You Play the Girl

by Carina Chocano

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Introduction

  Down the Rabbit Hole

  Bunnies

  Can This Marriage Be Saved?

  The Bronze Statue of the Virgin Slut Ice Queen Bitch Goddess

  What a Feeling

  The Eternal Allure of the Basket Case

  The Pool of Tears

  The Ingenue Chooses Marriage or Death

  Thoroughly Modern Lily

  Bad Girlfriend

  The Kick-Ass

  You Wouldn’t Have Come Here

  Surreal Housewives

  Real Girls

  Celebrity Gothic

  Big Mouth Strikes Again

  The Redemptive Journey

  A Modest Proposal for More Backstabbing in Preschool

  A Mad Tea Party

  Let It Go

  All the Bad Guys Are Girls

  Girls Love Math

  Train Wreck

  Look at Yourself

  Phantombusters; or, I Want a Feminist Dance Number

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Works Consulted

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2017 by Carina Chocano

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-544-64894-4

  “The Ingenue Chooses Marriage or Death,” “Bad Girlfriend,” “The Kick-Ass,” “Surreal Housewives,” “Celebrity Gothic,” “A Modest Proposal for More Backstabbing in Preschool,” and “Girls Love Math” first appeared in a different form in the New York Times Magazine. Portions of “Real Girls” and “Big Mouth Strikes Again” appeared in the Los Angeles Times, and a different version of “Thoroughly Modern Lily” was first published in Salon.

  The author is grateful for permission to reprint lines from “Miley Cyrus Is Just Trying to Save the World” by Allison Glock (2015), courtesy of Marie Claire, Hearst Communications, Inc.

  Cover design by Mark R. Robinson

  eISBN 978-0-544-64896-8

  v1.0717

  For Kira

  In a society where values changed frequently, where fortunes rose and fell with frightening rapidity, where social and economic mobility provided instability as well as hope, one thing at least remained the same—a true woman was a true woman, wherever she was found. If anyone, male or female, dared to tamper with the complex of virtues that made up True Womanhood, he was damned immediately as an enemy of God, of civilization, and of the Republic. It was the fearful obligation, a solemn responsibility, which the nineteenth-century American woman had—to uphold the pillars of the temple with her frail white hand.

  —Barbara Welter,

  “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860”

  The title women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like; or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them; or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light.

  —Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

  From the time I was 11, it was, “You’re a pop star! That means you have to be blonde, and you have to have long hair, and you have to put on some glittery tight thing.” Meanwhile, I’m this fragile little girl playing a 16-year-old in a wig and a ton of makeup . . . When I wasn’t on that show, it was like, Who the fuck am I? . . . My dream was never to sell lip gloss. My dream is to save the world.

  —Miley Cyrus,

  on playing Hannah Montana, in Marie Claire

  Introduction

  My daughter, Kira, has heard bedtime stories almost every night since she was born. By the time she turned eight in 2016, she was surprisingly up to date on early Peanuts comics, the collected novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett, Spider-Man cartoons from the sixties, the existential adventures of Frog and Toad, the collected oeuvre of Roald Dahl, Star Wars through the ages, mother-and-daughter versions of the movie Annie, and Ghostbusters past and present. I didn’t set out to lead her on a tour of my literary coming-of-age, nor did I anticipate, on revisiting them, that I would recall the stories I’d loved as a kid more vividly than actual events from my childhood. But that’s exactly what happened. At times, I’ve questioned my motives. What did I think I was doing? What were my intentions, exactly? Was I introducing things to her, or introducing her to me? What if I was trying to introduce myself in her somehow, via her eyeballs and ear canals, like an airborne brain spore? Could that still be considered educational, or was it just creepy? Was I like every other parent, or like a parody of a hipster caregiver in a Portlandia sketch? Was that just how culture works?

  Once, when Kira was five, I presented her with a beautiful, too-expensive illustrated copy of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and I accidentally let it slip that I wasn’t sure whether I’d read it before. She smelled a rat—probably because I was, in fact, proffering a rat. For one thing, we’d already established a system of recommendation rooted in unregenerate nostalgia, not pedagogy. For another, she’d already seen the animated Disney movie and read Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, the Little Golden Book based on the movie, and she hadn’t liked them any more than I had at her age. But I was curious. I had the pressing feeling that the original had something urgent to tell me. So, I insisted, and Kira relented, but a few pages in, she shut me down and demanded I read Sleeping Beauty instead.

  The version of “Sleeping Beauty” we owned also happened to be the Little Golden Book version, Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, the one based on the movie featuring a Goth-Barbie Princess Aurora, the silly-goose fairies Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather, and the sophisticated supervillain, Maleficent. Kira was crazy about Sleeping Beauty. She could not get enough. We read the story every single night at bedtime, sometimes twice a night, for a year. She memorized it by heart from start to finish and insisted that I pause just before the part where Maleficent crashes the christening, so she could recite the lines. Every night, Kira gravely pronounced Maleficent’s fatwa on the princess, followed by her parents’ alarmed reactions.

