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PARTISAN REVIEW
another context, discussing Norman Mail er's
The Prisoner of Sex,
there are probably as many definitions of female liberation as there are
men or women acquainted with the phrase. And liberation not only
means different things to different people, it means different things to
the same person at different moments. I know of myself, for instance,
that I sometimes use it to describe a condition that I favor and wish to
celebrate, sometimes I use it mockingl y or, worse, with a too-easy
irony, and sometimes I even confuse it with its opposite, enslavement.
The word "heroine" would appear to lead a less hazardous
existence. Yet h ere too we conspire in ambiguity. In literary discussion
we use the word casually enough, and not merely in its di ctionary
meaning, to denote the foremost female character in a book or play, but
as a value judgment: unl ess the chi ef female character in a literary work
is an out and out villainess, we deal with her as its h eroine. But thi s is
the shorthand talk of the classroom and of book criticism, and in the
realm of feeling it is not entirely responsibl e. In preparing thi s essay I
thought back over many important women in literary history , and men
as well. There are striking differences in the way men and women are
depicted in literature. In the case of men there is an almost entire
consonance between those who are des igna ted as heroes and those
about whom we feel that they are h eroes. In antiquity, for example,
there is no question but tha t Achilles was a hero, or Hector, or
Odysseus, or Heracles. And it does not matter tha t we do no t like
Heracles-if he is not a likeabl e hero, he is a hero nonetheless. But
what about Clytemnestra? When Aeschylus says of her tha t she has a
"man-thinking heart," quite apart from our purely moral response to
her conduct in the play our fee lings about her hero ine- ism have a
considerabl e res tri ction put upon them. Or there is Antigone: she is
out-sized, to be sure, but is she a heroine or a cl ini cal study, an
obsessive-depressive if there is such a psychiatric di agnosis? There is
the scene, you will recall, where h er sister Ismene as ks Antigone, "Am I
outside your fate?" to which Antigone repli es, " Yes. For you ch ose to
live when I chose death. " This is not how a hero in e ta lks; it is very
chilling and heroines a re no t supposed to chill. Beca use of her
resistance to government, Antigone is undoubtedl y a ttractive to a
modern audience; but she takes her stand against authority on her
brother's beh alf, not her own-by present-day standards she is too lilli e
possessed by self to be redeemed (or heroin e-ism even by her psycho–
pathology and suicide.
By and large we a re agreed on what a hero is: he is strong, brave,
nobl e o( purpose, nobl e of bearing-we remember the fil m criti c
