Guest Rant #3

(posted by Marla in response to "I Am A Robot")

To answer your "I pleaserobot:"
Without putting everything that was in my head as a teen-ager on paper, I would not have survived. I have journals that begin at 12 and to read them serves as a reminder of how fragile an existence can be and how much personal growth is possible. By the way Jeff, in We The Living, she doesn't choose love, she chooses
her particular brand of being happy and taken care of. A better characterization of what choices need to be made in Communist Russia is in Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler. But women characters, and her struggles with them, is why Rand's fullest character is the architect in The Fountainhead. This is an unfortunate situation that permeates modern literature. Name a great woman author - I dare you. And the best woman characters were written by men, including Fitzgerald. His Daisy and the cast of other women who inhabit his many short stories are the best depictions of women of that time, at least the ones who would be known by a member of the upper class, educated and therefore more open minded about our capabilities. Even in The Awakening - not a Fitzgerald - the main character simply is happy to die because
the man she was forced to spend the rest of her life with didn't measure up. Real women characters, who live full and contented lives of their own, have yet to appear in respected literature. Try reading New York to Miami by Martha Gellhorn, it is the only real sense of feminity I have been able to gather in the past 100 years of short stories. Flannery O'Conner and Tennessee Williams had a grasp, but it was upon those of us who revel in being part of the "weaker sex." I have the same problem with my own fiction - 100 stories and counting and despite all that I've lived I can't create a character that is believable, with depth, who would garner the respect of the world.

Take care,
Marla
"Be practical-demand the impossible."