Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

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  For the heroines that we meet in adolescence, the future is different—not natural and inevitable but unfathomable and traumatic. In Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), an extended study of this shift and its reverberations, nineteen-year-old Esther Greenwood keeps encountering the void. “I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue,” she thinks. Her physical sight blurs as she counts telephone poles in the distance. “Try as I would, I couldn’t see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.”

  The Bell Jar, published pseudonymously in the UK a month before Plath committed suicide, introduces us to Esther in the middle of her summer internship at the magazine Ladies’ Day. She lives in the Amazon, a fictionalized version of the Barbizon, the famous all-women residential hotel on the Upper East Side. The interns are having a whirlwind summer, posing for photo shoots and going to parties while trying to impress their editors and secure a professional future. “I was supposed to be having the time of my life,” Esther thinks. She “should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”

  Previous to this internship, Esther had constructed her identity around her intelligence, and the new worlds it broke open for her. But this era of precocity is coming to an end. She feels “like a racehorse in a world without racetracks.” She imagines her life “branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked….I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death.” Stuck at home, rejected from a writing seminar, she deteriorates. She gets electroshock therapy. She takes sleeping pills and crawls into a cubbyhole in the basement; they find her a few days later, barely alive.

  As much as The Bell Jar is about a specific experience of paralyzing depression, it’s also about how swiftly the generalized expectations of female conventionality can separate a woman from herself. Early on, Esther dissociates when confronted with basic social processes. She watches a bunch of girls get out of a cab “like a wedding party with nothing but bridesmaids.” She has a “terribly hard time trying to imagine people in bed together.” On her last night in New York, she goes to a country club dance, where a man named Marco leads her into a garden, shoves her into the mud, and tries to rape her; after she hits him, he wipes his nose and smears the blood on her cheek. Later on, she makes a bid for normality by deciding to lose her virginity. She gets fitted for a diaphragm (“A man doesn’t have a worry in the world,” she tells the doctor, “while I’ve got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line”) and chooses a man named Irwin. There is more blood after she has sex with him, a “black and dripping” towel. She ends up in the hospital once again.

  A truth is taking shape under the narrative—a truth exacerbated but certainly not created by her depression—that the future is nothing like the fig tree Esther imagines. There are not infinite branches, infinite paths. “For the girl,” writes de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, “marriage and motherhood involve her entire destiny; and from the time when she begins to glimpse their secrets, her body seems to her to be odiously threatened.” “Why was I so unmaternal and apart?” Esther wonders. “If I had to wait on a baby all day, I would go mad.” She is repulsed by the idea of marriage—days spent cooking and cleaning, evenings “washing up even more dirty plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted. This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A’s.” She remembers how her boyfriend’s mother once spent weeks braiding a beautiful rug, and then put it on the kitchen floor instead of hanging it up. Within days, the rug was “soiled and dull and indistinguishable.” Esther, Plath writes, “knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard’s kitchen mat.”

  Simone de Beauvoir herself refused to get married to Jean-Paul Sartre, choosing instead a lifelong open relationship, in which, as her former pupil Bianca Bienenfeld wrote in 1993, de Beauvoir sometimes slept with her young female students and passed them along to Sartre afterward. (Louisa May Alcott, single all her life, was another conscientious objector: she once wrote to a friend that “Jo should have remained a literary spinster but so many enthusiastic young ladies wrote to me clamorously demanding that she should marry Laurie, or somebody, that I didn’t dare refuse & out of perversity went & made a funny match for her.”) In the introduction to The Second Sex (1949), de Beauvoir writes that the “drama of woman” lies in the conflict between the individual experience of the self and the collective experience of womanhood. To herself, a woman is inherently central and essential. To society, she is inessential, secondary, defined on the terms of her relationship to men. These are not “eternal verities,” de Beauvoir writes, but are, rather, the “common basis that underlies every individual feminine existence.”

  Much of The Second Sex still scans as unnervingly contemporary. De Beauvoir notes that men, unlike women, experience no contradiction between their gender and their “vocation as a human being.” She describes the definitive thrill and sorrow of female adolescence—the realization that your body, and what people will demand of it, will determine your adult life. “If the young girl at about this stage frequently develops a neurotic condition,” de Beauvoir writes, “it is because she feels defenseless before a dull fatality that condemns her to unimaginable trials; her femininity means in her eyes sickness and suffering and death, and she is obsessed with this fate.”

  This is the situation in Judy Blume’s Tiger Eyes (1981), in which fifteen-year-old Davey’s nascent sexuality is inextricably linked to death. The book begins just after her father’s funeral: he was shot to death in a holdup at the 7-Eleven he owned. Throughout the story, Davey, depressed and traumatized, experiences flashbacks to the night of the crime, when she was on the beach making out with her boyfriend. She’s terrified of intimacy. “I want to kiss him back but I can’t,” she thinks. “I can’t because kissing him reminds me of that night. So I break away from him and run.”

