[In the following essay, Wolff analyzes various conventional portrayals of women in literature throughout history.]

Insofar as it mirrors the world, literature reflects the prevalent social attitude toward women; and since this attitude so often values men and masculine pursuits over women and feminine hobbies, women's concerns seem devalued. In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf describes the situation with characteristic acuity:

It is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are "Important"; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes "trivial." And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battlefield is more important than a scene in a shop—everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists.

Those of us who have studied "women in literature" are not wanting for men to explain this "realistic fallacy." As the husband of a friend pointed out with exasperated patience: "Maybe it's not fair, but that's how it is. Men are more important in society because they do, in fact, hold the principal roles which govern it. Wars are more important than female thoughts in a drawing-room."

This is a tidy explanation. The trouble is that it doesn't really fit the problem. If the treatment of women merely reflected their relative lack of influence in the public world, then one might expect to find that literature dealt mainly with men. Yet such is strikingly not the case. Since the Renaissance in English literature (and in many major literary epochs before that time), women have figured prominently; and at some periods, literature flows so enticingly around the feminine character that it is men who seem to be excluded. If this is so, why do we complain, why do we women still feel slighted? This further question can be answered only by examining how women are portrayed in literature.

In society as we know it, there are a number of specifically masculine problems that shape every man's life: "Oedipal" problems (accepting the fact of the mother's relationship to the father and turning sexual energy towards other, appropriate objects); establishing masculine identity (this frequently involves testing one's courage, independence, or physical competence); resolving conflicts with authority, either by accepting the authority's right to govern or by freeing oneself from a guilty obligation to it; entering into an appropriate marriage; performing a series of public roles in an acceptable way (or, perhaps, choosing not to); acting as a good father (another variation on the problem of authority); and accepting the inevitable loss of power and potency that accompanies old age. A very large proportion of the works which people generally term literature are focused on one or another of these problems: one thinks of Hamlet, King Lear, Paradise Lost, David Copperfield, Lord Jim, all of Dostoyevsky, Huck Finn—one could go on almost ad infinitum. There are, of course, a corresponding set of essentially feminine problems: resolving the "Electra" problem; establishing feminine identity (among other things, coming to understand and accept the fluctuations of the menstrual cycle and resolving conflicts of power with the mother); entering into an appropriate marriage; acting as a mother (this entails resolving one's own desire for oral gratification, resolving fears concerning childbirth, accepting the responsibilities of rearing a child—or redefining the role so that the task of rearing will be shared by others—or even choosing not to undertake the task of mothering); accepting the private sphere as the appropriate one (or redefining woman's role so that an accommodation can be made between public and private); and dealing with loss of beauty and with menopause. Unlike the masculine problems, these feminine problems are very seldom the principal subject of literary interest; and when women's problems are discussed, the discussion is virtually always limited to problems of courtship and of accepting the private sphere as the proper one. Of course there are exceptions, especially in the twentieth century; the important thing is not, however, that there are exceptions. Rather it is that there are so few, and that this "feminine" literature balances so insignificantly against that massive body of literature which is dominated by masculine dilemmas.

How seldom a major work of literature deals primarily with a power conflict between two women (though such exist in real life for every woman); in literature when women compete, it is always for the attentions of a man. Childbirth (its rewards, its terrors) exists in literature primarily as a convenient plot device for eliminating extraneous young women. Mothering, when it is portrayed at all, is shown from the viewpoint of the child (male) who either resents it or idealizes it; the genuine happiness and difficulty of mothering don't exist in traditional literature. Menopause is portrayed as a snide joke—a rouged woman with a young lover, or a grasping harpy of a wife and mother—a figure to be scorned or pitied, but one not worthy of sustained analysis. All of these are genuine, serious problems that real women deal with daily (even within the context of their subordinate social position). Yet literature seldom if ever shows them doing so. Instead, the relationship between women and men is treated as if it were the only meaningful relationship that a woman has; thus her relationships with other women, with children, and with society in general are significantly diminished. What is more, while women are seen as subsidiary parts of essentially masculine problems, men are seldom seen as subsidiary parts of feminine problems (ironically, when men do figure in what might be termed a feminine problem, they often end up playing a dominant role—as Knightley does in Emma).

