[In the following essay, Heilbrun finds female fictional heroes largely unique to modern literature because these female heroes represent the struggles of both women and men in the modern age.]

It appears that having chosen such a title as "the woman as hero," I ought to begin with some definitions. What do I mean by a woman, and what do I mean by a hero? I hope you will be immesurably relieved to learn that I have no intention of defining a woman. For one thing, it would involve defining a man, and I'm not hero enough for that. Let us say that if there are two doors, one marked "women" and one marked "men," we shall be talking about those people who will go through the door marked "women."

What I shall try to define is a particular literary phenomenon involving women. This literary phenomenon, which can be given an opening and closing date, like any other proper historical occurrence, does involve our knowing what a hero is. Clearly it will not do to put up a door marked "heroes" and wait to see who walks through it. Almost as clearly, it will not help to track the concept of "hero" through the forests of literary criticism and literary history: that is the sort of undertaking for which a scholar must be prepared to devote a large portion of his life. Therefore, I asked my seven-year-old son, who happened to be reading about Wyatt Earp at the time, what a hero was, and he said: "the main character in a book, of course." Which I think is a pretty good definition.

Still, let me, womanlike, enlarge on it a little. The hero of a work is the protagonist, the central character who undergoes the major action. If we can borrow Kenneth Burke's phrases, the hero begins with a purpose he believes himself sufficiently in control of circumstances to carry out; but—to be human is to act on partial knowledge; and so events he could not foresee, the past which he has forgotten, rise up to thwart him. He undergoes a passion, he is acted upon, he suffers. He emerges from this suffering with a new perception of what the forces are which govern his world. We all know, or soon learn, what it is to think that we can plan the future, what it is to suffer as these plans go awry, what it is to learn at last what past acts—our own or other people's—were at work to render impossible our illusion of being in control of destiny. This action—purpose through passion to perception—which the hero undergoes is a universal, perhaps an archetypal action. It is at least of sufficient universality to allow us, as we say, to "identify" with the hero, regardless of our age or sex.

Now it is quite clear that if we put up a literary door for literary characters marked "heroes," most of the characters who walk through it will be men. I'm aware that we have a word for central women characters—heroines—but what we mean by this word, almost always, is that female character who plays the largest, or most important role in the life of the hero, who is the chief sexual event in his life; or we mean the central character in a work, like soap opera, written for women, with which no man could possibly identify, his usual reaction to such heroines being that they richly deserve the slow torture they are so lugubriously undergoing. Perhaps you will see then why I speak of a woman as "hero." I am speaking not of a woman who occupies the traditional place of women in literature, but of a woman who is the protagonist of a work, the character who undergoes the central action, the character whom men, as well as women, may view as an actor in a destiny possible for them.

The traditional place for women in literature can be seen clearly, if distantly, in the Aeneid. Which of us can forget the picture of Aeneas as he leaves the burning city of Troy? On his shoulders he carries his aging father, Anchises; by the hand he leads his son, Ascanius. Of his wife Creusa we seem to have lost account; so has Aeneas, so almost has Virgil. She has produced Aeneas's son, and can now only be an encumbrance to everyone. Aeneas's other hand is not offered to her; she is left to follow, and is lost in the shadows.

As a contemporary novelist has said to me, "What do you do with women characters, except have the men characters make love to them? Then either they marry them or they don't." Virgil would not, one assumes, have put it so inelegantly, but one senses the emotion, nonetheless, in the Aeneid. Dido is a queen, the builder of a great city, the ruler of a great people. But all of it is lost for love of Aeneas. Unlike Aeneas, she has no sense of destiny to sustain her. Seized with unrequited love for a man who must follow his destiny undeterred by casual affairs in caves, she forgets everything but passion as she throws herself upon her sword.

In discussing the phenomenon I have called "the woman as hero" I am going to speak only of women heroes created by male authors. Though some of the greatest women heroes are the creation of women authors, I am limiting my discussion to the work of male authors for several reasons. First, when a man has been forced, possibly against his inclination and by the deepest demands of his artistic vision, to use a woman as hero, the choice he has made reveals far more powerfully than could the work of a woman writer the particular qualities of a woman which make her a hero. To put this frivolously, if D. H. Lawrence chooses a woman as hero, that is news; if Virginia Woolf does, that is just what everyone expected.

