What If This Were Enough?

by Heather Havrilesky

  Later, though, Natalie’s mother drunkenly rages over her husband’s betrayals in a bedroom upstairs. “First they tell you lies,” she says to Natalie, “and they make you believe them. Then they give you a little of what they promised, just a little, enough to keep you thinking you’ve got your hands on it. Then you find out that you’re tricked, just like everyone else, just like everyone, and instead of being different and powerful and giving the orders, you’ve been tricked just like everyone else and then you begin to know what happens to everyone and how they all get tricked.”

  A now-tipsy Natalie escapes downstairs, but a strange older man presses her to tell him what she’s thinking. “About how wonderful I am,” she replies. The man seems angered by this, and leads her into the woods. Natalie’s innocent shock at his intentions is truly heart-stopping: “ ‘Oh my dear God sweet Christ,’ Natalie thought, so sickened she nearly said it aloud, ‘is he going to touch me?’ ”

  Jackson understood horror. She knew that horror requires an emotional seduction, one that is revealed to be a malevolent ruse: The ingenue experiences herself as radiant and powerful right before her power is stripped from her. Clever young girls imagine they were born to be cherished, when instead they’re created merely to be destroyed. In many of her stories, Jackson outlines how girls are groomed for this fate by overly critical mothers (or, in the case of Hangsaman, by a manipulatively intimate father). Worst of all, the recognition that the macabre universe you enter in maturity isn’t fantasy—it’s reality—sets you apart in the world, raving or drunk in some upstairs bedroom. Your choice is either to play along, or to lose your grip completely.

  Whether that sounds hopelessly bleak to the point of paranoia or terrifyingly prescient depends on your particular perch. For me, Jackson’s uncanny portraits of the fragmentation and collapse of the female psyche echo throughout contemporary culture, from the casual derision we lavish on all things female or feminine to the so-called fairy-tale marriages we celebrate in the pages of magazines, the ones that are later revealed to be nightmares of verbal and physical abuse. The chilling seven-thousand-word letter a sexual-assault victim wrote to her Stanford attacker in 2016 (which quickly went viral) reads like a Jackson novel in miniature, in which darkness subsumes former innocence. By its end, we hear echoes of the last, haunting line of “The Lottery”: “And then they were upon her.” But has the world gone mad, or have we?

  These feelings of dread and panic, paired with the desperate hope that the deluded crowd will snap out of it and come to its senses, lie at the heart of what makes Shirley Jackson’s work unforgettable. Tapping into her own frustrations and agonies, she painted one exquisite portrait after another of that precise juncture where blustery confidence yields to helplessness and terror. The sinister forces the heroine perceives are real, but they’re just ephemeral enough, by design, to make her doubt herself repeatedly. In the end, the self-possessed woman becomes the possessed.

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  In order to understand how women land at the point where their desires are treated as utterly beside the point, it’s important to zoom in on that moment when the ingénue first enters the haunted house. That moment forces us to recall the naïve bluster of girlhood with an almost bittersweet clarity, and remember, in a rush, how all of the stories we were told at a young age seemed to place us at the center of everything: The witch was waiting for us, sure, but we would win in the end. Beauty and innocence always win—or that’s what girls are usually told, up to the exact moment when most of what they’ve been taught to value proves worthless.

  And yet: To be a girl again! Not a child, of course, but an inhabitant of that rarefied, pH-balanced zone of romance and optimism, where you might flirt and flounce and be easily bruised by a pea. Girls can put on a dress and twirl in a circle and others will clap and say, “How pretty!” Girls never have to question whether the attention they get is well-meaning. They skip through the forest with a basket full of treats for Grandma, happily telling every Big Bad Wolf they encounter exactly where they’re headed.

  Sooner or later, of course, most of us wise up. A combination of skepticism and feminist indignation sets in, and it becomes harder to wink coyly at strangers or to marvel innocently at Grandma’s sharp and pointy teeth.