  And then there’s The Virgin Suicides (1993), by Jeffrey Eugenides, which tells the story of the Lisbon sisters, five teenagers from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, who are so confined by their religious parents—and by other mysterious inner forces—that they find themselves gravitating toward the hideous freedom unlocked in death. The first Lisbon girl to attempt suicide is Cecilia, the youngest, who slits her wrists in the bathtub. Newly adolescent, she sees futility everywhere. She stands on her curb, looking at fish flies, talking to a neighbor. “They’re dead,” she says. “They only live twenty-four hours. They hatch, they reproduce, and then they croak.” After her suicide attempt, a doctor chides her: she isn’t old enough to understand how bad life really gets, he says. “Obviously, Doctor,” says Cecilia, “you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”

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  The Virgin Suicides was Eugenides’s debut novel, and although his dramatization of the Lisbon sisters’ existence—“the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy”—captures something vivid and undeniable about female adolescence, a distinctly male consciousness is threaded through the book. Eugenides accounts for the ubiquity of male pressure in teenage girls’ lives by narrating the book in first-person plural, from the tender, disturbing, attentive “we” of an amorphous group of teen boys. The boys speak of the Lisbons with a damp, devotional fervor—a tone that crosses the religious pilgrim with the peeping Tom. They are obsessed with the dirty miracle of the teenage-girl body, hoarding artifacts (a prized Lisbon thermometer is “oral, alas”), trawling for old photos, interviewing key
players as the years go by.

  The Lisbon daughters—Therese, Mary, Bonnie, Lux, and Cecilia—occupy the bulk of the teenage life cycle, spaced out evenly in the years between thirteen and seventeen. As a group, they form a case study in the female body’s transformation from child to sex object—a fact that is multiplied in this case, freakishly, by a factor of five, and exaggerated by the nature of the Lisbon household, which is puritanical to a near-occult degree. When the narrators catch a glimpse of the Lisbons’ faces in school, they look “indecently revealed,” they write, “as though we were used to seeing women in veils.” Because the girls are not allowed to socialize, the boys observe them not as peers but as dolls in a display case, prostitutes in a window. Behind double layers of glass—their parent-jailers, their boy-observers—the Lisbons intensify into myth. They appear in tragic, glorified states of recombination: they are innocent and arousing (“five glittering daughters in their homemade dresses, all lace and ruffle, bursting with their fructifying flesh,” or Cecilia in her wedding dress and soiled bare feet); they are animals and saints (“in the trash can was one Tampax, spotted, still fresh from the insides of one of the Lisbon girls”). The Lisbons’ bodies are the rubric through which all else in the town is interpreted. The boys think the smell around the house is “trapped beaver.” The air that summer is “pink, humid, pillowing”—the atmosphere is fecund and doomed.

  The heroine of The Virgin Suicides is playful, enigmatic Lux, whom the high school heartthrob Trip Fontaine refers to as “the most naked person with clothes on he had ever seen.” For a while, it seems possible that Lux might get around the Lisbon predicament. She can’t be trapped—not Lux, who radiates “health and mischief,” who gets Trip to persuade her parents to let the sisters go to prom; who stays out too late after prom having sex with him on the football field; who then, after the girls are collectively grounded, starts having sex with random men on the roof. (For the narrators, this image sticks; as adults, they say, it is Lux they think about when they’re fucking their wives, “always that pale wraith we make love to, always her feet snagged in the gutter.”)

  But Lux doesn’t actually ride her adolescence to glory. The night that the Lisbon sisters seem ready to fulfill their observers’ fantasies—inviting them into the house in the middle of the night, asking them to get a car ready so that they can all run away—Lux, in the darkened house, undoes one of the boys’ belts, leaves it hanging. The boys freeze, ready for all their desires to be realized. Lux goes to the garage, switches the engine on, and lets the carbon monoxide suffocate her. Therese takes a fatal dose of sleeping pills. The boys run out of the house after seeing Bonnie hanging from a rope.

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  The teenage girl, wrote de Beauvoir, is bound up in a “sense of secrecy,” a “grim solitude.” She is “convinced that she is not understood; her relations with herself are then only the more impassioned: she is intoxicated with her isolation, she feels herself different, superior, exceptional.” So it goes with a certain type of blockbuster YA heroine—the series protagonist who either doubles down on her sense of isolated exceptionalism, if she’s in a dystopian universe, or superficially attempts to reject it before acquiescing, if she’s in a romantic one.

  These teenagers, like their depressed counterparts, cannot conceptualize the future. In the dystopian stories, the reason for this is built right in. Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (2008) is set in a futuristic totalitarian version of North America called Panem, in which a wealthy Capitol is surrounded by thirteen Districts populated by serfs who are required, every year, to send two human tributes to fight to the death. Our heroine, Katniss Everdeen, volunteers as her district’s tribute after her younger sister’s name is called at the lottery. Katniss is brave in a grim, fatalistic way: her courage comes from her certainty that the future is a nightmare, and her romantic decisions are driven by her sense that everything has already been lost. Divergent (2011), by Veronica Roth, uses a similar frame. The books in the Divergent and Hunger Games series have collectively sold over a hundred million copies.

