The Good Bad Girl is the assertive one who gets ahead the passive Good Good Girl is likely to be raped.įiedler’s analysis of the novels written in the 1950s is, not surprisingly, more limited. During the 20’s, another shift takes place. In Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, the snow maiden becomes the gold-digger. Scott Fitzgerald, the Fair Maiden and Dark Lady are merged into one character. The Dark Lady is a sexy brunette, representating poison and danger, sex and death. The Fair Maiden is slender, virginal, very white-skinned (often milk-white!), blonde and blue-eyed. But how do we go from a largely asexual plot line to the sense of injury incels feel at their lack of sexual partners?įiedler finds in 19 th century literature a simple division of women into two types, as are non-white males: Good and Evil. We see the same themes in today’s buddy films.

The female characters are a few poorly written stereotypes. Fiedler also notes that these novels do not contain well-written female characters. Relationships with women were onerous, but few if any adult sexual relationships with either gender. What I recalled was that Fiedler showed that male friendship was at the center of much American literature, often with a man of color as sidekick to the main character. Fiedler’s treatment of race and gender issues was careful and, I think, acceptable in today’s environment. My recall of the general themes was correct. I skimmed the sections about earlier literature, but the critique of 19 th century literature, particularly James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Henry James, and Mark Twain was clearly relevant. The original was 1960, before Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, although after Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex. I looked it up and bought a copy of the revised edition from 1966. I hadn’t read it in a long time and didn’t remember much of it. I wondered whether Love and Death could still be relevant. AIDS and public recognition of gay issues were in the future. The civil rights movement was ramping up. In the early 1960s, second-wave feminism was just getting started in the United States. Seems like now might be a good time to look at that book. It took me a while, but I recalled Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, from the early 1960s. When incels started shooting women, it seemed to me that I had read an analysis of something similar.

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