In literary fiction today, there exists a profound anxiety over the complex female character — and where she could possibly be. For years, we’ve had our Holdens and our Hamlets; we’ve put up with young Werther and his innumerable sorrows. But what about the existential musings of female characters, their passions and their philosophical obsessions?

We read Ulysses, marvel at the psyche of Raskolnikov, accompany Jack Kerouac on the road. We praise these as masterpieces of humanity, but ignore that they deal with only half of humanity’s scope. We rarely afford the same capability for intellectual angst to female characters, who have more mundane — and supposedly less intellectually stimulating — problems to worry about. When Werther kills himself, it’s because he’s a messed up dude. When Anna Karenina kills herself, it’s because of a man.

Women never get to be messed up dudes. They are not “tormented” or Byronic. For a long time, fictional works and their accompanying criticsm have struggled to explore female characters beyond the chalked lines of archetype. Literature has shortchanged and demonized women. More often than not, it simply leaves them out. Female characters never get invited to the party, or the big cool whale-hunting trip. And while critics commonly regard the Romantics, the existentialists and the Beat Generation as male movements that write about male feelings, there's little space in this intellectual history for women.

In a recent article in Public Books, Tess McNulty posed a challenge: “Ask the average critic, professor or reader to name an experimental novelist and they will more likely name a man.” We frequently view the avant-garde as the jurisdiction of male writers, despite the fact that there are plenty of women behind experimental fiction as well. What is most striking about McNulty’s point is not that female writers are marginalized — we know this already — but rather that their marginalization excludes them from the literary avant-garde — a strain regarded as high-brow, innovative and deserving of special intellectual merit.

The overarching attitude seems to be that women can operate in fiction, but just not in any of the smart stuff. This is compounded by criticism’s broader failure to promote female characters as sources of intellectual or philosophical inspiration. Whether real or fictional, women are rarely understood as prompting the enduring questions that make literature universal, which we invoke when we use the nebulous phrase, “the human condition.”

All this is not to say women don’t appear in fiction or aren’t central to many of its works. They are. But readers and critics rarely uphold female characters as paradigmatic examples of human struggle — whether it be with the world, with god or with oneself. At most, the female character does battle with the patriarchy, and is regarded merely as a literary victim of gendered oppression.

A salient example is The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, a prominent 1963 novel about a young, intelligent woman named Esther who succumbs to depression after a summer in New York. As has been well documented, The Bell Jar became a “feminist touchstone” after its publication; feminists and women’s movements since the ‘70s have raised up Plath’s passages like they were banners, toting famous quotes such as, “I hated the idea of serving men” or “I was my own woman.”

And while The Bell Jar certainly contains valuable insight into a woman’s lived experience during that period, our framework for reading it has become increasingly narrow and gendered. Now, critics are bent on representing the protagonist, above all, as the female victim of a misogynistic world. They forget that Esther is, more importantly, also a victim of mental illness — one whose poignant struggle can resonate with young readers regardless of gender.

That is why our current interpretations of Plath are so limiting. We plunder her words, her diaries and even her biography for evidence of how difficult it is to be a woman. But what about the larger issue that looms in Plath’s work? What about how difficult it is to be human?

In 2013, The Guardian published an article about Plath's legacy, inviting famous writers such as Lena Dunham and Jennifer Eagen to discuss the impact of The Bell Jar on their lives and aspirations. Most contributors noted how revolutionary Esther was in her resistance to gender norms, declaring that she wielded a “role which few women claimed” and refused to be “a doormat” in a man’s world.

But of the 12 contributors in this article, were any of them male? Of course not, because as someone once quipped in The New Yorker, Plath’s novel is a version of A Catcher in the Rye “for girls.” Even in 2013, the idea of a man being intellectually inspired by Plath’s genius was unfeasible.

In 2015, Gillian Flynn published the wildly popular Gone Girl, and everyone went crazy debating whether the novel was a searing indictment of gender norms or a terrible caricature of female insanity. Both sides missed the point, which is that the novel is about a sociopath — a disturbed and disturbing person who stages her own murder, lies compulsively, contemplates suicide and eventually kills someone else. At the heart of it, the characterization presents a look at a dysfunctional and morally bereft human being, and yet Buzzfeed is too busy obsessing over how the book responds to “meninism" to notice.

Gillian Flynn has said that she’s not holding up her protagonist as a “model of female empowerment.” But critics are so enamored with the idea of having “unlikeable women” in literature, that they make the patriarchy the most interesting thing about these characters. The pay-off is that men’s problems in fiction are prosaic and worldly: spiritual poverty, moral ambivalence, ennui. Meanwhile, women’s problems are men — or rather, the things that men make them do.

Ironically, one of the fairest reviews of The Bell Jar was published in 1971, at a time when American students were still smuggling in copies of the book from England. The review describes Esther Greenwood as so much more than a gendered knee-jerk response to patriarchy. She is not a woman who hates men or loves men or wants to be a man. Rather, she is just “a human being who cannot avoid seeing that the price we pay for life is death.” We know exactly where the female complex character is. She has been in literature all along — in the classics, the avant-garde, the contemporary and the chick lit. We just have to give her the reading she deserves.