Breaking out of the Attic
Female Agency in Two Victorian Classics and Two Contemporary Bestsellers
Master’s Dissertation Literary Studies Programme: Writing, Editing and Mediating
University of Groningen
Georgia Zouganeli S2874512
Supervisor: Dr. I. Visser
Date of Completion: 1/30/2017
Word Count: 15,134
Table of Contents
Abstract 3
Introduction 4
Chapter One 11
Contextualizing the “Madwoman” and Women in Crime Fiction Chapter Two
22
Marriage and Madness: Representation and Critique of Marriage in Jane Eyre and The Woman in White
Chapter Three 33
Subverting the “Madwoman” Trope in Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train
Conclusion 49
Works Cited 52
Abstract
This dissertation first explores how women and the archetype of the
“madwoman” figure in the novel genre and crime fiction of the Victorian era. This exploration offers a foundation with which to compare and contrast representations of madness and female agency in two works of contemporary fiction. Specifically, it looks at madness within the context of marriage and, in the third chapter of this thesis, the female protagonist’s role in solving a crime. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Wilkie Collins’
The Woman in White (1859), Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012) and Paula
Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train (2015) were chosen because they illustrate a woman’s position within the conservative marital laws and social codes of their respective times. Jane Eyre and The Woman in White offer a basis to understand how these conventions are denounced and subverted. However, their representation of the “madwoman” dismisses women’s mental health and effectively locks the proverbial “madwoman” into the attic as a
background cautionary tale. Taking into account the differences in marital laws of the nineteenth century and today, the question this thesis grapples
contemporary bestseller novels Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train. I argue that by moving the “madwoman” from the position of secondary character to primary character in the modern novels, women’s mental health is given a platform with which to understand and humanize “madness.” All four authors have as their central theme female agency in the framework of marriage and madness. While the contemporary novels give more agency to the “madwoman” by making them the curious, investigative protagonist, they both forgo the earlier novels’ attention to female alliances and bonds.
Introduction
This thesis revolves around women as curious investigators in a
realist novel and a crime fiction story in the Nineteenth Century, and in two contemporary crime fiction thrillers. It also focuses on how the
“madwoman” features in each of the four novels, and offers a compare and contrast on their representation in fiction and the move of the “madwoman”
from secondary character to protagonist.
Though the genre of crime fiction is not at the forefront of this dissertation, it is important to look at the history of this genre since it
became a platform for subverting hypermasculin ideals in popular fiction by female and lesbian crime writers. It, therefore, is appropriate that the two popularized modern novels discussed in this dissertation, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train, break the “madwoman”
out of her proverbial Nineteenth century attic by moving her to the forefront of their respective psychological thriller narratives.
Crime fiction was popularized during the Victorian era, which is due to the original formation of policing units. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first use of the term “detective” back to 1843, in the Chamber’s Edinburg journal which makes mention of the creation of a special police
task force. Prior to the development of the police detective branch in 1842, the origins of modern policing date back to 1829, with the establishment of a civilian police task force in London (Kestner 3-4). The formation of an organized policing force coincides with the expansion of cities across
England during both the Industrial Revolution and the growth of port towns and trade. “In 1800, London was already the largest city ever known,
double the size of Paris with more than 1 million inhabitants […] by 1851 nearly 3 million people occupied 306,000 houses” (Flanders 27). The creation of police and, later, detectives, eased the handling of crime and public riots. “The formation of Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police force in 1829 improved matters: no longer were armed soldiers brought out at the first intimation of danger” (Flanders 399). With a rise in population came a rise in crime, so it is no small wonder that detectives and police officers, agents that restored order within society, were fictionalized and
popularized.
Crime fiction’s mass distribution and popularity was most prominent in novels and short stories. Technological advancements in publication
enabled their mass production and consumption. This popular genre has featured a greater amount of fictional male sleuths in comparison with female detectives, largely due to a historical disassociation Western society made between women and crime. To offer an example, David Farrington estimated in 1981 that 11.70 per cent of males are convicted up to the seventeenth birthday, 21. 76 per cent up to the twenty-first birthday, and 43.
57 per cent “at some time in their lives” (174). In contrast, the
corresponding figures for females were 2.10, 4.66 and 14.70 (Farrington 174). Frances Heidensohn offers another example for the female share of crime by stating: “some 2 million offenders were found guilty by all courts in England and Wales. […] Of all those found guilty 1 in 9 was female” (5-6).
Earlier records of female crimes, in the Eighteenth Century, point to
domestic violence, with cases centering on wives murdering their husbands (Dolan 302). Punishments for treason and petty treason were gender
determined (Dolan 304). To exemplify this determination of punishment, Frances Dolan uses the example of petty treason stating that while men were hurtled to and then hanged at the place of execution, women were burned at the stake for both high and petty treason (304). All of these examples through time demonstrate a disparity between male and female convictions. In addition, as Heidensohn writes, one of three problems in the criminal justice system in the 1980s concerning women were a chivalrous attitude that punished women less severely, a sexist system that aimed to reinforce sexual stereotypes and sanction devious women, and kind
coercion employed to protect women from themselves or the harshness of the law (32).
