10 fictional women in literature who are eternally enigmatic

By Madeliene Rose

The best literary pieces are eternal because the message they bring never dies or because the characters born out of the stories we remember, just as we would remember old friends. While some we never forget because they made us laugh or fall in love, there are some female literary characters whom we can never forget because they are eternally enigmatic.

1. Madame Chauchat

A door left to slam shut will not go by unnoticed, once we read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain because it will remind us of Clavdia Chauchat making her “noisy entrance” into the hall and taunting Mann’s protagonist while doing so. Donning her bright colored skirts or peignoir, Madame Chauchat “has the same eyes” as a boy Hans Castorp once knew in school, and while at first Clavdia is perceived by Hans Castorp with feelings of disapproval, he soon becomes obsessed with this woman who never chooses to reveal too much of herself.

“Gliding” in and out of Hans Castorp’s days, Clavdia gives him something important to get him through his time in the sanatorium and a reason not to leave and continue with his life — unrequited love. Most of what we see of Madame Chauchat in this story is her tucking her hair back into her braid, moving “in a soft, fluid motion” in the dining hall and her eyes, which “could darken, almost melt, to a veiled dusky look.” Becoming an alluring and unattainable source for Hans Castorp, all we ever get of Clavdia is an X-ray of her insides bearing bones and nothing else.

2. Juliana Bordereau

When there is only one person left in the world who was close to someone you admire, then that person becomes your only source to feel as close to your hero as it is physically possible. This is what Juliana Bordereau becomes for the nameless protagonist in Henry James’ The Aspern Papers, as she once was the lover of Jeffrey Aspern, the poet the protagonist is obsessed with. Juliana belongs to the past, an alluring past, and despite being very old — “a grinning skull” — the protagonist still refers to her as, “the divine Juliana” because of her association.

Despite being in possession of letters written by Jeffrey Aspern addressed to her, she never allows us, or the protagonist, to merely catch a glimpse of his handwriting and by the end of the story, we are left with no Juliana and with no idea as to whether the letters were burned before her death.

3. Clarisse

When a 17-year-old girl helps to change the course of one man’s life, despite the risks, then it is very hard to forget about that girl. Clarisse takes only a couple of pages in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and yet, she leaves an undeniable mark, especially because she never says goodbye, not to the protagonist, not to us, and we are left unsure as to whether she died or ran away. With her nonchalance and youth, and despite the oppression going on, Clarisse shows Guy Montag that life should be more than just a place where people go, “somewhere, somewhere, nowhere” — rushing and never really doing anything, never stopping to look and think and question.

4. Lady Brett Ashley

The unforgettable woman in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises is the ultimate guy’s girl and the one the protagonist, Jake Barnes, can never have to himself. Lady Brett Ashley is always with men, drinking as much as them and getting married like it is nothing. “Her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that,” Barnes explains of the woman, who together with him and a group of men, head to Spain to watch the wild bulls, while going on a drinking binge that lasts days.

“She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes,” Barnes tell us. “They would look on and on after everyone else’s eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that.” Always at the center of the group and the life of the party, it was only in the back seats of taxis, along with the protagonist, that we could catch a glimpse of this woman’s fears and insecurities.

5. Lolita

Probably one of the most popular enigmatic characters in literature, Lolita leaves us wondering because we are never quite sure if she was a victim who turned into a flirt or if this was only an interpretation of her from the man who fell in love with her. Whatever the truth may be, Vladimir Nabokov has given us an unforgettable literary character whom we will remember as eternally young with an old soul.

What’s fascinating about this girl is that she was only made exceptional and eternal thanks to the narrator. “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock,” he explains. “She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita,” and because of him, there will only ever be one Lolita in this world.

6. Holly Golightly

“Home is where you feel at home. I’m still looking,” Holly Golightly says at one point in the story. A contradictory figure, this enigmatic woman is bold yet afraid of so many things, she is poor but has expensive taste and she is wild but with a heart aching for the brother she left behind. “Never love a wild thing,” she says, and as we reach the end of Truman Capote’s story, we can only imagine where Golightly will go next and if she will ever find a place that feels like home.

