Color Them Morally Gray: Relatable and (maybe) Unlikable Women Characters
by Kimberley Allen McNamara
Once, my Main Character in Workshop was labeled as being too much. She also, I was told, needed to be more. "No one wants to sit in that kind of status for too long," was one comment. Followed by another: "What does she want? She needs to want something, even if it's a glass of water." Thank you, Kurt Vonnegut; I didn't know you were in my Workshop. Questioning these critiques, I determined my MC was not very likable in her current state, and she didn't want to exert much energy to change her circumstances. She was indifferent. In my rough, sketched pages, my MC was a conundrum, and this aspect perturbed the readers. In hindsight, I should have asked: She may not be likable or even palatable, but is she relatable?
Likability and Relatability is Different for a Woman Character
In the forward of Anna Bogutskaya’s Unlikable Female Character, the Women Pop Culture Wants You to Hate, Terri White (writer, columnist, author, and screenwriter) asserts:
“For it’s a note that I still know echoes around writers’ rooms and boardrooms alike; the furrowed brow of an exec who’s trying to put any other way then the way he finally has to put it: but is she…likable?
What do we, what do they mean by likable? It’s been said that likeability means relatability. And that relatability is what a female character needs in a film or TV show for that film or TV show to succeed commercially.” (kindle version location 81).
White continues to voice that how entwined likability is with palatability and how the patriarchal world, to a large extent “like its women—both fictional and otherwise—to be supine and silent.” (kindle version, location 89)
Following White's forward, author Anna Bogutskaya explores nine tropes she says make up the unlikable female characters on the screen. She refutes the premise that woman characters must be likable to be relatable. She educates the reader about the early days of Hollywood when the unlikeable woman character was not "straight-jacketed" by the system of studios, critics, producers, and audiences.
In an interview with rogerebert.com, Bogutskaya references the pre-Code era of Hollywood and how she wanted to draw attention to films like Female with Ruth Chatterton or Mae West’s I’m No Angel. “Sometimes we have this erroneous notion that everything was much worse in the past, and silent Hollywood and old Hollywood female characters were very strict, very conservative, they didn’t have agency, they didn’t have any power. And that’s not true.”
Bogutskaya asks us to consider Shiv Roy of Succession “it’s a portrait of corporate ambition, right? Of monetary ambition, of climbing the social and economic ladder. But it seems almost more provocative now that it’s a woman that prioritizes money and financial success over relationships.”
Bogutskaya points out the leads of the award winning films: TAR and Everything, Everywhere All at Once were originally written for male leads. Yet, these films won big with women leads. Why?
“The implication is that they’re [the leads] written as a character with agency, with thoughts, with ambitions, with a personality that wasn’t beholden to certain invisible rules. And once they are gender-flipped, Michelle Yeoh’s character, Cate Blanchett’s character, as well as Ripley [Sigourney Weaver, Alien] are some of the most incredibly nuanced, beautifully portrayed, thorny characters of the last year in movies. And they were originally written for men. What does that tell us? It’s both very silly and very revealing.”(rogerebert.com)
Are these Woman Characters of the Screen Morally Gray or Antiheroes? Quite possibly Both.
Morally Gray Fictional Character: a character who follows their moral code, which is frequently at odds with and unlike the presumed or expected moral code accepted by a large portion of society. They buck the desired moral code of the status quo. They follow their moral compass.
Antihero: the character who embraces unorthodox methods (often illegal or immoral) to achieve a worthy goal: a greater good. Historically male and morally ambiguous.
The Morally Gray Character and the Antihero can be, at times, two sides of the same coin. Both can be unlikable or tolerable. However, the Morally Gray tends to be less violent and may also be unapologetically indifferent; the choice of being unapologetically indifferent versus an altruistic or punitive option causes the reader/viewer more of a dilemma.
Sarah Hagelin and Gillian Silverman contend in their book:
“Today’s female antihero is fundamentally different from the television leads that preceded her, characterized not by pluck but by punch and pathos….Her signature move in [both drama and comedy] is a wholesale rejection of virtue and social responsibility…to refuse the part of role model and transmitter of values...”(location 34 kindle version)
Further Hagelin and Silverman state:
“The new female antihero questions not only the truth of the popular story of female empowerment but also its desirability.” Their book “proposes that the new female antihero—antisocial, nonconformist, self-involved—represents an alternative for viewers. […] These protagonists, we argue, push back against the myth of modern day superwoman […] and in so doing expand the possibilities for females in contemporary America.” (Location 112 kindle version)
They argue :
“the female heroic is an oxymoron, we have no way of understanding these figures except in terms of the transgressive category of the antihero.” In short, women characters are not meant to heroic and when they display traits ie: masculine strength (think Sydney Bristow in Alias or Buffy in Buffy the Vampire Slayer) they are thought of as antiheroes. Carrie Bradshaw, Betty Draper, Carmela Soprano and Skyler White are also cited as antiheroes because if “ the female protagonist’s badass and indolent ways undermine conceptions of femininity, the same behavior by men reaffirms rather than challenges their masculinity.”