During the Victorian era, this disparity between genders within the field of crime was seen in how women were equally kept out of the police field of work long after its creation. Joseph Kestner notes that it wasn’t until much later, 1914, that women were granted the foundation of a Women’s Police Service, and in 1918, a Metropolitan Women Police Patrol (5).
However, this did not hinder the creation of female sleuths in fiction works from appearing. “In the 1860s, two works appeared featuring female
detectives, the first attributed to W.S. Hayward, Revelations of a Lady Detective, and the second by Andrew Forrester Jr, The Female Detective”
(Kestner 6). Both fictional works precede the first involvement of women in the Metropolitan Police in 1883 (Kestner 6).
As male detective heroes grew in popularity, with Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot among others, so did several female protagonists such as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, in 1927, and Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew, in 1930. The evolution of television also brought several TV series that featured female sleuths, such as Murder, She Wrote, from 1984 to 1996. Many crime novels that featured female detectives were also adapted into films and series, for example the detective series Rizzoli & Isles, based on Tess Gerritsen’s novels, were first published in 2005 and adapted to TV in 2010.
The female detective’s role in crime fiction also transgressed social codes and the domestic sphere attributed to women during both the Nineteenth Century and the Twenty-first Century. The defining
characteristic of the female detective is a desire to know, to persevere, to unravel a mystery, and to understand despite, and even in defiance of, the constraints placed on them. Jane Eyre’s relentless pursuit of knowledge in Charlotte Brontë’s novel is exemplary of the female detective. Jane Eyre’s story is told from the perspective of her as an adult looking back at her life.
We are made both privy to her intellectual pursuit while she is growing up and her continued pursuit to understand those past events by looking back on them. By doing this, Charlotte Brontë’s narrative depicts Jane Eyre as a curious observer, observing curious subjects moving curiously through the story. To that end, this thesis utilizes Hilary Schor’s Curious Subjects
definition of realism:
[M]y definition of realism depends further on a sense of doubleness, one that I connect not only to Watt’s classic distinction between the realism of “presentation” and the realism of “assessment” but also to the doubled nature of curiosity: that curiosity is both something you have (“I am so curious about Isabel Archer; what will she do?”) and something you are (“Isabel Archer is so very curious; what a curious vase that is!”). (4)
The act of exploration, of curiosity, is thus defined by trying to unravel a kind of other. It is, as Schor explains, “a form of inquiry; an innate sense
of wonder; a subject unduly interested in looking; an object of true or imagined singularity; and that world of objects cunningly made” (4). The four novels this thesis focuses on, the aforementioned Jane Eyre, Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Paula Hawkins’
The Girl on the Train, all deal with female agency through relentless
exploration of self, of marriage and of solving a mystery and a crime. All four also wrestle with the “madwoman” trope as a curious subject to be investigated. In all four novels, I argue that the “madwoman” holds the answers pursued by the protagonist, even in the case of The Girl on the Train and Gone Girl, where the curious subject embodies the double nature
of being investigator and object of curiosity, much like Jane Eyre as
mentioned above. Juxtaposed to this is the figure of madness. Each novel contains a character that falls under the trope of the “madwoman,” and though each novel investigates the curious subject of the “madwoman,” I am most fascinated by Gillian Flynn’s and Paula Hawkins’ embodiment of this trope as the central protagonist of their fiction.
All four novels embody an aspect of the “madwoman” trope as either monstrously animalistic or ethereal apparition, but it is only in the more modern novels that this trope is rationalized and offered a platform on which to develop beyond its mythical literary characteristic. This literary tradition of translating madness into the novel as linked to myth and monstrosity is one that dates back much further than the Nineteenth
Century. Lillian Feder links both the prototypical mad men and mad women
to the wild man, “an imaginary being who occurs in various forms
throughout Western literature […] also emerges from myth and rituals” (3).
What the Nineteenth Century did add was the desire to categorize, tame and even eradicate that which is other to the socio-cultural norms. This is notable in the narratives of the popularized crime fiction novels of the time.
Gill Plain states that “crime fiction in general, and detective fiction in particular, is about confronting and taming the monstrous” (3), while according to Phyllis Betz, it involves resolving a mystery which in turn seems to restore order and a semblance of balance to society (17-8). I argue that by having the protagonist’s mental health combined with the solving of a murder, Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins’ works present a possible
allegorical framework for relating to “madness.” Additionally, all four novels present marriage as constraint towards the female characters through both social codes of their times and marital laws. As Hilary Schor states, “[i]n short, my view of female curiosity places it securely within two sets of law:
the first, the laws of genre that we recognize as the realist novel; the second, the legal constraints of Anglo-American marriage, in which a
marriage contract literally “contracts” around the heroine” (6). While Jane Eyre and The Woman in White highlight courtship, or pre-marital
investigation, Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train focus on the trials and tribulations of being in a marital union.
