by Susan Bordo
. . . At the feast Anne sits beside Henry on the dais, and when she turns to speak to him her black lashes brush her cheeks. She is almost there now, almost there, her body taut like a bowstring, her skin dusted with gold, with tints of apricot and honey; when she smiles, which she does often, she shows small teeth, white and sharp.66
Mantel, of course, cannot be compared as a writer with Erickson (or with Gregory, for that matter), and her artistry brings touches that distinguish her Anne from the cartoon schemers of historical romance. Her Anne is brittle, anxious, tightly wound, and skinny; she exudes the nervous energy of a modern-day anorexic, her true self and laser focus carefully hidden away, constantly calculating how to keep up appearances lest her secrets be exposed. And, of course, she’s only a bit player in the novel, which is the world according to Cromwell. Yet it seems clear, especially with the publication of Bring Up the Bodies, that Mantel’s Anne is not just an “offering” of how Cromwell might have seen her, but Mantel’s own rejoinder to the more sympathetic portraits of other writers and filmmakers.
In both novels, for example, Mantel excludes some key historical material that, coincidentally, might cause readers to question (her) Cromwell’s view of Anne as a cold “strategist,” with whom he feels some identification but little affection,67 “a woman without remorse” who would “commit any sin or crime.”68Among the most famous material that she rejects are Anne’s eloquent speeches at her trial and on the scaffold, left out, Mantel says in her author’s note, because they “should be read with skepticism.”69 The explanation via skepticism over the authenticity of this material is odd, not only because there are multiple corroborating reports of both speeches, but because she has just told readers that she claims no historical “authority” for her version of things. Certainly, she doesn’t let history get in the way of other narrative choices. For example, it’s a matter of historical record that Anne’s longtime ally Cranmer, shocked by Anne’s arrest, sat down to write a letter to Henry expressing his amazement at the charges and his belief in Anne’s virtue. His writing was interrupted (as Cranmer relates when he resumes) by a visit from Cromwell and his cronies. They apparently helped him “change his mind” about Anne’s guilt, for the letter ends very differently than it begins, with poor Cranmer, clearly quaking in his boots, acknowledging that she must be guilty.70 Mantel chooses not to tell us about Cromwell’s interruption, although, of course, it’s part of his story. But this detail would have made Cromwell seem like more of a thug than Mantel wants to present him.
Mantel is creating a fiction, of course, and can do what she wants. But if she gives herself such free rein with Cranmer’s letter (and other incidents), it seems disingenuous to justify the absence of Anne’s speeches (and her final letter) on the basis of skepticism about their factual nature. Is this history or a novel? Mantel would be the first to acknowledge that it’s a novel. But her choices of what to include and what to eliminate from the historical record suggest that she (and not merely her Cromwell) is intent on building a case against Anne—not necessarily for the commission of the crimes with which she was accused (she leaves that ambiguous) but certainly as a cold, self-seeking manipulator.
I love Mantel’s writing; no other novelist has given us such a textured, unsettlingly “real” re-creation of Henry’s court and the tightrope nature of survival within it. But I can’t help wondering why, in an imaginative work of great depth and subtlety, we find the old, one-sided, extremist view of Anne as a wily schemer. Perhaps this is our “default” Anne, who insinuates herself in the imagination whenever we aren’t specifically focused on rehabilitating her. In The Tudors, it took the concerted efforts of Natalie Dormer to knock her off the page and replace her with someone more complex. And when Howard Brenton’s play Anne Boleyn opened in 2010—the first popular depiction of Anne since her early Protestant defenders to present her as a heroine of the Reformation—it was hailed as “fresh and sympathetic,”71 a “radically revisionist work” that “challenges received wisdom,”72 “an alternative history,”73 “eye opening,”74 “a re-materialization of . . . an Anne we have, until now, never seen,”75 which will “have the historians scratching their heads.”76 The praise for the vibrant, witty play was deserved, but few responsible historians would scratch their heads over Anne the reformist (Brenton himself credits his interpretation to historian Eric Ives). That Brenton’s sexy but spiritual Anne was “eye-opening” says more about the intransigence of temptress stereotypes than Brenton’s “radical” revision of history. And even in those appreciative reviews, the “received wisdom” kept popping up in the descriptions of Anne. She “used her sexual stranglehold over Henry VIII to pursue the idea of religious reform,”77 “advances herself in court—and Henry’s heart—by dedicating herself to the spirituality of William Tyndale’s low church, while simultaneously allowing a drooling, still-Catholic Henry to inch ever further up her leg over seven long years”78; “Her irresistible wickedness is a fiery companion to Anthony Howell’s fiercely lusty Henry as she tempts, resists and subsists to his advances over seven years.”79
I spoke with Brenton when the play first opened and can say with confidence that he had no interest in portraying Henry as “drooling” and Anne as having a “sexual stranglehold” over him. In fact, we talked at some length about those stereotypes and their indebtedness to the puritanical strain of Protestantism that had not yet developed in Anne’s own time.