Second, by choosing male writers, one avoids, neatly if unfairly, those women writers against whom can be leveled a "masculine protest." Though most men do not respond to women writers in this way, there are others who loathe Jane Austen, and, at the moment at least, many men seem to recoil from Virginia Woolf s work as from the screech of chalk on blackboard. Norman Mailer's dismissal of women writers, while extreme, is perhaps not totally unrepresentative: "I doubt if there will be a really exciting woman writer until the first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale."

Finally, by choosing male writers, it is possible to avoid "feminism" as an issue. We may feel certain that men chose women heroes not out of any urge to fight the feminist battle but because woman's place in the universe provided the proper metaphor for the place of the heroic in a work of literary art. A male writer with a woman hero may be antifeminist or antiwoman in his personal life or in his discursive writings; this is not to the point. Ibsen, a man unusually sympathetic to the dilemma of women, still denied that he was writing about women's rights: "I am writing about humanity," he said.

Ibsen and James, then, almost at the same moment, discovered the woman as hero. Certainly within a year of each other, each had conceived his first major, tragic work, and each had determined that in this new work a woman would bear the burden of the tragic action. Thus, in 1880, was born the woman as hero, a creature quite distinct from the "heroine." Greatly significant, she has been little noticed, and now, indeed, the wench is dead. But for a period of nearly fifty years such major writers as Ibsen, James, Shaw, Lawrence, and Forster were to find that, at the height of their powers, it was a woman hero who best met the requirements of their imaginations. The woman hero became the embodiment of the masculine artistic vision.

Ibsen made the first notations for A Doll's House in 1878. We are told (by Halvdahn Koht) that he called it at first simply "a modern tragedy, so great and inclusive did it seem in his mind." What he wished to show was the contrast and conflict between "the natural feelings on one side and belief in authority on the other." For Ibsen, the woman was the proper spokesman for the "natural."

The following year, in 1879, Henry James wrote to his brother: "I have determined that the novel I write this next year shall be 'big.'" What James had determined to do (in the words of Oscar Cargill) was to make the heroine of The Portrait of a Lady "focal rather than contributory, which neither Shakespeare nor George Eliot, however deeply interested in their heroines, had done, and to center everything in her consciousness, particularly emphasizing her view of herself." One recalls James's phrase about his cousin, Minny Temple, who died young: "She would have given anything to live." It is the phrase which, with all the force James intended behind the verb "to live," describes the modern hero, man or woman.

The woman hero of modern literature is sustained by some sense of her own autonomy as she contemplates and searches for a destiny; she does not wait to be swept up by life as a girl is swept up in a waltz. Ralph Touchett, in The Portrait of a Lady, thinks of Isabelle: "but what was she going to do with herself? This question was irregular, for with most women one had no occasion to ask it. Most women did with themselves nothing at all; they waited, in attitudes more or less gracefully passive, for a man to come that way and furnish them with a destiny." Before the 1880s it was shocking—to many it still is—to think of a woman as a person before she is thought of as mistress, wife, or mother. Even Frau Raabae, the German actress who played Nora in one of the first productions of A Doll's House, flatly refused to perform the conclusion of the play as Ibsen had written it; "I would never leave my children," she said. Almost no one bothered to notice—many still haven't—that Ibsen, using his woman hero, was writing of the need of every human being to be himself freely and strongly.

"The main thing," Ibsen once wrote in a letter, "is to remain sincere and true in relation to one's self. It is not a matter of willing this or that, but of willing what one absolutely must do because of one's self, and because one cannot do otherwise. Everything else leads only to falsehood." Ibsen's plays with a woman hero are not, as they have so often been called, "social dramas"; they are tragedies.