All four books do not have what would be considered to be high academic acclaims, though Jane Eyre is the exception as having joined the
ranks of the classics. However, each novel was impactful during their respective times and continue to be read. Charlotte Brontë, who published her novel under the male pseudonym Currer Bell in order to avoid prejudice against her writing as penned by either a male or female entity, received
“hearty, yet delicate and discriminating praise” (Gaskell 383). Gaskell further explained that the demand for the book in libraries was unaffected by the reviews, and a rush for copies began (383). Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White gained so much popularity that, according to John
Sutherland’s introduction to the novel, “[m]iddle-aged men by the score fell in love with Marian Halcombe. […] Cats were renamed Fosco, and thought to look more sinister. Walter became a suddenly fashionable name for
babies” (9). Wilkie Collins became the pioneer of the sensational novel. Both Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train were number one New York Times
Bestsellers during their respective releases, with Gone Girl having been on for thirty-seven weeks and The Girl on the Train for twenty weeks. David Itzkopf wrote on Gone Girl, that it “has become arguably the year’s biggest literary phenomenon for a book not containing the words “Fifty Shades” in its title” (“New Two-Book Deal for ‘Gone Girl’ Author Gillian Flynn”).
Chapter one of this thesis contextualizes the representation of women and madness in literature and the crime fiction. Chapter two offers a critical analysis on the nineteenth century concept of madness and marriage
through a close reading of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Wilkie Collin’s The Woman in White. Chapter three is a close reading of both Gone Girl and
The Girl on the Train, focusing on the crime and thriller aspects of the
genre and how it incorporates both the themes of investigative women, madness and marriage. The aim of this thesis, is to look at how the use of female agency and curiosity in all four novels challenges the social codes of their time, and to explore whether there are changes between the novels’
representation of the “madwoman” and women’s place in thrillers, and whether post-feminist era is supported by the more contemporary novels.
Chapter One: Contextualizing the “Madwoman” and Women in Crime Fiction
The “madwoman” is often times correlated with the antiquated
concept of female hysteria. Philosophers and psychologists theorized about
women’s madness as far in time as the Greek Classical period. Hippocrates employed the concept of the wandering uterus, assuming the female organ was an independent beast that roamed the female body, causing mayhem.
Plato, on the other hand, gave this notion a more advanced biologically sound explanation. He attributed hysterical symptoms to sexual appetitive, impulses that lived within the body and wandered or “sexual desire
perverted by frustration” (Adair 154-162). Historically, in both Western literature and theory, symptoms of madness in literature were, according to Lillian Feder, often reflective of what she terms the “Dionysiac frenzy” (35).
In several of these mad mythical protagonists stories, the revelation of the effects of social and political forces on familial attitudes of certain periods in history offer an exploration of the psychology of madness through the continuous exploration of their inner experience (Feder 36). “[S]ymptoms of insanity and the conduct of the mad protagonists of certain Greek myths have long been apparent and sometimes grossly appropriated in both
scientific and imaginative analogies” (Feder 35). The exploration of social and political codes on familial attitudes reflects the maddening effects social constraints had on women during the Victorian era. “By the time women married they had been conditioned to attend to the needs of their husbands, to pre-empt their every desire” (Kelsey 97). Women were delegated to being beneath men and if they ever demonstrated protest or unhappiness at their situation, Kelsey explains that “[u]ntil the Nineteenth Century it was also possible for a husband to have his wife locked up, or do the job himself”
(99). A woman who exhibited freedom of thought and rebelled against pre- conceived notions of docility and malleability was monstrous and subject to being locked away in either a house/attic or, later, an asylum.
In literature, one of the defining pieces that initiated the concept of the “madwoman in the attic” was Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Gilbert and Gubar, in their book The Madwoman in the Attic, establish that the female image as either monstrous or angelic was largely created by the male author. In their preface, they explain that female authorship became non- anomalous in the nineteenth century (Gilbert and Gubar xi). Prior to this, the authority of authorship was mainly granted to men (Gilbert and Gubar 4-5). Though both function within codes set by a largely patriarchal society, the monster-woman largely inhabits the outer edges of society in autonomy and rebellion, while the angelic-woman remains trapped within the codes set by socio-cultural expectations. Thus, the monster-woman “embodies intransigent female autonomy and thus represents both the author's power to allay 'his' anxieties by calling their source bad names (witch, bitch, fiend, monster), and, simultaneously the mysterious power of the character who refuses to stay in her textually ordained 'place'” (Gilbert and Gubar 28).
The binary aspect of the angelic and monstrous woman is defined by the reoccurring concept in literature of the other. The other being anything that stands outside of social codes of acceptable conduct or acceptable aesthetics. There is an inherent fear of the other, a fear of its contagion were it not to be monitored, contained and controlled. By using the term
monstrous to describe the other side of female agency, the feared witches and fiends, Gilbert and Gubar create the association of monstrous with madness. The “madwoman” is monstrous, defying her position within the acceptable socio-cultural standards of her time. A binary can only exist through classification, an act that Rebecca Stott attributes to the Victorian era. “Incessant classification and naming became a feature of the late
Victorian period: an instinct to define and measure culture by what it ought not to be” (23). This in turn established new areas of scientific exploration such as anthropology, criminology, craniology, all of which undertook the different ways of classifying sex, race, naming species and deviant behavior (Stott 23). Classification defines both what one is, but also what one isn’t and what one shouldn’t be. It also leads to an inevitable hierarchy. “Binary opposition in Western thought (as opposed to Oriental thought) are
internalised as hierarchical oppositions: the element of each pair needing the dominance or subordination of the other for its meaning” (Stott 32). Gill Plain opens her discussion on criminal desires by recounting her experience in an exhibition of monsters and imaginary creatures, stating “our sense of the monstrous negotiates the species barrier: image after image
transgressed the boundary between mankind and animal, creating hybrid creatures that embodied […] the fear of absorption by an ‘other’” (2).