  But for those of us who retain some sense memory of twirling and hearing others coo, spotting the word “girl” in every other title these days (Girls, Gone Girl, 2 Broke Girls, The Girl on the Train, The Girl Before, New Girl, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, to name just a few) can bring on a faintly nostalgic twinge. Or is it a shudder? We recall that privileged but exasperating era when we were transfixing and special but also a little doomed. As a girl, you are a delicate glass vase, waiting to be broken. You are a sweet-smelling flower, waiting for life’s hobnailed boots to trample you. That built-in suspense is part of your appeal.

  “How will you make it on your own?” the theme song of The Mary Tyler Moore Show asks, hinting that the slightest pothole in the road might ruin everything for our hopeful heroine, peering worriedly from behind her steering wheel. When books and movies and TV shows use the word “girl” in their titles, it’s this state of uncertainty they’re hoping to conjure. Forget that Mary Richards herself was done with twirling, if not hat tossing, well before she stepped into Mr. Grant’s newsroom. Ever since she (and “That Girl” Marlo Thomas before her) turned the world on with her smile, we’ve been offered coquettish creatures who mimic her second-guessing and nervous tics but often lack her complexity and gravitas.

  With their forced laughs and their preening and those heavy bangs resting straight on their eyeballs, many among the current batch of TV ingénues seem designed to conjure the childlike poutiness of America’s onetime sweetheart Ally McBeal. You can afford to be a little sassy and street smart when you have big doll eyes and the frame of a preteen. With a few exceptions—Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon on 30 Rock, Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope on Parks and Recreation, the title character on Fleabag—we were largely spared confident, complicated, single comedic heroines for a few decades straight. Each week on 2 Broke Girls, the spunky leads fled confrontation, sought solace in each other’s “You go, girl!” clichés, and then strode out from their hidey-holes to shake a finger in someone’s face, only to be rewarded with more humiliation. For all of the single-girl bluster of Whitney, our heroine had few interests outside of her live-in boyfriend, whether turning him on, manipulating him, or distracting him from ogling another girl’s assets. Even Jess (Zooey Deschanel) of New Girl, the least insipid of the lot, tended to go all bashful and pigeon-toed a few times per episode, forsaking weightier goals in favor of trotting out her oddball charms for the adoration of her male roommates.

  After prolonged exposure to these smoldering doll-babies, it was hard not to long for some of the stubbornness of Lucy Ricardo (Lucille Ball), the insatiability and bad temper of Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), or the nerve and self-possession of Mary Richards. When Mary and Rhoda attended a party thrown by young hippies and Mary noticed that they were the only ones wearing eyeliner, we understood Mary and Rhoda as real human beings, complex entities capable of layered reactions to their surroundings. If this were 2 Broke Girls, Mary and Rhoda would have dashed off to the bathroom to giggle behind their hands, then wiped off their makeup and reemerged, anxious to blend in with the crowd. Or Rhoda, after resolving to tell those hippie kids a thing or two, would’ve ended up being humiliated by them in the process.

  For decades, in books and movies and on TV, humiliation has been used to transform adult women into something lighter, perkier, less frightening. It’s as if writers imagine that we’re afraid of proud women and we’re eager to see them humbled. Female characters are outfitted with charming tics (“What an adorable sneeze!”) and inoffensive mediocrities (“She’s so clumsy!”) and toothless yuppie righteousness (“You tell that snippy barista the customer is always right!”). Such narrativ
es favor the naïve audacity of girlhood over more robust concepts of femininity; the grit and complexity of Deborah Harry or Kim Gordon or Björk are inevitably upstaged by the lip-glossy pep and nonthreatening lady bluster of Katy Perry or Taylor Swift. (Beyoncé, with her brazen bird-flipping and baseball-bat-swinging, is the exception that proves the rule.) Even shows like Big Little Lies and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend induce a certain familiar queasiness, as their grown female characters still occasionally twirl for an imagined audience. It’s enough to make you long for the frank assertiveness of Mary or Rhoda or even Carrie Bradshaw, who, in all of her attention-seeking wishy-washiness, at least had the courage of conviction to dress like an extra in the Ziegfeld Follies.

