Thoughts on what I’m writing?

[Historyguy]

I am trying to write a novel but it’s pissing off two women I know.

The problem they have is my villain, Abigail Williams (she’s a real person who was used in the Crucible, but given the fact that she really did exist, she’s fair game).

She will be 40 because the novel is set in 1720, as she was only 11 or 12 in the real witch trials.

At this point, the money she stole will have gotten her far in life and now she’s a wealthy widow of a merchant in Barbados.

She continues to do what she did as a child, create moral panics and mass hysteria to get innocents killed (now they are her enemies she’s framing as pirates).

her greatest nemesis is a fictional daughter of Sarah Osborne that I invented. Abigail will try to get her hung for piracy.

Thoughts?

Did you mean to post this in FWR?There are other sections of MN which might be able to give you creative writing tips.

No, I need to know if my portrayal of her is misogynistic in anyway.

You what? You are suggesting she hasn 't matured? Your scenario casts back a light on the teenage Abigail that suggests she was maybe as guilty then as she is now. Stick of rock. Maybe you don't mean to suggest that a child's moral failure will dog them through life, but that's what I'm reading from it.

Some people never change.

it’s going to be hard to write her in a sympathetic way.

I dunno. Maybe my view is skewed by similar asymmetric relationships I knew were going on at the time, but I always saw it as a play written from the man's point of view and thought maybe a teenage kid got carried away and maybe John Proctor wasn't as innocent as all that.

What’s her character arc? Does she change as a result of the events of the story and if so how? Does she grow? Who/what is her nemesis and why? How do they inform her character growth? If she’s ‘just nasty’ then, yeah, it’ll likely be seen by women as misogynistic.

It’s a novel. You can write her any way you like!

Absolutely!
But if your novel is going to reference the play, you're taking on a helluva lot of baggage, some of which you may prefer to dump. Sowhy start from there?

it wont

Why Is it pissing off the two women you know?

What have they said is annoying them

I’m not sure of the history of the Salem witch trials but I’m assuming you’ve researched more than I have!

I do however know quite a lot about Scottish witch trials. The women and girls accused could not get out of those accusations. Everything they said or did would be taken as proof they were a witch. Of course not
one of them was actually a witch. Every accusation was false.

The only real way to get out of being accused would be to accuse
someone else and even that wasn’t a guaranteed escape route.

If you’re depicting Abigail as a manipulative teenage girl who seduced John Proctor (I believe Arthur Miller made this bit up?) and accused innocent people then yeah I’d probably have a problem with that. It’s just a bit simplistic.

As a writer myself, I’d agree with a previous poster as to her character development. I would say you need to give Abigail proper motivation. Perhaps she has been abused by Proctor and metaphorically lashed out, then fled and rebuilt her life. But when she is abused again she reverts to old methods of revenge. If you want the reader to be on her side she has to have some sort
of good elements (a ‘save the cat’ moment as it’s known!).

But saying all that, write the story you want to write. And don’t talk about it too much while you’re writing if you’re likely to doubt yourself according to others’ comments.

'given the fact that she really did exist, she’s fair game'

I'm not able to get past this description of a girl.

That was my thought.

Not sure why you have posted a second thread on this, OP, given that there is already discussion on your first thread - https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5342656-aibu-by-saying-it-isnt-misogynistic-to-have-a-female-villain-in-fiction

Just a thought - but 90% of agents, and those in the publishing industry, are women. As is 66% of those who buy and read books per the marketing data. I would really try to take on board what the two women you mention have said - explore the reasons WHY your approach has pissed them off, and how you might frame your writing - and your interactions judging by your responses here.

Am a creative writer myself - MA and completing a PhD. Both focusing on the novel form. You have to develop both a hard skin when receiving feedback but you also have to listen. In every workshop/feedback I’ve ever received, even by complete numpties, when I’ve put it to one side and let it percolate I usually have a moment a week or so later when I realise ‘ah, that is what they meant’. I may not agree with their feedback in its entirety, but there is usually a rally valuable nugget buried within it that really improves or refines my writing.

