The Search is on for the REAL Top-10 Feminist Literary Icons

Hello! Have you tweeted your spooky story to #31witch yet? You should: YOU COULD WIN my book and a bunch of other fab spooky titles JUST IN TIME for Halloween. The details are in my last blog. But now, on to more pressing matters: The Search is now most definitely on for the REAL Top-10 Feminist Literary Icons of All Time.

"I'd rather be a feminist warrior than a Spice Girl."

My quest for Feminist Literary Icons was inspired by this article, "The Top 10 Feminist Literary Icons of All Time", unattributed and on a site called "Library Science Degree" - which was posted as a link by @emmaguire on Twitter.
I identify as a feminist, in the words of the great Rebecca West, "because I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat". And amongst the fictional women cited on the "Top 10 Feminist Literary Icons" list, I'd suggest there are some characters whose behaviour is, I think, a bit doormatty.
So here, I thought I'd stir up some discussion and playfully - playfully, mind - argue some of this list. Because I love books and I love talking about books, I'm very interested to hear what all of you think.

Here goes.

Scarlett O'Hara may be feisty, but most of her advantages are gained by the fact that she's pretty - not to mention that there's a rape scene in Gone With the Wind the repercussions of which are a literary gift to rape-enablers worldwide.
Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany's is arguably fun at a party, but rather than being the agent of her own subjectivity, she's really just another exploited and exploitable young woman who trades on her allure to men; she's only got value to herself or the leeches she surrounds herself with while she remains attractive.

This is the same as Becky Sharp, the relentlessly self-interested protagonist of Thackeray's Vanity Fair; Becky, like Holly, may be smart enough to know that her social value is entirely her sexual appeal, but she, too, is young, exploitable, summarily exploited and very soundly punished by the author - her attempts at agency both defeated within the narrative and met with moral approbation.
That Becky's so wrapped up in her own ambitions, and willing to screw over other women to get what she wants - that is, individual social promotion within a patriarchal society - is hardly a feminist mindset. A rather central pillar of the feminist project is collective sisterhood - competing against one another leads to isolation and isolation to annihilation - like Becky Sharp's.
With this in mind, don't even get me started on Dagny from Atlas Shrugged, one of the deplorable heroines of Ayn Rand's propagandistic pap-tales of relentlessly projected self-hate. How on Earth did she make it on to a "feminist icon" list?! Rape fantasies and narrative motivations to destroy not only collective bonds of sisterhood, but of society and the very notion of altruism are not the attributes of a feminist.
That Dagny manages to hold down a demanding job is one thing, but barely restraining a paraphilia for a railroad (or its capitalist ubermensch proxies) is entirely another - and whatever it is, it's about worshipping domination and it's doormatty. Besides, the very notion of including one of her heroines in anything as collective as a list would have made the poisonously individualistic Ms Rand throw up.
As for Jane Austen's Emma, let's be honest, Ms Woodhouse's interests are hardly the pursuit of agency, intellectual liberty and moral values above bourgeois, material concerns. She's one, alas, of an overwhelming percentage of female literary characters with a monomaniacal obsession with courtship and marriage. It's a fixation that kick-ass feminist babes eschew while they're busy trying to actually do something.

Jane Eyre may not share the singular focus of Emma Woodhouse's obsessions, but while Jane's general behaviour is smart and principled, her attraction to and validation of a misogynist partner like Rochester is an act of self-harm. Loving a bigamous, cruel, undeserving idiot who has married another woman for money, tortured and imprisoned her, gone whoring in Paris and lied to and manipulated you into a false marriage is not a feminist's act of noble self-sacrifice - it is the behaviour of a serially-abused woman trapped in an abusive paradigm.
Now, I love Jane - but the poor woman needs a social care intervention and emergency housing, not the legitimisation of her doormattery as "romance". The real feminist icon of Jane Eyre is not Jane but Bertha, as the excellent Jean Rhys knew all too well when she expounded the wronged wife's story in Wide Sargasso Sea. This is a woman who maintains resistance through the worst ongoing deprivation and degradation and asserts her subjectivity in a glorious conflagration of protest.

