by Nancy Friday
Women who had read the book used to write to me saying that they initially wanted to kill me, that the rage I had awakened had them hurling it across the room. I sympathized. I’d locked Klein’s Envy and Gratitude in a closet for months to forestall facing the reality of my relationship with my mother. But the subject of this book is richer still, for how we see ourselves in others’ eyes, how they take us in and what we see reflected in store windows when we pass, well, beauty’s roots are mother, father, siblings, the lot.
The richness of this subject is only surpassed by its timeliness. Beauty has become what our lives are about, not the clothes and seasonal fashions, but the rage, grief, a terrible sense of isolation that we get when we don’t get back any good feeling from the money and time we invest in appearance. Appearance is everything, appearance is empty. It’s a miserable cheat, this mirror today in which we look nice and feel hollow. Why aren’t people more generous and kind, as they used to be? Where are the nice grandmothers who once smiled at young, pretty girls? They are at the gym, getting beautiful, getting in shape, getting rid of the soft, sagging underarms that remind them of their envy of pretty young girls.
Feminism has split into so many theoretical camps, it is difficult to keep track. This is good. Feminists are individuals with varying ideas on how we want to live. But even as we grow into our highly differentiated beliefs, there is no respect for diversity. Each group acts as if those with differing opinions from their own were traitors, as if there were only “one feminism,” theirs. Women still speak of a sisterhood, when in fact it is more akin to a highly diverse same-sex community. We can’t even agree to disagree in what could be a healthy argument precisely because we are so different. Only when we can fight it out verbally, will we reach a declaration of independence that we can live with and then shake hands.
But to argue without fearing that our anger will destroy the opponent, or vice versa, requires healthy, individuated people. Acquiring a trusted voice for anger demands practice so that we know, again and again, that it is not a killer but simply one of life’s emotions. The young boy gets better practice at this, which is why men’s groups can argue and either stay together or splinter. Feminism cannot tolerate dissent because we women never felt safe differing with the first woman in our lives, who would not tolerate our anger. Emotionally, we are still unseparated, and our original anger boils up whenever another woman takes us on. How dare she! Total conformity is the only way these feminists can live in the narrow world they inhabit and intend to control. They will “kill” with accusations and threats any of us who try for a larger life than their own; witness the current girlish name-calling where dissenters are labeled “pod feminists,” “faux feminists”… I’m embarrassed to go on.
I cannot imagine a better battleground on which to examine our independence than the subject of this book—looks, beauty, dress, the way we present our selves to others’ eyes and see our selves in all reflecting surfaces. Fashion appropriately spins like a top today, throwing away one look after another, bringing to mind the obsessed heroine of The Red Shoes, destined to dance her life away whenever she dons the slippers, which to me symbolize denial.
Women, men, none of us will ever understand or change our attitude about the way we look without going back to the source, she whose eye was our most critical mirror. She, along with father and siblings, created the primal stage on which we were cast in a role we continue to play or to deny. How were we seen by them? Were we so much the apple of mother’s eye that our sister or brother hated us? Did father love to gaze at us and thus arouse mother’s envy so that she came between us, literally to divide and conquer? Or were we the plain one opposite mother, or father, or the more lovely sister, and thus forced to invent other ways of getting ourselves seen and loved? Or did we just go under, hide?
The combinations and permutations of roles within the family are not finite; they shade into ever more complex solutions of rivalry and competition. Early family is where the bedrock of our self-image is laid down. If thinking about the early injustices of childhood fills us with rage today, don’t blame mother! Don’t set her up as the scapegoat. Blame is a trickster, the devil. When we blame mother for all our problems, we think we’re not part of the problem: “All her fault!” when indeed, what we’ve done is to embed ourselves in childhood, guaranteeing that we’ll never grow up. We are the ones who want to get past the rage; she won’t even remember. We must do our homework, think it through honestly, keeping what is good and loved with her so that we can be grateful. Gratitude is important. So she wasn’t perfect. Who is?
“Bring Me Her Heart!”