In general there is a whole range of feminine characterization which is delimited at the one extreme by a very narrow consideration of the "problem of women" ("problem of women" here is usually taken to mean problems of courtship and marriage) and which concludes at its other extreme in gross misrepresentation. What is more significant, all of these characterizations of women are dominated by what one might call the male voice. The definitions of women's most serious problems and the proposed solutions to these problems are really, though often covertly, tailored to meet the needs of fundamentally masculine problems. To a greater or lesser extent, then, this kind of feminine characterization must be termed prejudiced or stereotyped because it tends always to emphasize one aspect of character while leaving out others of equal or greater importance. To be more explicit, the bias is carefully chosen so that certain types of masculine behavior (toward women and toward the world in general) might be justified. The stereotypes of women vary, but they vary in response to different masculine needs. The flattering frequency with which women appear in literature is ultimately deluding: they appear not as they are, certainly not as they would define themselves, but as conveniences to the resolution of masculine dilemmas.

The final irony is, of course, that Nature often imitates art. When a society gives its sanction, even its praise, to stereotyped images of womanhood, the women who live in that society form their own self-images accordingly. A stereotype may become, by a sort of perversity, an image of reality that even women seek to perpetuate.

The psychological origins of these first two stereotypes—treated together here because they so often appear together in the same literary work—are reasonably clear; they have been spelled out in Freud's three essays entitled Contributions to the Psychology of Love. A little boy first forms ties of affectionate dependence with his mother; as he matures, he adds to these a more explicitly sexual attachment (and the accompanying realization that his beloved, "pure" mother has a sexual relationship with his father). Freud would claim that the problem of uniting these two forms of love is never completely solved in modern society. In pathological cases, they become completely separate in the adult man: he projects his own broken emotions on to the women around him, dividing them into two distinct classes. There are "good" women—for whom he feels fondness and respect; and there are "bad" women who arouse him sexually; in literature these projections of the man's feelings become the stereotypes of the virtuous woman (who reflects his inhibitory tendencies—his "super-ego") and the sensuous woman (who reflects his libidinal or "id" tendencies). The value to the man of creating these stereotypes is clear; it relieves him from the difficult task of trying to unite the two forms of love which have become distinct in his experience. These stereotypes are much reinforced by two literary traditions: the Christian tradition, with its twin figures of Mary Magdalen and Mary the Mother of Christ, and the Courtly Love tradition, which refined some of the distinctions already implicit in certain Christian attitudes.

Once we understand the origins and function of these stereotypes, some of their distinctive characteristics become clear. First, although literature dealing with them frequently appears to focus on a woman, the real focus is usually the man who is affected by the woman he describes. For example, there are a number of early Saints' lives which treat the conversion of whores who later become venerated for their purity and piety; although the ostensible subject of these lives is the female Saint, the real focus is usually the male narrator, who describes with elaborate detail the various effects (bad and good, before and after) that the subject has had on him. Similarly, Dante's La Vita Nuova is supposedly about Beatrice; it is really about Beatrice's effect on Dante. In Elizabethan sonnet cycles the declared subject is the lady; often our principal interest is the poet who has been inspired by her. This stereotype imputes enormous power to the woman, a power which is demonstrated by the man's reaction to her.

Usually the chaste woman is identified with the positive elements in a man's life; typically she inspires literary productivity or other virtuous acts such as patriotism (as in Scott's novels). The sensuous woman, on the other hand, is identified not only with sex but with other forms of non-virtuous behavior (Shakespeare's Dark lady keeps him from writing; Milton's Delilah tries to divert Samson from fulfilling his heavenly destiny). And the language which is used to depict these women reflects the moral evaluation of them. Assuredly certain physical characteristics are assigned to each: blond hair, blue eyes, fair skin to the chaste; dark hair, etc. to the sensuous. More interesting, however, is the frequency with which the modalities of praise and blame are employed to describe the "love" relationship. In the Courtly Love tradition, especially, the lover repeatedly seeks his lady's approval—she sometimes becomes an external conscience according to which he may judge himself and his life (the evolution of Petrarch's Laura throughout the course of his songs and sonnets illustrates this tendency clearly—as does Petrarch's repeated concern with problems of praise and blame). When the lady is virtuous, the lover is in a humbled position; but when the woman is sensuous, the situation is reversed. Now she (and all those unacceptable emotions she is made to represent) becomes the object of contempt and derision. Ovid, in the Amores, has contempt for the lady whose sexual favors he seeks; and when English poets (such as Donne) write in the Ovidian tradition, they adopt much the same air of contempt for "loose" women. The lady's social status also seems to reflect the built-in moral bias: chaste women tend to be well-born; sensuous women are low-born—or they are gypsies or foreigners.

