Six female characters that 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:

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

Tokarczuk walked so Moshfegh could run. Drive Your Plow (which was first published in its original Polish in 2009, then translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and re-released in 2019) follows Janina, a 70-something retired bridge engineer who devotes her days to astrology, translating William Blake, and acting as an off-season caretaker for the summer cottages in her isolated village near the Czech border. When the neighborhood’s colorful cast of characters keep turning up dead, Janina takes it upon herself to solve the murders. A staunch vegetarian and protector of animal rights, she begins to believe the local wildlife are imparting vengeance upon those who hunt them for sport.

Death in Her Hands [by Ottessa Moshfegh] and Drive Your Plow draw a lot of similarities, and some of those similarities run deeper than the conceit. Like Death in Her Hands, I read this less as a murder mystery and more as a characterological study on a type that’s often overlooked or misunderstood in culture—the eccentric older woman with radical ideas. Though the setting is contemporary, it has a distinctly folkloric quality to it, helped along by Janina’s stylistic tendency to capitalize improper nouns (Catastrophe, Ailments, Dusk). If not for mentions of phones and laptops, you get the sense that this could be a diaristic account of a 17th-century witch hunt, told from the perspective of the accused woman. Because this is, in fact, proven to be a kind of modern witch hunt: Of course the coterie of powerful men that run the town are threatened by the older woman who fights vigilantly on behalf of the animals—which puts a damper on their favorite pastime of game hunting. Darkly funny, earnest, and, yes, a little kooky, Janina has become one of my favorite characters in contemporary literature.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is among Andrea Carlisle's seven books about women over 60 who defy societal expectations and Francesca McDonnell Capossela's seven titles about women committing acts of violence.

--Marshal Zeringue