Trick Mirror
Page 13
The problem is literary in another way, too. In the late eighteenth century, the middle class, the love-based marriage, and the novel all blossomed into being. Before this point, wealth had come from land and inheritance rather than wage-based work and specialized production, and in marriage, women had served as vehicles for families to transfer and retain wealth. They had also mostly worked alongside their husbands to keep their pre-industrial household running. But in a time of rapidly changing economic structures that allowed for individualism and leisure, marriage began taking on a very personal dimension. It had to—the new market economy had rendered certain domestic duties redundant, and created, for middle-class women, an occupational void. And so the narrative that framed marriage as a deeply personal achievement, as well as an existentially freighted decision, took shape for women both on and off the page.
The idea of marriage as a totalizing American institution peaked in the years around World War II. Then came second-wave feminism, with The Second Sex, and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), which built on de Beauvoir and made it respectable for middle-class white women to question social expectations. “We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my home,’ ” Friedan wrote. Ever since then, women have been negotiating down the inflated value of marriage, pushing back against the historical reality of marriage as a boon for men and a regulatory force for women—a problem that was exposed in literature long before political will addressed it. Two of our greatest nineteenth-century heroines, Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, find themselves locked in unhappy marriages, mothers to young children, with no possibility of respectable escape. They face their own literary problem: what they want is impossible in their society, and characters—people—have to want something to exist.
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Adult heroines commit suicide for different reasons than teenage heroines do. Where the teenagers have been drained of all desire, the adults are so full of desire that it kills them. Or, rather, they live under conditions where ordinary desire makes them fatally monstrous. This is the case in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), where Lily Bart’s empty purse and unmarried status is, at twenty-nine, enough to drive her out of respectable society and into an overdose on chloral hydrate. Society breaks poor Tess, too, in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). Tess is a teenage milkmaid who experiences the worst of both the adolescent and adult heroine conventions. She is raped and impregnated by her cousin; she falls in love with a man who abandons her after he finds out she isn’t a virgin. After she kills her rapist and runs away with her former lover, she is cornered by the police, lying on the rocks of Stonehenge like a sacrifice, her body and life an offering to the world of men.
In Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), Emma, a pretty and suggestible farmer’s daughter with a taste for romance novels, gets married to a doctor named Charles Bovary and finds herself confused. Marriage is much more dull than she’d expected. “Emma tried to figure out,” Flaubert writes, “what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.” She “longed to travel or to go back to her convent. She wished at the same time to die and to live in Paris.” She cannot stagnate comfortably, as is expected of her. (“It is very strange,” she thinks, about her baby, “how ugly this child is!”) “She was waiting for something to happen,” writes Flaubert. “Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon.”
This longing drives Emma to her love affairs—first with Rodolphe, who ditches her the night before their planned elopement, and then with Leon. Their attention is not enough. (She wonders, “Whence came this insufficiency in life—this instantaneous turning to decay of everything on which she leant?”) Emma has been perfectly socialized into the idea that female happiness exists in the form of romance and consumer purchases. When romance fails, she goes deep into debt, attempting to excite herself. She begs her lovers for money; she finds out that affairs almost inevitably get as tedious as marriages; finally she takes arsenic, dying a drawn-out, painful death. As with so many other nineteenth-century novels, the main narrative engine is the inability of a woman to access economic stability without the protection of a man.
Leo Tolstoy’s protagonist in Anna Karenina (1878) is an entirely different sort of woman than Emma—she is intelligent, capable, perceptive—but nonetheless follows the same trajectory. The novel begins with an affair and a possible suicide: two chimes on a clock, telling the reader what time the story’s set to. Anna has come to visit her brother, Stiva, who has been cheating on his wife, Dolly. At the train station, the two of them run into Vronsky, an army officer, and Anna is instantly electrified. Then a man either falls or throws himself on the train tracks. “It’s an omen of evil,” Anna says. During her visit, she urges Dolly to forgive Stiva, and the love between her and Vronsky starts to burn. When she returns to St. Petersburg, the sight of her husband and child disappoints her. She’s only in her late twenties, but she’s trapped: unlike Stiva, she will be cast out of society if she has an affair. She has a recurring dream about what seems like a threesome, her husband and lover “lavishing caresses on her” simultaneously. “And she was marveling that it had once seemed impossible to her,” Tolstoy writes, “was explaining to them, laughing, that this was ever so much simpler, and that now both of them were happy and contented. But this dream weighed on her like a nightmare, and she awoke from it in terror.”
Anna gets pregnant with Vronsky’s child and confesses to her husband. She can’t bring herself to end the affair, and she can’t get a divorce without ruining her social standing. She starts to unravel. “She was weeping that her dream of her position being made clear and definite had been annihilated forever…everything would go on in the old way, and far worse, indeed, than in the old way…she would never know freedom in love,” Tolstoy writes. Formerly poised and vivacious, Anna dissolves rapidly—struggling to interact with people, taking morphine to sleep. She turns on Vronsky, becoming erratic and manipulative, the way women do when the only path to power involves appealing to men. She is aware that “at the bottom of her heart was some obscure idea that alone interested her,” and suddenly realizes that “it was that idea that alone solved all.” The idea is dying. She throws herself in front of a train.