The sensuous woman is defined as sensuous because she affects men in a certain way (she arouses them, she makes them tend toward "sinful" behavior, she intrudes into their domestic arrangements—in short, she is disruptive); and there is no place for such a character in any work of literature that is meant to conclude with social order. So sensuous women are killed off, or they move on, or they enter a convent. Now this hasty removal often has nothing intrinsically to do with the woman as an individual; it is behavior which does not grow easily and convincingly out of the demands of her character; it is merely a literary convenience too often offered as realism.

We might observe that the usual identification of the chaste woman with all that is good and the sensuous woman with all that is bad is sometimes reversed. The chaste woman (as embodiment of conscience) sometimes becomes so destructively critical that her disapproval renders the man unable to act (because he can never meet her exacting standards). In such situations—Joyce's Portrait, Lawrence's Sons and Lovers—the young man must flee his "good" but devouring "ideal woman." By the same token, the sensuous woman sometimes receives gentler treatment—most often when she appears in subliterature, the official aesthetic status of which makes her moral position clear. (I am not talking about the prostitute with a heart of gold; that is in the Sentimental tradition.) Hence Cleland feels no need to condemn Fanny Hill; the genre of her Adventures is condemnation enough.

There is a long tradition which maintains that woman is essentially emotional; the literary form of the heroic epistle accommodates this view to some extent. Nevertheless, portraits of women in English literature are remarkably free from the taint of hysteria until the eighteenth-century cult of Sentimentalism. Since the specific aesthetic and moral origins of this stereotype are of major importance, we will begin by outlining them.

The Sentimental definition of woman was largely supported by the Moral Sentiment school of philosophy. Such men as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Adam Smith claimed that every man had a natural inclination toward good; and this "natural affection," as it was called, expressed itself as an inclination toward justice and fair behavior and as a spontaneous and deep response to human suffering (Adam Smith especially emphasizes the empathic component of man's moral sentiment). In practical terms, this view of morality holds that a man engages in moral behavior not on the basis of a set of rationally apprehended principles, but as a sympathetic (emotional) response. One could either share the happiness of others or respond with pity to their suffering; in aesthetic practice the tendency toward shared happiness usually took the form of poetic expression, while pity was aroused by suffering depicted in the drama and the novel. Such a moral system seems humane enough; however, one fact emerges upon reflection. If an important aspect of man's moral behavior is a response to suffering, then someone must be victimized if a man is to engage in this form of moral behavior. The "moral" man cannot feel sympathy in a vacuum.

Under the influence of this moral system, the status of victim—and all those qualities which might lead someone to be victimized—gained public recognition and even approval. The Moral Sentiment view did not make sex distinctions (though Burke's Essay on the Sublime and the Beautiful gives some indication of the kind of quasisexual terminology that could be used to describe aesthetic relationships). In theory the sufferer could be either a man or a woman; however, in literary practice it was usually—indeed, almost always—a woman or a child. Those who are physically smaller and legally dependent were prized for their vulnerability. In characterizing women, authors employed a whole series of devices to reinforce our view of them as helpless: the epithet "little" first came into vogue at this period as a sign meant to coerce affection—little Emily; little Dora; Amelia (in Fielding's novel), described repeatedly as a "little helpless lamb"—and of course, diminutive size became a sign of beauty. Weak health, the tendency to unnamed and often fatal illnesses, became an appropriate fate for fictional heroines: Richardson's Clarissa dies for absolutely no discernible physical reason, and in Grandison, Clementina's grief slides rapidly and inevitably into failing health. Most important, the woman was by definition incompetent; she must look to the men in her environment to resolve her dilemmas (after all, her competence would remove from them the possibility of engaging in "moral" behavior). Vanity Fair demonstrates this belief lucidly, though not without irony: the narrator perceives Becky with distaste not merely because she is immoral but also (perhaps principally) because she is so determinedly selfsufficient; and the passivity of Amelia, though disappointing in the end, is more emotionally satisfying to him.

