The Good For Her Genre: What It Is and Why You Should Care by Mathilda Zeller

What is a Good For Her Story?

I recently listened to a video essay from Rowan Ellis that absolutely rocked my world. Yes, I “listened” to it; I’m a mother of six and in order to keep up with the world of story, craft and genre, sometimes I have to listen to a video essay with my phone to my ear while I’m in the Family Dollar picking up toilet paper for my household. People usually assume I’m on hold with an insurance company. Don’t judge me.

Anyway, Rowan Ellis gave a brief history of the Good For Her Story. It started with a viral tweet and ended with Ellis watching several movies supposedly in this genre and proposing a five-point criteria for what qualifies a story to be Good For Her.

According to Ellis, a Good For Her Story must:

1) Have a female central character

2) That heroine has fallen prey to an unjust system

3) She outwits or conquers the system not by playing by the expected rules, but by her own.

4) She feels no remorse about doing this

5) There is a sense of catharsis for both the heroine and the audience

And that’s it! Pretty simple, yes? It is simple, deceptively so.

For me, the beauty of using this framework to look at different stories was that I realized several things.

Good For Her Stories defy genre and social expectation

First, I realized Good For Her Stories are a fascinating creature because not only do they transcend the in-world system of oppression (most commonly the patriarchy) but they also transcend the boundaries between genres.

Consider the delightful endless array of Good For Her Stories and their conventional genres:

Pride and Prejudice – Romance

Knives Out (2020 film) – Murder Mystery

Amelie (2001 film) – Comedy

A Little Princess – Juvenile Fiction

Matilda – Juvenile Fantasy

Mexican Gothic (Silvia Moreno Garcia) – Gothic Horror

A Consuming Fire (Laura Weymouth) – YA Fantasy

The Invisible Man (2020 film) – Thriller/Suspense

And the list goes on. The possibilities for Good For Her Stories across all genres are endless.

Second, the beauty of Good for Her Stories is that they provide people, especially systemically oppressed people, perhaps especially female oppressed people, with several important things: wish fulfillment, emotional catharsis, and inspiration.

We can’t all develop telekinesis and give our tormentors their just desserts, but sometimes, watching Matilda do just that can give us a dopamine shot that we desperately needed.

We are very unlikely to inherit a vast and beautiful New England estate from our famous novelist employer, but we can cheer for Marta when she, and not the vapid, selfish, and conniving Thrombey family, comes out victor and heiress in Knives Out.

There is so much we can’t control in life, from the potentially toxic societies and families we are born into to the potentially toxic bosses and coworkers with whom we must get along in order to make a living. This is why seeing other unseen, underestimated, and exploited women win just….Feels….Good.

More than making us feel good, Good For Her Stories can inspire us to take more active and unconventional approaches to handling our own problems and our own oppression.

Good For Her heroines that win with virtue

Of his directorial vision of the 2015 Cinderella, Kenneth Branagh said:

“In fact, I felt we were being a little revolutionary – I felt we were doing a film unashamedly about goodness. Disney at one point picked up on this and said yeah, goodness as a superpower. And yes, maybe that’s true, but it’s also trying to access that quality without seeming self-righteous or pious, or too-good-to-be-true. I think Cinderella, in Chris Weitz’s screenplay, can be funny and sexy and smart and kind, but she can turn the other cheek. She can, through knowing herself as she does, be totally at peace with these qualities. And I would call that real strength.”

In Cinderella, Cinderella subverts the oppressive system and plays by her own rules–rather than falling prey to the objectification of a Choose Your Bride Ball, she runs away when she has the prince’s attention. Rather than succumbing to the vanity and jealousy that consumed her stepsisters, she actively chooses kindness and gentleness.

Similarly, Marta (Knives Out) destroys Ransom’s plan to frame her for the death of his grandfather by giving CPR and calling an ambulance for the poisoned housekeeper, Fran. She was operating within a social group where everyone, by and large, acted in ulterior, selfish ways, and expected her to do so as well. Rather than meet those low expectations, she chose nobility.

Good For Her heroines that win with moral greyness

Choosing nobility, kindness, and goodness are not the only path forward for the Good For Her heroine, of course. Equally delicious are the narratives in which the heroine’s boundless (or perhaps boundaryless) selflessness is the very means by which she is exploited.

In the film Gaslight (1944), the heroine is constantly told by her husband that the flickering lights and her misplacing of precious possessions are the fruits of her disturbed and unstable mind. As a “good” wife is generally expected to believe her husband and give him the benefit of the doubt, the heroine is nearly driven to madness by, well, her husband’s gaslighting.

In order for this heroine to throw off her oppression and play by her own rules, she must make the active choice to trust herself and what she sees with her own eyes, a feat that is tragically difficult at times for women living in a world where they are perpetually patronized and gaslit.

Yet trust herself she does, and by so doing, overcomes her abusive, murderous husband, and claims justice not only for herself, but for her husband’s murder victim.

Beyond emotional catharsis, enjoyers can find empowerment in Good For Her Heroines. If Marta can win against a scheming greedy family and a would-be murderer, if Matilda can win against the adult bullies at home and at school, than perhaps our wit, savagery, kindness, and creativity can help us win against bullies and oppressive systems as well, bringing us to a well-deserved and unexpected happily ever after of our own.

And I think that’s the thing I like best about Good For Her Stories.

Good For Her means hope for us.

Do You Like Good For Her Stories? Here’s mine.

If you enjoy Good For Her Stories as much as I do, here’s another good thing: I wrote one.

The Revenge of Bridget Cleary follows the daughter of a murdered woman charged by the fairies to claim justice for her mother’s death by stealing a large amount of gold and killing her mother’s murderer, who also happens to be her father.

Our heroine does get her happy ending but not by playing by the rules of Victorian society or the Fairy Courts. She chooses her own, third path, as do her friends, who are on similar Good For Her journeys of their own.

If this sounds, Good For You, The Revenge of Bridget Cleary is available for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop.org. Google Play, and Kobo.

Mathilda Zeller has inhabited two continents, three countries, 11 of the United States, and 18 towns. Don’t ask her where she’s from; it’s complicated. She endeavors to make you lose sleep with fantasy and horror stories and currently makes her home in the midwest with her husband, six children, and two cats.

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