Hothouse

The female has always been a source of curiosity — a subject to study, speculate about and dismiss as an emotional liability. She is sensitive and vulnerable — deeply moved by the profundities of the world, or she is passionate and defensive — deeply inspired to challenge the injustices of the world, especially those committed against her. It is not a new concept that crimes against women are often closed without any real closure or justice, and when the system fails them, sometimes their only option is to take action themselves. In Mindy McGinnis’s novel, Female of the Species, small town high school senior, Alex Craft, is caught in the wake of her older sister’s brutal rape and murder, forwhich the offender is acquitted. McGinnis navigates the waters of how a flawed justice system has forced Alex to seek justice through her own methods, thus being labeled as vengeance, and creating this harmful dichotomy of the idealized “vigilante feminist” vs the condemnable “monstrous woman” that keeps women confined to a new but equally problematic space in literature.

Humans have developed a culture that loves to “other” woman; if she does not fit a mold previously defined or authorized by man in some capacity, there is something wrong with her— she is crazy —especially if she begins to reflect qualities that are used to define and uphold traditional masculinity, like aggression. As Paula Gilbert, professor of women’s and gender studies at George Mason University, puts it, “[t]he gender called man…often needs to reject the gender called woman…by distinguishing itself as strong, powerful, controlling, and often aggressive and violent” (1274). Men perpetuate this rejection of women through the creation of stereotypes for different patterns of behavior women can exhibit that exist outside of men’s comfort zones; this keeps the female within a definable space in order to continuously reinforce the male’s definable space as dominant to hers. 

In the same spirit of rejection, the justice system—which is deeply intertwined with the patriarchy—often suppresses or dismisses crimes against women, especially sex-related crimes, because female rejection of the male does not sustain the masculine paradigm. Women who report rapes, specifically, are usually met with doubt (the officials file it as a false complaint), concealment (they will file it as a non-criminal code where it will not be investigated), or pressure to withdraw the complaint altogether (Anderson 909). A process commonly referred to as the “second rape” is the best case scenario for a woman choosing to press charges against her attacker; her case gets its day in court, but she is then subjected to intense cross examination about her personal/sexual history in order to undermine her integrity. For these reasons, women become tired, frustrated, or distrusting of the system that is designed to maintain the patriarchy and must resort to their own pursuit of justice.

In McGinnis’s Female of the Species, McGinnis attempts to break free from the woman’s “obligation” to be non-aggressive by introducing a volatile, female protagonist. Alex Craft is an adolescent female that challenges the forces (men) threatening her or those close to her with physically violent responses. Part of this aggression stems from watching the justice system fail to rectify her sister’s rape/murder, but Alex also just possesses “this unwieldy wrath that burns through [her] brain, turning reason into ash” that she inherited from her father (McGinnis 115). Alex boldly takes on this traditionally masculine quality a natural tendency to challenge power dynamics in her life, though she differs in that she only confronts unjust authorities rather than any force that doesn’t enable her ego, as men do.

However, simply introducing this violent female character does not shatter glass ceilings. Though Alex outwardly embodies a historically repressed female impulse, reader perceptions of her volatility problematically confine women to new and disempowering stereotypes. As McGinnis acknowledges herself, she largely covers the “fantasy of violence” in Female of the Species and how Alex “represent[s] wish-fulfillment” to her female readership (Bilyeau). She wants Alex to be an outlet for female readers who feel disempowered in their everyday lives, but at the same time, McGinnis fails to clarify if or to what extent Alex is intended to inspire female readers to take action against patriarchal oppression in the ways she does. 

McGinnis doesn’t seem to condone violence as a realistic means of justice, but Alex’s strong will and bold stand taken against oppressive patriarchal behaviors are idealized as heroic following her death at the end of the novel. Alex’s best friend, Claire (Peekay), reflects on how “Alex is gone but she’s very much still [there]…in Sara’s willingness to skip class and erase [male genitalia graffiti] with [her],” and in open, retaliatory gestures taken against outright misogynistic behavior (McGinnis 340). There is this confusing double standard occurring that says Alex’s attitude toward misogyny is heroic, and this attitude is even romanticized as “woke” and empowering after her death, but at the same time this implies that the horrific narrative of violence she perpetuated, which resulted in multiple deaths and a permanent physical deformity for one assailant is also heroic and “woke,” which is very clearly an ethical issue concerning impressionable and naïve readership. 

