by Sady Doyle
The source of this sudden abundance of heterosexual passion is a confession—and if you know your Gothic, what Maxim confesses is far from surprising. Maxim loves the second Mrs. de Winter after all; he’s just been feeling under the weather ever since he murdered his last wife.
Specifically, when Rebecca told him that she was pregnant with someone else’s child, Maxim shot her and put her body out to sea in a leaky boat, trusting that it would sink. A husband, a pregnant wife, and a body dumped in the water: after all the foggy, Gothic ambiguity and romanticism, it’s a shock to look at Maxim and discover Scott Peterson in a better outfit.
Yet, somehow, it’s Rebecca who is marked as evil and inhuman, the serpent-bride at large; even looking at her, according to one character, “gave you the feeling of a snake.”25 Like Melusine, she is rejected (or, in this case, killed) for being a biological contaminant in Maxim’s noble line, either through her infidelity or through her own warped and monstrous body. Medical testimony soon reveals that her uterus and genitals were cancerous, riddled with disease and inexplicable mutation; one doctor, unprovoked, mentions a “certain malformation of the uterus…which meant she could never have a child.”26 Mrs. Danvers describes Rebecca as boundless and ravenous, a devouring goddess to whom lesser mortals were sacrificed:
“ ‘That’s right, my dear,’ I’d tell her, ‘no-one will put upon you. You were born into this world to take what you could out of it,’ and she did, she didn’t care, she wasn’t afraid”…“No-one got the better of her, never, never,” she said. “She did what she liked, she lived as she liked…. She cared for nothing and for no-one. And then she was beaten in the end. But it wasn’t a man, it wasn’t a woman. The sea got her.”27
The sea takes its dragons back in the end. Rebecca’s unrepentant sexuality—too big for her marriage, for any one man, for any one gender, for the world—renders her a malevolent, almost supernatural force. She could never truly be anyone’s wife. She had to be killed, lest she profane the very concept of marriage.
“It’s people like me who have careers who really have bitched up the old relationship between men and women,” du Maurier wrote to her unrequited love, Ellen Doubleday. “Women ought to be soft and gentle and dependent. Disembodied spirits like myself are all wrong.”28
But even in glimpses, as the disembodied spirit haunting du Maurier’s novel, Rebecca seems oddly, malevolently glorious; there is real power in her declaration that “I shall live as I please…and the whole world won’t stop me.”29 When we look at the woman who does behave like a good wife—the second Mrs. de Winter, soft and gentle and dependent, drab and mousy and victimized, clinging to her husband and making excuses for him while he describes how he, literally, got away with murder—we’re forced to wonder if wifeliness is really such a wonderful thing after all.
Men in This Country
We are not supposed to be worrying about these problems. We live in the post-housewife age, the age when marriage is less an institution than a perpetual camping trip with your favorite pal; same-sex marriage is the law of the land, cohabitation and living single are both valid options, no-fault divorce is available in all fifty states, and heterosexual marriage, if you do it at all, is supposed to be fun. This is the golden age of commitment, where everyone takes out the trash and the honeymoon lasts forever.
You wish. Despite the ever-sounding Klaxons of progress, the numbers just don’t add up. According to the Pew Research Center, most married women do work nowadays, but in heterosexual marriages, the average wife still provides literally twice as much childcare as her husband every week (fourteen hours to seven, respectively) and does nearly double the housework (eighteen hours to ten). On top of this, she is expected to accomplish around eighteen hours of (probably low-) paying work. The average man, meanwhile, works a hearty thirty-seven-hour week, then spends some time around the edges picking up chores.30
The increased presence of women in the workplace seems to have only aggravated men’s need for domestic control. In one Fairleigh Dickinson PublicMind study, conducted during the 2016 presidential election, men who were reminded that “in a lot of American households, women make more money than men do” were substantially more likely to vote for Donald Trump and against his female opponent, Hillary Clinton.31 A 2018 study found that, in households where women do out-earn their male partners, those wives lie about how much money they make so as not to outshine their husbands. So do the husbands; while the women literally shrink their own accomplishments in conversation, their husbands exaggerate their incomes by around 2.9 percent.32
Though it is no longer possible for contemporary women to be submissive, housebound Victorian brides, we are still expected to think like them. The financial and political realities of the twenty-first century are being tacked on to the gender roles and expectations of previous ages, leaving women struggling to accomplish contemporary goals while embodying Victorian ideals.
