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Her novels do not fail the Bechdel test, and her women are not without nuance. But they are obscured by unreliable male narrators
Only two women get any real page space in Donna Tartt’s debut The Secret History: Camilla Macaulay, the ethereal yet steely sole female member of the novel’s core friendship circle; and Judy Poovey, the vulgar and brash Californian with a crush on the novel’s narrator, Richard Papen. The two seem to come from different planets. Camilla is cool, intelligent, untouchable, beautiful; Judy has “wild clothes, frosted hair, and a red Corvette with California plates bearing the legend JUDY P” as well as a voice “which rang through the house like the cries of some terrifying tropical bird”.
For a while, I played a game with the rest of Tartt’s female characters that goes: Camilla or Judy? The Goldfinch’s narrator Theodore Decker’s unrequited love, Pippa, is a Camilla, as is his mother Audrey; background girlfriends Xandra and Kotku are Judys. It’s strangely easy to fit every woman into these two categories, as though there are only two ways to be a woman. Continue reading...