DIANA TRILLING
503
Robert Warshow's famous essay about Westerns and his definition: a
hero is someone who looks like a hero. We are indeed enough in accord
about what a hero is to know what is meant by his opposite, the
antihero, or by the character who refuses even the negative purposeful–
ness of the antihero: the nonhero or unhero whose appearance in a
present-day novel validates it as a serious work of the fictional imagi–
nation and even of the political imagination.
It
is the heroine who
poses the questions. Is Lysistrata a heroine? Or Shakespeare's Volum–
nia, mother of Coriolanus? What about Emma Bovary or Jane Austen's
Emma Woodhouse? Is Natasha in
War and Peace
a heroine? Is Anna
Karenina a heroine? George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver? George Eliot's
Dorothea Brooke? Henry J ames's Isabel Archer? Edith Wharton 's Lily
Bart? Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Ramsay ? One can go on.
It
suggests an
amusing game but I propose the questions for a serious reason , to
dramatize, if I can, the degree to which our response to the heroine,
unlike our response to the hero, is subjective, involved with our
feelings of personal affection and identification. For me in some
measure all the women I have named are hero ines on the simple-no,
not so simple- ground that they try to make a destiny, they wish not to
be the inert recipients of their fates. Not one of them succeeds, of
course: the history of h eroine- ism wou ld seem to be an endlessly
reiterated story of failure. In fact, it is their failure to achieve the
destinies they deserve or seek tha t makes most h eroines of literature
precious to us.
It
is when we see Natasha so early settled into c1austral
domes ti city that the promise of her youth becomes most poignant for
us. It is when we close the book on Emma Woodhouse's marriage that
we let ourselves be fully aware of the pleasure we took in the energi es
that will probably no longer be exercised: the wise Mr. Knightl ey will
curb them as unsuited to a wife, attractive as he found them before
marriage. This is not how it is with heroes. They are not dependent on
our affection. Of Antigone we may ask, Did Sophocles love her as one
loves the true heroine of one's imagining? Of Heracl es we do not ask
such a question; it does not apply. Heroes need not be loved either by
their authors or by us. They stand free and clear in external reality like
the sculptures which so regularl y memorialize their counterparts in
life. Literary h eroes may not always choose their des tinies-the gods,
the state, the thousand and one circumstances of their lives intrude
upon th eir fates-but th ey are not merely acted upon by fortun e; they
act.
Most of the women who h ave come down to us in litera ture have
been resourceful or a t leas t competent, courageous, able
to
make do
