Unit on Agency

What is agency?

According to Wikipedia, “In social science, agency is the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices. By contrast, structure is those factors of influence (such as social class, religion, gender, ethnicity, ability, customs, etc.) that determine or limit an agent and his or her decisions.”                    

Note that in order for a character to have agency, he/she has to have a choice to make. If you are out in the rain with an umbrella, you have a choice: put up the umbrella, or don’t put it up. If you have no umbrella, you have no choice: you are going to get wet. Also note that the definition talks about the ability or capacity to make choices, not whether someone actually uses their capacity, and certainly not whether the results are what the person choosing wanted or expected.

And that’s where fiction comes in. When you start looking, agency is all over all kinds of fiction, from different angles. There are stories about people who made good or bad choices in the past and then suffer the consequences; stories about people who face current choices, large or small, personal or public; stories about people who have no choices and want some, or who struggle to find or create choices where there seem to be none. Fiction is, to a large extent, about the choices characters make and the desirable or undesirable results those choices have.

A character who gives up and accepts his/her fate at a critical moment in a story – especially someone who still seems to have choices, but who refuses to do anything about them or make any further moves to achieve his/her goals – loses a lot of readers, even though choosing not to act when one is able is, theoretically, still a choice. It is almost always a huge, horrible let-down when someone who has struggled through half a novel or better, against increasingly heavy odds, decides to give up the fight.

As always, there are exceptions. The two that come to mind are the character who has truly exhausted all his/her choices, and the character who still has choices but who has succumbed to despair and thus can’t see or act on any of his/her few remaining options. They both require a fair bit of groundwork and setup, and both are still tough to pull off. For my money, the character who succumbs to despair is a bit easier than the character who truly has no more choices, because if there is any other option that the reader can see (and readers can get really creative when it looks as if their favorite character is about to succumb to some inevitability or other), they will never believe that the character couldn’t/wouldn’t think of the same thing. And having a choice but not using it is far worse than having no choices at all. (Sitting and thinking hard about the best move to make next is a kind of positive action, provided it doesn’t go on so long that the reader starts getting impatient.)

·       Patricia Wrede, “Agency in Fiction”

MICRO (deals with individuals)	MACRO  (deals with society)
Agency	Structure
Individual choice / “free will”  Who has power?	Social forces Who or what limits power?

Link to A Room of One's Own


NOTE:

When you read, analyze, and discuss the literature from this perspective, structure questions, such as "What cripples Daisy's agency?", or, "How effective is Woolf in advocating for female agency as writers?", or "How are the girls in The Crucible trying to attain agency?".

Let's look at some characters from fiction to begin the conversation:

• The narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper
• Mayella Ewell and Scout Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird
• Beatrice from "Rappiccini's Daughter"
• The girls in The Crucible
• Piggy, Ralph, and Jack in Lord of the Flies