Nathan Bick

  I read The Red Tent as a means to study the writing of female characters in novels. It’s a bit of cliche, but one nonetheless true, that many or most of the “great novels” of the canon are written by men and do not focus or execute well on the female characters of their stories, many of whom are limited to instrumental roles or are otherwise incidental to the plot. For example, there is the famous “Bechdel test” that assigns a simple True or False to a story depending on if in the plot there is at least one conversation between two women in which they do not discuss one of the men in the story. If the plot fails this test, it is seen as a non-feminist story with women as instruments or objects rather than genuine subjects. I am not sure if I was able to get past this in the story that I wrote this past summer, so I decided to study further in hopes of improving.  I decided to start at the beginning, so to speak. The thinking of Joseph Campbell on the wisdom embedded in an...