Everything around me seems redolent of the first years of life these days, perhaps nothing more so than the New Baby Boom, the proliferation of pregnant tummies, breasts, the engorged bosoms of beautiful women thrust in our faces on television, in advertisements on the sides of the passing bus, blotting out the sky in the billboards above. In this morning’s newspaper, naked men and women sell products that don’t require their taking off their clothes, but they do. It is as if they can’t help themselves. Often they hold babies, who are also naked. Naked supermodels smile as if to assume that we love them for their beauty, when indeed we don’t so much love as envy them, craving to be them and wield their power.
Our culture promotes envy, stirs it up and applauds what is, by definition, that emotion of which nothing good can be said. Envy sells; the advertising agencies have learned that making people unhappy with what they own is an excellent means of getting them to replace what is barely worn, barely used. “You thought you were happy with that car you bought six months ago?” the commercial intones. “Well, you idiot, look at what your neighbors just bought, look at what the really important people are wearing, eating, drinking. Better still, outdo your neighbor, get a car that’s even flashier than his and watch him squirm!” Envy, that slimy, ooze-infested emotion, has become so familiar that children pick up guns and kill other children to steal the gold chain, the running shoes, or just to dissipate the rankling inferiority that envy produces: Why him and not me?
Why, we even envy the power we have given to our beloved to make us happy or sad, the power that he or she has to take their beauty and bestow it on another. Hating the power they have over us, we leave them for another. Adultery is a popular TV talk-show subject, and the divorce rate soars. There is no constancy. There is no gratitude, and without gratitude, says Melanie Klein, there is no love.
There is nothing evil in competition per se, but when it is employed without practice and safe rules, as with a loaded gun, it is only a matter of time before something bad happens. “The fact that in our paranoid society we need no spur for competition to develop does not belie the original useful purpose of the emotion,” says psychiatrist Willard Gaylin. “It is likely that the exclusive possession of the mother is the primary goal of all children, that competition is normal, and that sharing must be learned.” But learned from whom? Feminism has for twenty years preached to women that all competition is evil. What are children to do when mother doesn’t name or explain the “useful purpose of the emotion”? Oh, yes, it is a wonderful time for fairy tales, the grimmer the better to reflect real life honestly to a child.
The child, about to go to sleep, is listening to the dearest voice in the world; dreams and nightmares are going to occupy him. It isn’t the gory plot of “Hansel and Gretel” that structures the dream, but instead the child’s own destructive emotions felt that day toward a sibling, a parent, a friend. When a parent’s loved voice reads the story and ends it with a kiss before sleep, the child is less harsh on himself because the fairy tale has told him that he is not the only one to feel nasty emotions, and the parent’s kiss before sleep assures him that he will not be abandoned. Small wonder that family members are stock characters in fairy tales; for a child, his family is his entire world, upon whom he is totally dependent for everything. When it works, the family is a trusting network, but it becomes a frightening microcosm when the child fe
els threatened from within.
What to do? Prettify the unconscious? Read to children only what grown-ups want them to hear? Take away from them the recognition of their own inherent nastiness, destructiveness, as part of the full spectrum of human emotion? If our dark side isn’t recognized early, how then consciously to decide whether or not to act on malice or to temper the nasty emotion? Fairy tales abound with heroes and heroines who must choose. So must the child.
In recent years some Matriarchal Feminists have criticized exposing children to the old fairy tales, which they say endorse stereotypical sex roles. Most “storybook” heroines, they complain, are portrayed as passive and submissive, functioning primarily as a prize for a daring prince and thus dependent on the prince for identity. As the nihilist Andrea Dworkin puts it, fairy tales exhort girls to “become that object of every necrophiliac’s lust—the innocent, victimized Sleeping Beauty, beauteous lump of ultimate, sleeping good.”