Thus Don Draper (alcoholic, womanizer, shady, and absent dad figure) is not recognized as antiheroic and in fact he’s been defended as such because he’s “neither a murderer or psychopath” as critic Vikram Murthi wrote in his article “Don Draper Is No Antihero.” But then by this definition, Betty Draper is also not an antihero even though she is viewed as one because she is an indifferent mother who has the kids watch television rather than engage them.(kindle, loc. 195)
The Morally Gray found in Books
Can you find morally gray women characters in literary classics? Mainstream fiction? Of course, you can, in fact, over and over if you search for "morally gray women characters," you will get: Madame Bovary (Flaubert), Emma (Austen), Catherine (Bronte), and Daisy (Fitzgerald), Sula (Morrison), Scarlett O'Hara ( (Mitchell) as examples. Mainstream fiction lists include Amy Dunne (Flynn) and Lisabeth Salander (Larsson), cited as the go-to examples of morally gray. For Dystopian: Katniss Everdeen (Collins) is a fan favorite.
But there are other morally gray woman characters and frequently these characters leave readers with mixed feelings.
For example, some readers of Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus have complained about the MC Elizabeth Zott because she is indifferent to what is being said about her (the disparaging nickname of Lizzie on her lab coat, the question of her love for Calvin, her stance against marriage, even her approach to motherhood). Her lack of caring about values many readers care about left some of those readers infuriated, annoyed, and frustrated; other readers found her indifference refreshing and in keeping with Elizabeth's moral code. Elizabeth knows who she is and the rest: the defining values forced on her and her expected compliance are not her concern because they are not of her.
Another example of a morally gray woman character is Dava Shastri in Dava Shastri's Last Day by Kirthana Ramisetti. The novel takes place in 2044 and focuses on the false reporting of Dava's death. Dava has orchestrated this premature reporting. She intends to die, but only after she has read her obituaries. She wants to bask in the afterglow of what she perceives as a well-lived life. This, of course, is a display of incredible hubris on her part. Things go awry, and there is a reckoning with past events, decisions, and truths are revealed. Dava Shastri's choice to delay her death is rife with moral ambiguity, and the realities exposed by her death underscore her ambiguity. BUT in Dava's world, guided by her morals, this decision is very much in keeping.
Elizabeth Zott and Dava Shastri may be morally gray; they may frustrate, annoy, or be unlikable to some, but they are true to their essences. Then there are those woman characters who don't seem to want anything. Consider Franny from Ann Patchett's Commonwealth or Lara from Patchett's Tom Lake, who seem to be indifferent woman characters as life seems to happen without them railing against it. However, Franny and Lara retain their core selves.; maybe not in a way that is palatable but in a way that is relatable and true. These characters are true to themselves, and we are richer because of their existence as they embrace authentically their experience and reality.
To the Work In Progress
I have since recrafted, resculpted, and made an MC that I believe leaves my long-ago Workshop submission in the dust; further, this MC's potential for growth is more promised or hinted at than it was initially, thus giving the reader a reason to turn the pages. She may be ambiguous, and her want may not be earthshaking or what every woman/person may aspire to, but brace yourself; my MC is flawed and genuine to herself. Her tagline is: Authentic, not perfect (and yes, there's a t-shirt with this statement).
For additional reading about antiheroic, imperfect, complicated women characters check out these:
Sarina Green of Two AM at the Cat’s Pajamas when she takes the picture of the bachelors at a bachelor party or even the Unamed protagonist of Bertino’s Parakeet who has the audacity not to be happy on her wedding day.
Bella Ross in The Christmas Wager by Holly Cassidy (a Hallmarkesque Christmas romance novel); Bella is all abut career advancement and plays dirty in the end but she does so by adopting a Robin Hood validation.
Then there’s Joyce Meadowcroft of Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club mysteries—always observant, a bit man-crazy, a ‘good egg’ who often sits back and let’s others have the spotlight giving them their due until their due threatens the case. One could say she doesn’t trust her contemporaries and steals the limelight for herself; when in reality she’s simply being Joyce and filling a niche on the team.
On the screen: Dr. Mindy Lahiri of the Mindy Project. She’s an awesome doctor, cares about her patients, can be irreverent, obsessed with pop culture, makes questionable trope references, and believes in true love. For more on Dr. Mindy see the links below.
How Mindy Kaling’s The Mindy Project Ushered In a New Era of Anti-Heroines
16 Best Movies & TV Shows About Imperfect, Complicated Women
