Female literary characters, in contrast, indicate the condition of being a woman. They are condemned to a universe that revolves around sex and family and domesticity. Their stories circle questions of love and obligation—love being, as the critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis writes, the concept “our culture uses [for women] to absorb all possible Bildung, success/failure, learning, education, and transition to adulthood.” And so I’m using the term “heroine” simply for the women whose version of literary femininity has stuck.
