European Authors With Anti-Heroes

Henrik Ibsen, 1992

A controversial play because of its end. Nora Helmer is the main character, a Norwegian married woman, wife of a bank manager, and a mother of three. Her life elapses day after day without opportunities for self-fulfillment in the last decades of the 19th century. I can’t say this female character is a feminist for its time because she lives in a world full of laws made by men; so, in this sense, she is like a doll, a superficial and wasteful person, and she changes slowly from act to act; she feels empty, she contemplates killing herself and at the end of the play Nora leaves her husband and family trying to escape from a stifling male-dominated society. Although this play was not intended to be written as a feminist, it has great historical value in this field. If, after reading, you try to imagine what kind of life she could have out of the dollhouse, then you can read Elfriede Jelinek’s play Was geschah, nachdem Nora ihren Mann verlassen hatte oder Stützen der Gesellschaften (What Happened After Nora Left Her Husband or Pillars of Society) to check if in 1984 a woman with ambitions in a capitalist background has significant changes.

James Joyce, 2023

Gretta Conroy is Gabriel’s wife in the final short story The Dead by Joyce published in 1914. Although Gabriel Conroy is the main character and the most talkative in this novella, Gretta is probably well-known as the female character who finally ends a long silence. After a Christmas dinner, when they both are leaving the party, Gretta is standing at the top of the stairs and she appears lost while hearing a song. The song reminds her of a young man she was in love with. Then, she reveals her husband for the first time about Michael, he was seventeen years old; he was her first love, both were profoundly in love a long time ago; it was a genuine love and a true loss. Is it possible to continue as usual after telling this pain that comes alive again? The complexity of these emotions casts them as both as anti-heroes, and the prose of Joyce are a must-read.

Marguerite Duras, 2011

The Lover was published in 1984. It is set in French Indochina in 1929 and tells the story of a clandestine romance between an older, rich Chinese man and a fifteen-year-old girl from a French family that has family difficulties. This book is not only important for the period and the love story itself, there is something more, like the way it’s narrated in the first person by the young woman, with the pain and challenges between mothers and daughters. Also, on the opposite side, there is the father of the Chinese man and a society that would not accept a relationship between Asians and Europeans. The text as it was written seems alive, and I think that is because The Lover is an autobiographical book.