Within the text of Madame Bovary, the blame seems to fall mainly on flighty, foolish Emma. In Anna Karenina, our heroine is noble and tragic, a victim of the irrationality of desire. By the time Kate Chopin wrote her feminist version of this plot, in The Awakening (1899), the affairs were more explicitly a tool through which the heroine, Edna Pontellier, could fumble toward independence and self-determination. But Edna, too, commits suicide, walking into the Gulf of Mexico close to the end of the novel, the waves curling like snakes around her ankles. She “thought of Leonce and the children. They were a part of her life. But they need not have thought that they could possess her, body and soul.” Chopin configures Edna’s death as a gorgeous, synesthetic moment of freedom and absolution: “There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air.”
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Why all the affairs? De Beauvoir, who famously stated that “most women are married, or have been, or plan to be, or suffer from not being,” writes that “there is a hoax in marriage, since, while being supposed to socialize eroticism, it succeeds only in killing it.” A husband gets to be “first a citizen, a producer, secondly a husband,” where a wife is “before all, and often exclusively, a wife.” Her conclusion is that women are destined for infidelity. “It is the sole concrete form her liberty can assume,” she writes. “Only through deceit and adultery can she prove that she is nobody’s chattel and give the lie to the pretensions of the male.” (In 2003, in her polemic Against Love, Laura Kipn
is argued that adultery was “the sit-down strike of the love-takes-work ethic.”)
Perhaps now is a good time to acknowledge the fact that I’m using “heroine” very casually. The feminine of “hero” was first used in the Greek Classical period, and was applied to women who acted within a chaste version of the heroic tradition—women like Joan of Arc, or Saint Lucy, or Judith, the widow who saved her city by decapitating a man. But in the eighteenth century, the conception of the heroine started shifting; novels featured women that were less extraordinary than they were representative, and literature created what the literary scholar Nancy Miller calls the “heroine’s text,” an overarching composite narrative of how a woman negotiates a world set up for men.
In 1997, the psychologist and theorist Mary Gergen wrote about the contrast between the two gendered narrative lines. On the one hand, there’s the “autonomous ego-enhancing hero single-handedly and single-heartedly progressing toward a goal,” and on the other, the “long-suffering, selfless, socially embedded heroine, being moved in many directions, lacking the tenacious loyalty demanded of a quest.” De Beauvoir glossed this as transcendence versus immanence: men were expected to reach beyond their circumstances, while women were expected to be defined and bounded by theirs. Kate Zambreno, in Heroines (2012), nods to de Beauvoir while writing about the existential horror of traditional gender roles—“the man allowed to go out into the world and transcend himself, the woman reduced to the kind of work that will be erased and forgotten at day’s end, living invisible among the vestigial people of the afternoon.”
Traditionally, male literary characters are written and received as emblems of the human condition rather than the male one. Take Stephen Dedalus, Gregor Samsa, Raskolnikov, Nick Adams, Neddy Merrill (better known as the Swimmer), Carver’s blind man, Holden Caulfield, Rabbit Angstrom, Sydney Carton, Karl Ove Knausgaard, et cetera: they are not all exactly acting out the traditional hero’s journey, in which the hero ventures forth into the world, vanquishes some foe, and returns victorious. But the hero’s journey, in all these stories, nonetheless provides the grammar to be adhered to or refuted. Self-mythologization hovers regardless of the actual plot.
Female literary characters, in contrast, indicate the condition of being a woman. They are condemned to a universe that revolves around sex and family and domesticity. Their stories circle questions of love and obligation—love being, as the critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis writes, the concept “our culture uses [for women] to absorb all possible Bildung, success/failure, learning, education, and transition to adulthood.” And so I’m using the term “heroine” simply for the women whose version of literary femininity has stuck. Sometimes they repudiate attachments, like the suicidal characters, or Maria Wyeth, losing her mind on the highway in Play It as It Lays (1970). Sometimes they turn subjugation into an origin story, like Lisbeth Salander, the titular character of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005), or Julia from The Magicians (2009), dark heroines scarred by rape. (I’ll note that both of these series were written by male authors; although men quite obviously can produce and have produced magnificently perceptive novels about women, they also seem prone enough to using rape in a reductive, utilitarian way.) Sometimes these characters manipulate the expected narratives to their advantage, as with Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair (1848), Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind (1936), or Amy Dunne, the sociopath who narrates Gone Girl (2012). (De Beauvoir again: “Woman has been assigned the role of parasite, and every parasite is an exploiter.”) All of these women are in pursuit of basic liberty. But our culture has configured women’s liberty as corrosion, and for a long time, there was no way for a woman to be both free and good.
