When She Was Good and the Eclipse of the Virtuous Heroine: A Revaluation

Abstract: Beginning with a brief discussion of the lack of serious revaluations of Roth’s work amidst the scandal surrounding Roth’s biographer Blake Bailey, this essay considers the overlooked importance of Roth’s early satiric novel, When She Was Good (1967). The novel may be said to mark Roth’s lasting challenge to the Anglo-American tradition of the heroine distinguished above all by her virtuous character. Roth implicitly alludes to earlier saintly heroines in his portrait of Lucy Nelson, who, as she comes of age, ultimately embodies the apotheosis of what Harold Bloom has called “the heroine of the Protestant will.” Roth’s representation of the American middle class Protestant value system, with its imperial conviction of its own righteousness and its blind sentimentalization of the women who carried its banner, freed Roth to write his next novel, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). It was as if exorcising the demonically virtuous shiksa Lucy Nelson was necessary before he could speak in his own voice. In When She Was Good , Roth explores a psychology of personal grievance that resonates eerily on both sides of the political spectrum today.