Tragedy, like psychoanalysis, offers no superhuman salvation, only the perceptions of the limits of human power, and the freedom which such perception brings. Nora faces the world at the end far more stripped of everything than Oedipus. Though blind, symbolically dead, his "occupation gone," he is still a great man. It has been prophesied that the land where he is buried will flourish. Nora, on the other hand, has come to realize that in the sense in which Forster will later use the phrase, she does not "exist." She is called mother, wife, housekeeper, but in fact she is none of these things, and without these she ceases to be. The hero of our modern tragedies is no king whose death brings about the salvation of society. Our modern hero is a man searching for himself. Both Oedipus Rex and A Doll's House are Aristotelian tragedies because they possess plot, which we know to be of the first importance; there is present the imitation of an action. Ghosts, for example, is not a social drama about syphilis, or even about the narrow mores of a provincial society. It is a tragedy of a hero who looks now to the future when all joy may be possessed, when the past has been "paid off," a hero who then discovers, as Oedipus discovered, that the past has only just begun to reveal itself, and that the future holds only a revelation of the power of the past. Mrs. Alving has, like Oedipus, apparent autonomy; her husband is dead, she has a son, she has the chance to tell off the man who betrayed her passion many years ago. Triumphant and arrogant, she follows the inevitable path of human tragedy. She is a hero.

Have there not been women heroes before the age of "modern" literature? Yes: we may mention Shakespeare's plays, and The Scarlet Letter. But the woman as hero is more frequent in great modern literature precisely because the peculiar tension that exists between her apparent freedom and her actual relegation to a constrained destiny is a tension experienced also by men in the modern world. "She would have given anything to live." Woman, serving as a metaphor for modern man striving to express himself, to be himself within a mechanical society, discovers her greatest wish is to live, a wish for which she will give anything or everything, even that which we have decided is innate in women: the love of children and the passionate desire for a man. Not even these two "innate" qualities are allowed, in modern literature, to stand between a woman and herself. Nora will leave even her children; Isabelle Archer will leave even the man she has come passionately to desire. It is, incidentally, noteworthy how many commentators insist that Isabelle "fears" passion in The Portrait of a Lady: in fact, she does not flee from the passion of Casper Goodwood's kiss. She flees from the temptation that kiss offers away from the moral act to which, by marrying Osmond and promising Pansy to return, she has committed herself.

"We do not see women," Consol Bernick says at the end of one of the drafts of Ibsen's Pillars of Society, and indeed she has been harder to see than any other human being, harder to visualize as a person. Conrad was, together with Joyce, one of the only two major modern writers in English who could not so visualize a woman, who did not use a woman as a hero. Yet Conrad and Joyce avoided the woman as hero in startlingly different ways and for different reasons. Conrad could no more have conceived of a woman hero than could Dickens. Though we should not, after the common fashion, call him a writer of sea stories, this label does at least emphasize his creation of artistic worlds in which women have no part, or no continually essential part. In his most characteristic, perhaps his most profound work, Heart of Darkness, women are explicitly characterized as outside the range of reality, the experience of truth. "It's queer how out of touch with truth women are," Marlow says; "they live in a world of their own, and there has never been anything like it, and never can be." Kurtz's fiancée could no more be told the truth of her lover's death than a foreigner could, on a sudden, be initiated into sacred rites. For Conrad, women are outside the range of action. This is not, of course, a criticism of Conrad; such a criticism would be absurd.

Joyce is quite another matter. Suffice it to say that the woman as hero, like the man as hero, exists in one character in Ulysses, Leopold Bloom. No one surely can deny Bloom's feminine (I do not mean effeminate) characteristics; he is both man and woman, he is everyman. In the "Circe" episode he becomes a woman, but I speak of something closer to his conscious nature than this. His empathy with women is extraordinary: he alone in the book is sympathetically present during childbirth; he is sympathetically aware, though not in awe of, the problems of menstruation; he is sexually passive at times, even masochistic. Molly says of him, "I saw he understood or felt what a woman is." Apart from Leopold Bloom, all men and all women, we have in Ulysses only woman in childbirth, woman as sexually exciting girl (though crippled) and woman as the sexual object of man's quest. And Molly is perhaps, as some women critics have testified, closer to a man's sexual fantasies of a woman, than to a woman. It is Leopold who performs the rites of homecoming, Leopold who makes the cocoa he drinks, in a kind of communion, with Stephen. Hero and anti-hero, Bloom who is Jew and Gentile, Moses and Christ, is man and woman too.

