Down the Rabbit Hole

Three Mad Women

Prompt: Who are your three favorite book characters? What makes them so great?

I have been an avid reader since early childhood and so there are no shortage of memorable characters for me to consider as contenders for my favorites. In reflecting on the prompt, I'm a little surprised to find that; I can easily come up with three right away, they are all girls and they don't necessarily hail from my most favorite books.

The first one is immediately apparent. My absolute favorite literary character is Alice, from of course, Alice and Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. I have always identified with her curious nature, her stubbornness, her bravery. By far though it is her emerging sense of self that draws me to her the most. The knowledge that she might be exactly what she suspects about herself, good and bad, and her resilient acceptance of those truths and traits. I love Alice because I'm still very much a young girl inside who "always gives myself very good advice, but seldom ever follows it."
I'm fascinated by the possibility that fighting off my own fierce and loathsome Jabberwocky might be as simple as believing in "impossible things". She is all at once endearing, candid and mighty!

My second favorite character is from a Scott Odell book, Isle of the Blue Dolphins, based on the true story of a young girl abandoned on a island for nearly 18 years. This was the first book I read at such a young age that has stayed with me my whole life. The story so impacted me that it ignited a passion for the ocean that influenced the majority of my academic and extracurricular plans. As a young reader, I identified immediately with Juana Maria, who was very close to my own age at the time. I remember hanging on every word of her story, through all its tragic and terrifying twists. Juana Maria was simply the smartest, bravest person I had ever read about and she was girl! She made me proud, she empowered me. This is one of the books, and she is one of the characters I most look forward to introducing my own daughter to one day.

Lastly, this last character was hard to accept. When I was forced to read Sylvia Plath's, The Bell jar, in high school I remember not just hating it but being appalled that they would assign us something so morbid. I thought, why give a book about a troubled young woman to a bunch of emotional high school students? It wasn't until, years and years later, I realized how much the character of Esther Greenwood stayed with me. I think it would be most accurate to say she haunted me. The book terrified me. The concept became a visceral one in which I could easily picture myself as a woman, going about her everyday life - always with that bell jar perched precariously above my head. I feared madness because I would come to know it in others. I feared madness because I would lose others to their battles with bell jars. So Ester makes the list because she becomes the one character I can never fully and completely shake off. She is at all times both easy to relate too and easy to reject. I remember how often I would be angry with her choices, her weaknesses but at the same time, drawn to her vulnerability, her intelligence and her earnest attempts to fight her demons. Esther makes me peer around the corners of my own mind, fearfully but with purpose, to make sure that same brand of madness isn't in there somewhere, slumbering and waiting to wake.

Looking back over my choices, I have to wonder if Madness is not some time of subliminal theme...after all Alice found herself trapped in the mad world of Wonderland. Poor Juana Maria had moments in her long isolate when she had to fight from going mad from sheer loneliness and grief. Sadly, Esther Greenwood's entire existence was plagued by her own slow descent into madness. I wonder what it says about me, these three mad women that I carry around with me?