In her own books, Dworkin gives us an alternative to fairy tale wisdom by writing fiction in which her heroine systematically castrates all the males. Not a pretty picture, but a gruesome depiction of Dworkin’s own particular brand of feminist rage at men. Though she may not be writing bedtime stories for children, the venom she spurts and the rabble-rousing “Take no prisoners!” tactics her followers favor toward anyone who doesn’t agree with them are every inch the nihilism bubbling up in a child’s unconscious. Dworkin admits in her various writings to a very unhappy youth, the horror of which is laid at the boots of men who have raped her, not once, but many times. As Freud once remarked to a patient—and I paraphrase—“I can understand this misadventure happening once, even twice, but at some point your own involvement in your unhappiness must be questioned.”
In my opinion it is thrilling that women are creating new fairy tales in which heroines are no longer depicted as woebegone and helpless but take courage in hand and accomplish the gallant end of freeing themselves and others from evil oppressors. In the story “Petronella,” the princess eventually marries, but only at the conclusion of her own personal quest, which is dangerous and demands both cleverness and valor. In “The Forest Prince,” the “Rapunzel” tale is reversed, and the princess rescues the prince.
Too often zeal overwhelms the storyteller of some of these new fairy tales, and the result is narratives no less stereotypical than the crudest patriarchal stories. When women create fairy tales to celebrate women’s world, we should remember that to the listening child, male or female, women do have the total power to give or withhold love, to punish, to dominate, to settle all quarrels and differences, in short, the power of the nursery. If new feminist fairy tales present male characters as one-dimensional and weak, opposite all-powerful females, we do a disservice to our sons and our daughters too, who look to fairy tales not so much for the promise of a rosy future as for communication with their own destructive unconscious.
“While some literal-minded parents do not realize it, children know that, whatever the sex of the hero, the story pertains to their own problems,” writes Bruno Bettelheim, disputing the idea that the ancient tales result in sexual stereotyping.
We are foolish to throw out the old tales because they do not subscribe to our militant agenda. Long before these tales were written down, hundreds of years ago, the important plot line of beauty and its powerful influence over our lives is what parents spoke to children and what those children chose to remember and to tell in time to their own children. Almost twenty-five years into modern feminism, have you noticed a lessening of beauty’s importance in men’s and women’s lives? Quite the contrary. Can you honestly suggest that this reassertion of beauty’s power is a dastardly act thought up by evil men to divert women from the workplace and back to the dressing tables? It is we women who want beauty back in our lives, but the structuring of its practical uses is being hampered by those women who do not want to see it used at all. Beauty’s power is eternal, not something we can turn on and off. Because it was once our only power is no reason not to employ it still; better to understand it, learn to use it effectively by facing its luminous power straight on, from the cradle up.
“Let me feast my eyes on you” will be in style until we all go blind; even then we would use our fingertips to delicately trace the beloved outline of our dear one’s lips and eyes. The power of beauty has nothing to do with changing political machines and should be included in feminist handbooks to enlighten women and make us more aware of its many uses and responsibilities.
To leave beauty out of contemporary fairy tales when women are pursuing appearance more ravenously than at any other time in my own life is to twist reality for the purpose of one’s own dream of how life should be. Because boys too will grow up to use their looks to achieve their ends, not just with women but also in the workplace, well, all the more reason to write tales that mirror the feelings of the boy child sleeping alongside his sister, whom he hates for getting all the hugs and oohs and ahs, and who would feel far better for knowing/hearing that rivalry doesn’t make him evil.
Whatever is said to a child, it must have the virtue of truth, represent what the parents genuinely feel, for children know their parents like the insides of their pockets. Parents should explain what looks engender, both the good and the bad. Yes, beauty will open doors, but it will close others. Beauty is such a free-floating form of power, walking in when we least expect it, in the form of the stranger, the new girl in class, at the party, that a child should be prepared to deal with beauty and with envy of beauty too, in others and in himself or herself. The power of money makes no visceral sense to a child and will only come later. First comes beauty, the earliest currency. Spoken about honestly by people a child loves most, beauty’s power and problems become a given, so that in time, when superficial beauty fades, when the child ages, the old adage bears fruit: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
It wouldn’t hurt a bit for all of us to hear the old tales again. Grown, with children of our own, we’ve forgotten their wisdom and learned instead the polite defenses that society teaches to mask the unspeakable meanness felt toward more handsome rivals. Last night’s rage, for instance, disturbed our sleep, made us late for work this morning, those horrible dreams having something to do with the dinner party during which our husband agreed with his lovely dinner partner instead of with us, smiled at her in that conspiratorial way that is “our” smile, smiled it too long at that woman whom he later said was truly boring but whose hair and eyes and splendid clothes had strangely put to shame our own finery, magnificent when we left home.
