The Complexity Of Women In Helen Graham Vs. The Wildfell Hall

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With more and more women taking ownership of their lives (and our hearts) onscreen and in pages, we ought to do a throwback to our foremothers, who helped to make it a thing to talk about women in the first place. Long before female characters became trapped as tropes, flattened and insignificant in today’s media, they were written in all their glory by women like Austen and Woolf, as well as many others. Here are three famous ones, who, when compared to three infamous tropes, illustrate the complexity of women as born at the pens of equally excellent women.

3. Helen Graham vs. the Frigid B*tch
The first part of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall keeps Helen Graham inches away from suffering the unspeakable tragedy of being the Frigid B*tch who refuses to sleep with the male hero. In the eyes of narrator Gilbert Markham, Helen is a mysterious young widow uninterested in and distanced from his courtship (if he was Elliot Rodger, he probably would have shot her before we could even get to know her).

The second part onwards, however, is where Anne Brontë truly shows her hand. As the first step towards redemption, Helen is shown to have a tragic background of domestic abuse and neglect, which is a pretty common way of creating sympathy for the cold woman. But beyond that, …show more content…

Firstly, in the form of serving as governess to his ward, Adele. She reshapes her into the proper little English girl, which represents the return of his morality and uprightness of character. Spoiler—she even heals his blindness in the end.

The simplest way in which Jane Eyre defies this oversimplification is, of course, by being the protagonist. One of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl’s key conditions of existence is that she exists solely for the male protagonist to rediscover the meaning and beauty of life. In Jane Eyre, we follow her from child to adult, sympathising with her troubles and celebrating her growth. And so this first descriptor no longer

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