Partly because of the greater value placed on women's incompetence, but even more because of the increased attention which came to be paid to their emotional life (the moral sentiment being an "affection"), the display of emotions became a supposedly reliable index to character: good women cried easily; bad women were self-contained. One could make a long list of weeping heroines in this stereotype. With this obsessive focus on emotionality, women came increasingly to be defined as purely emotional, without rational competence worth mentioning (Rousseau is very explicit in Emile).

Yet the "proper" emotional sphere for women was rigidly limited. Her proper realm was the private one, her proper emotions domestic. A woman could suffer; she could feel love (especially unrequited or betrayed love), but seldom sexual passion; she could feel sympathy for others (typically responding with kindness on a personal level), but she was portrayed as incapable of moral outrage. Most strikingly, she was never permitted to feel anger; the absence of rage in these otherwise highly emotional women is truly striking. And of course, she was never moved by public ambitions (no one who believed in the Sentimental ethic could have written Macbeth). As the denial of her public self and her rational capacities is completed, woman is relegated entirely to the domestic scene. Her role as wife is of passing but subsidiary importance (there is little hint of married sexuality), and her emotional energies are channeled into her relationship with her children. Thus the role of mother became idealized; and in some works, as in Dickens', one feels that a woman married only to have children.

Whereas the sensuous woman and the virtuous woman were described in modalities of praise and blame, the Sentimental woman is described in terms of submission and suffering; and this view of woman as essentially submissive or masochistic is accompanied by an interesting shift of aesthetic intention. Aristotle declared that tragedy should inspire pity and terror. Traditionally, the central figure is a person of great parts and renown who suffers calamity; and the tragedy takes its force from the impressiveness of his struggle and the disaster of his defeat. During the Sentimental era this formula shifts very much in the direction of pity, and the central character becomes correspondingly weaker. We are meant to sympathize with his pain, not admire his struggles; and there emerges a literature not of great men and women, but of helpless victims (usually women). To give one example, in the traditional rendering of the Heloise/Abelard story, Abelard is castrated; in Rousseau's adaptation, Julie (the heroine) suffers and dies.

What male problems are projected into this stereotype? Most obviously problems having to do with the expression of sadistic impulses. The "Byronic" hero is the complement to the Sentimental heroine (and incidentally, he appears much before Byron). Frequently the heroine finds him attractive precisely because he is cruel (his rough treatment being a kind of perverse gesture of attention and/or affection). In other cases his cruelty is seen as regrettable, but understandable: men of strong passions do act sadistically and (so the implicit argument runs) women are intended by Nature to be victimized.

The picture of "the liberated woman" which appears in 19th and 20th century literature is less stereotypical than any of the others that we shall deal with; perhaps, indeed, it is less of a distortion than it is an exaggeration of certain real problems. Yet its plausibility makes it, ultimately, all the more seductive; and perhaps more than any other stereotype, it has been accepted not only by men but by women as well.

In many ways, the picture of the liberated woman is the exact obverse of the Sentimental stereotype; this relationship is not accidental, for liberation entailed rejecting the clichés of Sentimentalism. The first great spokesman for liberation was Mary Wollstonecraft, who set out explicitly to rebut what she felt to be the outrageous claims of Rousseau. Wollstonecraft's image of woman—an image which was to become fundamental to the stereotype of the liberated woman—was drawn from the liberal political writings of the day. Thomas Paine saw man(kind) as essentially rational and based his theory of government upon that assumption; Wollstonecraft saw women as part of mankind, and therefore claimed (against the emotionalism advanced by Rousseau) that they, too, are essentially rational. Women are, she asserted, not fundamentally different from men; and the "feminine" character is merely the product of socialization. Wollstonecraft's treatise does not offer a stereotype; however, the insistence upon women's intellectual capacities and the complete disregard for their emotional and domestic lives which serves Wollstonecraft's argument is used by later authors to turn the liberated woman into a freak. g

