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A Heroine in Hiding Historically, throughout literature, there has been a genre in the way that authors portray the roles of women, a genre that has almost no association with women playing the role of the hero. Through further analysis of some stereotypical female roles from Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony, and Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman it will become evident that the females in these two novels are themselves heroes. Some stereotypical roles that women will often fulfill in literary works are, what I will be naming, the passive female, the unsympathetic woman, and the new woman. All of these roles, when considered more thoughtfully, are admirable in some sense or another and therefore heroic. Although both readers and writers of literature have failed to give heroines the recognition they deserve, this does not mean that the heroine does not exist. What this simply means is that within literature men have historically played the role if the hero and therefore society is unfamiliar with the idea of a heroine. This is explained in Nadya Aisenberg’s Ordinary Heroines, “...the hero has nonetheless been our culture’s central symbol. Hence within our male-dominated culture we experience great