Case in point: Last week, one of my seniors mentioned a three-part test to determine if a book or movie has strong female characters. A little digging turned up the name — the Bechdel Test, named for cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who popularized it in a 1985 comic strip.
The first criterion is that the work must feature at least two women. Next, the two women must speak to one another. And their conversation must be about something other than men.
The Bechdel Test was a revelation for me. I started thinking about the works I assign to my classes and how they fare under these criteria. The short answer? Not too well.
Freshman year is “Romeo and Juliet.” It has several strong female characters, including Juliet, her mother, and one of Shakespeare’s most masterful creations, the Nurse. All three talk among themselves. Unfortunately, their conversations revolve around Juliet’s impending engagement or her desire not to be engaged. This play of doomed love fails the Bechdel Test.
“To Kill a Mockingbird” is somewhat better. Narrated by the wonderfully strong Scout, Harper Lee’s novel features several conversations between women about rabid dogs, gardening, and missionary trips to Africa. It passes the Bechdel Test.
“Of Mice and Men”? Only one woman there — Curly’s wife, who doesn’t even merit her own name (which may have been Steinbeck’s point), and the ghost of another, Lennie’s Aunt Clara. No conversations between the two. Fail.
I don’t teach sophomores, but junior year brings “The Scarlet Letter,” which almost passes because at least it has two female characters — that hussy Hester Prynne and her daughter, Pearl — who talk a lot about the minister and the Black Man (the devil). But as one student noted, even if some of their conversations veer from strictly male-centric, they’re still “all about sin,” so that doesn’t count. Fair enough. Fail.
Next up, “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker. Many strong female characters, many conversations among them about a host of issues, including men. Pass.
But then along comes “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien’s tour de force about Vietnam. Great book, but woefully lacking in female characters. Fail. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” and “All the Pretty Horses”? Classics, all … but fail, fail, fail.
Senior year is the worst. Some selections don’t get past the first Bechdel hurdle: Having two women as characters. “The Lord of the Flies” and “Bartleby, the Scrivener” have zero. “The Road” has one in flashback and one who appears for about two pages near the conclusion. “1984” has one. “Macbeth” has two — the scenery-chewing Lady Macbeth and Lady Macduff — but they never speak to each other. “Hamlet” has a duo, Gertrude and Ophelia, but their conversations are limited to the title character. “Great Expectations” and the perpetually jilted bride, Miss Havisham, and her man-hating acolyte, Estella? Fergedaboudit.
To be clear, I don’t consider Bechdel to be a true test, per se. Books don’t really pass or fail based on arbitrary character counts, content, length or lexile levels. But in environments like school, where being as inclusive as possible should be a major goal, a blanket exclusion of fifty percent of the audience in the vast majority of titles gives me pause.
An argument could be made that school reading lists are still the province of Old Dead White Men, also known by unapologetic Eurocentrists as the Canon, and that the lack of female characters who live independently of men is merely a reflection of the social reality in which these writers worked. An argument can also be made — one which I can’t in good conscience refute completely — that replacing acknowledged classics with more contemporary titles merely to balance a ledger based on somebody’s idea of political correctness is problematic.
So I won’t be making a wholesale replacement of my reading lists next year, but I will be pondering more deeply the titles I select and their implications. After all, my students deserve an accurate representation not only of the past, but also of the world outside their classroom window.
Originally published in The Alliance Review in April 2015.
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