Straight women adopt and internalize these ideals because we’re told marriage will make us good, or make us happy, or (given the constant contempt poured on spinsters) that marriage is an accomplishment, like getting into a good college, and we’ll be losers if we don’t qualify. We act like “wives” even if it kills us, because—like du Maurier before us—we’ve been made to believe that a failure to be naturally and happily wifely signifies a flaw in our personalities, rather than a problem with the role itself.
Yet study after study shows that women simply don’t like being married to men—no matter how we romanticize or idealize the institution from the outside, no matter how lonely or insecure we may feel about not being picked, once we’re in, we’re banging on the walls demanding to be let out again. Sociologist Lisa Wade, summing up the research, says that married women are “less happy than single women and less happy than their husbands, they are less eager than men to marry, they’re more likely to file for divorce and, when they do, they are happier as divorcees than they were when married (the opposite is true for men) and they are more likely than men to prefer never to remarry.”33 Married women routinely rank at the bottom of happiness surveys, while married men are near the top. One 2017 survey by the National Health Service found that women were unhappier than men all their lives, and especially unhappy in the prime marriage and child-rearing decades of their thirties, forties, and fifties—but that female happiness saw a sharp uptick once the women reached their mid-eighties, because by then, their husbands were dead.34
I should pause here to admit that I’m married to a man, and that I usually enjoy it, and that my husband does most of the cooking. (“Just as God has been pronounced dead quite often but has a sneaky way of resurrecting himself,” wrote second-wave feminist Shulamith Firestone, “so everyone debunks marriage but ends up married.”)35 Yet it’s hard to deny the obvious conclusion here: heterosexual marriage, despite the cosmetic improvements we’ve made to it over the years, is still an institution set up to benefit men at women’s expense. Women are told, their whole lives, that marriage has gone from a means of subjugation to a romantic adventure; a five-star resort built in an abandoned prison. But when they arrive, there are still locks on the doors. The cells still have bars. Our attitudes have shifted, our expectations have shifted, but the institution itself remains largely unchanged. It would be crazy not to feel some frustration.
Think back on Scott Peterson, and all the female hatred he inspired. Here was a grown man who still saw himself as (to use Gloria Allred’s corny phrase) a “bon vivant”; a perpetual frat boy, floating through party after party, going on fishing trips and bedding masseuses.36 He was not smart. He was not kind. He was not exceptional in anything but the sheer depth of his selfishness. Yet Laci Peterson had jumped through a thousand hoops to please him. And even though she had worked as hard as possible to be as wifely as possible, even though she found the husband, planned the wedding, conceived the son, watched the cooking shows, and otherwise fulfilled pretty mu
ch every requirement society put on her, in the end, he killed her anyway. She had died trying to measure up to a man who was beneath her. So what were the rest of us doing? Who were we trying to measure up to, and why, if even a “perfect” wife could still get thrown away?
Of course women hated Scott. He was the living proof that they’d been sold a phony bill of goods, that the game of heterosexuality was not worth the candle. Not only was marriage not a ticket to happiness or fulfillment, it wasn’t even any safer than our other options: Laci could do everything right, or “right,” and still wind up a collection of half-rotten body parts floating around a bay.
Lady Lazarus
“I’m so much happier now that I’m dead.”37 If the details of the Scott Peterson case sound familiar to you, and if you (somehow) missed them the first time around, you’re probably thinking of the 2012 book-slash-movie-slash-quote-on-everyone’s-Tumblr-dashboard, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.
