The women characters in the novels of Harold Frederic

Within recent years literary critics have finally recognized Harold Frederic's ability to create memorable characters in his novels. Not enough attention, however, has been given to Frederic's vivid, believable portrayals of women. Although he was inclined toward literary realism, Frederic did not limit himself to one particular literary mode when he characterized women. When he portrayed his intriguing temptress, he realistically showed her good qualities of beauty, wealth, and sophistication along with her evil power to entice men to abandon their moral judgment and their loved ones. Depicting the seductiveness of this siren, Frederic went even beyond the usual boundaries of realism, however, and treated sexual activities in a naturalistic way. In contrast to these artistic techniques, when he wrote about the passive, pure heroine who was the wife or lover of the protagonist, he patterned her after the "ideal women" of romanticism. Then with his most admirable female character, the emancipated "new woman," he used all three literary modes, romanticism, realism, and naturalism, to show the nobility of this intelligent, independent, socially responsible human being. Harold Frederic, therefore, superbly employed whatever literary mode best suited his innovative purposes to create unconventional, convincing women characters.