Female Bad Behavior in Literature

• The lecture explores the complexities of female bad behavior in literature, specifically in novels, plays, and epic poems.
• It questions the contemporary permissibility and necessity of depicting women behaving badly in literature.
• The talk references a children’s rhyme about a girl who is either "very, very good" or "horrid," which is a remnant of the Victorian era, but highlights the Jungian idea of a double life for women.

Spot as Guilt

• The title references the "spot" on Lady Macbeth's hand, symbolizing guilt and blood, contrasting her with the "unspotted" Ophelia.
• The central idea suggests that disruptive elements are needed for dynamism as that helps define literature.
• The speaker recalls a play with characters endlessly having breakfast, lacking the "something else" that defines literature.
• Literature differentiates itself from life by requiring more than a static existence, such as eternal breakfast, demanding events like earthquakes or revelations.

Essentials for Fiction

• The talk goes over essentials for creating fiction, acknowledging potential insult to intelligence, but emphasizes focusing as a creator.
• Questions about characters in novels are addressed from the perspective of audience and creator.
• Characters are often judged as potential candidates for personal relationships, which is inappropriate.
• The speaker questions why she should make the male characters stronger, and references Adam's temptation as an example where perhaps God is even an "enamourer" or character flaws.
• The author equates artists to con-artists who tell the truth indirectly, referencing Emily Dickinson's slantwise approach.

Novels and Their Essence

• Novels aren't sociological textbooks but may contain social commentary and criticism.
• Novels aren't political tracts, though they inevitably involve human power structures.
• Noble sentiments, like converting readers, can lead to bad literature, as highlighted by André Gide.
• Novels aren't how-to books for a successful life, even though some books like Pride and Prejudice can be read this way.
• Novels aren't primarily moral tracts; characters aren't necessarily models of good behavior.
• Morality is linked to novels because characters judge each other, and readers judge the characters however a novel's worth doesn't rely on a "Not Guilty" verdict form the reader.
• According to Keats, Shakespeare delighted in creating both Iago and Imogen, however Iago stands out more.

Novels vs Reality

• Novels aren't merely Art for Art’s Sake, but are rooted in the rawness of real life and attempt to grapple with the human condition.
• Novels are ambiguous and multi-faceted due to their use of language itself.
• The novelist's process starts like wrestling a greased pig in the dark.
• Novelists start with a blank page unlike critics who start with text.
• Novelists focus on the widget level, working on the details and the 'how to' of a story, rather than its 'meaning'.
• The novelist begins with chaos, creating one detail at a time, similar to God but the critic starts on Day Seven.
• The novelist focuses on believability and how to "pull this off," while the critic questions the believability of events.

Essential Questions for Novelists

• What kind of story to tell? (comic, tragic, etc.)
• How to tell it?
• Who will be at the center, admirable or not?
• Will it have a happy ending or not?
• Conflict and suspense being essential, requiring "something other than breakfast".

Female Protagonist

• The protagonist is also important; what happens when a woman is placed at the center of a story, and something other than breakfast occurs.
• Conflict can stem from the natural world, evolving the story into an adventure.
• In adventure stories, the protagonist must flee or combat threats, showing courage or cowardice.
• The plot is also affected with the presence of a man, who could be a rescuer, enemy, companion, or sex object.
• Stories about space invasions and wars share a focus on external threats and survival.
• Vampire, werewolf, and ghost stories are more complex, where external threats may represent internal conflicts or hidden agendas.

Gender and Genre Crossover

• Detective and espionage stories revolve around a crime, criminal, pursuit, and revelation, formerly male-dominated but now include female sleuths.
• Gender and genre crossover are common.
• "Serious" literature focuses on relationships, necessitating conflict among characters.
• The mud also includes the history of the women's movement, influencing reading.
• The women's movement has expanded the topics available to writers, including homemaking, motherhood, incest, and child abuse.
• The Cinderella happy ending has been challenged.

The Woman's Movement

• Creating a bad female character doesn't impact women's rights.
• Innovative literature includes the previously excluded, challenging conventions.
• Endings in stories relate more to literary conventions than to real-life experiences, where every story ends with death.
• The women's movement benefits literature through expanded territory, sharp power examinations in gender relations, and explorations of concealed experiences.
• Initially, there was a cookie-cutter tendency to polarize morality by gender.