  “Before the sun sets on her sixteenth birthday, she shall prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel, and d-i-i-i-i-e-e!” (she said in Maleficent’s voice).

  “Oh, no!” (she said in the queen’s voice).

  “Seize that creature!” (she said in the king’s voice).

  It was fun.

  Her dad, Craig’s, theory was that Kira loved Sleeping Beauty because it ends with the cursed princess Aurora reuniting with her parents after spending sixteen years in hiding with the fairies. Being welcomed home by her father, King Stefan, and her mother, the queen, who is nameless but alive (which is more than can be said for most princesses’ mothers), was the real happy ending. This made sense to me; five-year-olds want nothing more than to be autonomous and free, but also safe, cherished, and loved—just like adults. Still, I wasn’t satisfied. I kept fishing for some stunning preschool insight, some apocalyptic nugget of truth that would reveal all. Like, why did she like Sleeping Beauty so much? What about her did she rate so highly above the other princesses? I liked to imagine that it had something to do with her ultimately defying a death sentence, or maybe that Kira was unconsciously attracted to the power of the rebel
fairy. But my daughter’s answer was always the same: Sleeping Beauty was the prettiest. And it was true. She was. And really, what else was there to go by in a heroine? She had the longest, blondest, most flowing hair. Her dress had the fullest skirt and the most sharply drawn-in waist. Other than that, she was young, innocent, passive, naive, vulnerable, submissive, oppressed, kind to animals, handy with a broom, persecuted, and exploited—which is to say indistinguishable from the rest. An impotent pawn in a power struggle between the king and an “evil” fairy or “wicked” queen, who was always defeated in the end. She spoke very little, and when she did, she did so softly, never stridently. She sang sweetly, worked cheerfully, and suffered nobly and exquisitely. We’re taught since birth to associate prettiness with goodness and worth. It’s a hard lesson to unlearn. When I was little, I liked Sleeping Beauty best because she was the prettiest, too; because I recognized her as the feminine ideal. I understood that she was not descriptive so much as prescriptive, that she was not so much the hero of her own story as the grail.

  After Kira fell asleep that night, I finished reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and was shocked by how familiar the story felt, how deeply it resonated. Alice was moody, snobbish, high-handed, judgmental, and quick to anger. She asked too many questions and had a real problem with authority. She was an emotional eater who anxiously scarfed whatever anyone put in front of her. She acted like she was entitled to things such as explanations, respect, and a nice house with plenty of toys to play with. She took offense easily and often felt sorry for herself. She was opinionated, argumentative, and self-absorbed. She was nothing like the heroines in fairy stories—nothing like the princess, or the girl. No wonder I didn’t like her. Compared to Sleeping Beauty, Alice was a monster. She was just like me.

  The story goes like this: Alice, age seven, is lounging by the river with her older sister on a warm spring day. Her sister is reading a book with no pictures, and Alice is bored and on the verge of dozing off, when suddenly a White Rabbit in a waistcoat runs by, checking his pocket watch and muttering about the time. Alice jumps up and follows the Rabbit under a hedge, accidentally tumbling down a rabbit hole. She lands in a nonsense land, where none of the rules of logic or physics apply. In Wonderland, depending on the ever-shifting, utterly nonsensical context, her body is always either too big or too small, her emotions are too much, and the creatures she meets are rude, bossy, dismissive, and hostile. They misapprehend and misunderstand her and mistake her for things she’s not. The White Rabbit takes her for his maid. The Pigeon takes her for a serpent (her neck has stretched out like a flamingo’s). The Mad Hatter and the March Hare tell her there’s no room for her at the tea table, even though it’s evident there’s plenty. They offer her some nonexistent wine, then rebuke her for crashing a party she has not been invited to.

  All this gaslighting eventually leads Alice to a full-blown identity crisis. She starts to doubt her sanity. (“We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad,” the Cheshire Cat tells her. “How do you know I’m mad?” Alice asks. “You must be,” says the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”1) She never believed in fairy tales when she was younger, and yet here she is, seemingly trapped in one. Someone should write a book about her, she thinks. Perhaps she’ll write it herself when she grows up. Then it occurs to her that she is grown up—or as grown up as she’s going to be allowed to get in this limiting, infantilizing place, where there’s no room for a person like her to grow up in.

  When Lewis Carroll published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in 1865, the world was in the midst of scientific, technological, economic, and social revolution. Industrialization, urbanization, mass communications, mass transportation, and free trade had given rise to market capitalism and the middle class. Darwinism, Marxism, and Freudian psychology had revolutionized the social world. Newly minted middle-class “ladies” found themselves in the awkward position of having to symbolically uphold the culture’s values. What women were and how they fit into society became a kind of public obsession. The more educated upper-middle-class women organized around social causes like abolition, temperance, prison reform, education reform, marriage reform, and asylum reform, and the more they agitated for suffrage, property rights, custody rights, reproductive rights, legal rights, access to higher education and the professions, and dress reform, the more they were pressured to conform to a certain type. The “cult of true womanhood” was the capitalist answer to the “woman question”—as in, What was to be done about them and their infernal demands? It was the trope versus women of the Victorian era, the original backlash against liberal reforms that played out in the press, popular media, and advertising,2 and it dominated the popular media in overt and covert, pandering and hectoring, polemical and service-oriented ways, as it does now. It sold papers and magazines, inspired sermons, launched letters to the editor, and moved a lot of soap. It provided a materialist answer to an existential question, filling the void left by the end of the old, “divine” feudal social order and replaced it with a “natural” social order based in “science.” The “cult of true womanhood” split the symbolic world in two, sorting everything into categories. To men went the “public sphere” of commerce, politics, law, culture, reason, and science; and to women—“true women”—went the “private sphere” of the home, the children, morals, and feeling.