These are my six principal objections to the "Top 10 Fictional Feminist Icons of All Time" list. I have my reservations, too, about two of the four characters who remain.
Ramona Quimby is an adorable, sprightly and active protagonist in the Ramona books, but her age-range across the entire series only ascends from 4-10. I'll leave it up to the readers of this blog to determine how much of an icon status her age allows her, unencumbered as she is of the sexual pressures that beset all adult heroines.
Goddess Athene is worth considering. As goddess of wisdom, strategy, justice and war, she is certainly no doormat - but the fetishisation of her virginity is a bit of a concern. If a classical deity were to make the list, I'd certainly advocate the more worldly Hecate, goddess of witches, wisdom and the night. Her remit as protectoress of women, children, the homeless, the poor and the marginalised certainly advances her sisterhood credentials over a goddess who turned a sister into a spider for beating her in a sewing contest.
My Antonia by Willa Cather I haven't read. I will pursue it as an adjunct to my quest - to see if Antonia the Bohemian immigrant to the prairielands can crack a knee to the first Mrs Rochester in my regard.
Of the ten, it is only Hester Prynne, the heroine of Nathaniel Hawthorne's brilliant The Scarlet Letter, to whom I would unhesitatingly apply the status of feminist icon.
Named, shamed, used, abused, threatened, humiliated and ostracised, Hester never relents, always resists, and wears the badge of shame her community literally sew into her as an avatar of her own defiance and identity. She is the counterhegemonic, feminist babe par excellence, her resolution so strong she actually subverts the society around her into accommodation of her uniqueness and ultimately achieves that for which all feminists aspire - a better future for her daughter. So right on, Hester: girl power.

Readers, friends, the task at hand is this. I have consulted the oracles of Twitter and Facebook, and harvested from friends and twitterwes a list of characters worth considering in a REAL Top-10 Fictional Feminist Icons of All Time. I'm going to list them below for your consideration, and would love to receive comments and suggestions for additions to or perhaps removals from the list. When there's something approaching a consensus of worthy nominees, I'll post up a poll for the Top 10.

Some criteria for considering a feminist icon:

• either an active protagonist of the story, or an active protagonist of a story within the story
• pursues the realisation of values and moral principles ABOVE the monomaniacal pursuit of a man, even if the man hanging around is nice enough
• isn't a helpless victim, or a maiden in distress; is instead the kind of girl whose first instinct is to fight her own way out of trouble; who always, always, resists doom
• isn't some candified idealisation of popular "femininity" contemporary to the creation of the book
• refuses to spiritually submit to a dominant paradigm that keeps her in chains
• doesn't ascribe value to herself on the basis of her looks
• doesn't submit to a subjugation of the self or submit her body to subjugation to attain some kind of realtionship status with either another individual or a social paradigm

While TV, film and games abound with feminist icons, I'm keeping this list to aural/literal cultural products: characters from books, myths, stories and poems. Here's the list of suggestions thus far: I don't agree with all of them, some are deliberate provocations, but I'm interested in reading discussion. Feel free to suggest other characters, out-argue me on the characters in the original list above or demand exclusions.

Lyra from His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
Phyllis from The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham
Offred in The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Moira in The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Ann in Z for Zachariah by Robert C. O'Brien

Emily from the Emily of New Moon books by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Anne from the Anne of Green Gables books by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Molly from Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell
Nora from A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen
Mrs Lind from A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen
Hester from The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Hermoine from the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling
Bertha/Antoinette from Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Bertha from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Orlando from Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Elizabeth from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Lydia from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen 
Takako from Battle Royale by Koushun Takami
Mitsuko from Battle Royale by Koushun Takami
Anna from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Eloise from the Eloise books by Kay Thompson
Lisbeth from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series by Stieg Larsson
Lucy from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
Irene from Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle
Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Ayesha from She by H. Rider Haggard
Ellie from the Tomorrow When the War Began books by John Marsden
Jessica from Dune by Frank Herbert
Trixie from the Trixie Belden books by Julie Campbell
Nancy from the Nancy Drew books by Carolyn Keene
George from The Famous Five series by Enid Blyton
the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
the governess in Turn of the Screw by Henry James
Lucy in Dracula by Bram Stoker
Molly in Ulysses by James Joyce
Alice in Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Sookie in the Sookie Stackhouse/True Blood series by Charlaine Harris
Valancy in The Blue Castle by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Stephen in The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
Sybylla in My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin
Gertrude in Good Bones by Margaret Atwood
Meg in A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
Anna in Anna and the King of Siam by Margaret Landon
Cordelia from An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by PD James
Harriet from Strong Poison by Dorothy L Sayers
Eoin from Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein
Lucy in The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Miss Marple from the Miss Marple novels by Agatha Christie
Flora from Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
June from The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy
Katsa from Graceling by Kristin Cashore
Jo in Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Helen in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
Alexandra in O Pioneers by Willa Cather
Cordelia in This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn by Aidan Chambers
Villanelle in The Passion by Jeanette Winterson
Ma in The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Anna from The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Frances from The Sweetest Dream by Doris Lessing
Iza in The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel
Morgaine in The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
Ma Ramotswe in The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
Edna from The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Rosalind from Shakespeare's As You Like It
Amy from Me and the Fat Man by Julie Myerson
Fevvers in Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
The Marquise de Merteuil in Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Marilla from Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

What think you? 
Please remember: this is about a love of literary discussion, so no biting! No pie-throwing!