The representation of madness within literature is affected by its physical, or aesthetical, descriptions within the narrative. A distinction is made between mankind, animal, and this hybrid creation which is human
but acts in an animalistic, and sometimes otherworldly, way. This distinction clearly delineates that the literary madness is something from another world, that is from myths and a world in-between. Feder notes a constant awareness of the differences between the literary madman and actual insanity, explaining that “the madman of literature is, to some extent, modeled on the actual one, but his differences from such a model are at least as important as are his resemblances to it” (9). “He is rooted in the mythical or literary tradition in which distortion is a generally accepted mode of expression” (9). Both Feder and Chris Wisenthal agree that this language of expression and portrayal has value and meaning. “[W]hat is of most interest in this study is his adaptation of delusion, dissociation, or other aberrations to the creation of a unique view of his society, his art, and his own mind” (Feder 9-10). Wisenthal adds to this in his own work that because portrayals of madness in literature offer iconic and symbolic
vectors, they “invite the paradoxical pursuit of meaning in madness” (2). In Jane Eyre, Bertha’s movements are described with the same vocabulary
used by Gill Plain to reference the monsters she saw in an exhibition, a hybrid between human and creature: “a figure ran backwards and forwards.
What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell” (Brontë 296). In Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, the “madwoman”
description falls under something reminiscent of an ethereal being.
“[T]here, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven, stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to toe
in white garments” (71). If the defining characteristic of crime fiction, as described by Phyllis Betz is “[t]he threat of chaos is represented by the subversion of social codes. Only the detective hero is able to restore order, often only temporarily, by successfully resolving the mystery” (17), then the fact that the “madwomen” in each novel, Jane Eyre, The Woman in White, Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, hold the secrets to unraveling the
mystery the protagonist so fervently pursues, symbolically demonstrates attempts at the paradox described by Chris Wisenthal: finding meaning in madness. The protagonist of each novel thus functions as a female
detective.
Detective fiction is generally agreed to have begun in the English speaking world of literature with Edgar Alan Poe’s 1841 short story
publication “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” a story wherein two amateur detectives help Parisian police solve the brutal double murder of a mother and her daughter. Wilkie Collins is regarded as a close contender to being the father of detective fiction, with his novels The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868). The genre gave rise to several beloved and well- known names in the field of crime solving, notably Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade. However, alongside these famed fictional male sleuths there also existed, in early detective fiction, female investigators. Most notably Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew. As Glenwood Irons writes, though Miss Marple and Nancy Drew were (and
continue to be) well-known characters within the genre, “the names of female detectives have only recently gained wide recognition” (Irons x).
Indeed, though women were also active members within this genre as both authors and protagonists, the role of the female character in crime solving is more popularly attributed to that of victimhood. “Without doubt, the majority of the murder victims who meet their deaths between the covers of mystery fiction paperbacks, in mystery movies on the large and small
screens, and even in the daily news are women” (Irons ix).
The tradition of brutal murders against women is pervasive even in modern psychological thrillers, though novels such as Gone Girl are
subverting these tropes. Elyse, an avid reader and reviewer of crime novels and psychological thrillers wrote in a blog post “[m]ysteries and thrillers are built upon the bodies of fictional dead women, and if that woman is white, petite, and young all the better. Just like when these crimes happen in real life, this particularly blend of victim (the blonde with the toothy smile) gets the most air time, lures in the most consumers” (“Good Girl, Gone Girl, and Women in Psychological Thrillers”). However, not just any female trope is granted the role of victimhood. Just as children make
compelling victims due to cultural associations of youth with innocence, so are the chosen female characters required to demonstrate an equivalent amount of innocence through youth, physical appearance and social status.
The female character must fit into, for example, the modern Western cultural view of beauty, for empathy towards a female character who
commits a “crime” against socially constructed ideals of beauty. And of course, a female character’s innocence can only be valid if the victimized woman inhabited one of the following roles: mother, daughter, sister, wife or virgin. The importance of writing women in a different variety of roles is, therefore, paramount. Even though some female characters in Nineteenth and Twentieth century literature partook in the rise of the detective, crime and thriller novel, such as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, or even rebelled against the established Christian norms set during the Victorian era, such as Jane in Jane Eyre, the novels they inhabited still worked within the limited social framework of their time. Miss Marple is described by Glenwood Irons as the spinster detective because “[she] operated in the rigidly convention-bound, quasi-Victorian world of early twentieth-century England, and operates apart from the local police because her age and sex make her unsuitable for the job of discovering murderers” (x). Only in recent years has Miss Marple come out of the shadows of Christie’s other detective, Poirot, largely due to the American TV series attributed to her (Irons x). Female characters in Victorian fiction and detective novels were not unheard of, the problem lies in the scarcity of personalities and roles they were allowed to inhabit. Even when they did inhabit male roles, it was more likely than not that they would do so in a restricted, segregated
manner, or at times they would be sexually empowered but upon as manipulative and dangerous.