In creating Isabelle Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, James was able (as Fred B. Millett has written) to bestow on her "a considerable number of traits of his younger self." Essential to the creation of the woman as hero is the ability of the male author to transpose his own experience to a woman character. Thus Lawrence bestows on Ursula his own early experiences, the traits of his younger self. In the figure of the "hero" (as Maud Bodkin has pointed out) we have the human spirit which has found expression where differences of male and female cease to be of first importance. As it happened, it was modern woman, with her strange destiny of slavery and freedom inextricably combined, who best symbolized the modern, existential, "absurd" lot. Bodkin knows that in the experience of any gifted woman her "imaginative life has been largely shaped by the thought and adventure of men." For modern authors, the imaginative life can be largely shaped by the thought and adventure of women, particularly the gifted woman "affronting her destiny" and refusing to be trapped by the usual expectations which society has for her. As Isabelle Archer puts it: "I don't know whether I succeed in expressing myself, but I know that nothing else expresses me. Nothing that belongs to me is the measure of me; on the contrary, it's a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one." The artist is, as Coleridge and others have said, androgynous; and here it is the woman who, through the vision of the androgynous artist, speaks for modern man: "I know that nothing else expresses me."

It is possible to find, in Leon Edel's brilliant biography, statement after statement of James's in which he tells us that woman is not to be contrasted with man, as something "other" to be criticized by him, but is simply a vision of man's own "inner economy." It is interesting to know that a man who saw much of James in London was sufficiently fascinated by James's great attractiveness to women to attempt to determine the essential reason for it. James, he discovered, "seemed to look at women rather as women looked at them. . . . Women look at women as persons; men look at them as women." In many cases the young women who are the focal points of his great novels made present, so to speak, the possibility of a woman hero to many men, particularly many authors, who followed James.

It is doubtful if Henry James's first perception of the woman as hero came from his cousin Minny Temple. What seems far more likely is that after the concept of the woman as hero had formed itself in his mind he, with his artist's imagination which works always in the concrete, never in the abstract, allowed these ideas temporarily to crystalize around the figure of his dead cousin. However that may be, in describing Minny Temple, he described the woman as hero: "Life claimed her and used her and beset her—made her range in her groping, her naturally immature and unlighted way from end to end of the scale. . . . She was absolutely afraid of nothing she might come to by living with enough sincerity and enough wonder. .. . "As James reached maturity as an artist, the female protagonist preëmpted the scene. True, there would be heroes also; but the woman had become a "hero" for James.

E. M. Forster began by writing fantasies, short stories of youths who turned into trees and omnibuses which left with regularity for the celestial regions where Shelley dwelt. When he came to exchange fantasy for plot, he wrote novels whose essentially revolutionary quality was not immediately recognized, largely because he seemed to deal with the nature of reality rather than the problems of social revolution. In his first three novels, the moral burden is borne almost entirely by men. By the time of Howards End, however, Forster has found his woman hero and given her, moreover, a female moral progenitor from whom she inherits, not only England, but the sense of reality which will enable her properly to pass the inheritance on. Margaret Schlegel is a hero, but so new and outrageous a one that even today we squirm uncomfortably in contemplation of her.

In Howards End, Forster is writing of appearance and reality; by appearance he seems to mean that which has only the sanction of social and cultural approval; by reality that which a person discovers to be true expression of himself. Margaret and Helen Schlegel, who refuses to be bound by what culture or society considers "right" or "normal," still have the power to shock us; at best we feel that Forster has somehow failed in his presentation of them. It is, for example, shocking and inexplicable to us that Margaret should marry so stuffy a businessman as Mr. Wilcox: it is so clearly not, on her part, a marriage of love. I might note here that in teaching modern fiction in several institutions, I have found that the fictional events most unacceptable to students are Margaret Schlegel's marriage to Mr. Wilcox and Leopold Bloom's acceptance of his wife's infidelity. On the other hand, Molly Bloom's uncorseted memoirs, and Lady Chatterley's abandoned moments of passion, while provocative, are in no way shocking. Students do not call "shocking" in novels that which really shocks them: this they call improbable. That a marriage between unlike people should be undertaken for reasons emphatically not romantic disturbs our sense of fitness.

