At long last, another of our awesome female characters: Clare DeTamble from The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (beware: this will contain spoilers though I try to gloss over specific plot points). I have read this book countless times now. In fact, the first time I read it, I closed it, sat for a minute, and then opened it up again to start over. One of the greatest things about Clare as an element of the story is that while so much of the storyline is about Henry, the real factor at play here is the way that they have shaped each other through time and circumstance.
She is the titular character here and the first one that we hear from. The story is written from two viewpoints: Henry, the involuntary time traveler, and Clare, the time traveler's wife. Though Henry's voice is so dominant in the chronicle of their lives it is truly Clare's story that shines through and gives it definition. It's Clare who we follow from youth to adolescence to adulthood with a much greater focus. We get snippets of Henry's past but nothing like a clear picture of his life, really. He travels back and meets her as a young girl and as he begins shaping her life (admittedly in an inadvertently twisted way), she begins to change him in the time that he comes from. Clare teaches Henry to be reliable, or as reliable as he can be. She teaches him to maintain hope through the futility of his life. That's really what this novel is about. It isn't an epic love story. It's a story about the futility of predestination, about reliving memories over and over, about learning from the past even if you don't know if you can change the future.
Henry is the tennis ball in The Time Traveler's Wife, batted back and forth through time, and Clare is his constant. She is the one thing we can depend on in this story. The only times we truly see her fall apart are when they are trying to conceive and when Henry dies. She is a rock not just for Henry but for the reader. We know who she is and we can rely on her to act, for the most part, with wisdom, compassion, and justice. Clare isn't perfect and as I've said before, no good heroine is perfect. If she was, we couldn't aspire to be more like her--she would be out of reach. Clare's biggest flaw is that she spends so much of her time just waiting. She tries to find things to do to fill the time while Henry is gone but she doesn't seek to do them with other people, just by herself. And she goes back and forth between glorying in the freedom and despairing in the loneliness.
Clare is strong and determined with an incredible foresight. So much of the end is left to our imagination but from what I read into Clare, I know this much is true: In spite of defining herself as simply The Time Traveler's Wife, she rises up beyond her relationship with Henry and builds herself a life with her daughter and teaches us that we are not victims of circumstance as long as we pull ourselves above it and move forward.
