“Ladies and gentlemen,” the captain said in a low voice that was slow and a little tired. “you have five minutes to withdraw.”
The redoubled hooting and shouting drowned out the bugle call that announced the start of the count. No one moved.
Five minutes have passed,” the captain said in the same tone. “One more minute and we’ll open fire.”

The above is a passage from the famous Spanish-language novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. In the aftermath of this, there was a massacre that killed three thousand people. If we do not know any period background or cultural background of the author (Garcia Marquez), we will find this episode very sudden and difficult to understand.

But when we learn something about what happened in the development of Colombia, we understand the author’s meaning. In the 1920s, after World War I, Colombia’s economy began to boom and grow. In 1928, the banana growers and pickers went on strike until the end of the year. More than 20,000 workers demanded improvements in their working conditions and economic situation. The managers of the company saw the ripe bananas rotting in the ground unpicked and finally turned to the Colombian government, leading to the massacre in the central square of Cienaga.

In this way, Marquez reflects the time in a way that we cannot know simply through formalism.

This is a very similar image to the Little Mermaid from my favorite card game Magic the gathering, and the artist who created her is named Livia Prima (which we can find on the card). From the drawing and background narrative (she yearned to walk on dry), we can find that she faces the same dilemma as the Little Mermaid.

But the difference is that she has a purpose other than romance – vengeance, a manifestation of the awakening of female consciousness that “we can do something great or heavy without the help of male power”.

Unfortunately, the image still has overtones of objectifying women. But considering that the author is a female artist, we can understand it as a personal aesthetic pursuit of hers, rather than an attempt to please men.

As mentioned in our class, stories with male protagonists can deal with a variety of different themes, while stories with female protagonists often have only one story: romance. They overcome difficulties and eventually marry the prince, which, in the context of the patriarchal society of the past, makes me wonder if the author’s purpose is to make them “subordinate” to men.

I recall reading novels I’ve read, most of which feature male protagonists. The one exception is that I have read almost all of the works of Eileen Chang, a very talented Chinese woman writer whose works mainly feature women as protagonists. However, the endings of these female protagonists are often tragic, seemingly unrelated to the glamorous words “heroism,” “finding yourself,” and “defeating the enemy” that often appear in novels with male protagonists. I think this is probably because Eileen Chang was a writer who was good at reflecting reality, and the women of that era were miserable.

And my question is, as more and more attention is paid to feminism, are there many stories with women as the main characters in the real sense? If so, how are these stories fundamentally different from those with male protagonists, i.e., if we replace the protagonist of a classic story with a woman, does the story still stand? What are the things that an author, especially a male author, needs to be aware of when he creates such stories? Is it easy for him to fall into the male gaze, stereotypes, or even sexism?