In Flynn’s novel, the dead wife in question, Amy Dunne, is a survivor gifted with charismatic sociopathy, a knack for elaborate event planning—Laci’s Martha Stewart fandom is seemingly the one personality trait to have survived her fictionalization—and a sadistic rage-on for her bumbling, cheating husband, Nick. (Played in the David Fincher adaptation, obviously, by Ben Affleck; some coincidences are too good to waste.) After discovering his infidelity, Amy manages to fake her own death, frame Nick for murder, and skip town.
“I’m going to hide out long enough to watch Lance Nicholas Dunne become a worldwide pariah, to watch Nick be arrested, tried, marched off to prison, bewildered in an orange jumpsuit and handcuffs,” she tells us. Then, she’ll drown herself: “My body may never be discovered, or it may resurface weeks, months later, eroded to the point that my death can’t be time-stamped—and I will provide a last bit of evidence to make sure Nick is marched to the padded cross, the prison table where he’ll be pumped with poison and die.”38
Well, ah, yeah. You can quibble with the taste level here. (Do we really need to see the dead woman in a domestic violence case as the villain?) But, like Lucy Westenra avenging poor, meek Mercy Brown, there’s a kind of justice in seeing these “good,” victimized girls come back to us in fiction as inconvenient, frightening, monstrous women.
And Amy’s sociopathy does have a clear precedent—not in life, but in fiction: “She was clever, of course…. Damnably clever,” Maxim de Winter says of his dead wife. “No one would guess meeting her that she was not the kindest, most generous, most gifted person in the world. She knew exactly what to say to different people, how to match her mood to theirs.”39 He could be describing Amazing Amy.
There is something eerie in reading Amy’s description of her own battered, drowned body—“I’ve actually felt sad for myself, picturing my slim, naked, pale body, floating just beneath the current…my waterlogged flesh peeling off in soft streaks, me slowly disappearing into the current like a watercolor until just the bones are left”—as if all those thrown-away girls in the water were speaking to us, delivering their own eulogies.40 But Amy’s monologue is also a literary wish-fulfillment fantasy; a way to retell Rebecca with its most interesting character still onstage.
“Nick must be taught a lesson,” Amy tells us. “He’s never been taught a lesson! He glides through life with that charming-Nicky grin, his beloved-child entitlement, his fibs and shirkings, his shortcomings and selfishness, and no one calls him on anything. I think this experience will make him a better person. Or at least a sorrier one. Fucker.”41
Gone Girl sold by the truckload, in part because Flynn did not try to sanitize the brutality of Amy’s resentment. If you’ve been through enough, the difference between making a man better and making him sorrier can be tough to figure out. In fact, it may not matter. If the book’s success is any indication, that kind of rage bubbles underneath the surface of many “normal” marriages, and behind the smiles of many seemingly happy women. Gone Girl gave women a way to vent their daily indignities and unspeakable anger safely and without consequence; let us have our wedding cake and poison it, too; it was an opportunity to save the wife and punish her husband for killing her at the same time.
Are You the Wife?
“If you can’t take care of me while I’m alive, you have made me dead anyway,” Amy says. “[Nick] destroyed and rejected the real me a piece at a time—you’re too serious, Amy, you’re too uptight, Amy, you overthink things, you analyze too much, you’re no fun anymore, you make me feel useless, Amy, you make me feel bad, Amy. He took away chunks of me with blasé swipes: my independence, my pride, my esteem…He killed my soul, which should be a crime. Actually, it is a crime. According to me, at least.”42
Amy is, admittedly, a monster. But she’s right that there’s more than one way to kill your wife. Beyond the spectacular violence of shootings and stranglings and wives thrown in rivers, there is the daily, grinding violence of subservience and loss of self—which, like those more visible attacks, is a built-in part of the system. To this day, women are expected to give up more of themselves in marriage than men are; to change our names, change our goals, to give up our homes or careers or autonomy or our very identities. Like the protagonist of Rebecca, we are still expected to be “Mrs. [Whoever]” and no one else. The stories contemporary women tell about marriage are documents of a fractured consciousness; torn between the complicated, thinking people they are and the wives they’re supposed to be, between the marriages they have and the capital-M Marriage that is still the cultural ideal. At the points where autonomy and personhood bump up against the edges of wifeliness, monsters arise.
