If you’re
interested in female representation in popular narratives, you’re probably
already familiar with The Bechdel Test. For the uninitiated, the Bechdel Test—named
after the cartoonist and author, Alison Bechdel—delineates three minimum
requirements for writing strong female characters: the story must have at least
two female characters, these two characters must speak to each other, and they
must speak to each other about something other than a man. I find this is an
excellent place to start if you want to put some strong female characters in
your story. However, I should mention that I don’t think the problem of weak
female characterization is as rampant as many feminist critics and authors
claim. The lack of strong female characters is no more remarkable or telling
than the lack of good characterization in general. The skill of
characterization—female or otherwise—creates the same spectrum of quality that
any other skill does, with a few extraordinarily talented people on one end, a
few hilariously incompetent people on the other, and most falling into the sea
of mediocrity between.
While
outdated and prejudicial worldviews contribute to this spectrum of quality,
they are by no means the only factor, and no matter how much we may wish that
there were only strongly-written female characters, there will always be at
least nine misfires for every success, just like most people who pick up a
basketball can’t play in the NBA. Blaming the alleged lack of moral awareness
in authors, critics and audience members for the lack of strong female
characters only gets us so far. A more helpful exercise is to revisit what makes
strong characters, and then talk about what this means for female characters
specifically. I’d like to take Bechdel’s three criteria, and build off of them
with some of the best advice I’ve gotten on characterization from another
source: John Truby’s Anatomy of Story.
Let’s
start with Bechdel’s first criterion: there has to be more than one woman in
the story. When it comes to the importance of creating more than one character,
The Anatomy of Story has this to say: “Most writers come at character
all wrong. They start by listing all the traits of the hero, tell a story about
him, and then somehow make him change at the end. That won’t work, no matter
how hard you try.” I like this passage from Anatomy quite a bit because
it points not only to a mistake that writers make when creating their
characters, but one that critics and social commentators make when analyzing those
characters. Often, I’ll read a review or an opinion piece that talks about what
job a female character has, how good-looking they are, or about what race they are:
“Why couldn’t she have been a CEO instead of a housewife?” “Does she really
have to play into conventional beauty standards?” “Why was the hero white
instead of a racial minority?” While writing female characters with these
traits is admirable, unless the writer nails the fundamentals, their characters
will just be a list of traits, empowering though those traits may be. A
character could be a black, female CEO who doesn’t look like a Victoria’s
Secret model and still be a flat, uncompelling bore.
Truby
goes on to say that “the single biggest mistake writers make when creating
characters is that they think of the hero and all other characters as separate
individuals. Their hero is alone, in a vacuum, unconnected to others. The
result is not only a weak hero but also cardboard opponents and minor
characters who are even weaker." Truby further advises writers that the
secret to creating a multidimensional character—especially a multidimensional
protagonist—lies in the counter-intuitive strategy of fleshing out the supporting
characters around them and making sure that they contrast. This is a much more
comprehensive and dynamic way of looking at female characters than the minimum
demands of the Bechdel test and it places us at the cusp of how Truby’s ideas
for character can help us surpass the two remaining criteria of the Bechdel
Test: have the two women talk to one another and have them talk to one another
about something other than men.
To start,
I would actually argue that the third criterion in the Bechdel test is actually
its weakest. Love and romance are a huge part of life, and making our
characters talk about something other than the opposite sex can limit us far
more than it frees us. With that said, it is good to open up the possibilities
for dialogue between two characters to more topics than romance. But what the
Bechdel test doesn’t say about dialogue and character interaction in general is
what makes those interactions meaningful. Truby’s next piece of advice for
creating your cast of characters can help fill in that blank. Truby advises
that every character needs to be a variation on the story’s central theme. In
other words, each character has to have a different perspective on some
pressing moral issue about what it means to live a meaningful life. It isn’t
just that the characters have to talk about something both specific and novel,
they have to actually disagree about it, because each one is going to
have a unique perspective about the story’s central moral issue.
To
illustrate this point, let’s return to the example of our black, female CEO. For
simplicity’s sake, let’s also say that this character is our protagonist. If our
protagonist is a CEO, then the theme of our story could be that power corrupts.
