Sometimes, there can be a slightly condescending assumption that anything unlikable about a female character is a mistake, as if they're a contestant in a beauty pageant and have to seem charming and upbeat all the time.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the unfair expectations placed on female characters in storytelling, suggesting they must always be likable.
Curtis Sittenfeld's quote critiques the pervasive stereotype that female characters must adhere to a strict standard of charm and positivity, akin to contestants in a beauty pageant. This belief undermines the complexity and depth that female characters can possess, suggesting that any negative or challenging traits are errors rather than integral parts of their character development.
In practice
During a panel discussion on character development in literature, one might reference this quote to address the portrayal of women in fiction.
She was the reason I was a reader, and being a reader was what had made me most myself; it had given me the gifts of curiosity and sympathy, an awareness of the world as an odd and vibrant contradictory place, and it had me unafraid of its oddness and vibrancy and contradictions.
The big occurrences in life, the serious ones, have for me always been nearly impossible to recognize because they never feel big or serious. In the moment, you have to pee, your arm itches, or what people are saying strikes you as melodramatic or sentimental, and it's hard not to smirk. You have a sense of what this type of situation should be like - for one thing, all-consuming - and this isn't it. But then you look back, and it was that; it did happen.
Is the depressing part that he's only half right - it's not that she doesn't need rescuing but that nobody else will be able to do it? She has always somehow known that she is the one who will have to rescue herself. Or maybe what's depressing is that this knowledge seems like it should make life easier, and instead it makes it harder.
Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.
What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.
We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.
And I desperately needed books that would take me out of my environment and show me a world where being smart and brave and prepared was more important than being cute or cheerful or knowing the right thing to say. And that's what science fiction and fantasy gave me.
People in my novels always have terrible problems. If they are not terrible, I make them more terrible.
THE WRITER can get free of his writing only by using it, that is, by reading oneself. As if the aim of writing were to use what is already written as a launching pad for reading the writing to come. Moreover, what he has written is read in the process, hence constantly modified by his reading. The book is an unbearable totality. I write against a background of facets.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.