  In the best-known romance series, the future’s opacity (and subsequent inevitability) is a matter of the heroine’s personality—these girls are as passive and blank as tofu, waiting to take on the pungency of someone else’s life. Bella Swan, the heroine of Twilight, and Anastasia Steele, the heroine of Fifty Shades of Grey, form a neat bridge between YA and adult commercial fiction: in a sense, they’re the same character, as E. L. James wrote Fifty Shades of Grey (2011) as fan fiction after Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2005). Bella and Anastasia are both so paper-doll-like that they can barely make choices; they are certainly unable to grasp the romantic fates they’re walking into. They are blind to this blindness, just as the dystopian heroines are blind to their own bravery, and all of them are in turn magically blind to the fact that they’re very beautiful. (To the male characters in these books who fall in love with Katniss and Anastasia and Bella—as with the pop singers who praise girls for not knowing they’re pretty—these blinders form a crucial part of their appeal.) And so Bella gets involved with a vampire, and Anastasia with a damaged, BDSM-fixated billionaire. Both characters balk a little when they get a sense of what might be coming: Edward eventually bites Bella and turns her into a vampire, and Ana’s life becomes a vortex of unresolved trauma and high-stakes helicopter incidents. But they have been absolved, by romance, from having to forge a path into the future. Their futures have been predetermined for them by the extreme problems of the men they love.

  As is probably clear already, I could never stand a Twilight type of story. (It doesn’t help that the writing in those books, and in the Fifty Shades series, is amazingly wooden, reiterating the idea that a young woman’s story can be perfunctory nonsense as long as she’s linked to an interesting man.) Even Francine Pascal’s Sweet Valley High series, first published in the eighties, revolved too much around romantic intrigue for me. My relationship to female protagonists changed sharply in adolescence: childhood heroines had shown me who I wanted to be, but teenage heroines showed me who I was afraid of becoming—a girl whose life revolved around her desirability, who was interesting to the degree that her life spun out of control.

  There were a few exceptions, of course: I loved Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Alice series, whose first book came out in 1985, and Sarah Dessen’s Keeping the Moon (1999), and the Judy Blume books. This was kind, thoughtful, everyday YA literature in which the main characters rarely believed themselves to be exceptional; their ordinariness was a central part of the story’s appeal. But during the stretch when I’d outgrown chapter books but couldn’t quite process literature, I mostly read commercial fiction that I found on sale at Target, or at my tiny local branch library: Mary Higgins Clark paperbacks that scared the shit out of me, or book-club weepers like Billie Letts’s Where the Heart Is (1995), or Jodi Picoult novels about amnesia or medical emergencies—stories so dramatic that I felt relieved to have nothing to relate to at all.

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  If the childhood heroine accepts the future from a comfortable distance, and if the adolescent is blindly thrust toward it by forces beyond her control, the adult heroine lives within this long-anticipated future and finds it dismal, bitter, and disappointing. Her situation is generally one of premature and artificial finality, in which getting married and having children has prevented her from living the life she wants.

  That our heroine would have gotten married and had kids in the first place mostly goes without saying: even today, the expectation holds, regardless of the independence a woman demonstrates. In the title essay of The Mother of All Questions (2017), Rebecca Solnit writes about being asked, in the middle of a talk she was giving on Virginia Woolf, if she thought the author should have had children. Solnit herself had been asked that question onstage, about her own life, some years earlier. There were any number of ready answers about Woolf’s decisions
or her own, Solnit writes: “But just because the question can be answered doesn’t mean that I ought to answer it, or that it ought to be asked.” The interviewer’s question “presumed that women should have children, and that a woman’s reproductive activities were naturally public business. More fundamentally, the question assumed that there was only one proper way for a woman to live.”

  We know what that one way looks like: marriage, motherhood, grace, industriousness, mandatory bliss. Prescriptions about female behavior, Solnit notes, are often disingenuously expressed in terms of happiness—as if we really want women to be beautiful, selfless, hardworking wives and mothers because that’s what will make them happy, when models of female happiness have always tended to benefit men and economically handicap women (and are still, as with the term “girlboss,” often defined in reference to male power even when theorized in an ostensibly emancipatory way). But even when women get married, look beautiful, have children, et cetera, they are still often found deficient, Solnit writes, launching into an unforgettable sentence: “There is no good answer to being a woman; the art may instead lie in how we refuse the question.” It is a literary statement of purpose, and later, Solnit wonders if the reduction of women to their domestic decisions is, effectively, a literary problem. “We are given a single story line about what makes a good life, even though not a few who follow that story line have bad lives,” she writes. “We speak as though there is one good plot with one happy outcome, while the myriad forms a life can take flower—and wither—all around us.”