Thus the first element which we may discern in the stereotype of the liberated woman is an insistence upon her intelligence and/or talent. Prior to Wollstonecraft, it is difficult to find a description of a heroine that gives any information about her intelligence; afterwards, there is a veritable flood of bluestockings. Emma is "handsome, clever, and rich," Dorothea Brooke was "usually spoken of as being remarkably clever," Jane Eyre is formidably, destructively bright—and the list extends right to the present. When the author is sympathetic to women, their intelligence is problematical but not bizarre; when he is not, her abilities (however real) are seen as aberrations (as in Princess Ida, "Mighty maiden with a mission, / Paragon of common sense, / Running fount of erudition, / Miracle of eloquence"). It is amusing, or even "unnatural" that women should develop such capacities.

If the liberated woman has potential, then her problem, a problem which is repeated with endless variations, is that she desires to find meaningful (usually public) employment of that talent. In this endeavor, the liberated woman is almost always doomed to failure: Emma, if she was ever truly liberated, submits to Knightley's wisdom; Dorothea and Dinah recognize the far-reaching significance of private acts; Mary Barton, one of the few working women in 19th century fiction, longs for a husband to support her; Sue Bridehead and Eustacia Vie are destroyed in their attempts to move beyond the domestic world.

Sometimes woman's failure to find public fulfillment is depicted as an adjustment (however violent) of personal aims; in other cases, the woman's "wrong-headed" attempts at self-fulfillment are represented as political rebellions against the system of male-dominated marriages. Sue feels she must submit herself to Phillotson as obedient wife; in Tennyson's Princess, the heroine ultimately renounces all talk of equality between the sexes; and in pulp literature (see A Woman in Spite of Herself), the woman's "proper" submission to her husband is postulated in more dramatic and degrading forms. During this period there grew a large body of self-proclaimed "responsible" medical opinion to the effect that women are mysteriously unreliable. They must submit (for their own good) to the restraints of male-dominated marriage; for their intelligence, however great, cannot compensate for biological inadequacy.

In addition to their sex-linked inadequacy, ambitious women were often portrayed as sexually perverse. Sue Bridehead is not a lesbian, but she is certainly frigid. Hermione and Gudrun (in Lawrence's Women in Love) are sexual grotesques. Even George Eliot's heroines tend to channel their sexual forces into unhealthy directions until they have recognized and accepted the essentially domestic quality of their talents. The notion that a liberated woman must be sexually aberrant is, of course, still with us; and female intellectuals are labeled promiscuous or lesbian according to the fantasies of the accuser.

Accompanying this sexual distortion is a more general distortion of the woman's domestic life. For example, so long as she is liberated, a woman is presumed to have no interest in—no feeling for—children and mothering. This stereotype seems to presume (in an ironic acceptance of the Sentimental ethic) that intellect and mothering are incompatible. One thinks of the haste with which Nora divests herself of family in The Doll's House. Perhaps Ibsen's psychology is correct; perhaps the ties are too binding and too close—so that freedom can only come with renunciation. Still, what is unreal is Nora's lack of conflict, regret, remorse. Once she has found her mind, all domestic affections seem to have been supplanted. Shaw's heroines have children, but there is no affection since these children become mere expressions of ambition. Even Mill, who spoke so eloquently for women, assumed that a mother, though she might wish time to develop her intellect, would have no public ambitions. The Suffragists (many of them women with children—daughters who followed in their mothers' way) were pictured in the press as sexual and emotional freaks.

It is not difficult to see the male end served by this stereotype; simply put, it is the maintaining of power. If by implication, insinuation, bullying, bravado, women can be convinced that there can be no working accommodation among their varying needs and desires, if they can be convinced of the necessity to submit, then men need not fear their competition.

