I agree, and it’s the only way I’ve been able to conceive of it, that creating “real” characters, “giving them their due” as you put it. Is the only hope. The value then becomes making sense of the world not in terms of some moral logic but in showing how things in a particular time/place/group happen to operate, for better or worse. If the result is silly or depressing or shallow then that would be the fault of the world not the author, and if there’s a glimmer of something we might label hope or promise, then the author has not created it but captured something actually there.

That’s not to say that you have to like the character. But you really have to comprehend and sympathize with the character.

You can set out to write a moral tale perhaps by creating a character that would be a role model to you. The power of To Kill a Mockingbird comes from the author’s intense respect for every character. Even the ones that are clearly hateful have a strong voice. They are all strong characters. Atticus is a role model character, but his actions are given no more deference than the actions of any other. He is no more an motivator of the work than any other character.

Dickens sometimes only has one respected character (for instance David Copperfield), and every other character is sort of a joke. That works too. It’s more satirical, but the story is given life by the central character. In David Copperfield, the central character isn’t strong morally. He’s sort of adrift in a sea of ridiculousness. He is strong because Dickens spends a lot of time showing the character dealing with all the ridiculousness. The story then becomes a moral story because of what Copperfield has to deal with. David’s realness is his morality/integrity. The immorality is the ridiculous world.

I guess what I mean by respect is giving the character his due, truly trying to understand the character, rather than just using the character for your own ends.

Perhaps the characters you write will “take on a life of their own.” Or maybe they’ll end up where you expect them to.

One of my favorite books is The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne. It is considered a “proto-novel.” That is, it does not contain all those aspects that Jane Austen put into her works. It is arguably a “silly” work, with constant digressions, leading to conversations about everything from sex to religion to donkeys. It starts with the narrators parents conceiving him, and takes 3 volumes (of 9) to get to his birth (and it never gets much past that). On element the work contributed to the form of the novel was “sentiment.”

Sentiment in Tristram Shandy occurs randomly throughout the book, where the silliness and randomness suddenly stops, and moments of sympathy (sometimes over the top) occur. The characters, ridiculous as they are, suddenly, for brief moments, become people at least the author cares about. Their situation is respected by the author, if only briefly.

In Tristram Shandy, these moments are almost jarring to the reader. Is this guy really crying all of a sudden? That contrast serves to clearly illustrate the “sentiment,” the humanity possible in the character, that which the observer can comprehend and “feel” with the character.

Extending that to the entirety of the work is one thing Jane Austen accomplished (amongst others, like providing a dense culture/society in which the character moves that is given as much care as the psychology/sentiment of the characters themselves).

In 1925 a hollywood scriptwriter named Anita Loos (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_Loos) wrote the short novel “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”

The edition I read of the book had an introduction by a feminist critic, who explained the distinction at the time between the “sexual liberation” of the flappers and the moral liberation of the suffragist movement. Women in both “movements” were opposed to each other. The suffragists were primarily Christian moralists, while the flappers were, you know, strippers.

Anita Loos wrote scripts for hollywood where gun-toting, ample-breasted women go toe to toe with powerful, sexually hungry men, and gradually lose bits of their clothing as the action progresses. Such movies were censored as immoral. Was Anita Loos a liberator of women, or an objectifier/degrader of women?

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was a book with two central female characters. The brunette I find to be a “good role model” despite being neck-deep in the world of dancers and lascivious men. She is an intellectual observer of her blond friend, who has less moral integrity, but more “success.” The story of the blond, as told by the brunette, is interesting, and educational, though not didactic. The brunette is a “good role model” because she is an observant/intelligent person. The story is attractive/interesting because the blonde is not like the brunette (amongst other things).

The movie “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” is kinda dumb. It doesn’t explore anything. It just has some vapid leading characters with little depth. The movie has little of the value of the book, and less of the immorality.

Simply because they exist doesn’t mean that people are being victimized by them. Gossip Girl is appealing to those who read it for some reason. I believe that in that appeal there is value.

I don’t think anyone gets “self-respect” from what they read. They may get role models. They may get ideas. Gossip Girl may or may not provide “good” role models. But whether or not a book has good role models is not a measure of the book’s worth as literature. There is very little in Russian literature that provides good role-models. I don’t put “good” in quotations in the previous sentence because, objectively, the characters in much Russian literature are not supposed to provide good role models.

Thinking of early interesting English novels, I could say similar things. The works of Defoe were “psychological” explorations of characters, either morally ambiguous, or morally deficient. The greatest example of didactic literature for women, a work that explicitly presented a role model for young women, Pamela (as I mentioned earlier) would, by today’s standards, be a horrible book for young women to learn anything from.

Even at the time, contemporary writers (Henry Fielding) lampooned the Pamela, as they lampooned much of English society.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Apology_for_the_Life_of_Mrs._Shamela_Andrews

Henry Fielding’s work (and Pope’s and Swift’s) were not meant to have positive role-models either. Their works were filled with “ridiculous” people, or used classic forms in new, morally questionable ways (”burlesque”).