I do think that even in England, the mind/body split, or the soul/body split, the fallen body, all that, which came out of Calvin, really, was only beginning to make its way into the reformist faction at this time. Come the turn of the century, it had taken hold, and it was warfare between the different sections of Puritans, really. But I thought, well, maybe it hadn’t really got hold by the time of this play. And that’s reflected in Anne’s version of Protestantism.80
In other words: Yes, Anne was sexual (and Brenton’s play definitely portrays her as such), but our reading of this as “wicked” (even if deliciously so) is a puritanical leap that would have baffled Anne. I’m not sure that I agree with Brenton’s chronology or genealogy regarding the mind/body split. What was clear from talking to him, though, was that he was much less interested in Anne’s hold over Henry than her advocacy of Tyndale’s Bible. That, and her courage: “What was extraordinary to me about her was her recklessness. The Tudor court was unbelievably dangerous and yet she got to the very center of it, and the only way out was either bear a male child or death. There was no other way out. There was no retreat, and that I thought was an extraordinary existential place to end up, and I thought the recklessness of it, the courage that took, was amazing.”81
Who Let the Bitch Out?
What is it about Anne the temptress/predator? Why do we keep returning to her, even though serious scholars have challenged the stereotype? The “femme fatale” is a long-standing archetype in many cultures, of course, and Anne is only one of many: Eve, Delilah, Salome, Jezebel, the sirens, Medea, Cleopatra, Morgan le Fay, Vampira, the Dragon Lady, and all their various incarnations and evil sisters in mythology, novels, fin-de-siècle painting, film noir, and television soaps. There are many explanations—cultural, psychological, feminist, and misogynist—for her appeal. Camille Paglia, in Sexual Personae, follows Freud and Nietzsche and argues that the femme fatale is “one of the most mesmerizing of sexual personae,” who will always have a cultural presence because “Woman,” beginning first of all with the mother, represents the seductions, betrayals, and “uncontrollable nearness of nature,” “a malevolent moon that keeps breaking through our fog of hopeful sentiment.”82 Bram Dijkstra sees her less as a permanent fixture grounded in the facts of women’s biological role and more as a periodically erupting, misogynist icon, whose popularity waxes and wanes historically. He illustrates this in Idols of Perversity through the culture of fin-de-siècle Europe, arguing that a wave of literary, artistic, and scientific “fantasies of feminine evil” flooded that period, externalizing
its misogyny and developing evolutionary racism. One of my Facebook page readers offered a more “Jungian” view: that Gregory’s Anne, like Scarlett O’Hara, acts out parts of the self that most of us are afraid to put into public scrutiny.
In the great autobiography that is my inner monologue, I am the heroine of my story sometimes, and an anti-heroine other times. We aren’t supposed to like Scarlett O’Hara, but we admire her and talk about her almost a century since she debuted in the public consciousness . . . She fascinates those who like her, who hate her, or those who admire but do not necessarily like her. I would argue that Anne Boleyn—the real one—and just like me and Scarlett O’Hara and you, was a complex human with good intentions mingled with bad. Philippa Gregory’s Anne has the disadvantage of being fictional, of having her thoughts and intentions broadcast by their author, whereas real people are able to conceal their intentions behind words and perspectives.83
Putting this comment into Jungian terms, wicked Anne belongs to the repressed “shadow” that is part of the storehouse of our collective unconscious. We all secretly identify with the behavior of those who dare to act out our more libidinous (sexual and aggressive) fantasies and impulses. And perhaps when they are punished, it psychologically wipes clean our own slates, exorcises our demons, makes us feel purified.
