We need to talk about so-called unlikeable female protagonists
It's a tiresome way to write off a book
There is a specific type of protagonist in a book I cannot get enough of: it’s the woman who’s gritty, makes bad decisions, who’s honest and unconventional. I seek out books with this type of character. (Think Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation; Julia May Jonas’s Vladimir, and any book written by Elena Ferrante.) I know many readers do.
At the same time, I keep hearing these protagonists be referred to as unlikeable, and I have a question about that:
Why?
How is it that Humbert Humbert can prey on 12-year-old Lolita and the book can become part of the literary canon, but a female protagonist making bad decisions is considered unlikeable?
I thought the protagonist of Melissa Broder’s Death Valley made one too many idiotic decisions. I was annoyed by Alex in Emma Cline’s The Guest. But even though I wasn’t in love with either of them — and in fact I hardly liked them — I never referred to them as unlikable. I never thought of them as unlikeable. They are just women faced with difficult choices.
But aren’t we all? Aren’t all women constantly barraged with challenges in which, no matter the decision we make, there’s reason for someone to judge it?
Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse says we are reminded of our womanhood when we step out into the world each day and offer ourselves for judgement. Somehow, inexplicably, while these rules do not apply to men, they extend to fictional women.
Read that again.
There’s a list on Goodreads called “women vs the void” and it is described as “female protagonists contemplating the banality of existence.” It’s a list of 198 books about women confronted with earthly struggles. I’d venture to guess that the protagonists in every one of these books have, at one point in time, been called unlikeable by someone. Or many someones.
It’s okay to dislike a character. I think that’s one of the points of literature; to expose readers to different worlds and different people, but what is not okay is the conspicuous lack of tagging male protagonists as unlikeable while readers are so quick to say this about female characters.
The other day I came across an unofficial literary genre: Good for Her1, the trope where “women reclaim their agency, often through morally ambiguous or unconventional actions.” These are the books that create space for “complex and unapologetically human characters.”
Why wouldn’t we want more books like these? Why would we write them off because the protagonists could be considered unlikeable?
Raven Leilani, author of Luster, a book in which the protagonist makes a hundred raucous decisions, says it’s more humane to allow a narrator to be unreliable because we are all a little unreliable at times. She says her protagonist, Edie, isn’t always her own best representative and she processes things imperfectly. To me, that doesn’t make her unlikeable. If anything, it makes her more real.
I make this argument firstly because these are the books I love and the books I want more of. If I only read Good for Her books for the rest of my life, I’d be happy. I make this argument also because I have seen the unlikeable protagonist reasoning from the other end: editors rejecting my novel because the protagonist is hard to connect with. That’s the nice way of putting it.
The other way to put it is that she is unlikeable.
By normalizing this term, I worry readers are unintentionally skewing the gatekeepers’ decisions about what kinds of books to publish. The more readers normalize unlikeableness as a direct correlation to female characters, the less I think editors will take on books featuring these types of women.
That would be a disservice to readers everywhere.
The title of this post is pulled from the book We Need to Talk About Kevin, a novel by Lionel Shriver about a mother and her son Kevin, who committed a heinous crime. I haven’t read the book, but we discussed it in my fiction workshop last week and it got me thinking: do people talk about murderers as unlikeable? Or do we reserve that for the women who are apathetic toward their children or who sleep with men for money? For the unconventional women who reclaim their power?
Have you ever heard of someone refer to a male protagonist as unlikeable? This is not a rhetorical question, I am seriously asking if you can think of a time you’ve heard, or you’ve said yourself, that a male character was “unlikeable.” If you have, I beg you to share it with me.
If you’ve been a part of the conversation around unlikeable protagonists, don’t panic. Please just try to work into the discourse your opinions on male characters you find unlikeable. Like Humbert Humbert. Like Kevin. We need to talk about them being unlikeable, too.
In the same vein of
’s eloquent shout about literary fiction (“Want more literary fiction from Big Five publishers? BUY MORE LITERARY FICTION FROM BIG FIVE PUBLISHERS”), if you love these kinds of books, buy more of them. Support the authors, support the publishers, and for fuck’s sake, stop calling female protagonists unlikeable. Those characters happen to be the same steely women who make art great, and I don’t want to see them going anywhere.
What I’m reading: Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout and Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor
What are you reading? If you found this post useful, please share it!
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Such a great piece. I often say “unlikable female characters” but always sort of as a compliment 😂 but i do agree with your take! reminds me of one of my favorite Ottessa Moshfegh quotes:
“I wish that future novelists would reject the pressure to write for the betterment of society. Art is not media. A novel is not an “afternoon special” or fodder for the Twittersphere or material for journalists to make neat generalizations about culture. A novel is not BuzzFeed or NPR or Instagram or even Hollywood. Let’s get clear about that. A novel is a literary work of art meant to expand consciousness. We need novels that live in an amoral universe, past the political agenda described on social media. We have imaginations for a reason. Novels like American Psycho and Lolita did not poison culture. Murderous corporations and exploitive industries did. We need characters in novels to be free to range into the dark and wrong. How else will we understand ourselves?” —OTTESSA MOSHFEGH
So I’ve read a few books with “unlikeable” protagonists. Usually I’m reading for myself and tend not to look at the internet’s view of said character. I found Ottessa Moshfegh’s character in MYORAR unlikeable, yes. In the Neapolitan Quartet, I didn’t find the women unlikeable, much more I found the men so. Sometimes I wonder, is it the internet’s obsession in analysing books so extensively that this has become a phenomenon since less books paint the female characters as not being able to commit any wrong? I tend to only find such hyper-fixations on the female character in said communities. Which, I may add, are dominated by women. I think even, there was a quiet movement in the online communities to read more books with bad women. Almost as if it was a point proved that women can be bad and we can write them as such.