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  When Lena Dunham’s HBO comedy, Girls, premiered in 2012, Dunham looked poised to skip through the woods for a while, then toss the basket of cupcakes aside and play the Big Bad Wolf instead. It was no accident that we met our lead, Hannah (played by Dunham), while she was slurping up pasta on her parents’ dime, and that, just a few scenes later, she was having awkward sex on the couch with Adam (Adam Driver), a guy who rarely returned her texts. The deliberately jarring juxtaposition of these images, one of an overgrown infant, the other of a sexually submissive woman, was at once horrifying and hilariously appropriate. Caught in that bewildering nowhereland between childhood and adulthood, Hannah demonstrated how easy it could be to experience a loss of directional cues, if not a total shutdown of onboard instrument panels. The show’s use of that ubiquitous term “girl” was less about offering up another candidate for America’s sweetheart than it was about charting that unnerving intersection of giggly specialness and self-consciousness, coyness and skepticism, flirtation and feminist indignation.

  Hannah herself appeared to have marched straight from a Take Back the Night rally to a booty call with a guy who wanted her to pretend she was a lost girl on the street with a Cabbage Patch Kids lunchbox. She played along, limply—“Yeah, I was really scared.” But a few minutes later, when Adam called her friend’s abortion a “heavy situation,” she asserted that it was less a tragic affair than a pragmatic concern. “What was she gonna do, like, have a baby and then take it to her babysitting job? It’s not realistic.”

  If Girls was at first heralded as game-changing television, there was a reason for that: The stuttered confessions, half-smiles, hissed warnings, and quiet shared confidences between Hannah and her friends made the empty sassing and high-fiving of existing girlie comedies look like the spasms of a bygone era. But what was most riveting about Hannah and her friends was not their wisdom, righteousness, or backbone—as we might imagine would be the antidote to the frothy pap of other female-dominated comedies—but their confusion, their vulnerability, and their ambivalence. Instead of clamoring for attention like Whitney or Jess, Hannah’s roommate, Marnie (Allison Williams), who was beautiful and had a devoted boyfriend, was bored by his sensitivity, bored by his affection (she complained that “his touch now feels like a weird uncle putting his hand on my knee at Thanksgiving”), but couldn’t muster the resolve to dump him. This was not how the candy-coated ingénue of America’s imagining, poised on the doorstep of womanhood, was supposed to react to male attention.

  Hannah, meanwhile, almost never took a stand in the show’s first two seasons. She asked her boss at her publishing internship to give her a paid job, and he politely bid her farewell in that passive-aggressive professional way that’s so difficult to counter. After trading quips with a potential employer at an interview, Hannah said something off-color and was summarily dismissed for her insensitivity. (She was baffled but didn’t protest.) Worst of all, she let her sort-of-not-really-boyfriend, Adam, call her a dirty little whore and smash her face into the mattress. Afterward, he asked her if she wanted a Gatorade. “What flavor?” she asked. “Orange,” he answered. “Um, no thanks, I’m good,” she replied. This was how far she was willing to go to express a preference: a polite no thanks, maybe next time.

  In the show’s early seasons, Hannah, like so many women walking the line between the coddling of girlhood and the realities of adulthood, didn’t hoot or cackle or tell it like it is the way other sassy female leads on TV did. Her inability to do that, against a backdrop of smart-talking but empty comedic heroines, felt like a groundbreaking choice. Because most young women, even the assertive and determined ones, still find themselves, in those forlorn in-between years, apologizing repeatedly, blurting some muddled, half-finished thought and, finally, resolving to take up less space.

  It’s telling that, as Hannah aged and stood up for herself more, audiences and critics seemed less enamored of her antics. Part of this was a natural backlash to Dunham’s massive fame. After the first few seasons aired, Dunham had become a kind of cultural icon, with a newsletter, a memoir, and a million and one outspoken remarks to share. As her confidence (and wealth and notoriety) grew, her tone shifted from the naïve enthusiasm of a young woman to the self-assured bafflement of a grown woman who’s maybe just a little bit tired of twirling in circles. But by then, the audience had started to roll its eyes: America’s sweetheart always gets too big for her britches eventually.

