The lyricism of female sadness and ennui in the eyes of everyone else is everywhere; that mythologised in the figure of Sylvia Plath, a Sofia Coppola film, a Lana Del Rey track… But what is sometimes troubling is the notions of female identity forwarded by men, veiled in a seeming sensitivity; fifteen-year-old me was too sold by the Lisbon sisters’ tortured, fragile realness, and strived to be as aloof as Haydée in La Collectionneuse, or Anna Karina’s character in Vivre Sa Vie, these hopelessly fictitious cool girls. To be a force, elusive, yet all-encompassing, life changing – more than a person, an effortlessly beautiful sketch on a screen, to have that cinematic je ne sais quoi. It was only a year ago that I saw Gone Girl, (on Valentine’s Day, but I unfortunately don’t live in America…), one of the most iconic modern antidotes to the stable, sane, sexually liberated, modern woman wandering either on society’s periphery, or slotting into ordinary heteronormative relationships. No, instead, I stopped responding to a boy I’d recently met, and just got on with my life (after sending a link to Fiona Apple’s ‘Parting Gift’).
It seemed my forecast for the end of 2024 literature-wise was cynicism, as I found myself occupied with effaced women, whether in Rachel Cusk’s Outline, or Deborah Levy’s autobiographical The Cost of Living, yet there was something empowering here. Cusk’s almost omniscient protagonist Faye, freshly divorced, traipses around Athens, attempting to gain a sense of truth in the lives of others, who fill the novel’s pages. Cusk playfully disorientes Faye’s surroundings and their stories, questioning the bounds of materiality and upsetting the clear distinction between herself and others. Thus, she Faye is obscured, and is able to present her truth, her subjectivity the filter through which we see the world. Levy similarly embraces the fractured reality she finds herself suspended in, amidst frequent returns to dwell on the masks she and her husband wore as ‘husband’ and ‘wife’. Levy terms femininity as a ‘cultural personality’ in which she no longer found her self-expression, arguing that it’s merely an ‘exhausted phantom’ that was ‘written by men’, asking what the cost would be for a female character to exit her own story, much as Cusk’s did. These women, whether at their moments of strength or weakness, actively attempted to resist the gaze of others, and even themselves, get away from the pigeonholes with ‘mother’ and ‘wife’ and ‘divorcee’ engraved.
Is that destabilisation of the self necessary for recalibration? Before long, I too began wondering if I could free myself from these shackles of society, something resonated or felt like a fate I suppose, even though I could hardly relate to these women’s experiences of childbirth or marriage. I played How to Disappear, and in January was revelling in the almost unreal, subversive characters in Gaitskill’s Bad Behaviour, who often still found themselves subjected to the wills of men, existing in their orbit. The recent literature that addresses the less desirable traits in women and expresses the exhaustion felt in even the most privileged of characters like that in Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation seems to capture the current zeitgeist of burnout my generation are experiencing. It’s in a similar vein to the embrace of Brat, its sentiment the antithesis to that of the composed clean girl. It must be a red flag that I enjoyed much of Sweet Tooth, delighting in the stalkerish dramatic irony of the Serena and Tom’s relationship, and her blissful absorption in romantic novels, and youthful ignorance. Yet is that submission so awful, to admit one wants to be saved (knowing one could do it themselves just the same)? Saved; taken to dinner, bought a silk blouse, taught about what ‘taste’ means, taught things… The ultimate slap in the face (that you could nearly see coming) – Serena is too paper-thin, a little flimsy, is the fact that Tom has written her, in classic McEwan-style, in an attempt not to atone but get even with her plotting and ultimately love. To possess her, ultimately, in writing because there is no other way, taking her voice, and her body. Perhaps I am boring, and like an easy life, finding delight in these simple, middle-class pedestrian characters’ romance, even mildly entertained by Tom’s ventriloquising of female sexuality. Time and time again, Serena’s life and sense of self is coloured by her liaisons with men, and she constantly asserts that she was so beautiful – is this all? I’m sure there exists a far more layered, troubling, and compelling Serena out there; she already was a spy lying about her identity to get with the man she adored. Naturally, even Tom’s final letter to her is left unanswered, her voice effectively covered entirely by her lover. Yet I could look away, running to its inherent sweetness and sentimental side; it is firmly a love story, if only a self-assured male’s assertion of love, based on a woman McEwan knew in his past.
Adrienne Rich in When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision is an ode to the pen, arguing for the act of looking back on events gone with new eyes, as she holds the belief that for women, our drive towards knowing ourselves transcends the quest to configure our identities. This is because it resists the destructiveness of patriarchal society, awakening a consciousness of the female psyche, the state of being a woman outside of the male writer’s realm. She critiques the male assertion that women are constantly victimised by love, this notion a form of tyranny and rejection. Ultimately, the argues for the necessity of women articulating their truths, to process their anger in this way, first because in attempting to ignore our anger and pain as women, we only expose our reality – Sisyphean it may be, but we cannot suppress these fundamentally female experiences. Rich wrote this in 1972, but it rings as true today, in our age of dissociative and fourth-wave feminism.
Do I ever question the value of writing, the sake of it, and the value of the little I have to say? To say no would be a lie, but in this climate of shifting truth and changeability, it is gratifying to have the gift of writing. Possessing a malleability and ability to re-write, it is forever a testament to the present, captured by an irretrievable instant, even when you’re slouched at your desk, fumbling for sleep.
I’ll leave you with Hélène Cixous’s The Laugh of Medusa, which gave me the resolve to obscure less; taking my writing to Substack and community however small (away from my Notes app): ‘Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it… you’ve written a little, but in secret. And it wasn’t good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing; because you didn’t go all the way; or because you wrote irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further but to alternate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off’.