7. Caddy Compson

The enigmatic is bound to follow when you have a girl who is talked about throughout a whole novel, without her ever getting the chance to give us her perspective. This is what happens to Caddy in William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury. With her three brothers, each giving us their perspective on their sister, Caddy’s thoughts remain unknown as she goes through blossoming sexuality, the loss of her virginity and pregnancy.

We only get sensory glimpses of this girl. “Caddy smelled like trees,” one of her brothers remembers, while another recalls her putting her arms around him, her and “her shining veil.” The first time we see Caddy is also the first time Faulkner saw his enigmatic girl. “It began with a mental picture,” Faulkner told The Paris Review, “the picture was of the muddy seat of a little girl’s drawers in a pear tree, where she could see through a window where her grandmother’s funeral was taking place and report what was happening to her brothers on the ground below” — an image that ignited a story of inner dialogue and an eternal enigmatic girl.

8. Cecilia Lisbon

The neighborhood boys living in mundane suburbia had their youth tinged by the enigmatic when they became obsessed with the Lisbon girls, in Jeffrey Eugenides The Virgin Suicides. Of the four girls, however, it is the youngest, Cecilia, who remains wholly enigmatic, because she is the first one to die, on her second attempt to suicide. “What we have is a dreamer,” we read in the story, “when she jumped [out of her window] she probably thought she’d fly.”

We never get a dose of Cecelia. We never understand what is going on in her mind and the only thing we have of hers, it haunts us with endless questions — “Obviously, Doctor,” she says, when she survives her first suicide attempt, “you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.” Melancholia and angst pervade the whole novel and even when the boys are grown men with a belly and losing their hair, the girls still haunt them. “In the end,” the boys explain, “we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn’t name.”

9. Remedios the beauty

“The smell of Remedios the beauty kept on torturing men beyond death, right down to the dust of their bones.” This girl, found in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s, One Hundred Years of Solitude, embodies primal instincts, and beauty which leads the men in the village to go mad. We never get to understand the mind of this enigmatic girl, not even her own family does, but we do get to watch her living without inhibitions, with no notions of time or propriety.

“Sometimes she would get up to have lunch at three in the morning, sleep all day long,” explains the narrator, “and she spent several months with her timetable all in disarray until some casual incident would bring her back into the order of things.” Remedios the beauty would run around the house naked, with no notion of her sexuality. “A creature of purity,” her family were, nevertheless, “disturbed by her beauty, for it seemed a contradictory virtue to her, a diabolical trap at the center of her innocence.” Unlike anyone else, Remedios the beauty was never “a creature of this world,” and she leaves us before the book ends, waving goodbye amid “the flapping sheets that rose with her,” ascending to the sky.

10. Miss Havisham

Charles Dickens’ enigmatic woman has been a haunting image of revenge for decades now. Miss Havisham is always in that same one room in Great Expectations and yet she haunts the protagonist, Pip, and us, with her persistence towards anger and revenge, while she, and the things around her, degenerate with time. What is unfathomable is how this woman managed to stop time in that one room, so there is no one else to close off this list than Dickens’ enigmatic woman who never got to get married,

“She was dressed in rich materials,” Pip explains, “—satins, and lace, and silks,—all of white. Her shoes were white. And she had a long white veil dependent from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was white. Some bright jewels sparkled on her neck and on her hands, and some other jewels lay sparkling on the table. Dresses, less splendid than the dress she wore, and half-packed trunks, were scattered about. She had not quite finished dressing, for she had but one shoe on,—the other was on the table near her hand,—her veil was but half arranged, her watch and chain were not put on, and some lace for her bosom lay with those trinkets, and with her handkerchief, and gloves, and some flowers, and a Prayer-Book all confusedly heaped about the looking-glass.”