live in the world of post-work. That changes people’s priorities.
I hate this, by the way. But I can’t pretend it’s not happening.
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LOL, I never implied any thought process was involved whatsoever, quite the opposite. And you are not the only one that cannot deny what is happening, both my instinct and training is to try to bloody understand why ;-D
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\ It’s not the 19th century. We live in the world of post-work. That changes people’s priorities.
Could you clarify, please what you mean by “post-work”?
I still must work to earn a living, and you too, right?
And how is post-work related to children?
May be, even a post about that? Sounds like an interesting topic for discussion.
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“what you mean by “post-work”?”
Well in my lifetime, I’ve seen ‘work’ bifurcate and evolve in different directions.
Originally it was a grim duty, necessary for survival. For many unpleasant jobs that’s what it still is (though less and less a guarantee of even minimum standards). At the other end it evolved into a right and now it’s a privilege for the well-connected in their never ending efforts to chase clout.
One problem is that most authors only want to write about (upper) middle class snowflakes chasing ‘self-fulfillment’ and are not so interested in those who have to work (partly because most authors lean left and the left despises those who have to work to put food on the table and most readers are middle class women who look down on the working class and who hate low status men).
A novel about a woman with a born American woman with a high school education who can only get a job cleaning offices and faces constant lowering of wages while trying to compete with immigrants who sleep six to a room… and whose is alone because almost all the men she comes into contact are addicts or cons or who are just checked out of trying to get a job….who wants to read about that?
Who wants to read about a guy who’s entry level tech job is taken by an H1B1 visa holder who he has to train? He still lives with his parent because no job he can find comes close to paying for housing. No woman will look at him because he’s a ‘loser’.
Lots of potential topics out there that no author or publisher will touch because Oprah book club is about winners and girl bosses.
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I’d read those.
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There are a lot of works of literature about this in the Spanish-speaking world. But the US publishing industry is, indeed, very different and very inhospitable to anything that isn’t celebratory of neoliberalism. It’s also very escapist. Rarely, books about something real squeak by. “Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsollver and “The Guest” by Emma Cline are examples. But the overwhelming majority of books that get published in English absolutely pretend that this whole gigantic reality of chaos and dispossession doesn’t exist. Almost all characters are quite comically wealthy. Almost all don’t really need to work or bother about paying the bills. There are more people with gigantic inheritances than in Trollope’s novels about British dukes and earls.
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We do have to work but the economy no longer needs masses of people to show up at the factory door. To the contrary, people have become a burden.
I’ll write separately about children and post-work.
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Clarissa
No, the West is not importing millions of people from societies that are unlikely to ever properly assimilate because we do not need labour. Simply put, we do not want to pay some of our citizen’s adequate wages in our society.
Further, we have misled many youth into imagining that ever increasing costly acadenic degrees were necessary, whether they had any inclination, or ability or not. While simultaneously depressing too many that could not follow that route, to either fall out of the job market or deliberately limit their attempts. Here’s a thoughful guy trying to help:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES0qa2u4JNU&ab_channel=FoxBusiness
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thoughtful
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“importing millions of people from societies that are unlikely to ever properly assimilate because we do not need labour”
Well…. in Europe they’re not working. Only something like half of Merkel’s 2015 invitees have ever had legal work in Germany (and a lot of that was directly or indirectly subsidized).
Labor migration looks very different from undifferentiated open borders experiments by alienated politicians (Merkel, whatever loser is the UK PM at the moment, Trudeau).
There is an already visible number of non-western people in Poland but they’re here to work (the social benefits system is not…. enticing for layabouts who want to suckle at the state’s teat).
Large numbers of people without much education or promise from chaotically failing countries are not brought to western countries to work. And when workers are wanted the process is much different from just letting anyone and everyone from chaotically failing countries in.
My own best guess is that a number of western countries are trying some version of something like the Kalergi plan and/or want to disincentivize the native population so they can be exploited at will.
