1. Scout of To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Scout is simply a badass. She might be an eight-year-old girl, but her ability to process the world around her without acting in accord with society’s prejudice is remarkable. She often doesn’t even understand the significance of her actions, but even in her naiveté, the importance of her words are not lost on the reader. She manages to break up a potential lynching with a simple “hey, Mr. Cunningham,” her innocence and her kind heart forcing down the guns and anger surrounding her. Like I said, she’s just a badass.

2. Alison of Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. These two panels say it all:

(I gave my thesis presentation last week, part of which was about Bechdel’s graphic memoir, Fun Home. I don’t know if it was my use of the word “fuck” or my pictures of lesbian sex, but the room was surprisingly quiet…)

3. Finn of Accomplice by Eireann Corrigan. I love love love everything written by Eireann Corrigan. Part of it may be that she teaches at the high school I attended (and there are subtle references to Prep in a lot of her writing), part of it may be that she uses the traditional Irish spelling of Eireann, and part of it is that all of her characters are so beautifully fucked up. In Accomplice, Finn helps stage the disappearance of her best friend, Chloe, so that the two of them can write kickass college essays. I was so drawn into Finn and her relationship with Chloe as I was reading this book, and it was impossible to predict what would happen next. But what really made me love this book and adore Finn in particular will ruin the ending, so I’ll leave it at this: go buy this book. Now.

4. Precious of Push by Sapphire.

everi mornin
by Precious j.

Everi mornin
i write
a poem
before I go to
school
marY Had a little lamb
but I got a kid
an HIV
that folow me
to school
one day.

5. Portia of The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare. I first read this play in a Shakespeare seminar on the politics of friendship–so naturally, we were preoccupied with themes of masculinity, political power, and relationships between men. Portia stands out as a character who, despite her circumstances, remains assertive, opinionated, and confident. She’s often pegged as manipulative because she so cleverly finds her way through social and legal loopholes with her cleverness and her male lawyer drag… while she’s not the only one of Shakespeare’s heroines to crossdress, I find her the most compelling. And you just can’t ignore the hilarity of a male actor playing a woman in male drag.

6. Rebecca of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. Who says a heroine can’t be dead throughout the entire story? (That doesn’t give anything away, don’t worry.)

7. Kathy H. of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s Kathy’s best friend, Ruth, who is really the alpha-female of this novel, but Kathy is the clear winner for the title of Heroine. There’s one scene in particular–Kathy dancing to the song Never Let Me Go, holding a doll close to her chest–that I always think of when I recall reading this book. It’s Kathy’s kind-heartedness that ultimately makes the book so devastating, and her empathy for others, despite what she’s been through, is almost tragic. I think part of me wanted to see her express anger and lash out, but she refuses to compromise her humanity, even if society refuses to recognize it.

8. Dolores Driscoll of The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks. There’s something about Dolores’ pride in her work as a school bus driver that had me attached to her from the second she started narrating. The book is actually told by four different narrators, each receiving their own section, but the tragedy of Dolores’ life after the accident–especially when she becomes the scapegoat for the deaths of 14 children–left me in awe of her incredible sense of responsibility and genuine love for the children of her town.

9. Irene of Passing by Nella Larsen. Despite her weaknesses and her intense judgement of Clare, it was hard for me not to love Irene. As it turns out, neither Irene nor Clare are completely satisfied with their choices in life, and in more subtle ways, Irene attempts to “pass” as much as Clare does. (I’ve already included one lesbian sex picture in this post, so I’ll just go ahead and admit what you’re all thinking–it’s definitely the homoeroticism of this book that does it for me.)

Annnnnd drumroll please…

10. Pippi from The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking by Michael Chesworth. OK, all I remember of Pippi is from my childhood, of course, and I think I just thought her braids were really cool, but I had to save a spot for her to satisfy my 8-year-old self…

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This photo was taken at Passion Puddle, located on the border of the Cook and Douglass campuses at Rutgers (you can’t see the lake itself too well in this photo, but I only had a few minutes before the bus left, and at the time I was busy taking some freshmen on “vacation” — an activity that involves a Saturday afternoon bus ride to Sears, where we enjoy napping on real beds for a few hours). According to legend, when a male from Cook College and a female from Douglass College hold hands and walk around the water three times, they will soon become engaged. This myth seems to have been slightly modified since the merging of all undergraduate liberal arts colleges at Rutgers and changed simply to a male and a female — though I don’t think we’ve progressed to the point of incorporating same-sex hand-holding into the passing of the legend. I’m not sure I mind being left out, of course, because Passion Puddle is primarily known for another myth involving the very unromantic excavation of a body from the bottom of the lake, which leads me, in a very morbid transition, to Virginia Woolf…

This past week I finished reading Mrs. Dalloway for the second time in one of my courses, and during a class discussion, the subject of food was brought up in relation to the way Virginia Woolf’s anorexia seems to affect the meaning attached food in her writing. The passage we spoke about involved Miss Kilman eating a pink cake — Woolf’s description of this act is unmistakably resentful, with Miss Kilman’s eating directly paired with her own feelings of worthlessness and the narrator’s repulsive depiction of her. The image of food itself, though, is somewhat glorified — there’s a subtle sense of indulgence in the very hateful way she writes about food, with great care taken to describe in detail the way Miss Kilman speaks while handling her food, and finally swallows the last bit of her eclair, and then wipes the chocolate from her fingers, and then finishes with a cup of tea. A friend once jokingly suggested that the reason anorexic women so often work around food or otherwise aspire to go onto culinary school is because “it’s like porn for them” — and I think that’s the kind of withheld desire evident in Woolf’s writing… that there is something almost pornographic about the experience of watching someone eating while personally abstaining from food. When a person spends so much time thinking about and obsessing over food, I think that obsession can manifest itself in all sorts of ways, whether it be through one’s profession, writing, or artwork… I’m thinking Fiona Apple’s The First Taste provides an interesting musical comparison to Woolf (or perhaps Paper Bag, with its more blatant references to hunger and loneliness).

What I also wonder about, though, is the presence of Elizabeth in the pink cake scene, and how her relationship with her mother, Clarissa, might complicate Woolf’s ideas about food. It seems to lend to to the idea that eating disorders often develop out of an inadequate relationship with a woman’s mother, which would certainly make sense in Woolf’s case, given her mother’s death at such an early age. Either way I think that understanding Woolf’s relationship to food adds another dimension to the novel I hadn’t picked up on before now…

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