Such a character rose out of Victorian fiction: the femme fatale. The femme fatale is, above all else “characterized by her effect upon men: a femme cannot be fatale without a male being present, even where her
fatalism is directed towards herself” (Stott iix). This character pertains most notably to the literary world of crime and espionage and according to
Rebecca Stott, arose from the Zeitgeist of the fin-de-siècle within biological and philosophical attempts at defining and determining the female body, mind and sexuality, the fear of imperialistic loss in colonies, race, and evolutionary theories (Stott ix-xi). Femme fatales were not written as victims but as women considered treacherous and dangerous by the male characters within the novels they inhabited. Their danger stems from their use of sexuality to ensnare and charm. In other words, female sexuality that was unbridled and untamed by the patriarchal society was deemed a threat.
In tandem with the rise of the femme fatale, another female character inhabited the pages of turn-of-the-century British literature and crime
novels: the new woman. New Woman challenged the sexual norms, and thus challenged dominant sexual morality (Stott iix). She is unlike the femme fatale in that she is not characterized by her sexual and/or erotic effect on men (Stott iix).
The new woman in crime fiction offers a restructuring of the
expectations of women’s roles in investigation and solving mysteries. Taking up the role of detective or investigator within the novel, Sally Munt explains that “[f]unctioning within a fantasy environ of post-feminist opportunity,
these powerful detectives resolve three unstable forms close to the liberal feminist heart- the individual, the family, and the states” (31). When
defining the detective as an agent sent to restore balance, order and justice in an out of control society, as has been done in the introduction of this thesis, then the new woman crime detective is held to the same standard as a male sleuth, though with a more focused target. However, the differences lie in the expected task. The male detective is described by Munt as a
contemporary crusader or knight tasked with restoring the social order by representing the “dominant hegemonic Christian/patriarchal order, the assertion of values very traditional” (3). The male detectives, endlessly replayed in late-night movie versions by Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum, are connected to the male heroes of Westerns like Shane, and they operate outside the civilized world around them because of a mythic necessity which encourages the male hero in that lonely direction. Frequent encounters with Spade-like loners in movie, Holmes-like intellectuals on public television, and Hammer-like dicks on commercial television could create the sense that the detective as urban hero is, almost by definition, male (Irons x). As an urban hero, he is in charge of an entire society, restoring and keeping order for both men and women. The new woman investigator, on the other hand, is tasked with liberating the female form by having the agency to probe and challenge social codes constricting women.
Irons argues that since the late 1960s, audiences began to be exposed to a plethora of female sleuths in both novels and television series (Irons xi).
In fact, according to Irons the publication of the critical dictionary Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary demonstrates that
women have been a part of the genre since its inception (Irons xi). The female sleuths are unlike the spinster detectives of old and tend to be more outgoing, aggressive and self-sufficient who have “transcended generic codes and virtually re-written the archetypical male detective from a female perspective” (Irons xii). This has continued to evolve, and now women have been afforded roles as law enforcement and legal executives within these novels. Both Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train feature female detectives actively working as police officers and detectives in the murder case. In Mary Kubica’s The Good Girl, the victim’s mother, Eve, joins forces with the detective to find her. The exact same investigative role is played by the victim’s mother in Kimberly McCreight’s novel Reconstructing Amelia. The investigative, curious and relentless female character has risen within the genre, pushing aside, or joining forces with, the moody and ruggedly individualistic male detective to make room for a more nuanced variety of female characters.
This variety has opened the door to the literary exploration of a different female character, though not previously unheard of: the female psychopath. It is important not to confuse this particular character with the femme fatale; sexuality and manipulation through sensuality and charm do not play a role here. This is the female sociopath or psychopath murderer.
The female villain. After a barrage of criticism directed at Amy’s evilness in
Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn wrote an essay “I Was not a Nice Little Girl” in the
defense of both Amy’s evil and of her authorship of such characters. She expresses her discontent and weariness at the high amount positive representation of women as only good characters who are “spunky
heroines, brave rape victims, soul-searching fashionistas” (“I Was not a Nice Little Girl”). This lament is problematic for the fact that it undermines the importance of representing brave rape victims in a Western society that still victim-blames in rape cases. However, she expresses a desire for a good potent female villain, one that will represent the ugly side, or at the very least acknowledge the fact that women can also be violent and evil.
Not ill-tempered women who scheme about landing good men and better shoes (as if we had nothing more interesting to war over), not chilly WASP mothers (emotionally distant isn’t necessarily evil), not soapy vixens (merely bitchy doesn’t qualify either). I’m talking violent, wicked women. Scary women. Don’t tell me you don’t know some. The point is, women have spent so many years girl-powering ourselves --- to the point of almost parodic encouragement --- we’ve left no room to acknowledge our dark side. Dark sides are important (Flynn "I Was Not").