The novel complicates the perception of violence in the real world, as girls/women are discouraged from challenging or even responding to oppressive forces, especially men. This is typically accomplished through “direct punishment, withdrawal of affection, or simply cognitive training that ‘that isn’t the way girls act,’” and thus, the patriarchy sustains its disempowerment of females by reducing them to repressing their anger and physical impulses rather than expressing them (Richardson 239). 

The festering of those repressed emotions has led to the creation of a new role in literature that offers female readership an agent that acts on their behalf within a story, a persona coined by Dr. Laura D’Amore as the “vigilante feminist.” The vigilante feminist is a young, female character that “exist[s] in [a] violent space” and “take[s] on the role of [protector] against that violence…outside the parameters of law and society” (D’Amore 4). She is an idealized heroine who redeems the female through “corrective action…but not for the sake of dominating or taking power” (D’Amore 4). She is someone the female reader can romanticize and desire to be like, but she still exists in this separate and fantastical realm that cannot occur in the real world.

Early on in the novel, McGinnis isolates a revealing line about Alex’s intent to avenge her sister’s death. Alex says she’s “not a court, and [she doesn’t] need proof,” referring to the offender’s acquittal based on the destruction of evidence (McGinnis 2). Here McGinnis vocalizes Alex’s operation outside of the bounds of law, a deviant yet empowering statement that women can exact justice for themselves, and implying, it in fact, would be a much more convenient way of doing so in that the process is more streamlined than the judiciary system.

However, while Alex does take measures outside the bounds of the law to defend the dignity of women in her life who have been violated by men, she is not intended to function as a vigilante feminist within Female of the Species. McGinnis implies her violent nature is not intended to be romanticized, which is problematic because young, vulnerable female readers facing disempowerment or hopelessness in their own lives are searching for someone to relate with, and they can easily identify with or idealize Alex with each “successful” violent encounter she has. This is also problematic because McGinnis contradicts herself, wanting Alex to be a standalone example of how violence can destroy one’s life, but at the same time, she memorializes Alex’s life and contributions to female empowerment within the novel through the use of violence. The vigilante feminist can problematically become an idol, or even worse, a martyr for young women, as Alex seems to become at the end of Female of the Species. 

McGinnis intended to communicate a message dissuading women—and more generally men—from becoming involved with violence. She revealed in an interview that Alex serves as an example of “how violence damages the perpetrator as well as the victim,” but this seems to be undermined by the romanticizing of Alex’s legacy at the end of the novel and the success of her violence in the “takedown of rape culture in their society” (Bilyeau, Sio). If she is leaving a legacy of challenging the patriarchy, her main method of doing this was through violent confrontation, which then tells the reader that violence is acceptable in this context, especially if they relate to her as an agent of liberation and empowerment. 

For those who cannot or choose not to identify with Alex as their heroine because of her blatantly criminal and immoral actions, she becomes a condemnable monster. Many critics/scholars, including McGinnis herself, label Alex as “a stone-cold killer” right up there with infamously sadistic Lizzie Borden, who hit her stepmother over the head around seventeen times with a hatchet (Reagan). Though in completely different realms as far as motive and possibly psychopathy, it is an understandable viewpoint to take that Alex is a deplorable human because anyone willing to take someone’s life has to be mentally ill in some capacity. In other words, murder is murder. 

In respect to these antithetical roles that Alex takes on, the novel fails to accomplish anything new or progressive on the feminist front. McGinnis gives us a female with a unique temperament and a narrative that one-dimensionally deals with the issue of violence in young adulthood. She sets up the novel to literally focus on the “female of the species” as a force to be reckoned with, then proceeds to isolate solely Alex as an individual force to be reckoned with. Whether the reader chooses to receive her actions as heroic or monstrous, McGinnis has developed a new space for the female to be alienated in as one of two absolute extremes (heroine or monster), allowing her to step outside of her historically gentle disposition and ironically disempowering her in her own fight against alienation. 

