The Death of the Heroine

Abstract

This article is about heroines. It is concerned with the virtues of goodness, honesty, integrity and morality: nowadays reduced to values which are much praised in rhetoric but perhaps less observable in everyday life. Understood in this way, virtue has come to be regarded as a Victorian legacy. In The De-moralisation of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values (1996), the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb characterizes the Victorians as moralists who believed in virtues as qualities of character and morality that they regarded as necessary in a civilized society. She takes the view that virtures have been replaced by values that are relative and subjective. Any and all positions, desires and demands then become personal preferences that can be and are accommodated and met. The stories of the heroines of fifty years ago and more are stories of heroic virtue: of opposition. We are deceived when we are told they are stories of female oppression. Where, at this distance in time from these stories, we feel uncomfortable is with our own persuasive narratives of liberation and heterogeneity.