Though controversial due to the violent nature of such a character, dark sides are important because they undermine the idea of women’s roles as either loving mothers and daughters, or innocent virgins. They subvert the concept of the woman as merely complacent, malleable and mere
victim. The idea that the realm of violence solely belongs to men
automatically places any other as victim to this violence. By “granting”
female characters “access” to this realm, we acknowledge fully that women are equal to men both in the good and the bad, deinstitutionalizing the idea that victimhood can only be performed by women, therefore allowing the audience to see that female characters should not have needed to be granted access to such a realm, for good and evil are human traits.
Kanost offers a glimmer of hope for the “madwoman.” “The attic, along with the marginal physical, social, and intellectual spaces traditionally afforded to people with mental illnesses, is being opened up and
reconfigured by literary and popular culture alike” (Kanost 112). Much like Bertha, Rachel in The Girl on the Train embodies that same character: the maddened ex-wife of the male protagonist. However, unlike in Jane Eyre, this modern novel offers us a first person view of Rachel’s mental inner workings. The madwoman is no longer hidden away and spoken of in the third person, she is the narrator and voice of the story. “The very existence of the sentence “I am the madwoman in the attic” affirms that the
madwoman is a subject. Given that the intended purpose of a t-shirt is to publicly broadcast a message linked to its wearer, this particular shirt calls attention to the marked discrepancy between the printed message and the wearer’s ostensible freedom of speech and movement: the madwoman has left the attic” (Kanost 113).
Chapter Two: Marriage and Madness: Representation and Critique of the Institution of Marriage in Jane Eyre and The Woman in White
Motivations for marriage during the Victorian era, in accordance with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White,
centered around improving ones social status, inheritance and wealth. In addition, the Victorian period offered a radical social experiment in which a new sentimentalization of marrying for love arose (Coontz 195). “The
Victorians were the first people in history to try to make marriage the pivotal experience in people’s lives and married love the principal focus of their emotions, obligations, and satisfactions” (Coontz 195). Both novels offer a critique on marriage and the conservative aspects of marriage during the nineteenth century, and illustrate the damaging effects
surrounding social codes of the time. “[T]hese hopes for love and intimacy were continually frustrated by the rigidity of nineteenth-century gender roles” (Coontz 195). Nineteenth-century gender roles demanded that women become domestic care givers while men the main provider of the household. Stephanie Coontz explains that the roles of both husband and wife shifted during the eighteenth-century, making the husband become the sole provider of the household while “the wife’s role was redefined to focus on her emotional and moral contributions to family life rather than
economic input” (162). The purpose of idealizing love and intimacy was meant to strengthen marital bonds, but the continued separation of the male and female spheres coupled with the idealization of female purity put new strains on the institution of marriage (Coontz 195). However, by
Charlotte Bronte writing Jane as a character who rebels against her own
societal position and who eventually inherits from her uncle, she gives her literary protagonist the tools necessary to elect a marriage of love and companionship over one of status elevation and protection. Equally, Wilkie Collin’s denouncement of women’s unequal position when it came to
inheritance laws wrapped in a sensational crime novel unravels the
madness and ridiculousness of such an arrangement. Both novels feature narratives that demonstrate the maddening dehumanization of women as objects of gain and property to men, and denounce them by having both female protagonist find a form of triumph over their respective oppressors in the end. Both novels conclude with marriages that offer their audiences an example of unions that find comfort in equitableness and companionship, instead of monetary and societal echelon gains.
In Jane Eyre, women’s economic dependence on men robbed them of personal agency and placed them outside of society, marriage becoming a means to either advance socially or find domestic comfort. Lauren Osley cites Maria Lamonaca when she makes the claim that Jane is celebrated by feminist due to her vocalizing her views on “the potential equity of
marriage, her lamentation of the restricted labour opportunities for educated women, her desire to expand her intellectual integrity, and her questioning of systemic religious practices that oppressed women and dignified men” (55). These limited labour opportunities are made clear in Charlotte Brontë’s narrative as female characters are either constricted to a marriage of opportunity, as is Mrs. Reed who spends the better part of her
days in a homely environment with her children, or restricted to become governesses, and thus in service to a master or employer in a household.
Though women were granted the chance to earn an income by being governesses, they were still bound to a household for room and board.
“Jane, Diana, Mary and Miss Temple must seek employment in the form of teaching or governessing, both of which would secure room and board in lieu of or in addition to a meagre salary” (Osley 57). Emancipation through work as a governess or teacher was therefore difficult, if not impossible.
Charlotte Bronte herself is documented as having had to work as a private governess, and she wrote: “I see more clearly than I have ever done before, that a private governess has no existence, is not considered as a living rational being, except as connected with the wearisome duties she has to fulfil” (Gaskell 130). Additionally, women’s expected roles restricted their potential to develop as intellectuals of equal standing to men. “[I]t is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.” (Brontë 96). This unfair and imposed position for women is consistently questioned by Jane, who is described as possessing “fury” and being “frantic” with “deep ire and desperate revolt” (8, 27, 28).
