Kill off your story’s heroine? You misogynist! Some critics seem to accept as fact the theory that if a heroine in a literary work dies, the author is, categorically, an oppressor of women. And the situation is even worse in opera.
Charlotte Higgins’s 2016 article in The Guardian lists a number of opera heroines (12 in her first paragraph!) who meet with unhappy demises, and then Higgins states the unfortunate “truth” that opera, like other narrative-based art forms, chews up and spits out female characters.
