It’s Not Easy Being Green
This past summer, during my stint as a law firm summer associate, I finally had a chance to see “Wicked”. Throughout the course of the show, all around me, people were sighing over the fate of poor What’s-Her-Name– you know, the green one. The downtrodden one. The underdog.
I just didn’t see it.
That poor downtrodden Green Girl got all the sympathy, all the magical talent, and stole her best friend’s boyfriend, to boot. And then what does she do? She runs away, leaving Galinda– bereft of her faithless beloved, I might add– to carry the heavy burden of running the kingdom. As far as I was concerned, Galinda was the real heroine of that story.
As we all milled out, into the mugginess of a July night, I discovered that this was a minority view. The general consensus among my peers seemed to be that Galinda deserved whatever she got. After all, she was the pretty one. The popular one. Any teen movie would say the same. We all know that the pretty girls, the polished girls, are invariably evil, and deserve to be brought down. It’s a message that starts with the Ugly Duckling when we’re but wee small things at our mothers’ knees and continues on through teen prom movies and Broadway musicals. In short, to paraphrase Mary Renault, the Prom Queen must die.
I promise, this really does tie back in to romance novels.
In my third book, “The Deception of the Emerald Ring,” I wrote about the classic ugly duckling heroine, the short, plump girl whose inner worth manages to shine through her freckled exterior. She doesn’t make prom queen (or become society’s reigning belle, which would be much the same thing), but she does get the Viscount. In fact, she gets her sister’s viscount. And, of course, it’s completely fair, because her sister is beautiful and popular, and thus deserves anything she gets.
Or does she?
Right now, I’m just starting work on my fourth book. It was originally meant to be about a different character entirely, a side character from one of my earlier books (Charlotte, for those of you who have read “The Masque of the Black Tulip”). But… I couldn’t stop thinking about Society’s Reigning Beauty who loses her beau to her sister. She might be popular– but how many true friends does she have? How many female friends does she lose, because of our instinctive assumption that anyone that gorgeous must be a self-centered witch? Despite earlier resolutions not to write about heroines who launch a thousand curricles and incite duels the minute they walk into Almack’s, I decided that I had to write the story of my nineteenth century prom queen, and show the other side of the coin, the price that gets paid for seeming perfection. In the words of Yeats, “It’s certain that fine women eat/A crazy salad with their meat/ Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.”
At the same time, I have to admit that I’m a little nervous about this endeavor. My Prom Queen heroine is the antithesis of most of the standard tropes. She isn’t particularly self-sacrificing; she doesn’t love children or small animals (or vice versa); and she’s well aware of her own good looks. For the first time in her life, she’s an object of pity rather than admiration, and she doesn’t know how to cope with it.
What do you think? Can a Prom Queen make a convincing heroine? Or are we, as a culture, too attached to the trope of the underdog?