Jane’s position within the novel is unique. Her character represents, from her first introduction in the novel, deep thought and high curiosity for the world around her. At the beginning of the novel, she is not just reading
her book, Bewick’s History of British Birds, but imagining the worlds described within the book. She may be perceived as a dependent, but
throughout the story she demonstrates a keen sense of curiosity of trying to understand her surroundings and herself, and by this means give herself the freedom to choose and move from Gateshead to Mrs. Reed, then in Lowood to Mr. Brocklehurst, to Mr. Rochester in Thornfield Hall, and to St. John Rivers. Layered onto this exploration of the World around her, the narrative is seen not directly through the eyes of Jane growing-up through the years, but through the fictional penmanship of Jane as a grown woman, ten years into her marriage with Mr. Rochester.
The narrative exposes the inquiries of young Jane when she is unjustly punished by Mrs. Reed and demonstrates her rebellion through the act of analyzing her circumstance and asking the most important question of why, despite not having all the answers. “How all my brain was in tumult, and all my heart in insurrection! Yet in what darkness, what dense ignorance, was the mental battle fought! I could not answer the ceaseless inward question- why I thus suffered” (Brontë 9-11). This question, one that a younger Jane finds herself unable to answer is revisited by older Jane who offers certainty in her answer: “now, at the distance of- I will not say how many years, I see it clearly” (Brontë 10). Looking back, Jane sees that she was a discord in Gateshead Hall, “I was like nobody there” (Brontë 10). She was a curious element that, in its nature of not fitting with its surrounding, brought matters into question. If she is like nobody there, then she is other, and by
being other, her existence within Gateshead Hall becomes a question mark in and of itself which challenges the existing codes, or disrobes these codes, revealing them as constructs rather than fundamental truths. As Gilbert and Gubar mention, Jane Eyre does not begin with elaborate scenic expositions, as other Victorian novels of its time, but with a “curiously enigmatic
remark” (339). The novel’s format is a curiosity when compared to its
predecessors. The opening sentence of the novel, “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day,” sets the tone for Jane Eyre, “both the occasion (that day) and the excursion (or the impossibility of one) are significant: the first is the real beginning of Jane’s pilgrim’s progress towards maturity; the second is a metaphor for the problems she must solve in order to attain maturity” (Gilbert and Gubar 339). That is the tone of the novel, the curious investigation of Jane into her tormented youth in order to layout her journey to where she is now as narrator and omnipresent observer of her life.
Her tormentors as a child are Mrs. Reed and her three children John, Eliza and Georgiana. John, the male heir of the Reeds, and, as Nancy Pell states, “John Reed's position as sole male heir gives him an absolute power to harass his dependent female cousin” (400), and is naturally granted higher status by the sole act of being the only son of the Reeds. Jennifer Kelsey writes about the rules of Victorian era that “just as women had been conditioned by their inferior education so too had men been conditioned into believing they were the superior species” (91). John Reed continually attempts to undermine her agency by reminding her of her status as a
dependent: “You have no business to take our books; you are a dependent, mama says; you have no money; your father left you none; you ought to beg, and not to live here with gentlemen's children like us” (Brontë 7). This constant stripping of rights and belittling act of power over Jane creates, what Nancy Pell terms Jane’s decision to “keep in good health, and not die”
(Pell 404), an answer Jane gives to Mr. Brocklehurst when asked: “Do you know where the wicked go after death? […] And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there forever? […] What must you do to avoid it?” (Bronte, 22). In essence, Jane begins to care for her own well-being and to not just survive but thrive in her environment in order to be free of the
“pit.” The pit, not only synonymous with where the wicked go after death, may also represent society’ aims to bury the aspirations and intellectual potential of women. And, as Jane elucidates, a lack of exercise of the mind would lead to suffering, “they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer” (Brontë 96). This suffering can be interpreted as a form of madness. Restrained and stagnated in the
singular attitude of being “very calm” and dedicated to “making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags,”
would lead to a suffering of the mind by having to repress an important aspect of humanity that was granted to men but not to women: the freedom to choose, deliberate and explore.
Jane grants herself this freedom to explore and contemplate
throughout the novel, and this ability to investigate successfully puts into
question the social codes represented in the novel. She, for example, looks at herself critically in contrast with Mrs. Reed’s expectations of life and a child and her cousins. “I know that had I been a sanguine, brilliant,
careless, exacting, handsome, romping child […] Mrs. Reed would have endured my presence more complacently” (Brontë 10). Rebecca Stott discusses this position of women in Victorian era on the frontier, a double position which depended on the type of woman (38). This double is split into the idealised woman, “the woman seen as representative of a higher and purer nature, as Virgin or Mother of God” and the woman vilified as “Lilith or the Whore of Babylon […] part of the chaotic wilderness outside,
representing that darkness and chaos” (Stott 38). The idealised woman is part of a metaphorical frontier, a frontier described as “protecting and shielding the symbolic order from chaos” (Stott 38), while the vilified woman inhabits the outside edge of the frontier (Stott 38). These
categorizations served more to ostracize and damage, robbing individuals of a freedom to choose and to exist as human rather than roles.