The marriage-plot heroines—Jane Eyre, the Jane Austen women—are the major exception. They are good and whole and steady in a way that does not interfere with psychological complexity. Elizabeth Bennet is such a wonderful and acutely perceptive observer because she is, all things considered, so cheerful and conventional and well-liked. The timeline plays a role, too, just like in a children’s series: Pride and Prejudice (1813) cuts out on the high note of new love, with a final chapter that telescopes into Elizabeth’s happy future with Mr. Darcy. You wonder about her mood if the novel had started ten years later. Would Elizabeth be happy? Would there be a book if she was? Has anyone ever written a great novel about a woman who is happy in her marriage? Of course, most protagonists are unhappy. But heroes are mostly unhappy for existential reasons; heroines suffer for social reasons, because of male power, because of men.
There are female protagonists who negotiate marital compromise without bitterness, like Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch (1871) and Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Dorothea and Isabel are smart, thoughtful, independent-minded characters, and uncertainty rules their stories: Dorothea ends her novel in a second, happier marriage after her stultifying union with Casaubon is cut short by his death, and we finish Portrait thinking that Isabel will go back to the pompous, insufferable Osmond—but also knowing that she might not stay in Rome for long. Marriage is the animating question, but not the ending. Theirs is the third way, the one in which marriage neither destroys nor completes you, the one that leads most clearly to the present day.
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What it means to be a woman has changed immensely in the past half century, and life and literature have shifted hand in hand. In Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot (2011), a college student takes in her English professor’s point of view on the subject:
In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely. What would it matter whom Emma married if she could file for separation later? How would Isabel Archer’s marriage to Gilbert Osmond have been affected by the existence of a prenup? As far as [the professor] was concerned, marriage didn’t mean much anymore, and neither did the novel. Where could you find the marriage plot nowadays? You couldn’t.
And yet not as much has been upended as the college professor thinks. The heroines of the past few decades have been concerned with the same questions of love and social constriction; it’s just that they answer these questions in a different way. Contemporary fiction about women doesn’t reflect or subvert the heroine’s text as much as it explodes the concept, re-creating and manipulating the way that narrative construction influences a woman’s sense of self. Today’s best-known heroines are often also writers—giving them a built-in reason to be hyperconscious of the story lines at play in their lives.
Chris Kraus, the narrator of Chris Kraus’s metafictional I Love Dick, published in 1997 and reissued in 2006, begins the novel as a failed filmmaker in a sexless marriage to a man named Sylvère. She develops an all-consuming crush on a shadowy figure named Dick, and begins sending him obsessive letters. In a previous century, this sort of transgression might have destroyed our heroine’s trajectory. But in I Love Dick, the letters rejuvenate Chris’s marriage and turn her into the artist she always wanted to be. She and Sylvère start writing to Dick together. “We’ve just had sex and before that spent the last two hours talking about you,” she tells him. Then, through the letters, Chris’s sense of self starts to sharpen. She leaves Sylvère, and continues writing to Dick. “Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement?” she asks him, explaining her desire to be a “female monster.” I can’t stand this book, personally—I find it almost radically tedious—but the audacity of Kraus’s project is undeniable. Rather than have her protagonist attempt to solve the problem of her social condition, her protagonist became that problem, pursued the problem as an identity in itself, an artistic discipline, a literary form.
Jenny Offill’s brilliant Dept. of Speculation (2014) is narrated by a writer in her thirtie
s, a young mother who, echoing Kraus, wants to be an “art monster,” but who also craves domesticity. She loves and despises her self-directed constraints. “Is she a good baby? People would ask me. Well, no, I’d say,” Offill writes, adding, “That swirl of hair on the back of her head. We must have taken a thousand pictures of it.” The narrator is brutal and deadpan; she thinks of a “story about a prisoner at Alcatraz who spent his nights in solitary confinement dropping a button on the floor then trying to find it again in the dark. Each night, in this manner, he passed the hours until dawn. I do not have a button. In all other respects, my nights are the same.” This is all much funnier and darker, because Offill’s narrator, in a way that is world-historically unprecedented, is genuinely free to leave. Shortly before the novel’s revelation that the husband is having an affair, the narration switches from first to third person: the “I” becomes “the wife.” It’s an acknowledgment, from both the narrator and Offill, of the way that social conventions can become fundamental to our selfhood—and sometimes by our own design.
And then there’s Elena Ferrante, who has accomplished what no other writer has been able to do at such blockbuster scale. She instilled her stories about women with an unmistakable shimmer of universal significance through overt feminist specificity; she created a concrete universal that was dominated by women, defined by what the feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero calls “existence, relation and attention,” that stood in shattering contrast to the abstract universal dominated by men. Her body of work—Troubling Love, The Days of Abandonment, The Lost Daughter, and the four Neapolitan novels—constructs a postwar Italian world populated by men who hold external power and women who set the terms of consciousness and identity. Women are haunted by memories and stories of one another—shadow selves, icons, obsessions, ghosts. It is transcendent, in the way de Beauvoir meant it, to watch Ferrante’s narrators triangulate themselves from these images, in their emotional and intellectual project of asserting selfhood and control.