The trouble with good girls

Supporting-character energy

Nobody wants to be called a ‘good girl’; it is, after all, something you say to dogs. It implies that you are ‘sufficient’, or ‘OK’, or ‘fine’; you are working as advertised. The acknowledged traits of a good girl are those that benefit the people with whom she interacts: reliability, an even temper, an awareness of the rules. Her worst traits, meanwhile — a certain flaccidity, the avoidance of conflict — leave no trace. Her social impact is null; she is a neutral value, an empty cell.

This absence of narrative excitement sees good girls relegated to non-speaking parts. This is notably true in popular culture: there’s not a lot of quiet hair-plaiting going on between the female characters in Sherwood, Slow Horses, Killing Eve, EastEnders or Happy Valley, which Google insists are the UK’s biggest current TV shows. But it’s also true in life. A good girl simply cannot be the main character; it flies in the face of everything we understand about her. This presents the good girls among us with something of an existential problem, because — despite everything — we have the persistent sensation of being the main characters in our own lives. We continue to exist even when other people leave the room; but you try telling them that.

Throughout my childhood, my parents expended a great deal of effort on making me a good girl. And, like a well-trained dog, I was good. I found out that this was a problem just before my fourteenth birthday, after I had gone with my brother to Live Aid at Wembley Stadium. Live Aid – as you might recall – was a very big deal, and once my brother and I had set off to Wembley my parents decided to record the TV coverage for posterity. But, for some reason, instead of hitting ‘record’ on the VHS they chose to make an audio recording using my brother’s ghetto blaster, which they placed on the floor in front of the telly. As a result of this insane proceeding, they recorded – as well as the sound of the TV – their own conversations. Then, presumably unaware of the full horror of what they’d done, they proudly presented us with the tapes the next day. 

This is how I found out just how much my brother dominated my parents’ private conversations. Over the distant burbling of Status Quo and the Style Council they talked about how little revision he had done for his O Levels, how much brandy he had swiped from the booze cupboard the night before, and how much trouble he had been getting into at school. They then moved on to a longer discussion covering various amusing and astonishing things he had said and done over the previous fifteen years. Finally, after a couple of hours, my father – who worked in TV and so might have been a bit more aware of the running tape – said ‘And then there’s Rowan.’ 

‘Yes’ my mother confirmed, accurately.

There was a pause, and then my mother said: 

‘Rowan is a good girl.’

An even longer pause.

‘A very… very… good… girl.’

I heard this and thought, ‘Well, that’s not great. But they’re bound to say something else.’ Which was true, in a way, because — after a moment or two — they started discussing Bono’s trousers.

Luckily I’d read The Female Eunuch, and had been electrified by Greer’s precise delineation of the endless irrationality facing women and girls, the thirteen impossible things we are required to do before breakfast. Reading Greer was like putting on a suit of tungsten armour with an integrated bullshit detector. It helped me to realise I was facing a set of madly contradictory demands, viz: 

• A girl must have a fierce natural intellect, but she mustn’t expend visible effort on her school work. 

• She must be attractive, but – and this is important – only because she isn’t trying to be. 

• She must be verbally fluent without being pert. 

• She must stand up for herself without losing her shit and crying everywhere. 

• She must achieve universal admiration while not giving a fig for other people’s opinions.

• That is, she must become admired (which is important) because she does not care about being admired (which is stupid and irrelevant).

• She must drink alcohol without being sloppy, experiment with sex without being trapped into teenage pregnancy, and smoke behind the bike sheds without becoming addicted to nicotine. 

If she can do all of this, she attains Firecracker Girl status and will become the main character. 

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My mother would have been horrified if I had been an ill-disciplined slut, a shrieker, a swearer or a drop-out; but she longed for a Firecracker. She wanted the kind of girl who was capable of rebellion, temper and vulgarity, who had worked out how to control them, and who could intentionally deploy them in appropriate moments to maximum Firecracker effect. Unfortunately for her, I had no such capacity or inclination. I stuck to the rules because I like order; I did my homework because I like to please; I stayed out of trouble because I hate being shouted at. My mother had not made me into a good girl. I had been one all along. 

Kids intuit this stuff quite early on. In Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte identifies the Firecracker type and explicitly juxtaposes it with the Good Girl. The solemn, anxious Jane laments that she is not ‘a sanguine, brilliant, careless, unexacting, handsome, romping child’, whose presence would have been ‘endured more complacently’ by her guardians. 

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with Firecracker Girls themselves, and the Firecracker archetype is not, in itself, any more problematic than any other social role. Some of my best friends, literally, are Firecrackers; in fact, most of my best friends are Firecrackers. Some women are just natural at it. Greer was one herself: talented and hard-working enough to climb the ramparts, sassy enough to jump over the razor wire and punch the guards in the mouth, pro-social enough to be carried shoulder-high into the elite. 

But we’re all just trying to navigate a set of dumb societal incentives (this goes for boys too), and where one archetype is seen as more desirable than the others people will force themselves into it. I had a friend at university who was a Firecracker, and one night – while extremely drunk – she confided that to her, it did not come naturally; she had worked out what the rules were and bent herself around them. She said: it’s like that scene in Dangerous Liaisons where Mme Merteuil slides the tines of her fork into the flesh of her palm to remind herself to sparkle at a boring dinner party. She said it was exhausting, to constantly present exactly the right qualities – intellect, allure, mischief, self-sufficiency, sexual confidence and danger – in exactly the right amounts. It required a lot of vigilance. This didn’t sound very liberating. Still, she was a lot of fun to be around.

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Jo in Little Women, Lizzie in Pride and Prejudice and Cathy in Wuthering Heights were all Firecrackers in societies that believed women to be inherently stupid and passive. In this context they offered a glimpse of liberation. Austen, though, did not believe that one necessarily had to be a Firecracker in order to be fully human; she believed that women could express the full grace of their humanity in a variety of ways. We know this because alongside the Bennet girls in Pride and Prejudice we find Charlotte Lucas. 

The Lucases, as Mrs Bennet points out, are ‘a very good sort of girls’. Charlotte is ‘amiable’ and ‘sensible’ and ‘steady’ and ‘prudent’. She also has the key Austen quality of unblinking perception; she knows that she is not a Firecracker, and has no hope of enchanting the occupant of Netherfield or the heir to Pemberley. She is unremarkable — except that she is remarkable enough to see exactly how she is trapped, and cunning enough to work out what she can do about it. When Lizzie rejects the horrifying Mr Collins, Charlotte immediately (and I mean, within minutes) devises a plan to grab him. 

‘Marriage had always been her object; it was the only provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and… must be their pleasantest preservative from want. This preservative she had now obtained; and at the age of twenty-seven, without having ever been handsome.’

This isn’t to say that good girls have to pair up with miserable bores; that would be bleak. Austen uses Charlotte to bring Lizzie to the realisation that reasonable people can differ in their fundamental inclinations. The key point — as Lizzie comes to recognise — is that Charlotte’s solution is acceptable to Charlotte. It is not necessary for other people to be delighted by her choice, because Charlotte is her own main character, and it is her own perception that counts. By these means, Austen turns Charlotte into the most enigmatic person in the entire book. 

Charlotte exercises agency, first in marrying Mr Collins and then in ensuring that he is out of the house as frequently as possible. (Jane simply flops about like a landed fish until Mr Bingley can be persuaded to fall on top of her.) Good girls, we learn, can move mountains; they just do it quietly, and without upsetting anyone. This theme of agency runs more strongly throughout Jane Eyre. The orphaned, bullied Jane is good because she – quite literally – cannot afford to be otherwise: ‘I dared commit no fault; I strove to fulfil every duty.’ (She is also, of course, ‘good’ in the sense of being deeply religious.) But she is emphatically determined to exercise agency. Because she is deferential and amenable, a succession of people (including Mr Rochester) expect her to fall in with their hallucinogenic schemes. Her surprising refusal to be pushed around, and her insistence on the validity of her own inclinations, provide the narrative motor. (Incidentally: Mr Rochester is nowhere near the brooding, taciturn Darcy type you think you remember. He — like Jane Eyre itself — doesn’t half go on.) 

‘I have served here eight years; now all I want is to serve elsewhere. Can I not get so much of my own will? … the end is not so difficult, if I only had a brain active enough to ferret out the means of attaining it.’

Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca unambiguously centres a Good Girl. Like Charlotte Lucas, the second Mrs de Winter is steady, cautious, unimaginative and polite. But once she’s worked out the kind of posh-dead-woman-mad-housekeeper-isolated-house-dangerous-husband pickle she’s in – which is a very specific kind of pickle, and really quite challenging – she puts her head down and quietly makes some extraordinary decisions. (The first Mrs de Winter had been, of course, a Firecracker.) 

‘I am very different from that self who drove to Manderley for the first time, hopeful and eager, handicapped by a rather desperate gaucherie and filled with an intense desire to please.’

There aren’t many of these women in popular culture, and I wish there were more. There’s an ambiguity to them; they are found to be unreadable, usually because people have assumed there is nothing to read. Even more than Charlotte Lucas, the second Mrs de Winter* is such an unusual character, so well-suited to the queasy uncertainty of the novel, that we cannot collectively get her out of our heads. The Firecracker, meanwhile — the archetype, rather than the individual women — has become predictable simply because we see so much of her. She is the heroine of every novel, TV programme and movie, and the template for a thousand books for ‘rebel’ girls, who — we are insistently told — are the only kind who ever ‘make history’. 

And yet we persist, we Good Girls: sticking to the rules because we hate drama, refraining from repartee because it takes us 24 hours to think of a response, stubbornly remaining our own main characters. Nobody particularly wants to be called a ‘good girl’; it is, after all, what you say to dogs. But if you reframe it as being an enigmatic subterranean super-agent, it doesn’t seem so bad.

*This originally read ‘Rebecca de Winter’, which somewhat undermined my entire argument. Thank you to Lou in the comments for tactfully pointing this out.

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For more of Germaine Greer’s opinions on good girls, here’s Rowan re-reading ‘The Female Eunuch’