Photo: Maisie Scott @ The Mancunion

By Jess Wilkinson (bookstagram: @robinreadss)

Eliza Clark’s startling debut novel, Boy Parts, has presented a new, sparkling entry into the Unlikable Female Character sphere in the form of her protagonist, Irina Sturges. The sudden upsurge in Boy Parts’ popularity, alongside the acclaim of books like My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh, Animal by Lisa Taddeo and I’m A Fan by Sheena Patel, clearly demonstrates what readers are hungry for.

Irina is a terrible person. This is not a Good For Her essay; you should not be rooting for her. She is manipulative, selfish, a sadist, borderline sexual deviant and an all-out murderer. But she is the main character. The narrative is told through her voice. The narrator is usually the one in the right, right? Thus, the reader may catch themselves about to agree with her awful inner monologue and become terribly confused. Did I really just understand where she’s coming from? She’s literally talking about abusing this poor supermarket employee.

Herein lies my point. Reading about Irina’s exploits should make you want to crawl out of your skin, not root for her purely because she is the narrator. The same can be said about Bret Easton Ellis’ oft misinterpreted American Psycho. But the focus today is on the unlikeable women.

So why is this phenomenon happening now? Why is the world so starved for messy, toxic, unlikeable women in their novels? There has long been a lack of balance between male and female characters in the mainstream media and literary canon. Name any ‘must watch’ film or ‘must read’ book and it is most likely that the main character of said book or film will be a man.

The Hunger Games was a true cultural reset, not only because of its highly original plot but its outstanding female protagonist, Katniss Everdeen. After its success, Strong Female Characters were everywhere, almost all featuring carbon copies of Katniss. The Divergent book and film series, the Red Queen book series, The 100 TV series, and hundreds more. With cash grab after cash grab, film studios and publishing houses grappling to get in on the Strong Female Character craze, The Strong Female Character became oversaturated.

There was too much demand and not enough time. Thus, with every Katniss wannabe character, creators seemed to care less and less about creating well-rounded characters, and just making a blank-slate tough lady who could handle a weapon but had no personality. Katniss’ appeal lay in her fighting abilities, but also in her fierce care for her family, in her smarts. The generic Strong Female Character can fight, she never cries, and she never wears pink. YAWN. It became boring.

Now, what we want is the raw reality of what women can be. Gone is the demand for the Katniss Everdeens; we are in the era of the Irina Sturgeses. The messy girls. The toxic women. Women who are blunt, stubborn, morally grey, often selfish and a little bit grotesque. I use the word grotesque with its more commonly used definition of ‘strange and unpleasant’, but also with the definition meaning ‘comically or repulsively ugly or distorted’. Distortion is the key word here: the Unlikeable Female Character is a warped view of the designated image of a woman.

Although the spectrum of female characters is much wider than it used to be, expanding beyond flaccid love interests, many female characters are still chained to the image of the Traditional Woman. Petite, polite, with less dialogue than their male counterparts. And unfortunately, many female character’s purpose is fulfilled once they get together with the male love interest. Their development is ditched, leaving them with such little depth it is often hard to witness.

The grotesqueness of the Unlikeable Female Character lies in their distortion of the Traditional Female Character, and by extension, the Traditional Woman. These protagonists are often physically gross; the unnamed narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation lives in a den of rotting food and unchanged sheets, only showering when absolutely necessary. They experience emotional extremes, ranging from cold and shut off to raging and wild.

Lucy from The Pisces feels her emotions are entirely out of her control: ‘My moods were their own entities… That was what made me scared of feelings.’ They are violent when it is called for; when their frustration becomes unbearable. Animal by Lisa Taddeo focuses on this idea of what happens when the everyday transgressions of men become too much. Finally, these characters are selfish. In The Vegetarian, Yeong-hye has a sudden realisation and abandons everything in her life that does not serve her new purpose: ‘The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure.’

Irina from Boy Parts has all of the hallmarks of the Unlikeable Female Character. Physically disgusting underneath her carefully maintained appearance, often emotionally cold but prone to outbursts of rage, violent through her art, her treatment of Eddie from Tesco (side note: I have never felt so awful for a side character in my life), full-on murdering of people, and being entirely self-serving.

Her inner monologue is jarring in its unfiltered aggression: ‘Do I have to smash a glass over the head of every single man I come into contact with, just so I leave a fucking mark?’ Her philosophy is nihilistic: ‘The things you do, the things you are; it’s all nothing. Would anyone miss you, if you went away? Would anyone look for you? Would anyone listen, or even care, if I hurt you? […] And if it’s a no to any of these, did you even exist in the first place?’ She is truly evil. When reading, I couldn’t help once again thinking of American Psycho: a protagonist that repulses the reader. Seeing as this book is set in Newcastle, perhaps Boy Parts could be nicknamed Northern Psycho.

All in all, we are entering a new era of female literary characters. The Irinas, and all of the other unconventional women mentioned in this piece, are showing readers a new side to female protagonists. Ones you don’t root for or wish to emulate. Rather, the Unlikeable Female Character shows us what women could be if we let go of all inhibition, and just how terrifying that would be.