Basically, didactic works are never good literature. They fail to provide what good literature provides (a deeper understanding of the world, moral or immoral, and aesthetic aspects which I think require at least some literal ambiguity to exist).

Nancy Drew may be a good role-model, but she is probably not good literature (although, you know, time will tell). If you’re looking for one, you probably wont find the other.

To Kill a Mockingbird is an exception to the rule, but the story of its transformation into a movie is telling. Atticus’ choice at the end of the book was seen as too morally ambiguous by the producers of the film. They dried up Atticus immensely for the movie, made him a black-and-white do-gooder. And they changed the ending of the story, so that Atticus would not have to make the choice of letting Boo get away with murder. The producers wanted a good role model in Atticus, and their interpretation of such meant changing him to something less than he was originally.

Are Gossip Girls girls realistic? Perhaps not. Perhaps it’s just racy drivel, appealing to simple emotions without exploring at all where such actions truly come from. But girls can be mean, and petty, without much apparent reason. Maybe the reason real girls like reading the novels is that the novels discuss a truth in their lives.

There are a lot of stories (books, movies) these days that show a hard environment (highschool) and a protagonist who overcomes the hardship by bravely realizing and professing their moral individuality. Unfortunately, those stories cannot translate into truth for highschoolers.

I just watched an episode of Glee where a fat cheerleader stood up in front of an entire high-school stadium worth of highschoolers and parents, and, when thin cheerleaders were supposed to be doing a dance, the random appearance of the fat cheerleader was greated with patience and interest. She gave an impromptu speech about individuality and how “everyone in highschool feels picked on sometimes.” The audience readily admitted that yes they do feel that way sometimes, and cheered her bravery.

Good role model? Probably. Good literature? Not at all. The situation is so incredibly unrealistic it becomes a joke more than a message of goodness. Unlike Fielding’s work, it’s not meant to be a joke that exposes truth.

I’m not arguing for Gossip Girl. But a book about girls being nasty to each other, that accurately, or interestingly discusses why they act the way they do, would be good literature.

The reader then decides what to gain from the novel, if anything. Is the book Atticus your role model? Or the movie Atticus? The answer depends on who you are. Who you are depends on a lot ore variables than the books you read, even if all you do is read books.

I guess the question becomes, why go backwards? The blame can’t fall squarely on the authors – they aren’t exactly going against the cultural flow – but then again, you point out with Jane Austen that individuals can change the direction of a cultural institution or art form (or create one, as you’re kind of suggesting). Still, it seems Austen must have been one of those rare people (something along the lines of a genius) who is able to pull from limited cultural resources and connect the invisible dots. Maybe the 21st century Jane Austen is right now an 8th grader reading Gossip Girl, but I have my doubts.

I do not disagree with basic idea, summed up by T.S. Eliot. “You are what you read,” but I also think, what you read is who your are.

In the 18th century, the “novel” was considered trash. That is to say, the first “novels” were the kind of thing you get at the airport. They were sleazy, “romantic” novels where people had affairs and murdered each other. That’s when they weren’t talking to ghosts, and riding off with knights in shining armor.

They were read by women. Girls actually. Teenagers. And they were considered the kind of trash that a girl would read. Women were not made for poetry.

Even the exceptions to the rule, those books that are considered greatly influential, had mad prostitute protagonists (Moll Flanders), or sought to teach young girls how to get married well–the lesson being “he may molest you, but it’s cool as long as you successfully resist rape” (Pamela.

Even in drama and poetry, the acceptable written arts, women were objects of passions–either their own, or a male protagonist’s–or bumbling idiots. The “strong” women of Shakespeare were almost unique for 200 years.

So it can be argued that “literature” of the time provided no real good role models for women.

But at the end of the 18th century, a 24 year old girl, who loved “novels” wrote one of her own. The girl was Jane Austen, and the novel was Northanger Abbey. It was about a girl who loved novels.

Northanger Abbey was not published until after Jane Austen’s death (and after a more experienced Jane Austen cleaned it up a bit), but it was the first of a string of novels that would come to define the novel as one of the great art-forms, and make it one of the most important, respected, creative projects of our time.

If not for Jane Austen’s love for trashy novels, lacking role models, we would not be talking about the demise of the art form now.

Another problem with today’s media (books, tv, etc.) in general is that it primarily always focuses on the happiness of the protagonist over against the ethics of being honorable. When pursuit of moral behavior is dismissed for whatever will make someone happy, its no wonder that people adopt a victim mindset. Their happiness at a moment is what they draw their identity from, and so anyone attacking their “happiness” is fundamentally destroying the very essence of their perceieved identity. This, of course, will cycle back through the different media as we consume the justification for our own narcissism.