But those monsters are only reflections of a deeper powerlessness, impractical revenge fantasies against a system too huge and old and powerful for even the most monstrous woman to defeat. Despite all the work we’ve done to reform it, the bones of marriage are not romantic. As originally intended, a wife is just a woman who’s been brought under male control, and marriage is just the process by which men make wives out of women; an institution built, like Bluebeard’s bloody chamber, to make girls disappear.
“Bridget Boland, the wife of Michael Cleary, in the name of God.” That’s how Bridget was asked to describe herself in the last days of her life; it’s the phrase she had to repeat, over and over, to prove she was human.
It’s a phrase that haunts us still. In Ireland, Bridget has become a children’s rhyme: “Are you a witch, or are you a fairy / Or are you the wife of Michael Cleary?” The question in that rhyme was the last thing Bridget ever heard. She died trying to answer it. Over hundred and twenty years later, we are asking her still. But we don’t ask for Bridget Boland anymore. In fact, we don’t even ask for Bridget Cleary. She is, now and forever, “the wife.” She has disappeared into the man who killed her, so completely that she no longer has her own name.
* Scott Peterson insisted that, on the morning Laci supposedly died, she was watching Martha Stewart make meringue on television. The prosecution argued that Stewart had not mentioned meringue on that day’s episode, and that Scott was making up a fake TV segment to cover for the fact that he’d killed her. The defense eventually dug up tapes of the episode in question, making this possibly the first case in history where people watched aspirational cooking shows in order to solve a murder. (Source: Chris Taylor, “Peterson’s Martha Defense,” TIME, June 6, 2004.)
Part IIIMOTHERS
5.
BIRTH
I think nature’s a bit of a cunt, don’t you?
—Prevenge (2016)
In the spring of 1815, Mary Shelley dreamed of fire.
“Dream that my little baby came to life again,” she wrote in her journal; “that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it by the fire and it lived—I awake and find no baby—I think about the little thing all day.”1
The baby never had a name. She was never going to live long enough to need it; Shelley gave birth to her several months too e
arly, just at the end of her second trimester. In the present day, at the best hospital in the world, Shelley’s baby would only have a fifty-fifty chance of survival. In the nineteenth century, without access to modern medicine or a NICU, it was a death sentence.
But the baby held on for longer than expected—long enough for Shelley to get her hopes up. Long enough to get attached. She and her not-yet-husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, even moved to a new, larger home, hoping to make more room for their family. One night, a few days after the move, Shelley noticed that her daughter hadn’t woken up for her usual feeding, and decided to let her sleep through it. By the morning, she still wasn’t crying, and Shelley knew her baby was dead.
In the days and weeks after childbirth, life and death have a way of blurring together—they seem closer than you’d think, not two opposed points on a continuum but two sides of the same locked door. You, the formerly pregnant person, are bleeding, you are wounded, you have been in agony, all of which makes death feel very present; meanwhile, a person who was not alive is now in the world, proof that the life force itself has been in you and passed through you, a giant winged shadow gliding along the surface of the world. Birth is a moment when you touch the hidden mechanisms of the universe. It’s a time when you work wonders. It seems almost rational that, if the baby died, you could just bring it back again—just as, before the baby was born, it was as absent and unknowable as someone dead.
Shelley’s dream emerged from that liminal moment and stayed with her a long time. The guilt and second-guessing (the baby was only cold, the baby was only hungry, why didn’t you just wake her up) seem to have mingled with her miraculous vision, the power of the body exposed to fire.