  The discord between how vehemently we’re told to believe in ourselves as young girls and how dismissively we’re treated as young women when we dare to do so—captured so heartbreakingly over the course of six seasons of Girls—is part of what fuels the shudder brought on by that word, “girl.” As vivid as our culture’s fantasy of this magical juncture between childhood and adulthood might be, it’s hardly a carefree time occupied by effusive pixies, let alone a period to which most of us would happily return. Because one day, we wake up ready—not to wag our fingers in someone’s face (which is just another way of twirling when you get right down to it) but to present our true selves without apology. This is the trajectory that Lena Dunham and her collaborators ended up portraying, with humor and subtlety and realism at first, and then through a haze of self-consciousness, self-righteous rage, and resignation as the show drew to a close. After all, you can only turn the world on with your smile for so long before it gets a little dull.

  Eventually, we have to learn to assert what we will and won’t accept. That might be less funny and less cute, but that is how you make it on your own, as Mary Richards often demonstrated, though her voice sometimes trembled and her hands sometimes shook. That’s the reason that scene where Mary throws her hat in the air still feels exhilarating, nearly fifty years later. Something in that arc of her hat in the air, something in that expectant smile, told us that she was a little too hopeful, a little too sure that everything would turn out swell (as she might put it). Because that’s not how it usually goes. You think the world will cheer you on forever, but at some point, the cheers curdle into jeers. You can’t twirl anymore. You want to believe in yourself, but you have your doubts. You don’t always trust your instincts. But how can you? The adoring crowd has become an angry mob. You must be doing something wrong.

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  Even as smart, confident adult female characters have paraded onto the small screen over the past few years, the more astute and capable these women prove to be, the more likely it is that they’re also completely nuts. And by “nuts” I don’t mean complicated, difficult, thorny, or complex—the token “crazy” that women are so readily assigned. I mean that these characters are often portrayed as volcanoes that could blow at any minute. Or worse, the very abilities and skills that make them singular and interesting come coupled with hideous psychic deficiencies.

  On Veep, Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s character is ambitious and manipulative because she’s selfish. On Nurse Jackie, Jackie was an excellent RN in part because she was self-medicated into a state of calm. On The Killing, Detective Linden, the world-weary, cold-souled cop, was a tenacious investigator in part because she was obsessive and damaged and a pretty negligent mother. And then there’s Homeland, on which Carrie M
athison, the nearly clairvoyant CIA agent, is bipolar, unhinged, and recklessly promiscuous.

  These aren’t just complicating characteristics like, say, Don Draper’s infidelity or ambivalence. The suggestion on all of these shows is that a female character’s flaws are inextricably linked to her strengths. Take away this pill problem or that personality disorder and the exceptional qualities vanish as well. And this is not always viewed as a tragedy: When Carrie undergoes electroconvulsive therapy to treat her bipolar disorder, we breathe a sigh of relief. Look how calm she is, enjoying a nice sandwich and sleeping peacefully in her childhood bed! But if she’s happy, she’s also forsaking her talents. And once she has a daughter and settles down, the implication is that while Carrie might be enjoying motherhood, her newfound peace is enjoyed at the world’s expense.

  The crazed antics of male characters like Don Draper, Walter White, or Dr. Gregory House are reliably treated as bold, fearless, even ultimately heroic (a daring remark saves the big account; a lunatic gesture scares off a murderous thug; an abrasive approach miraculously yields the answer that saves a young girl’s life). In the case of Walter White in particular, he might’ve been making bad choices, but he was still the one doing the choosing. Female characters are rarely viewed as possessing such self-determination. Sure, there are notable exceptions, like the women of Game of Thrones and Westworld. But alongside every coolheaded Peggy Olson, we get hotheaded train-wreck characters who, like the ballerinas with lead weights around their ankles in Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron,” can show no strength without an accompanying impediment to weigh them down.