The Perfet
Heroine
By Sharon
Sala
What's your
perception of the word - heroine? Is it someone who's
done something heroic, or is it simply the female protagonist
in our stories? Must they be the same? And what is your
definition of heroic? Is it a woman who does a heroic
act, like rescuing someone, or donating a kidney... or
maybe donating bone marrow to a dying person? Sure, that
would make a wonderful heroine for a story, wouldn't it?
But in my mind, a heroine could be so much more and yet
remain a virtual unknown. Take a look at the following
scenarios and determine if the females rate as heroines:
Scenario
#1:
A mother of seven children in the early nineteen hundreds
is widowed. It's in the middle of the Great Depression.
In her lifetime she loses a husband in a farming accident
and a son to friendly fire in World War II. Three times
she will lose her home - twice to tornadoes, once to a
fire. In the fifties, she will come close to losing her
youngest child to Polio. And yet she manages to keep them
all together, feed them, clothe them and see that every
living child has a college education.
Scenario
#2:
A young woman who has grown up during the depression through
great hardship becomes a teacher. She marries a man who
goes off to war and comes home an alcoholic. This woman
gives birth to three children, one of whom dies within
24 hours of birth, then loses another child years later.
She gives 32 years of her life to the education of other
people's children - helping mold many of her students
in ways few ever know, yet it makes life-changing impacts
on their lives.
Throughout this time she is so generously giving of herself
to others she quietly suffers verbal, mental and physical
abuse at the hands of the man who promised to love her
and cherish her always.
Scenario
#3:
A young, well-to-do 19-year-old girl from Czechoslovakia
sails alone on an ocean liner to the United States to
visit cousins who have immigrated. She is an adventurer...
the only one of four sisters who was brave enough to travel,
and she has come alone. Only her visit does not go as
planned.
Her ship's ticket is good for two years, but before she
can return, World War I breaks out in Europe and she is
stranded in a foreign country. She cannot speak English.
She has never worked a day in her life, has no way to
earn a living and no idea if her family is even alive.
Instead of throwing herself on the mercy of relatives,
she gets a job as a cook with the only Jewish family in
a settlement of Catholic Czechs... and she can't even
boil water.
She will marry a good-looking, hard-drinking man she meets
at a dance and she will suffer physical and verbal abuse
at his hands for years. In her first home, she stands
on a trunk with her baby in her arms, watching in horror
as her husband shoots rats through the holes in the walls
of the house where he's brought her to live.
She will be alone when her firstborn son gets whooping
cough and he will die in her arms as she runs through
a snowstorm to get help. She will give birth to four other
children, endure loneliness, hardship and despair, and
spend her life yearning to go back to her homeland without
ever seeing the dream come to fruition.
Scenario
#4:
Another young woman, also nineteen, average height, pretty
redhead, comes from an ordinary home. Two parents. Rural
upbringing. Nothing unusual about her life. She excels
at public speaking and basketball, graduated high school
with an A-average. Flunking in college, she decides to
go to beauty school, but it doesn't sound as if she's
going to set the world on fire, right? Only something
happens to her that should never happen to anyone's child.
She becomes the victim of an act of random violence.
She is spending the night with a girlfriend. As they sleep,
a man breaks into the home and attempts to kill them.
She alone fights him, and ultimately saves both her and
her friend's lives, then lives in terror because the man
who tries to kill them gets away. It's not until three
years later when another young girl is murdered in much
the same way that the man is brought to justice.
WHO IS THE
PERFECT HEROINE?
Is the single
parent who lost her husband and three homes a heroine?
What about the teacher who gave so much of herself to
her family and to others and still had love to share?
What about the immigrant girl who was stranded in a country
in which she never meant to stay? And what about the young
girl who saved herself and her friend? In my world, they
all are, because they are all members of my family.
The first person
was my great-aunt Gertrude, my grandmother's oldest sister.
She was four months shy of her 100th birthday when she
died and there wasn't a person in her community of Wilburton,
Oklahoma who didn't know and love her.
The second
one, the teacher, is my mother, and she continues to be
a most remarkable woman. She is 82 years old, still drives,
takes care of herself... and me, when she thinks I'm slacking...
and makes the best cookies this side of heaven.
The third one
was my mother-in-law, Agnes Sala. In many respects, her
life was a sad one, because to the day she died, she never
gave up wanting to go home and see her sisters. Yet she
managed to give her children a sense of home and family
while lacking one herself.
And the last
one, the young woman who literally fought for her life,
is my daughter, Kathryn. She is and will always be my
ultimate heroine. Every day of her life is a mark of her
will to survive and her refusal to let someone else be
the master of her fate. I've watched her battle back from
years of abject terror in being alone, to a beautiful,
positive woman who became a teacher. Now she teaches four-year
olds in the Oklahoma public school system and on September
28th of last year after eight months of serious illness,
she gave birth to her first child, a boy she and her husband
named Daniel. She's a marvelous mother now, as well as
a super daughter, and I know that whatever else she teaches
her babies, they will know they are loved.
When you begin
looking for the perfect woman to be a heroine in one of
your books, keeping it simple could be the key to a perfect
choice. A heroine's journey can be any woman's journey.
It's how she lives that makes the difference.
The above article appeared in the April issue of Magic
Moments, the newsletter for the Southern Magic Romance
Writers (Birmingham, Alabama).
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