My own view is that while the femme fatale can’t be simply dismissed as a creation of Western sexism, the fact that she has flourished in certain specific cultural contexts rather than in others is striking. She may be part of some collective unconscious, but there are (historical) moments when she is fairly quiet, and others when the “bitch is loose.” The end of the twentieth and turn into the twenty-first century seems to be one of those—and since this is more and more a global culture, the dominion of the bitch is too. Postwar popular culture had its share of scheming vixens on Dallas, Dynasty, and the rest. But they played a supporting role to Mary Tyler Moore, Claire Huxtable, Murphy Brown, Designing Women, and other independent but likeable prime-time women—and they clearly were marked as “villainesses.” Nowadays, really, really mean girls, backstabbing “frenemies,” and defiantly materialistic sluts are not just dots on the landscape, but truly in the ascendancy. And unlike Alexis Carrington, they don’t even scheme in secret. They’re proud of their materialism and their aggression, which Bravo highlights in the self-defining snippets that open each of their Real Housewives shows. (“If it doesn’t make me money, I’m not interested in it.”84 “There may be younger housewives, but no one is hotter than me.”85 “I don’t try to keep up with the Joneses; I am the Joneses.”86) Women crave power, hell yes! And they lust over designer shoes and handbags. And yes, they will beat one another up, verbally and physically—call one another whores, pull one another’s wigs off, overturn tables—given half the chance. Deal with it! The only difference between these characters’ behavior and the “selfish, boorish ways that once got men called ‘chauvinist pigs,’” Hampton Stevens writes in the Washington Times, is that “critics describe them with glowing words such as ‘assertive,’ ‘edgy,’ and, heaven help us, ‘sassy.’ However, what these women actually are, generally speaking, are utterly awful human beings: vain, selfish, shallow and controlling—a generation of ‘Mean Girls’ grown, not surprisingly, into mean women.”87 And consumed with relish—and often admiration—by viewers.
Compare this cultural moment to the late 1980s, when Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction aroused a storm of indignation and controversy over a depiction of an unstrung, bunny-boiling adulteress. When Fatal Attraction was released, we were still pre–Dinesh D’Souza, Camille Paglia, and Christina Hoff Sommers; Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind had only just been published. “Politically correct” had not yet become a handy ubiquitous put-down of feminists and other critics of sexism, racism, and ethnocentrism. And while preview audiences demanded to see the bunny boiler killed off by the betrayed wife (an original ending, which had Alex commit suicide to the strains of Madame Butterfly, didn’t wash and was replaced), the new ending (along with the portrayal of Alex as a murderous sociopath) was seen by many reviewers as an indictment and vicious punishment of the single career woman. Today, jaded by the slew of copycat female sociopaths that followed the success of the film (Single White Female; The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, etc.) and knowing that the culture is not very welcoming of “old-fashioned” feminism, movie and television reviewers are unlikely to beef about sexist imagery or ideology. It isn’t cool.
Who let the bitch out? Clearly, she is being warmly welcomed by an unhinged consumer culture that gratifies all tastes, no matter how sleazy or degrading, so long as the product sells. But just what tastes are being gratified, and what is being sold? Susan Herbst, in Rude Democracy, says, in speaking about the escalation of vicious attacks among politicians and from news commentators, that “conflict sells and excites in a way that calm political dialogue never will.”88 In the case of the outrageous behavior of reality-show contestants, this might be even more simply summed up as “It’s hard to turn your eyes away from a train wreck.” But arguably, reality-show contestants also hold a fun-house mirror up to viewers, acting out tendencies that our culture encourages in all of us—competitiveness, materialism, self-indulgence—but in an over-the-top way so we can feel superior. When Scott Dunlop created The Real Housewives of Orange County (the first in the Bravo series, which was meant to be a one-season feature), his intention was for it to be “a satirical look at life in affluent gated communities.”89 (Desperate Housewives, too, was originally marketed as a satire; it didn’t sell until rebilled as a prime-time soap opera.) But Bravo discovered that viewers didn’t see satire. They saw actual people leading enviably successful lives, whose behavior they could dissect and dis around the water cooler at work or talk about in blogs online.
