Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

Within texts about girls and women, Tolentino writes, childhood is presented as "spring-loaded with pleasure and thrills" (95). Meanwhile, teens then have a more ambiguous experience, while adulthood is presented as dark (the exception to this, the marriage plot, is almost never used anymore). Tolentino differentiates these fictional depictions of life stages from her real life, where she enjoys adulthood and doesn't want to return to childhood. However, she cannot find models in fiction for this. Tolentino recalls a time when her friend Allison wouldn't let her (as an Asian-American girl) play the Pink Rower Ranger, noting that it was the first time that she identified a difference between her friends and herself. Afterwards, Tolentino recalls feeling different in terms of identification with literary heroines, who are defined by their innocence and bravery.

In part, Tolentino writes, the appeal of children's literature lies in their language, which is both efficient and indulgent. She gives examples of this from Betsy-Tacy and Tib (1941) and Anne of Green Gables (1908) in terms of their depictions of objects and environments. She then gives an example from E. L. Konigsberg's From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1967), in which the heroine doesn't get scared during an adventure. Tolentino remarks on the resilience of these heroes. However, she notes, the novels are episodic, so the heroines can pass through uncomfortable emotions easily while their characters stay static. On the other hand, in adult literature, the presence of girls tends to relate to trauma. Tolentino emphasizes the likability of the girls in children's literature but notes that it is possible to like them when they are not particularly likeable. She comments on how many characters are writers. Even when heroines don't write, they work hard and are industrious. Some fear the coming of adulthood. Nevertheless, within such stories, the heroines' fear of marriage and adulthood always goes away before the day itself.

Tolentino then shifts focus to adolescent femininity. Here, she begins with the example of Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar, which presents female adulthood as a void. Tolentino reads the book as being both about depression but also about the separation from the self: the heroine does not have the infinite paths to choose from that she thought she would.

Tolentino weaves in writings by feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir. In de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, she writes about the conflict "between the individual experience of the self and the collective experience of womanhood" (106). Tolentino remarks that the book feels contemporary, and that no such divide for men exists. Meanwhile, for women, adolescence can lead to a feeling of defenseless. Tolentino cites numerous examples of this, including Judy Blume's Tiger Eyes and Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides. Tolentino notes that de Beauvoir presents female adolescence as a time of solitude and secrecy, which she connects to heroines in young-adult novels: they too are troubled about the future. This is particularly notable in works like the Hunger Games trilogy, in which heroine Katniss realizes how terrible the future will be. Tolentino continues the discussion by referencing the Twilight and related 50 Shades of Grey series, both of which show heroines with very little agency; romance keeps them from having to choose their own future. Tolentino remarks on her own distaste for this kind of story.

Finally, Tolentino presents the ultimate outcome of these narratives: the adult heroine. Marriage and children have historically been presented as what makes women happy, when really, their happiness is determined by what benefits men and what capitalist structures allow them. Tolentino traces love-based marriage as a recent historical development, related to the development of the middle class in the late 18th century. Before this, she writes, women were agents that transferred or preserved wealth through marriage. The peak of the cultural ideal of love-based marriage as key to women's happiness peaked around the Second World War, after which second-wave feminism (as embodied by de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan) began to dismantle some of its assumptions.

Tolentino uses the nineteenth-century characters of Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina as examples of this concept: unhappily married with children, the characters want lives that can't exist within their societies. However, Tolentino writes, characters need to desire to exist. This leads to their suicides. While female teenage characters have no more desire, the adult women in these novels have so much that it makes them "fatally monstrous" (114). Tolentino notes that in the later work The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, affairs are presented as a means to achieve independence. Nevertheless, the protagonist is still driven to suicide. Tolentino questions why affairs are so prevalent in these narratives. She returns to de Beauvoir, who wrote that, for a man, the role of "husband" is secondary to his identity as citizen and producer. On the other hand, "wife" is the primary identity a woman. Thus, affairs are the only means of freedom and escape from this situation.

Tolentino notes that she is using the term "heroine" loosely. Historically, it was used to denote women who acted heroically but changed in the 18th century, when female protagonists became more common. Tolentino highlights that in the hero's journey, men are read as symbols of the human condition instead of the male condition, whereas in the heroine's journey, women are read as symbolic only of other women. She notes that several narratives (like Gone with the Wind and Gone Girl) undermine this trope with heroines who seek their own liberty—though they are also portrayed negatively. The exception to the limitations of heroines' journey narratives, Tolentino writes, lie in marriage-plot novels, like Jane Eyre and the works of Jane Austen.

There has been a dramatic shift in female identity in the last 50 years, but heroines face the same problems they always have; they just answer them differently. Notably, several famous contemporary heroines are aware of the storylines at work in their own lives. Tolentino points to I Love Dick, The Department of Speculation, and the works of Elena Ferrante as examples. Tolentino then discusses an interview in which Ferrante referenced Relating Narratives by Adriana Cavarero as a reference point for how people understand their identities through the narratives other people tell. Within Ferrante's work, Tolentino sees this embodied in a Milan bookstore collective run by women, in which characters remake their own narratives through literary traditions.

Tolentino points out that she has focused primarily on white, straight characters in this essay, questioning why this is assumed to be a universal trait: "the presumed universality of her own straight whiteness is the literary heroine’s shallow revenge" (126). She provides examples of stories that don't use such heroines but notes that these stories operate under a different set of constraints. For women of color, she writes, they are not even positioned as symbolizing womanhood, but something different and more specific altogether.

Tolentino considers the possibility of rewriting narratives around the heroine's journey. After all, she writes, these stories are not based on a universal truth; they are just one framing of it and other presentations are possible. She also wonders if in writing about them, pointing out differences between the characters and herself has allowed her to underline her own identity. Like Ferrante's collective, Tolentino writes of her desire to read these heroines as mothers rather than role models, allowing them complications and ambiguity and using them as the foundation for something new.