  From here sprang the notion of wifehood and motherhood as a “job,” and not just any job but a calling so noble and exalted that it could be done only for love, not for anything as corrupting as money or status. The “true woman” was tasked with creating a serene, restorative refuge for her husband, far removed from the filthy, corrupting world of capital where he went out to stalk his prey. In compensation for her complete civic and financial disenfranchisement, the upper-middle-class wife was given the run of the house—assuming she was fortunate enough to acquire one in marriage. The job included managing the servants, administering the household budget, overseeing the social, moral, and spiritual development of her husband and children, and devoting herself to accurately telegraphing her husband’s status through “the ladylike consumption of luxury goods.”3 Safe at home in her “walled garden,”4 she stoked and quelled her social and status anxieties at once by heeding the counsel of magazines such as Godey’s Lady’s Book (1830–1878), which offered fashion tips, hints on practical housekeeping, advice on social-etiquette questions, intimate glimpses into the lives of aristocrats and socialites, and advertisements featuring all the latest must-haves. The stuff that made a lady a lady.

  That few could afford the lifestyles portrayed here, or keep to all the contradictory advice, was entirely beside the point. (Working-class women, with their labor for wages, were always too “real” to be “true.”) “True womanhood” was nothing if not aspirational anyway, because there’s nothing like trying to live up to an impossible standard to keep a woman in her place.

  The “true woman,” also called the “angel in the house,” after a popular poem by Coventry Patmore, was an idea of “woman” endlessly promoted in advertising, newspapers, popular literature, and women’s magazines.5 This was the popular ideal every proper modern lady was expected to live up to.6 The historian Barbara Welter narrowed the “true woman’s” cardinal virtues to four: she was pious, submissive, domestic, and pure.7 Her innocence was childlike, and her demeanor was modest and demure. She forgave her husband all his transgressions but committed none of her own. She absolved him of his sins. She aimed to please. Her manners were faultless, and her taste was unimpeachable. She was placed like a fragile doll atop a narrow pedestal from which, with one false move, she could fall from a very great height.

  This was the world a girl like Alice was brought up to navigate. This was her pathway to successful adulthood. She was expected to marry, have children, and become a lady of the house, and she was educated for this purpose alone. A lady of the house became part of the house: under both British and American law, marriage divested her entirely of her p
roperty and personhood. A single woman was a feme sole; a married woman was a feme covert, or “covered woman,” legally subsumed by the identity of her husband. Women began to acquire legal status as people with the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1839, but they did not yet fully enjoy it in Alice’s day.

  In Peru, my own great-grandmother, Rosa María Montenegro, was married off when she was sixteen to a prosperous man twenty years her senior. “I still played with dolls,” she told me once. “On my wedding night, I tried to climb out the window. Nobody had told me anything.” Once she figured it out, she was happier. Her husband was nice to her and gave her more money and freedom than her mother had. Twice a year, she ordered clothes and furniture from Europe. They would arrive by ship and be transported from the end of the dock to the harbor by train. Everyone knew her husband had syphilis. He died when she was very young, leaving her widowed with three girls. They moved back in with her mother. Eventually, she married again and had a fourth daughter six months before her second daughter, my grandmother, had my mom. To remain a spinster was to be societally “redundant,” but to marry, for a girl, was to be absorbed into the self of another, like a vanishing twin. A woman’s education was designed to coax her to sleep at sixteen and keep her unchanged and unconscious forever. It was an undoing. It wasn’t a start but a “finishing.”

  Why did I identify with this Victorian girl-child Alice? Alice’s adventures in Wonderland were nothing like my life. So why were they so familiar? I’d never fallen down a rabbit hole into a strange, incomprehensible land, except, you know, when I had. I’d had an absurdly peripatetic childhood and experienced more culture shock by the time I was Alice’s age than most people do in a lifetime. Then, as an adult, I’d spent almost a decade as a pop-culture critic. During the last four years, I spent most of my waking hours in darkened screening rooms. When I first started to work as a TV critic, in 2000, it was probably the best time to be writing about TV, and when I first started to work as a movie critic, in 2004, it was probably the worst time to be writing about movies. I found myself spending hours in the dark, consuming toxic doses of superhero movies, wedding-themed romantic comedies, cryptofascist paeans to war, and bromances about unattractive, immature young men and the gorgeous women desperate to marry them. Hardly any movies had female protagonists. Most actresses were cast to play “the girl.”