Chillingly, the behavior of the housewives may not even seem all that awful to many viewers. In an increasingly mean culture, it may read as all the more “real.” Our polarized political discourse, by the time The Real Housewives of Orange County aired in 2006, had already degenerated into name-calling. And the Internet had teased the bitch out in the rest of us, enabling “users to lash out at individuals without forethought.”90 Laura Stepp, in the Huffington Post, makes an apt comparison. “Tweets, blog posts and comments on Facebook are like the wicked notes girls used to pass in high school.”91 It’s no accident that the housewives all have their own blogs, in which they stoke one another’s fires between episodes. These sorts of blogs, David Denby points out in Snark, encourage nastiness to “metastasize as a pop writing form: A snarky insult, embedded in a story or post, quickly gets traffic; it gets linked to other blogs; and soon it has spread like a sneezy cold through the vast kindergarten of the Web.”92
Let’s not forget, though, that Housewives and Bachelor viewers are overwhelmingly women. And unlike Dallas and Dynasty, whose prime-time villainesses were made up, these shows reinforce the worst stereotypes about real women. So why do women, apparently, adore these shows? Have we been brainwashed to take delight in the demeaning and demonizing of our hard-won power? Susan Douglas, in “Where Have You Gone, Roseanne Barr?” (the Shriver Report), says:
The chief culprit is the use of an arch irony—the deployment of the knowing wink that it’s all a joke, that we’re not to take this too seriously. Because women have made plenty of progress because of feminism, and now that full equality is allegedly complete, it’s OK, even amusing, to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women. After all, TV shows such as “Are You Hot?” or magazines like Maxim can’t possibly undermine women’s equality at this late date, right?93
I would go further than this. It’s not just that sexist stereotypes are seen as “okay” but that they aren’t even seen as sexist anymore but rather as proof of women’s triumph over sexism in a culture that is viewed as “beyond feminism.” In this culture, our sexuality is seen as a potent form of power. Bitchery shows that we aren’t simpering, whining weaklings, that we�
��ve “come a long way” from our subservient ancestors. The “just do it” mentality has released all brakes on competitiveness; the harder we fight, the more we demonstrate that we have the right stuff. Unlike their mothers, the bubby-flaunting femmes of reality television aren’t afraid to “go for it.” They won’t allow anyone to make them feel ashamed of their ambitions or their aggressions. And they refuse to be stifled. “I’ve finally found my voice!” says one housewife, in the snippets that introduce the show. “I’m my own person,” says another. They announce themselves with feminist tropes. But they don’t need feminism. They already have power; just look at the size of those boobs and bank accounts. Both are usually the result of their husbands’ (or ex-husbands’) high-paying jobs, but puh-lease, don’t give me that tiresome libber crap. Get a life, Gloria Steinman (or whatever her name is).
The “heroines” of reality television are, in a sense, the inevitable flowering, in popular culture form, of the protest against “victim feminism” that Naomi Wolf, Camille Paglia, and Katie Roiphe inaugurated in the early 1990s. “Victim feminism,” as Wolf described it in her book Fire with Fire, “casts women as sexually pure and mystically nurturing, and stresses the evil done to these ‘good’ women as a way to petition for their rights.”94 It has turned “suffering into a virtue, anonymity into a status symbol, and marginalization into a mark of the highest faith.”95 It is also “obsolete” because “the psychology and the conditions of women’s lives have both been transformed enough so that it is no longer possible to pretend that the impulses to dominate, aggress, or sexually exploit others are ‘male’ urges alone.”96 Katie Roiphe (The Morning After) translated this into a critique of feminist ideas about date rape, arguing that in many cases, charges of rape were a “victim-feminist” excuse for a woman’s own bad behavior “the night before.”97 Camille Paglia went even further, charging all second-wave feminism with “paranoia” about male oppression and declaring that women, in fact, are “the dominant sex.”98