Still more shocking, however, is the fact that Forster permits his women heroes to eschew the most widely acceptable of female attitudes. Lionel Trilling, in one of the first and still the best book on Forster, reproves him sharply: "Helen confesses that she cannot love a man, Margaret that she cannot love a child," Here, in Mr. Trilling's eyes, Forster has failed. Yet the precise demand made by Forster in this novel is for a new concept of identity, especially for women, the most restricted of modern creatures. Margaret, the hero, speaks: "It is only that people are far more different than is pretended. All over the world men and women are worrying because they cannot develop as they are supposed to develop. Here and there they have the matter out, and it comforts them. . . . Don't you see that all this leads to comfort in the end? It is part of the battle against sameness. Differences—eternal differences, planted by God in a single family, so that there may always be colour; sorrow perhaps, but colour in the daily gray. . . . "

"Can't it strike you—even for a moment—" Helen asks Margaret, "that your life has been heroic?" The question is addressed to us.

Many critics have discussed James's "limited heroines," yet none surely is as truly limited as Adele Quested in Forster's A Passage to India. Hysterical, unsatisfied, uncharming, unpretty—she seems, she is, a negation of femininity, or heroine-ism; no man from Tom Jones to Mellors would look at her twice. But she performs the one act most difficult to all of us: she makes a fool of herself in the cause of justice. She does this, moreover, as a public act. Neither Aziz nor Fielding, both greater than she, is capable of this. Even Mrs. Moore, who sees the truth, is too repelled by human perfidity to remain for the trial; she escapes into death. In speaking the truth Adele Quested, the hero of the modern "quest," alienates everyone, those who will never forgive her for accusing Aziz, and those who will never forgive her for withdrawing the accusation. As a woman, Adele owes nothing to Aziz; he has been affronted that so ugly a woman, with no breasts, could have imagined he would make love to her. But she will not sacrifice him, even to that fury which hell hath nothing like. She finds her function beyond the range of her womanhood in an act of public heroism. This is not to say that the woman hero must be unfeminine: it is to say that she cannot be confined within her femininity. The woman who is hero does not fulfill herself by being wife or mother or mistress; she makes decisions, she affects events which shake the world.

Yet the question of sexuality has been considered central to our time—let us say, from Hard Times onward. The great modern failure of sexuality, and the prophet of this new doom and this new vision is, of course, D. H. Lawrence. It is therefore all the more fascinating that when Lawrence began writing not books which others might have written, but (in the words of Graham Hough) books which no one but Lawrence could write, his imagination should have chosen a female protagonist. It is clear from The Rainbow and Women in Love that only a woman could properly embody for Lawrence the new artistic vision. Modern woman (Marvin Mudrick writes) "in her unforeseen and disastrously unprepared-for homelessness, true representative of modern mankind—has nothing at all of what, outside themselves, sustained the two generations before her." With her consciousness only of herself, of her sexuality, with her awareness of her lack of inheritance, of place in the community, of satisfactory role in the world, she became precisely the searcher after the new prophetic vision. It is probably also likely that Lawrence, who had written out his "sickness' in Sons and Lovers, was enabled, as other artists have been, to find the proper objectivity of true art by making the hero a different sex from his own.

After Women in Love, Lawrence's greatest novel, he divided the masculine from the feminine more sharply, leaving as feminine that which only receives passion, and finally, in The Plumed Serpent, that which is properly denied consummation by her lover. Norman Mailer's "The Time of her Time" with its gymnastics, its dubbing of the male organ "avenger," carries the late Laurentian, Miltonic view of the sexes to its extreme, if logical, conclusion. But in Ursula, Lawrence created a hero. As artist he understood that the mortal risk was not, or was no longer, death; it had become the possibility that life, the lived life, might be evaded.