The stereotype of the liberated woman ultimately served a political end—the conservative maintenance of a maledominated marriage, which in turn reflected the power structure of a male-dominated society. The stereotype of the American Girl grows out of economic and moral issues: woman's function, according to this stereotype, is to magnify the men who support her; she is the visible manifestation of their success and the repository of that traditional morality which they so often suspended during the process of amassing wealth.

This stereotype is a post-Civil-War phenomenon. Very little literature focused on the American woman before 1860, although the early nineteenth century saw much feminist activity (Mt. Holyoke, the first women's college, was established in 1837), and women more than proved their usefulness at supposedly masculine tasks during the war. In 1860, then, there were a large number of women who were educated and conscious of their special role as women (often not satisfied with the prejudice against them); women became a large potential reading public and (now) an apparently appropriate subject for study in literature. A great deal of literature after 1860 is directed at woman, written about women; and in this literature we find the emerging stereotype.

The most important characteristic of the American Girl is her accomplishment: she is an "educated" woman, and her thoughts about herself take this consciously into account. A striking example can be seen in Alcott's descriptions of the March girls (all under eighteen); they speak several foreign languages, read Shakespeare, refer casually to the works of Dickens, do some Latin, play the piano, draw—all of this with ease and grace. They make Emma or even Dorothea Brooke seem clumsy by comparison. Yet, this education is deliberately designed to be unconnected with any real-life adult role (save perhaps that of teaching school). Veblen defines leisure as the "non-productive consumption of time. .. . an evidence of pecuniary ability to afford a life of idleness." No facet of American life better illustrates Veblen's theory than the girl whose father can afford to send her to school (rather than have her engage in household industry) and whose father and husband can both afford not to have that education put to financial use. A woman becomes, then, the ornament of prosperous society.

The irony, pathos, even tragedy of this situation did not escape perceptive writers. Alcott shows us Jo's troubles; Howells develops the theme repeatedly—most strikingly in a less-known work entitled A Woman's Reason; and Edith Wharton draws an impoverished Lily of the field in House of Mirth. Yet none of these portraits went so far as to suggest that woman should train her intelligence (as man does) for active social roles. No productive intellectual life is seen for her, and perhaps that is why she is always most captivating as a girl. If intellectual growth is denied, then the process of aging seems unnatural.

Although genuine public activity is prohibited, the American girl is given one rather nebulous task—that of bearing the torch of culture (while the menfolk are out working). The one genuine profession open to her is that of school teacher; in the East she may direct only young minds, but in the rough, masculine world of the frontier she tries to tame the anti-social spirits of grown men as well (in this connection Owen Wister's The Virginian is the archetypal work). Yet as teacher, she becomes someone to run from or to reform by wooing her away from her books. When she does not actually hold a position teaching, she nevertheless continues her "civilizing" work (as Twain termed it). Small boys understandably avoid her and her husband may learn to fear her bossy ways (Silas Lapham's wife was a teacher before her marriage, and when she gave up that job, she turned all her energies into making Silas socially respectable). Henry Adams makes the case even more clearly and tragically in Esther and Democracy. In both novels the heroines take the task of reformation seriously—the one in religion and the other in government. Both of his heroines refuse to capitulate to what their lovers might have termed practical realities. Because they are women, they cannot enter the drama of public life directly; and their persistent high-mindedness serves only to destroy their chances for personal happiness. Both society and the women themselves lose.

In James we find, perhaps, the most articulate statement of woman's dilemma. Many of James' heroines are women with a truly American capacity for generosity; they develop their intellects, their fortunes, their spirits to no end (save, perhaps, a Christ-like transcendence of the cares of this world). Varena Tarrant in The Bostonians comments most clearly on this stereotype; her gift is permitted no final public outlet, and she becomes—as the wife of Basil Ransom—the final flower of an impoverished tradition.

The woman of this stereotype is placed in an inherently contradictory position. She must develop her talents, but she must not do so with practical ends in mind; she is instilled with a sense of purpose and moral destiny, and permitted no more serious occupations than women's clubs; she is not permitted to age gracefully, yet she is scorned for clinging to youth; she is expected to bear responsibility for the transmission of culture (and morality), and avoided as a captious wife and possessive mother. Ultimately, what this stereotype offers is not so much the denial of certain female roles as a hopelessly contradictory definition of them.