In order to pass the Bechdel Test, we only need one other female character to
appear in the story, and she has to talk to our CEO about something other than
men; we could meet our CEO before she gets promoted to that position and have
her talking in the break room with one of her female coworkers. They could talk
about a huge client that our future CEO landed for her firm, and about whether
or not she will get a promotion for it. However, if we’re going to build off of
this minimal standard with Truby’s advice, we need more female characters and
we need each of them to have a differing opinion on the theme of power. Our
future CEO could be hell-bent on success, but very idealistic and think that
all she has to do is prove herself. Our female coworker could be an older, more
jaded member of the corporate world who tells our young CEO that she needs to
be ruthless if she wants to get ahead. We could then add an old college friend
of our CEO’s, who started off as a young professional but scaled back her
professional life so that she could get married and have children. Then we
could throw in another old college friend, who works as an activist and thinks
that the whole corporate world is inherently corrupt. As the story progresses
and our CEO pursues her goal over the course of the story, she will clash with
all of these other female characters over what right action to take in various
situations.
Finally, if
we are going to do real justice to our female characters, we have to now stray
completely outside the boundaries of the Bechdel test, and we have to give all
of our characters, but especially our protagonist a weakness. Most writers are
savvy to the necessity of character flaws, but they often do so in a way that
is not particularly effective. They make the character a condescending
know-it-all, but they constantly make them right. They make them an emotionless
killing machine but they don’t show how the consequences of the character’s
actions have any effect on them. In order for a weakness to do the work that it’s
meant to do in the world of the story, it has to actually stand between the
character and their goal. They have to pursue a goal that the audience clearly
sees the hero gain or lose. When the character first attempts to reach their
goal, something unexpected happens and they fail. They rationalize why this is,
blame circumstances or other people, they make a half-assed attempt at change,
or try to simply appear as though they have changed without having actually
done the work. Finally, by the time the story reaches its climax, the character
will have to look back on all the hard knocks that they’ve taken, and make the
painful but mature step towards actually changing who they are and overcoming
this weakness.
Writers
who write in order to put a message out into the world often write a hero that
has no weakness. They face off against a villain who is completely wrong, and
manages to stand between the hero and their goal simply because they are
powerful, not because they actually have a compelling and believable worldview.
By the end, either the hero kills the villain, or persuades the villain over to
their side. A handy little trick you can pull as a writer is, if you are trying
to persuade a person who holds a particular point of view that they are wrong,
don’t make that person your villain. Make them your hero! This is actually the
most convincing way to make a compelling moral argument through story, and it’s
the best way to win an audience over and get them to empathize with your
characters.
If you’re
a crusader that’s out to win hearts and minds over to a fresh perspective, then
you need to add a little sugar to make the medicine go down. When a writer
spends the majority of their time looking through the eyes of the character
whose heart and mind they would like to expand, it shows the audience that you
understand that everyone has to start from somewhere. If you think that women
are pathologically career-oriented at the expense of family, you can make our
CEO from earlier in this essay, start by pursuing her goal at work, only to
find a man that gradually changes her mind. If you think that career-orientation
is all well and good, but that it can fall prey to an inherently corrupt
system, have your CEO begin by trying to play by the system’s rules, gradually come
to realize what the price of cutthroat corporate politics really is, and finally
decide to stand up for what’s right. If you think that a career really is what a
modern woman should pursue and that you have to toughen up in order to achieve that,
then you have to start your CEO naïve and overly trusting, and gradually
thicken her skin and sharpen her political instincts so that she can finally
make it big. Surround this arc with characters who all have sharply differing
opinions on this arc, and you will create a multilayered web of female
characters that will show your audience what life as a woman is like from many
different angles, rather than preaching to them about the struggles of womanhood.
This approach only makes people smile and nod like lemmings just to get you to
shut up, or completely shuts them down because they know their intelligence has
just been insulted.
If you’re
a writer who cares deeply about increasing the quality of female characters in
contemporary stories, don’t take the easy way out by blaming others for not
already seeing the world in the way you would like them to see it. Instead,
show that you have mastered a particular moral issue by using the craft of
characterization to attack that moral issue from every possible angle. Then,
emphasize what that issue looks like through the eyes of the person you would
like to see change their mind. If you do that, you won’t have to wag your
finger in people’s faces. You will reveal to them how they can change by having
looked at the world through their eyes first.
