When I was a kid, I wanted to be Ariel, Spider-Man and an international spy, often simultaneously. My thirst for adventure began young and my literary heroes and heroines reflected that.
I especially loved Ariel from “The Little Mermaid” for her love of exploration and her curiosity. To me, she went through the trouble of gaining legs just so she could find out the proper use for a whatz-it.
It wasn’t until I was older and I could look back on the heroes of my youth that I saw how shortchanged Ariel really was. Her desire to see the world was mainly motivated by her want to catch her prince, and while her pursuit of her love interest was admirable, I often wonder how many answers to her many questions she ever found.
My doubts about my literary idol of, as well as several other iconic female literary characters, are discussed in Samantha Ellis’s semi-autobiographical “How to Be a Heroine: Or, What I’ve Learned From Reading Too Much.”
Full disclosure: I have yet to finish this book, but my first impression is Ellis is a witty, self-aware author.
The book reads in part as a personal revelation. Ellis as a character discovers along with readers just how much Ariel gave up only to be rejected by her prince in the original Anderson tale.
Ellis, who is Iraqi Jewish, grew up in London. She understood Ariel because she yearned for Baghdad like Ariel yearned for land. Ellis’s love of the story was not only because Ariel was a princess but also because she was a woman stuck between worlds.
Ellis is able to eloquently mesh her past ideologies with her present woes in “How to be a Heroine,” and I am eager to read her feminist-critiques of other literary favorites in the pages to come.
schulzek@indiana.edu