In modern times, men and women have moved nearer to each other in their experience of the fear that life might be unlived. So much of our modern fiction—one need instance only Hemingway, Joyce's The Dead, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Illych, James's The Beast in the Jungle—concerns itself with the sudden, tortured awareness of the unlived life, the knowledge that too often in modern times it is only at the moment of death that the experience of life is actually undergone. The life which dared nothing that society had not prescribed for it, hitherto mainly the lot of women, became also in our modern world the lot of many men.

But there was still another reason for the choice of the woman hero. Women, never the possessors of the military and business virtues, need not, as heroes, assume or pretend commitment to these outworn ideals. If Henry James, for example, sent an American young man to Europe, he had still to account for him professionally, for his commitment to the business of life. The alternative was to render his hero a dilettante, or dying like Ralph Touchett in The Portrait of a Lady. A young woman nicely avoided all these problems as life made no demands upon her of bravado and money-making and choice of profession. Hers was to be the heroism of those from whom a lived life is not demanded. The only demand the woman hero made on life was Minny Temple's demand to live.

The so-called "new woman" is not the woman as hero; to be more exact, few women heroes are "new women." Shaw, for example, is one of those writers whom we think of immediately, almost instinctively, in connection with the "new woman." His Quintessence of Ibsenism discusses modern woman at length and is, incidentally, largely responsible for the general impression that this was what Ibsen was "discussing" also. Shaw is important to the history of the modern woman hero, not because he portrayed "new women," but because he portrayed St. Joan.

Shaw's St. Joan is an extraordinary creation largely because Shaw knows that Joan is not only a woman hero, she is the prototype of the woman hero. We have had other great revolutionaries, and other great soldiers from the ranks. We have had other saints, others who talked with God and acted at His bidding. But in Shaw's play we have a hero so preposterous that had the historical Joan not existed, not even Shaw would have had the nerve to invent her. Shaw knows she is not a hero because she saved France, or because her heart would not burn in the fire, or because she was destroyed by just-thinking men acting wrongly, and resurrected by unjust-thinking men acting rightly. She is a hero only because, coming from nowhere, with few or no predecessors, looking forward only to the most circumscribed of lives, she lived in such a way as to change the world, to give her life for a purpose. The cause, moreover, for which she chose death, was simply freedom—not France, not God, not the Catholic Church, but freedom to live as a functioning moral being in the world. She was mocked, and revered, and destroyed and annointed because she was a hero, and because she was a special kind of hero: the person of no apparent importance from whom heroism, or even complete humanity, cannot logically be expected.

Shaw's St. Joan was first presented in 1923. One year later, in 1924, came Adele Quested, mocked and unloved, yet fighting for right and bearing scorn in public. They are a strange group of heroes reaching back to 1880: Nora, and Isabelle Archer; Mrs. Alving and Margaret Schlegel; Ursula Brangwen, and St. Joan. By the end of the nineteen thirties this kind of hero has vanished, and the door has slammed behind her. In the contemporary literature which followed World War II, she is an unknown creature; the female protagonist, at least in novels by men, has again donned her traditional dress, or undress. She has become only an event in the life of a man.

Like all heroes, she had a strange birth and came to a sudden end. Can we postulate some reasons for her disappearance from literature? Perhaps it was the triumph of equality over disability, of sophistication over innocence. Perhaps it was the discovery of new outsiders, Jews, Negroes, Angry Young Men. Perhaps the dread of lost masculinity prevents contemporary men from envisioning heroes as women.

A woman hero speaks: "I have no father nor mother nor lover, I have no allocated place in the world of things, I do not belong to Beldover nor to Nottingham nor to England nor to this world, they none of them exist. I am trammelled and entangled in them, but they are all unreal." Perhaps there are no more women heroes because there are no longer women who could say these words, nor men who could imagine a woman saying them.