We scarcely have space here to discuss the implications of these stereotypes; however, we can make a few tentative comments. One very common response to the observation that women are characterized stereotypically is an indignant assertion that after all, men, too, are confronted with literary stereotypes. Of course. To claim that for the most part feminine characterization is distorted is to make no claim at all about the characterization of men; and surely anyone who has studied literature would have to be a dunce not to notice that there are masculine stereotypes. We have mentioned one, the Byronic hero; another is the Warrior or the Soldier, and there are others.

The really interesting question is whether these masculine stereotypes are analogous to the stereotypes of women. In several significant ways they are not. Whereas the characterization of women is distorted to meet masculine needs and the feminine stereotype becomes a useful justification for male behavior of one sort or another, the stereotypes of men do not always serve this function for women. The Byronic stereotype is problematical; probably it fuels both masculine and feminine fantasies. However, the image of the Warrior has very little at all to do with women; and except in classical epics, the poem, play, or novel which includes this stereotype very often has no significant female figures at all. Thus men may appear stereotypically in literature, but when they do, the stereotype is usually a fantasied solution to an essentially masculine problem. The supremacy of the male voice remains unchallenged. Moreover, there is a genuinely significant body of literature which recognizes the limitations of some of these masculine stereotypes and which attempts to reveal their inadequacy as standards for defining character or guiding behavior: one finds Tennyson's "Ulysses," Lord Jim, or The Red Badge of Courage. There is no comparable body of antistereotype literature about women, unless one wishes to view the image of the liberated woman as an answer to Sentimentalism (and as we have seen, that course has its pitfalls).

Indeed, the persistent acceptance of the stereotypes of women is remarkable. Even women writers (to our embarrassment) seem to adopt them. Austen, who never married, condemns Emma for her resolution to remain single; and having chastised her heroine, promptly corrects Emma's "masculine" need to manage things by having her submit to the wisdom of Knightley. George Eliot, who lived openly with a married man, does not permit Dorothea Brooke the same independence. How often in literature, especially before 1900, is a woman's view of herself, of her own rights, of her needs, described entirely by the convenience of the male-authored stereotypes of women.

One might take an amused, almost archeological view of the literary remains of these stereotypes if they were only remains. The trouble is, they are still taken seriously. A modern novel (enormously popular) in the Sentimental tradition begins: "What can you say about a twenty-fiveyear-old girl who died?" The motion picture captures the image of the liberated woman (played by Barbara Stanwyck, Rosalind Russell, or more recently, Doris Day), successful women executives who wear mannish suits, who are tough, and who, if they are lucky, are saved by the intervention of a strong man who puts things to right. Television is the appropriate medium for the display of the American Girl, that beauty-contest winner who must have not only the proper measurements but also demonstrable (though unusable) schooling and a "talent" for amusing. A girl whose loftiest function is, apparently, that of endorsing products.

How many girls have made their lives miserable by trying to mold themselves to one or another of these caricatures of human nature? How many have thought that they might be virtuous or sexual but not both? How many have been counselled into emotionalism (and scorned for their lack of intellect)? How many have feigned stupidity lest they frighten suitors by their unfeminine intelligence? How many have been forced to obtain an education which they were absolutely prohibited from using?

Confronted with these mutilated and demeaning images of feminine character, it is all too easy for women to dismiss them as totally lacking in truth. Such an attitude is not profitable. Insufficient as they are for describing a woman's experience, these images do grow out of genuine male experience. Thus for example, if a man is psychologically incapable of uniting his affectionate and libidinal impulses, he will inevitably perceive his relationships with women in terms of the first two stereotypes we have considered. Now his view of women as either virtuous or sensuous may tell us very little about women; but it reveals a great deal about him. And the same may be said of all these stereotypes. The ultimate truth of these images of women does not rest in their ability to capture feminine experience or women's life-problems; it inheres, ironically, in their capacity for revealing masculine dilemmas and postulating fantasied solutions to them. These are women—not as they are, but as men wished they were. Better than rejecting these stereotypes, women might say to men: "Look, and learn about yourselves."