Sometimes, there can be a slightly condescending assumption that anything unlikable about a female character is a mistake, as if they're a contestant in a beauty pageant and have to seem charming and upbeat all the time.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the unfair expectations placed on female characters in storytelling, suggesting they must always be likable.
Curtis Sittenfeld's quote critiques the pervasive stereotype that female characters must adhere to a strict standard of charm and positivity, akin to contestants in a beauty pageant. This belief undermines the complexity and depth that female characters can possess, suggesting that any negative or challenging traits are errors rather than integral parts of their character development.
In practice
During a panel discussion on character development in literature, one might reference this quote to address the portrayal of women in fiction.
She was the reason I was a reader, and being a reader was what had made me most myself; it had given me the gifts of curiosity and sympathy, an awareness of the world as an odd and vibrant contradictory place, and it had me unafraid of its oddness and vibrancy and contradictions.
The big occurrences in life, the serious ones, have for me always been nearly impossible to recognize because they never feel big or serious. In the moment, you have to pee, your arm itches, or what people are saying strikes you as melodramatic or sentimental, and it's hard not to smirk. You have a sense of what this type of situation should be like - for one thing, all-consuming - and this isn't it. But then you look back, and it was that; it did happen.
Is the depressing part that he's only half right - it's not that she doesn't need rescuing but that nobody else will be able to do it? She has always somehow known that she is the one who will have to rescue herself. Or maybe what's depressing is that this knowledge seems like it should make life easier, and instead it makes it harder.
That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.
There is a tendency to presume autobiography in fiction by women or minorities. Guys named Jonathan write universal stories, while there's this sense that everyone else is just fictionalizing their own small experiences.
We tend to regard history as true and 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' as untrue. That's always puzzled me.
The shapes arranged themselves into words, and the words spelled out a delicious and wonderful phrase: Once upon a time.
After I had my son I looked everywhere for a book that might serve as some kind of mirror. I bought so many silly books. Now I see what the problem was: I wanted a book about time-about mortality. I can't think of a writer who is at once so experimentally daring and so rigorously uncompromising as Sarah Manguso. Ongoingness is an incredibly elegant, wise book, and I loved it.
I'm aware that many of my friends will be saddened and shocked, or shock-saddened, over some of the chapters in 'The Catcher In the Rye.' Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all my best friends are children. It's almost unbearable for me to realize that my book will be kept on a shelf out of their reach.
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