As I said above, there needs to be a character development journey that you take your reader on - the character must need something (forgiveness for what she did earlier in her life, acceptance within her community, love) and she needs to learn something about herself that changes her, that makes the reader bat for her, care for her. Am sure if your story is developed you may have this covered - but you’ve not explained this to us here. So perhaps you’ve not described this part of Abigail Williams story to these women?

I’d also caution against feeling that ‘because she is real she is fair game’. Most agents/publishers allow artistic licence, but there has to be authenticity and truth to your depiction - otherwise you should just make up a new character, one based upon her. Your alternate story needs to be an imagining that is plausible to agents and readers subsequently.

Thanks for that - I think to helps understand the issue. And yes, depicting a woman as the out and out villain in an era of extreme female oppression and against the backdrop of abusive, male dominated society, is going to be an impossible sell. Readers will want to see her behaviour as her way of fighting back against that oppression - however misguided. They will want to understand and empathise. That doesn’t seem to be the story you are telling. It seems to be just more ‘women are evil’ and, well, women are more than pissed off with this narrative. It doesn’t present a nuanced representation of the historical era and it is misogynistic if you make no effort whatsoever to explore and understand WHY a [real] woman did what she did in response to the Salem witch hysteria - which was really a way evil men set out to oppress, control and kill women to create a climate of misogyny and fear.

Something about this is reminding me of a bloke who turned up on the BBC Archers forum a couple of decades ago telling us all about the book he was writing, and not grasping AT ALL why a lot of largely UK posters, roughly half (maybe more?) of whom were women, weren't especially keen on the idea of an American bloke writing very lurid sounding fiction based on the Yorkshire Ripper.
Edited to add: talking about the author's interactions on both threads, here.

You are referencing it - isn’t the idea that Abigail stole money and fled lifted from the Crucible? In reality she was only 12

How can we possibly tell that from the brief outline you've given? Misogyny is an attitude that will be reflected (or not) throughout the novel in the way you write it and we can't know that until it's written.

BTW it's "hanged".

I don't understand your angst. Just write your book and publish under a pseudonym. Or quit and write something else. Constantly asking women 'is this misogyny' is only going to cause irritation. If you don't know if the subject, or your treatment of it is misogynistic and it matters that much to you, move on to a different project.
We all know that evil, unpleasant or disordered women really exist. The female villain is a stale plot twist, she's usually a one dimensional character because she's used for shock value, and she's rarely a child because in reality, children don't have much persuasive power over adults.

I'd be far more interested in a book that looked at the possible motivations for a child to make those accusations. Was she mentally unwell? Was it ergot poisoning? Or another hallucinogen? Was she abused? Was this the only way a vulnerable oppressed girl could get any positive attention? Was this related to being orphaned, and a reaction to the trauma of that? What was the nature of her "affliction"? Epilepsy? Functional neurological disorder? Something else?

Just defaulting to "the girl was an evil manipulative bitch, and grew up to be an evil manipulative woman" seems very one dimensional.

She didn’t have any parents and that excuse worked when she was 11.

but she’s 40 now, she’s far past it.

So you are declaring that a real historical girl was evil because you have decided to write a fictional adult version of her as evil? Yeah, that does seem a tad misogynistic to me.

We went to see The Crucible at the Globe on Saturday (very good imo). Obviously it’s ahistorical in its depiction of Abigail and her possible motivations (I think Miller has done more than enough of treating her as ‘fair game’ already). But even in that it was possible to see how girls playing silly games, in a world where the most respectable of adults were actively pushing the idea of witchcraft and where exposing witches was entirely laudable could get caught up in it, and the line between fantasy and reality could become very thin. I thought the girl who tries to recant but can’t - she’s completely backed into a corner - was close to the truth of it.

To add to what I said, I TRIED writing her in a decent light. It soon became clear that giving her redeeming qualities would be like having the Shawshank Warden redeem himself.