Restrictions and Analysis

• Writers polarized morality by gender, dividing allegiance based on relationships with men, in the first decade of the present woman's movement.
• Writers judged by tribal markings, and made hopeful excuses for women's defects. which are all ascribable to the patriarchal system which would cure themselves once that system was abolished.
• Novelists who were also feminist felt restricted.
• Heroines were expected to be spotless, suffering under male oppression, with plots resembling "The Perils of Pauline".
• Suffering could equal goodness, implying women's suffering was beneficial but some were of course slaves in the salt-mines of goodness.
• Feminist analysis enabled female characters to rebel without facing tragic consequences and to challenge authority and the new moral thermometer of the times were not really bad at all; the woman was really praiseworthy.

New No-No's and Limitations

• New restrictions included avoiding the will to power among women and depicting negative behaviors among women without being labeled anti-feminist.
• Silence around women's badness or attributing it to patriarchal influences was encouraged.
• Mothers were sometimes blamed as agents of the patriarchy, then later readmitted into the fold.
• Women were to be homogenised and deprived of free will?
• Was all bad behaviour was to be reserved for men?, and historical figures banished from view?
• Atwood hoped that female characters reclaim the night, the speaker calls that the 'Juicy parts' in the text that do not have to be reserved for men.
• Bad behavior is essential in literature, so why should it be barred from women.

Evil Parts for Women

• From an early age stories held spellbinding evil parts for women.
• The speaker was struck by the Evil Queen in Snow White.
• Grimm's Fairy Tales were initially frowned upon by feminists.
• They were cleaned up, with the children assumed not to like gore.
• They were selected at the time to fit the fifties "Prince Charming is your goal" ethos.
• Many tales were shared by women.
• There is a range of heroines in these tales; the female characters form a rich five-dimensional picture.
• Female characters should not be used to beat other women.
• Female characters unlock doors and act as mirrors.

Moral Freedom

• Evil women serve as keys to open doors and mirrors for self-reflection.
• They explore moral freedom and question responsibility.
• If there’s a closed-off road, the women ask why and where it leads?, and this has been the attitude in recent fiction-writing.
• Categorizing bad female characters involves a grid with various factors, highlighting differing perceptions of what is considered bad.
• A thoroughly evil person is defined as one who intends to do evil for selfish reasons, exemplified by the Queen in Snow White.

Examples of Characters Doing Bad Things

• Regan and Goneril are evil daughters of Lear who were against the Patriarchy.
• According to the speaker Lady Macbeth furthered her husband’s career while also subduing her own nature, resulting in a nervous breakdown as a result.
• Jezebel was merely trying to please a sulky husband.
• Medea's story is interpreted differently, sometimes as revenge or as a neo-feminist narrative about the struggles of being a woman and protecting her children.
• Tess kills her lover because of the complex sexual complications of her situation.

Seduction and Espionage

• Motives for seduction vary, and seduction itself is less sinful now.
• Stealing a sexual partner would probably to rated the worst crime by women against each other.
• Delilah was working for the Philistines, trading sex for military information.
• Judith combined sex with violence in a way men aren’t accustomed to and don’t much like.
• Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne becomes a kind of sex-saint through suffering.
• Madame Bovary was not evil, but foolish.
• A good course in double-entry bookkeeping would have saved Madame Bovary.
• Unlike Becky Sharp who is fully wicked and enjoys it, is a bad adventuress in society
• A male adventurer would receive money etc while a female would instead use and manipulate men to get these things.
• Bad mothers, stepmothers, aunts, teachers, governesses, and grannies create new possibilities for stories.

Evil's Necessity

• Evil women are necessary in traditions, because they exist in life.
• Both female readers and writers do not recoil in horror.
• Women have more to them than virtue and need to be given literary freedom.
• The bad female character can be a Jungian anima for men and a shadow for women.
• Losing one's shadow equals losing one's soul.
• I will leave you with a final quotation. It’s from Dame Rebecca West, speaking in 1912 – ‘Ladies of Great Britain … we have not enough evil in us.’
• Note where she locates the desired evil. In us.

Exploration of female bad behavior in novels, plays, and epic poems. It questions the contemporary permissibility and necessity of depicting women behaving badly. Disruptive elements are needed for dynamism as that helps define literature.