Six female characters who defy traditional archetypes

Caroline Wolff is a writer and editor. She holds an MFA in Fiction from New York University, where she also taught undergraduate creative writing. She lives in downtown Manhattan.

The Wayside is Wolff's debut novel.

At CrimeReads she tagged six favorite female characters who

are chronically misunderstood and villainized for acting or believing differently. In the hands of another writer (and perhaps written in a different era), they could be boiled down to crazy and used for shock value. Instead, these women wield their differences in perspective with agency, and in the end, they’re proven right to disagree with the people in power.

One title on the list:

Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand

With Generation Loss, Elizabeth Hand introduced the world to one of the great literary anti-heroes. Decades after Cass Neary’s seminal photography book on the ‘70s punk scene earned her cult fame, she hasn’t managed to produce any work of note. With no other prospects, she takes the opportunity to interview an infamous, reclusive photographer holed up on a remote island in Maine—also the site of a former commune where people continue to go missing. There she discovers a world of terror, by turns bleak, phantasmagoric, and punctuated with the kind of body horror you’d see in a ‘70s B-movie. Her experience strains her grip on reality, but she emerges Pyrrhically victorious.

Cass is the definition of an “unlikable” character. She’s gnarly, nihilistic, and makes confusing decisions driven purely by the strength of her will. As a true punk rocker, she sees what the mainstream doesn’t—she zeroes in on the blind spots and is relentless in her pursuit to uncover them. Such is the beauty of a character with absolutely nothing to lose. I think a lot of readers bristle against her, and her self-destructive behavior is sometimes hard to read. That said, there’s no question that if Cass were a man her self-destructive behavior would be glamorized as a bad boy just doing his bad-boy schtick.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue