The Wonderfully Eccentric Characters of Charles Dickens

Don’t know about you, but I’ve been enjoying Little Dorrit on PBS the last few weeks.

Reminded me of some lines from G.K. Chesterton (Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 1874–1936, author of the Father Brown mysteries, The Man Who Was Thursday, Orthodoxy, and The Everlasting Man, which had a big influence on C.S. Lewis, among others). Among Chesterton’s many works:  Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906).

Here are a few bits by Chesterton (from Chapter 10) on the eccentric, outlandish, quirky characters of Dickens:

The humble characters of Dickens do not amuse each other with epigrams; they amuse each other with themselves. The present that each man brings in hand is his own incredible personality. In the most sacred sense, and in the most literal sense of the phrase, he “gives himself away.”

. . . Now, the man who gives himself away does the last act of generosity; he is like a martyr, a lover, or a monk. But he is also almost certainly what we commonly call a fool.

The key of the great characters of Dickens is that they are all great fools.
. . .
It is impossible to do justice to these figures because the essential of them is their multiplicity. The whole point of Dickens is that he not only made them, but made them by myriads; that he stamped his foot, and armies came out of the earth.
. . .
It may be noticed that the great artists always choose great fools rather than great intellectuals to embody humanity. Hamlet does express the æsthetic dreams and the bewilderments of the intellect; but Bottom the Weaver expresses them much better.
. . .
There is an apostolic injunction to suffer fools gladly. We always lay the stress on the word “suffer,” and interpret the passage as one urging resignation. It might be better, perhaps, to lay the stress upon the word “gladly,” and make our familiarity with fools a delight, and almost a dissipation.

[Found the entire text of Chesterton's Charles Dickens: A Critical Study on a few web pages created by Mitsuharu Matsuoka, Nagoya University, Japan.]

As you may know, I’m a proponent of the quirky character (here’s a recent article, “In Praise of Eccentricity,” from my newsletter).

Indeed, let’s “make our familiarity with fools a delight”! And who better to learn from than the great Mr. Dickens?

Women’s Soccer and Stereotypes

Hats off to the U.S. women’s soccer team that just pulled off an amazing 1-0 victory over Brazil to win gold in the Olympics!

(And in the heart-stopping extra 30 minutes of overtime, no less.)

Somehow, the Americans’ gutsy, swarming defense managed to thwart the powerful Brazilians, led by Marta whose control of the ball was very scary to watch if you were rooting for the U.S. I was afraid the Americans would get worn out chasing Marta and others whose seemed to be able to thread in and out of traffic with impunity.

Brazil was on attack and kept the ball in the U.S. half of the field most of the game. It reminded me (though not quite as bad) as a match I watched a few years ago: Brazil v. Iceland. Poor Icelanders. The ball was in the Icelandic half maybe 89 of the 90 minutes. Seriously, they could have sold seats for a few hundred people to sit in folding chairs on the Brazilian half of the field and would not have interfered with the game.

Today, the U.S. spent most of the game chasing golden-jerseyed first-name-only Brazilians like Marta, Renata, and Erika, and got only two or three real shots of their own, but managed to drill one past Barbara, the diving, outstretched Brazilian goalie, to score the only goal. Wow!

For writers . . . (oh, right, the focus of this blog) . . . the Olympic final I was watching (in Spanish on Telemundo) was called Final Futbol Femenino.

Feminine football?

In the English language, while women’s refers to the gender, feminine traditionally refers to a special attitude (often assumed inescapable), an evolved, deep-seated pattern of acting differently from men.

How many of us unconsciously always adopt that assumption when creating female characters? Do we expect our best women characters to act differently . . . more emotional, romantic, weaker, indirect, indecisive? And if they act otherwise, are they assumed to be not-so-positive characters? Indeed, that’s often the case . . . in novels.

But what if the real world is changing? And what if we allowed women in novels to be like women in soccer: strong, confident, focused, playing by the same rules as the men?

What if their behavior was just situational, that they employed strategies of “feminine wiles” only when they wanted to (not because it was somehow bred in the bone)?

Of course, age, culture, upbringing, and past experiences play a role. And we’ll want to create strong and successful women characters, yet also others that try and fail, and others more weak and flawed.

But in the end, if you want to craft some powerful women characters, I’d suggest you get out and watch a women’s soccer match. Then go write . . . with a broader vision of what it means to be feminine.