| For years, I've read works by Stephen King like "The Gingerbread Girl," a story about a woman who must fight for her life after being captured as she is caught witnessing another murder. In the King's book of short stories, Just After Sunset, I found several characters similar to my own---women put into positions that make them choose: be strong or die. In his latest book of shorts, Full Dark, No Stars, strong female characters once again are prominent. In "Big Driver," a woman with a somewhat public life (she's a semi-famous author) is brutally raped and left for dead. After fighting to survive, she must then decide what to do about her rapist. She doesn't want to go to the police, for fear of the media coverage, so she decides to take matters into her own hands. In "A Good Marriage," a wife discovers her husband's sick fantasy life that has crossed into reality and decides to end his torturing and killing of other women.;In both of these stories, issues that we would hope wouldn't be relevant in the 21st century are brought up. In "Big Driver," Tess (the author who is raped and left for dead) worries that the media will assume "she was asking for it," and Darcy in "A Good Marriage," contemplates her place as mother, wife, and citizen. In Heartbreakers: Women and Violence in Contemporary Culture and Literature, Josephine Gattuso Hendin delves into the theory behind violent women in literature and explains why these issues are still relevant today. Using popular cases like Karla Faye Tucker and Lorena Bobbitt, Hendin tries to explain our society's fascination and fear of violent women. Violent women upset our cultural expectations, which will infuriate certain members of a society with a patriarchal design, and inspire those that have otherwise been constricted by the boundaries set forth by the male population. "In fiction and poetry," she states, "violence serves to explode stereotypes, rewriting conventional female scripts from the dark side" (2).;The problem with 21st century feminist fiction is that a lot of it comes from male writers. Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy---an international bestseller---is an "unexpected combination of familiar crime fiction devices---rape, murder, mayhem, etc., often at women's expense and described in excruciating detail---served up with a distinctly feminist flavor and with some remarkable feminist characters," according to Donna King and Carrie Lee Smith, editors of Men Who Hate Women and Women Who Kick Their Asses (xiii). Larsson's heroine, Lisbeth Salander, is the epitome of bad-ass women. King and Smith explore the issues of such a controversial feminist work written by a male author.;My fiction, which was heavily influenced by both Stephen King and Stieg Larsson, has a lot of strong female characters who are, throughout the narrative, physically empowered, often overcoming a antagonistic male counterpart. My female characters are physically strong and use language that is considered traditionally masculine. I hope to portray complex female characters that can't simply be brushed to the side as unrealistic because they are too one-dimensional, too violent, or too unemotional. The best example of this goal is "Champ," a story of a boy whose dog is accidentally ran over by Ashley, a girl who is kind enough to stop to help, and strong enough to take control of the situation to save Champ. "A Short Run" is centered on Grace, a girl who inadvertently puts herself in a dangerous situation while running to deal with her problems, specifically her recent fight with her boyfriend. She is forced to defend herself against a would-be rapist, and ends up killing the man in the end. Hopefully through the pieces included in this thesis, I can overcome common stereotypes that only men can use physical violence and strong language to protect themselves. I hope to show that women of today can be physically empowered, despite the restrictions of common beliefs that still exist. |
