Six of the Best Bad Women in Fiction

I’ve always felt it was the job of a good novel to dig in the dirt, which may be why the best ones always seemed to me to be the ones about women who were angry, sad, or just plain bad: women made reckless by ennui, women who resisted all the way, who failed to fit themselves to the shape of a husband’s thumb. I can’t understand picking up a book in search of someone unobjectionable. There’s nothing enthralling in good behavior; it’s wickedness that keeps us rapt. Besides, the pretense of virtue always rings false; hence no one ever came away from reading Little Women dreaming of being Beth March. As Margaret Atwood says, “Create a flawless character and you create an insufferable one.”

Many people claim discomfort when they come face to face with literature’s “bad” women. They set books down, declaring that they can’t “get along” with the protagonist. But surely that should qualify as a reason to love a book. I’m always tempted to quote Claire Messud at them: “Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Rasolnikov?” One way to measure power is to consider who gets away with bad behavior. Badly-behaved women are judged more harshly than badly-behaved men, because any threat to the domestic or the maternal is greeted with nerve-prickling dread. But literature has posed that threat since long before Lady Macbeth. Through literature’s adulteresses and murderesses we explore our dark impulses and our consciousness stretches to fit things we couldn’t conceive ourselves, but sorely need to understand. It’s precisely because books are mirrors that they can’t always promise flattery. We need them to unlock some part of our own psyches, and therefore above all else we need them to tell the truth.

If we come to books looking for friends, we should be prepared to find the kind who wants to talk about where the bodies are buried. Literature’s best “bad” women narrate their own flaws, honest as deathbed confessions. They go against the grain. They want to tell us about the agony of lost or abandoned ambition. They subvert the expectation that all women are natural mothers and that our only gifts and desires lie in the domestic arena. In doing so they wrestle some of their own power back. Here’s a list of my favorites.

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

My idea of the kind of woman I wanted to be spilled into me straight from the pages of this book. Jane’s voice was a rallying cry against all the badges of my own supposed powerlessness: as a girl, a black person, and a child in a world where each of those adjectives moved you further away from the center of things. It’s because Jane was such an outsider, just as awkward and at times as angry as I was, that I wanted her to triumph, and it’s because of those same qualities that she does. She was a Victorian anti-heroine par excellence. For all its fierce, far-flung passions, Jane Eyre is a lesson in self-acceptance: “I care for myself.” Jane declares. “The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.” Yes, modern women are disenchanted with the hand Bertha Mason was dealt, and yes, it’s a disgrace that Jane finds contentment in a marriage so far beneath her. But to read Jane Eyre is to bear witness to a consciousness coming alive, and to feel the quickening of your own consciousness as a result.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Levin who? Reading this novel I’m always in a hurry to skim-read through him to get to the Anna parts. She’s as selfish as any adulteress, cleaved by desire when she should be cleaved by guilt, at such a fever-pitch that she abandons her child. For that reason it is entirely her book. Her sin is wanting more, which in a female protagonist can only lead to self-destruction, a fate she foreshadows early and often: “Oh, if I were in his place, I’d have killed a wife like me long ago, I’d have torn her to pieces…” Tolstoy gives her “the death of a bad woman, a woman without religion.” He gives her the bad woman’s exquisite, painful push and pull: “There’s another woman in me, I’m afraid of her—she fell in love with that man, and I wanted to hate you and couldn’t forget the other one who was there before.”

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Reading Esther Greenwood’s account of her own mental breakdown and stay in a psychiatric hospital is as strange and terrifying and cabin-feverish as the bell jar coming down over one’s own head. The horror-story specter of electrocution hangs over the text, in the form of shock treatments and executions, but the prospect of marriage and childbearing is made to seem worse: “I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service was ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs Willard’s kitchen mat.” In Esther Greenwood, Plath pins down, precisely as an entomologist,  how depression separates a person from the world, renders them “very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.” Esther’s own malaise is equal parts wit and pathos: “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”

Zoë Heller, Notes on a Scandal

Barbara Covett recounts Sheba Hart’s affair with her underaged pupil, Steven Connolly but what we witness in real time is Sheba coming haplessly into Barbara’s clutches, the predator becoming prey. The novel sets two archetypes of “bad” womanhood at odds: Barbara, the virgin spinster who “lives on a crumb of anticipation for weeks at a time” and Sheba, the ambivalent mother for whom “if life is meaningless, bearing children is just giving birth to more meaninglessness.” Neither is the least bit abashed by Sheba’s crime. Indeed, Barbara’s clinical zeal for the telling is a flimsy mask for her flickers of misplaced glee, and Sheba is as sleaze-filled and solipsistic as Humbert Humbert (“There was no assault and I’ve done nothing indecent”). Speaking of him, the novel is a superb interrogation of how the evil that women do is circumscribed by gender. As Barbara says: “In the end, I suspect, being female will do nothing for Sheba but deny her the grandeur of true villainy.”

Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

One day middle-aged schoolteacher Nora Eldridge spies young Reza Shahid in a supermarket café, laughing at her as she chases a pile of spilled apples. Weeks later he walks into her third-grade classroom, a new student “bound in his charm and beauty like a net.” But it’s Nora who is caught. She enmeshes herself into the Shahids’ lives with a steel-tipped desperation that puts her entirely at their mercy, in thrall not only to Reza but to his parents. She narrates the story of her betrayal at their hands in a voice dipped in rage. “How angry am I?” she asks in the opening line: “You don’t want to know. Nobody wants to know about that.” In spite of this exhortation, or perhaps because of it, she proceeds to tell us: “It was supposed to say Great Artist on my tombstone but if I died right now it would say ‘such a good daughter/teacher/friend’ instead; and what I really want to shout, and want on big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL.” In Messud’s hands Nora’s anger is a virtue. When she asks, “Don’t all women feel the same?” it’s an invitation to walk straight into the waiting arms of our own rage, and use it purposefully.

Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

Olive Kitteridge is irascible, ill-tempered and at times plain abusive. She’s guilty of an emotional affair (at least) with a man whose “wariness” and “quiet anger” reminds her of herself: “We’re both cut from the same piece of bad cloth.” When she overhears her son’s new wife just after their wedding insulting her dress and hinting at her bad parenting, her “mouth begins to secrete” and she invades her daughter-in-law’s closet to scrawl on one of her sweaters with a Magic Marker. Yet no one is at more the mercy of her dark moods than Olive herself, who longs to tell that same daughter-in-law: “there is a thing inside me, and sometimes it swells up like the head of a squid and shoots blackness through me.” Her own desires are far more soft-bellied and complicated than that: “…there had been times when she’d felt a loneliness so deep that once, not so many years ago, having a cavity filled, the dentist’s gentle turning of her chin with his big soft fingers had felt to her like a tender kindness of almost excruciating depth, and she had swallowed with a groan of longing, tears springing to her eyes.” This book evokes the pain and anger of the kind of loneliness that runs that deep.

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The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins is out now via Harper.