The Power of an Unlikable Female Protagonist
January 8, 2023
Writer: Lily Miro
Editor: Abigail Peacock
“I thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me.”
As human beings, we enjoy reading works with characters that share our flaws. Specifically, we love to watch these characters triumph and to see ourselves redeemed through them. We often feel as though we need a protagonist who walks the line between likeability and imperfection to elicit the necessary hope that the character will and can change. We think we need an ambitious, slightly flawed hero who completes a journey of twists and turns in order to redeem their single flaw. While it's in our nature to lean towards these simple and likable characters, there is something so thrilling about reading a book with an unredeemable and extremely easy-to-hate protagonist.
“I always called back to cancel, which I hated doing because I hated talking to people.”
Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a dark and satirical approach to the traditional unlikeable female protagonist narrative. I have a love/hate relationship with My Year of Rest and Relaxation: I absolutely love the book, but I hate the protagonist. Ever since my first time reading the book, I have been unable to resist the pull of a protagonist I can't stand. We never learn the protagonist’s name — all we know is that she is a self-centered, cynical drug addict who decides to spend a year of her life holed up in her New York City apartment taking every single sleeping pill imaginable.
“The goal for most days was to get to a point where I could drift off easily, and come to without being startled. My thoughts were banal. My pulse was casual. Only the coffee made my heart work a bit harder. Caffeine was my exercise. It catalyzed my anxiety so that I could crash and sleep again”
Our protagonist is the epitome of privilege. She is a conventionally attractive white woman with generational wealth, an Ivy League education, and a large apartment on the Upper East Side. Nonetheless, she seeks to find an escape from the dissatisfaction she feels in her extremely privileged life and she decides the cure to her hatred of life is a year of medicated sleep. The protagonist is an orphan and had mostly unloving parents for the majority of her life, so the reader can’t help but feel a sliver of empathy for her tragic backstory. However, she treats Reva, her envious yet affectionate best friend from college (the only person in the world who still cares about her), like garbage, pathologically lies, and is dismissive towards virtually every person present in her life.
“I took a Polaroid of her one night and stuck it into the frame of the mirror in the living room. Reva thought it was a loving gesture, but the photo was really meant as a reminder of how little I enjoyed her company if I felt like calling her later while I was under the influence.”
While she is a self-destructive person with sociopathic tendencies at best, I found myself drawn in by her quippy one-liners and her thought-provoking hatred towards life. The protagonist’s goal to be reborn by sleeping for a year reflects a kind of crushing self-loathing that many young people have experienced at some point in their life. Moshfegh strategically calls attention to struggles with mental health, along with the idea that what we perceive to be self-care may, in fact, really be self-destruction. The reader is drawn into this thought through the character’s unlikeability, dark humor, and unexpected relatability. Through her string of painful loneliness, hatred, and general depression, the protagonist’s journey to rebirth seems to be slowly killing her, and she slowly falls prey to her own subconscious.
“I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it.”
The protagonist believes that, with enough sleep and separation from the outside world, she will be able to live without fantasizing about ending her life. However, the irony is that she is slowly killing herself within her “pharmaceutical chrysalis”. Her state of hibernation is equally terrifying and intriguing, and she maintains a cynical yet painfully relatable outlook on life throughout the entirety of it. She exemplifies every single impulse and raw emotion many young women have experienced at some point in their life — and you can’t help but love to hate her, just as you might love to hate yourself.
Not only is it extremely vital that this natural and authentic self-loathing be represented through a protagonist, but it is also extremely important for a woman to express emotions in a way that divulges from female stereotypes. Often, with female protagonists, even the ones who break stereotypes with the “tomboy” trope, is that they are written without inevitable and natural female emotions, such as this “crave” for attention, or constant shame and embarrassment. Likable female protagonists are patient, kind, and caring — sometimes to a fault. Female protagonists such as the one in My Year of Rest and Relaxation, express the other end of the emotional spectrum. They don’t shy away from the authentic rage, self-hatred, and general coldness towards others — all things that would often cause a woman to be labeled a bitch, yet are completely natural and real. And yes, it is fair to say that the protagonist in My Year of Rest and Relaxation belongs in the “bitch” category, but she remains someone many young girls can relate to. This is the beauty of an unlikable female protagonist: she destigmatizes taboo female emotions and plays into the darker, less stereotypically “feminine” parts of girlhood and womanhood.
“It was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.”
To me, what makes a great book is the essential simplicity of an irrevocably unlikeable protagonist who is fed up with life. A book doesn’t need to have a journey of twists and turns, a flawed yet redeemable protagonist, or even a hero to be great. It just needs an unhinged, contradictory female protagonist who makes the reader question their own reasons for existing.
Image: IG songofcecily