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cliff arroyo
LOL, well, if there is a plan it resembles the WEF. Would be elites, aristocrats that having never actually created anything in their entire lives, somehow feels that they should be in charge ;-D
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I’ve been binge-reading Trollope the last couple of months, and this point has been blowing me away. The women in his novels have little opportunity to act and they often make dumb decisions with the autonomy they DO have, but my WORD! They have a vigorous self of self-worth, boundaries, agency, inner life, that any number of empowered C21 rom-com heroines could barely imagine, much less enact.
Full disclosure: I’ve been binge-LISTENING to unabridged audiobooks.
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Yes! It was fashionable among literary critics for a while to announce that, since feminism won, female heroines will reflect that. Instead, what we see in literature is such depths of female abasement and patheticness, that any female character of Decameron or Jane Austen or Dickens would recoil on horror.
I first pointed that out in 2008, and it only has gotten worse since.
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Clarissa
“,,,since feminism won…”
Hmmm, okay, when and what did they win exactly? Does the current decline of Western Civilization ever remind you of the Eastern Europe that your family fled?
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I wouldn’t say “fled” because I left from a position of economic success and a comfortable lifestyle.
Feminism won everything. Most college students at every level are female. We have complete sexual freedom, we can work in anything we want. Young women are touted as the great winners of the neoliberal game.
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Perhaps I misunderstand, I thought that your family had lived in some relative poverty. And that the average workers were considered fungible, leading to indolence, debauchery, and widespread incompetence, resulting in hopelessness and drunkeness. That was also the feeling that I got from a second cousin(?) that visited family in the old country maybe 25 years ago.
As for the second paragraph, any possible wins actually belong to the humanity taught in New Testament ;-D
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We lived in poverty in the USSR. But the moment that bastard fell apart and we could start businesses and work for real money, that’s what we did.
But you are right, we were exceptional. My father was the only father who worked among all my friends in the 1990s. The other fathers were depressed and refused to adapt to the new economy.
I loved capitalism in the nineties. I still do. That’s one thing that remained unchanged. 😊
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What women want.
It’s tragic, bizarre even, when one thinks about the so-called arc of women’s “liberation”. It almost looks like its nemesis.
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We want to be liberated from self-respect?
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methylethyl
LOL, I see that you also have a dark sense of humour ;-D
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Another reason woke lit types discourage the reading of old books
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“to be liberated from self-respect?”
Precisely. From the outside it looks as if the whole point of this “liberation” process was so that women could be free to be impotent and submissive to men.
It’s like “Gay Liberation”: today the world of gay men is rife with grotesque stereotypes of masculinity. Was that the point of the whole struggle then?
Running away from the patriarchal “oppression” of fathers and husbands so that you can serve a male boss in an office; and female bosses are often even worse than male ones, in terms of bossiness and subservience.
Freedom is just another kind of prison: to be free is to be alone, and most people, thankfully, do not want to be alone. No one seems to have solved this conundrum for women. It’s bonkers, but there you are.
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I believe there were some outspoken early anti-suffragist woman who were very prescient about this.
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methylethyl
Yeah, amongst the Anglosphere there were more suffragists than suffragettes, but the latter were not only more vocal but far, far more violent. The former correctly believed that entering the political arena would lower their status and influence. Interestingly some appeared to want to vote on local rather than national matters, and more interestingly, wide female sufferance first appeared in the more isolated regions in western North America and Australia, It’s almost like the widespread abusive patriarchy was largely simply a useful myth ;-D
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“wide female sufferance [suffrage] first appeared in the more isolated regions in western North America and Australia“
I think you are onto something here: it seems that it started in New Zealand, then Australia and Western Canada and only later in the US and the UK.
Some of the suffragettes were basically terrorists: the white Western liberal women of the time.
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LOL, sufferance, perhaps a Freudian slip. Yes. the old male jest that women got suffrage and men have been suffering ever since. And I see that our comments have secured the usual down votes by gutless wonders fearing that further historic truths could possibly burst even more shiny little bubbles ;-D
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