The rage at him in the car driving home was out of all proportion to what had happened, which was nothing, after all, a smile, a few words. How to name out loud the humiliating feeling, the envy of the Wicked Queen toward the more beautiful Snow White, something painful but acceptable in our own mother’s voice when we were little but totally disgraceful, mortifying for an adult. Raised to deny the power of beauty, we must also deny the envy that rides alongside it. And so last night we slept badly, the fear of loss of love to a rival buried. But the burial didn’t work. Last night’s dreams were of demons who promised a return to the powerlessness once felt in childhood, rage toward brothers and sisters that couldn’t be admitted out of fear of abandonment, which, at that time in life was indeed death, or so it felt.
What happened today at the office was affected by the dreams, the loss of sleep to them; our usual competitive drive was unbalanced. We behaved badly, or did we do brilliantly, knock off the competition with a cruelty uncharacteristic, or was it? These feelings, unresolved, disturbing; we find ourselves, at our children’s bedtime, reaching for the Brothers Grimm. We love our children, want to protect them as our own parents once tried to protect us.
If the powerful forces of beauty and envy aren’t confronted, their sting is not removed, and denial becomes a way of life; power is traded on, pain inflicted, all actions and intentions called by names other than what they really are. For the rest of thei
r lives together, parent and child will play fact and fiction, the child knowing he/she wasn’t loved equally, the parent denying his or her affinity for the lovely one. It is a family history of Rashomon, in which each time they meet, a new scene is played out in reaction to the earliest dramatics of their shared lives. Each time the child believes it will all be different because life has outwardly changed, the parent grown older, the daughter/son now independent and successful, with children of her or his own. Except that it is never different. The old family quarrels and disappointments repeat because they are rooted in opposing versions of reality, one of which was how the power of looks influenced love.
Bettelheim writes that children often believe they deserve to be degraded, “relegated to a netherworld of smut,” because of their secret wishes or actions. Moreover, they hate and fear their siblings and others whom they think free of such evilness and worry that, like Cinderella, they will be demeaned by their parents should their secrets be discovered. “Because he wants others—most of all, his parents—to believe in his innocence, he is delighted that ‘everybody’ believes in Cinderella’s,” he writes. “Since people give credence to Cinderella’s goodness, they will also believe in his, so the child hopes… which is one reason it is such a delightful story.”
To me, it’s all of a piece, the fears of rejection and the promise of love in an omnipotent caretaker’s adoring gaze, won by dint of dimple and curly hair. The fact that my own hair is straight and my feet too big has led to the nightmares of which I speak: the lost suitcases, the doorways in which I stand alone watching couples in one another’s arms. I’m so accustomed to dreams of abandonment, I no longer question why intellectual understanding hasn’t changed them. This, I have learned, is the unconscious, relentlessly playing its old familiar song.
Here, then, is what conscious intellect has taught me, that without the straight hair and the absence of the adoring gaze, I would never have become the little overachiever, a woman unafraid to seduce a man. It has meant a lot of closets and more shoes than I could ever count. But here is my husband, who I know loves me dearly. My husband who was chosen one day in the fourth grade to be The Beauty’s favorite. “For one magic day,” he says, “I was treated and looked at differently by all the other girls and boys because I stood in the beauty’s magic glow. And then on another day, for a reason as indecipherable as the reason she chose me in the first place, she dropped me.” He “forgot” the story until we met. My adorable husband, to whom I’ve promised that one day we will travel with one small suitcase.