My guess is that, like Ripley, Booker would dismiss her as “unbalanced”, too Masculine. And unlike Ripley, I would have to agree with him. She is not just a strong woman who does need a man, she refuses to have a man and is willing to kill anyone that tries. She has to be “saved” from this condition – and brought out from the shadow of her Dark Tyrant father – by a male hero who outruns her, outwits her, and does it all for love.

As for Clarice, Booker devotes time specifically to her place in “Silence”. Again, her seems to ague from the assumption that any strong female character is “too masculine”, and “proves” this by claiming that her prima facia Adventure story (or Male Plot) morphs itself into a Female plot about feelings to “balance” out what went wrong. I think that, like Ripley, she shows a better balance of Male and Female traits, and should be lauded as a more “integrated” character than most of her male contemporaries. But like Atalanta, she’s not the Hero. She may win the battle in capturing Buffalo Bill, but she loses the war. Ultimately she is seduced by the stronger, Male, character of Lecter. He defeats her, and goes on to take over the entire plot. I think that, in a vaccum, Clarice Starling is a great role-model for women. But in the context of “Silence”, and the meta-context of the cottage industry that sprang up around Lecter, she is just another example of females who are allowed to be strong only if they don’t completely win, as long as there is one male they can’t defeat.

Slightly more recent, what of a character like Clarice Starling in “Silence of the Lambs”? I vaguely remember hearing an interview with Jodie Foster where she mentioned that one of the reasons she was attracted to the role was because it represented a female hero’s journey, a sort of distaff version of the Hero’s Journey popularized by Joseph Campbell (and, closer to our own comic hobby, the guys behind the ACTION PHILOSOPHERS comic: http://www.eviltwincomics.com/action/images/poster-big.jpg )