Within the YA genre, a field that probes the turbulence of the adolescent experience, socially unacceptable desires/impulses, such as this idea of female aggression, are uncovered and amplified. This allows readers an outlet to personally engage with that facilitates the vicarious release of feelings like insecurity or isolation. Karen Coats, a prominent scholar in the children’s and YA literature sector, reports that when we fail to see our “honest efforts bring us to the place in the world we wish for,” our response is to create these “imagin[ed] aggressive scenarios that lead to the vicarious release of real tension” (326). These scenarios are constructed from personal experiences with oppression and reflect institutionalized ideologies that have been impressed on the affected individual for so long that the individual begins to self-oppress and perpetuate their own marginalization, often subconsciously. 

I argue that McGinnis does just this in Female of the Species. Although she intends for Alex to be nothing more than a vicarious, emotional thrill ride for the reader, Alex is much more than this: her defiance against the patriarchy’s oppression can either be digested as heroic or condemnable, and neither are a progressive nor healthy outlook for females to have walking away from this novel. McGinnis also creates these depictions of dichotomies within the story that are reflective of stereotypical gender roles/behavior, disempowering Alex in her womanhood, despite the narrative of empowering women against the patriarchy in the dismantling of rape culture in their school environment. 

While Alex’s character reflects this stereotypical idea of the irrational and emotionally unchecked female, her father, the source of her same anger issues, is the wise and self-aware male that removes himself from the space that would cause him to act explosively on those impulses. Circling back to McGinnis’s introduction of Alex’s anger issues as a genetic inheritance from her father, her father is portrayed to have logically and reasonably removed himself from the family unit in order to prevent him “kill[ing their] mother, eventually” which Alex concurs is a respectable excuse for abandoning them (McGinnis 115). The fact of the matter is, “for women[,] aggression is the failure of self-control, while for men it is the imposing of control over others” (Campbell 1). Thus, it is Alex’s rage that turns “reason into ash” but the novel excuses her father’s rage even though it constitutes domestic abuse (McGinnis 115). 

McGinnis appears to have entered into authorship of this novel with the predetermined notion that Alex was going to be an angry and vengeful murderess; she details that she took inspiration from a true crime show episode that occurred in a small town where everyone knew the murderer, but there was a lack of physical evidence, so she thought it would be interesting to see someone “just go there and dispense justice themselves” (Bilyeau). The fact that she settled on an adolescent female as the justice-seeker is reflective of McGinnis’s own biases toward young women, exploiting the stereotype that teenage girls experience more potent and irregular emotions (mood swings) like Alex’s fits of rage that consume her and negate any logical processing. 

As far as the implication of this in the sense of justice, McGinnis also addresses that justice “becomes vengeance when the person executing justice is personally and emotionally involved,” such as Alex (Bilyeau). Though if a woman cannot rely on or trust in the legal system to rectify crimes committed against her, what else can she rely on but her own self? The only entity that has never confined, subjugated, nor criticized her is herself. Even other women are oppressing their female counterparts by writing them as their own worst stereotype, due to being conditioned by patriarchal ideology for so long, as shown through McGinnis and even my own writing in this paper. 

Almost like Stockholm syndrome, women cling to men’s ideas of them because it’s comfortable and familiar as normalized by the patriarchy’s pervasion of society. As a society, we are “uncomfortable with other people,” and I would add ourselves, “until we have successfully placed them in a gender status” (Gilbert 1273). Even if that status is wildly stigmatized or oppressive, we are a culture that values our gendered labels and expectations because of the dominant/submissive framework the patriarchal model requires. When we are presented with a foreign gender concept like an aggressive female, we are quick to mock and reject this as McGinnis symbolically does by ending the novel with Alex’s very graphic death at the hands of a male who impulsively tackled her for defending her friend from an assault. He literally and figuratively disarms Alex, taking away her “voice” in a sense because she communicates through her actions. This represents the fall of the deviant narrative that a female can subvert the patriarchy and suggesting that there is no just, happy ending for women.The idea that a woman could be anything outside of what man authorizes her to be—gentle, content, and submissive—continues to be portrayed and rejected in new spaces, even perpetuated by women themselves. In Mindy McGinnis’s novel, Female of the Species, McGinnis introduces the deviant idea of the violent female embodied in protagonist, Alex Craft. Following her pursuit of justice for violated women in her life in the face of a flawed judicial system, McGinnis paints Alex to be vengeful, isolating her to become one of two roles: the empowered heroine, or the psychopathic killer. Both roles are damaging spaces that are new, yet equally confining and problematic for the YA female.