Despite the advantages women today have over those who lived only a century earlier, they continue to play the underdog. Instead of creating characters that overcome difficulties, writers portray women who seem to enjoy wallowing in vulnerability. Perhaps it was Kate Chopin who made popular this perception of woman, providing in Edna Pontellier the very model of a knowing and willing victim. Edna throws out the lessons of the past and never attempts to penetrate the future. She is aware of her position, but in the end she sees no recourse except death.
Women writers continue to inflict upon themselves the lessons of the past.
They knowingly portray their characters as victims vulnerable and downtrodden, depressed and abused. In order for a woman writer to make any real literary strides, she must cast off this tendency to victimize her characters. The Liars Club. In this memoir, Karr tells the story of her Texas childhood fraught with all the horrors other women writers have clung to as inspiration for their victimized characters. An older boy raped her at the age of five.