Why do some women writers seem to hate their female characters?
Perhaps I've been reading the wrong books, but I've noticed a trend among books by women with female main characters and it's starting to bother me. Not only do some women authors not allow their female main characters to have fun, but they seem almost to be punishing them for their career choices/heroism. It could be that the authors in question think they're being realistic, but I can't help wondering if some of them actually hate their own characters. It's one thing to, as the famous quote has it, chase your characters up trees and throw rocks at them, and another to seem to truly have it in for them. And when it comes to certain writers and their characters it feels more like the latter.
This train of thought was prompted by reading a few Kathy Reichs books (not quite my usual fare, but a friend recommended her). Now, I know Ms. Reichs really does write what she knows, so it's possible that she really has experienced the personal targeting she treats her character to, but it bothered me. In each of the three books, Tempe (the main character) is directly targeted by the killer, people and animals she loves are threatened or injured, and she has a dramatic end confrontation with the killer in which her life is threatened and she is rescued by law enforcement.
Now that last (or a version of it) is a staple of mystery fiction...and I find one more historical example almost funny - the Campion books by Margery Allingham. Campion goes to such great lengths to be alone with murderers to confront them that one wonders if he has a death wish. Still, it's weird that Tempe never completely saves herself and its weird that her loved ones and her personal life is targeted. Certainly that kind of threat does not prompt the reader to become a forensic anthropologist. Not only that, but the stories are not fantasies - not ones the reader would want to participate in. (Interestingly, the real books about forensic anthropologists I've read do not suggest that criminals target them, threaten them, or go after their loved ones.)
Bothered by that, I started thinking about other books written by women with women main characters. Fantasy and science fiction writers didn't seem to engage in the personal life targeting of their female heroes and while the characters themselves were endangered and harmed, they usually saved themselves and they didn't suffer differently from male heroes by the same authors. (Though Mercedes Lackey might take that a smidge too far - I swear the world of Velgarth has more rapists per capita than anywhere else.) But when it came to mystery writers, a lot of women writers have their female detectives targeted at home, have their loved ones and pets targeted, and have strange show downs where the detective is threatened by the killer and rescued by others. Granted, that sometimes happens to male characters as well...perhaps it's the gender of the writer, not the character that matters for the disturbing trend I noticed.
As a woman who writes, I'm bothered by this trend. Why write stories that almost come off as cautionary tales? Don't be a detective, don't be a forensic anthropologist, don't solve mysteries...the bad guys will hurt those you care about and go after you at home. It's not that you might get hurt on the job (as is the case for fantasy and science fiction characters, who also tend to triumph over whatever happens to them, making their endangerment and the harm they suffer less disturbing), it's that they might get you when you're minding your own business. Even some humorous mystery writers do this to their characters. The first Janet Evanovitch book has her heroine attacked in her home and has a woman involved with the case raped with a broken bottle and left on the heroine's porch. (Please correct me if I've remembered this incorrectly. It's been years since I read it.) Yich and eek. I really want to read the rest of the series now. Not. I also don't want to become a bounty hunter (the heroine's profession).
The only modern women mystery writers I could think of who didn't treat their detectives this way still did weird things. Elizabeth Peters wrote okay stand alone mysteries, but her series are a bit odd. Or at least the series I can read is (I cannot stand Amelia Peabody). Vicky Bliss starts out as a competent woman who can take care of herself pretty well - the first two books in the series are fun. After that, things go weird. First, the author "resets" her relationship with thief/love interest John between books, which is annoying. Vicky either trusts him or completely doesn't, no middle ground, and usually the return to lack of trust is from something that happened off camera, so to speak, between one book and the next. Vicky also stops being able to save herself, is given a phobia that she did not have in the first book, but which is supposedly from childhood, and becomes a less and less likable character. Was she having too much fun for her writer to stand? Or what? Even P.D. James took years to give her widowed police detective a love interest, leaving him a rather depressed man for years worth of stories. Though her treatment of him may be the best treatment a main character gets from a modern women mystery writer. (Which is odd, since she has one of the most pessimistic views of humanity I can think of among mystery writers.)
Are women who write stories that could actually happen jealous of their characters? Do they feel compelled to make real the fears they would have in their characters' situations? What is it? What keeps them from writing characters who do what they want to do, enjoy it, and don't some how pay for it, either in story or through authorial interference? Whatever it is, I wish there was an antidote.