Edward Rochester’s marriage to Bertha Antoinette Mason is an example of a forced election for both Rochester and Bertha. As Sandra Gilbert states in her notes “Rochester’s ‘contemptible’ prearranged
marriage to Bertha Mason is also a consequence of patriarchy, or at least of the patriarchal custom of primogeniture” (Gilbert & Gubar 630). Edward Rochester, as the youngest Rochester son, was not entitled to receive his father’s fortune and was therefore bound to acquire an inheritance by way
of a dowry through marriage. “A younger son, he was encouraged by his father to marry for money and status because sure provisions for his future could be made in no other way” (Gilbert & Gubar 630). The encouragement by his father to marry for money and status can be seen as the patriarchal social figure pushing to further instill male dominant ideals, even if it was Rochester who was marrying for wealth, as opposed to the traditional view of women marrying for economic security. Jane Eyre was written before the passing of the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1870, which meant that Bertha Mason’s property automatically became Rochester’s upon marrying him. Women had no legal right to property, and thus still remained mere objects of fortune, as is the case with the fictional Bertha Mason.
Bertha’s marriage to Rochester is the pit to be avoided by Jane if she wishes to continue to keep in good health and not die. As Adrienne Rich writes that “just as [Jane’s] instinct for self-preservation saves her from earlier temptations, so it must save her from becoming this woman by curbing her imagination at the limits of what is bearable for a powerless woman in the England of the 1840s” (Rich, as quot. in Gilbert & Gubar 361).
Bertha is a cautionary tale against the pitfalls of marriage in the Victorian era. She is Jane’s double, a reflection of the maddening effects of constraint and suppression. Susan Sellers uses Mikhail Bathkins theory of the double- voice to explain that “a sense of self can only occur in language, our use of which is predetermined by the dominant ideology of the society in which we live. This situation […] results in a double-voice, since there is a split
between those utterances which accord with the dictates of our community […] and those which it censors or omits” (Sellers 42). And, as Gilbert argues
“Bertha is still […] another avatar of Jane” (Gilbert 359), and thus acts out all of Jane’s secret and repressed fantasies that do not accord with socially acceptable actions. Bertha burns the wedding veil Jane dislikes, and even puts off Jane’s dreaded wedding day (Gilbert 359.)
Her relationship with Jane, as well as one of a double-voice, is also a monitory one according to Gilbert. “[W]hile acting out Jane’s secret
fantasies, Bertha does […] provide the governess with an example of how not to act” (Gilbert & Gubar 361). Jane’s own encounter with “madness”
within the red-room when she was ten years old. As punishment for having aggressed John, Mrs. Reed locked Jane away in the red-room, Mr. Reed’s old room where he was said to have died. Jane begins to think about Mr. Reed’s fondness of her, and how he had wished and asked for his wife of be kind to Jane after he had passed. She becomes weary that spirits become restless when their dying wishes as not fulfilled: “and I thought Mr. Reed's spirit, harassed by the wrongs of his sister's child, might quit its abode whether in the church vault or in the unknown world of the departed and rise before me in this chamber” (Brontë 11) . She has a mental break down and panics
“my heart beat thick, my head grew hot; a sound filled my ears […]
something seemed near me; I was oppressed, suffocated” (Brontë 11). Just as Jane is locked away into the red-room, her uncle’s old room, the room of the patriarch of the Reed’s home, so was Bertha locked away from her
native Jamaica into the foreign land of England and into marriage in a Victorian society.
The attic, a place where is locked away from the house’s inhabitants, but still looming above them in the upper floor, is both a literal prison and the metaphorical imprisonment for a woman who enters into a marriage ruled by patriarchal dominant laws.
Jane’s acquisition, after escaping from Thornfield Hall and meeting St.
John Rivers and his sisters Diana and Mary, of her Uncle Eyre’s fortune of twenty pounds, frees her from the societal shackles of necessitating to earn money. She has risen in the social echelons by inheritance and wealth
instead of by marriage, and found the comfort to choose her own destiny rather than conform to labours prescribed by Victorian society. Therefore, when she returns to Thornfield Hall, she is choosing to take Rochester as her betrothed out of love and want, not out of necessity. Jane Eyre “chooses Rochester because she loves him, not because he has the financial
capabilities to sustain her” (Owsley 64).Charlotte Bronte, hence, highlights the importance of marital equality by giving Jane a relatively comfortable, and dare one say, happy ending. When Jane escapes from Thornfield Hall, and from a marriage to a Rochester who holds higher power than herself, she demonstrates that this is not the best of unions. By returning willfully and on equal economical footing with Rochester, it is highlighted as the better option.
Marital equality is necessary. Entering a marriage on equal footing to ones mate is necessary to withhold potential madness from a union based on economic profit and dehumanization through appropriation. This theme is also emphasized in Wilkie Collins’ sensational novel The Woman in White.
As Carolyn Dever explains “[m]arriage is both a formal and a thematic concern in a Collins text: his novels explore the grey areas created by
shifting social and legal expectations about love, property and the domestic sphere” (112). “Collins portrays marriage, for example, as the site of
conflict, confusion and intrigue as well as the means of resolution, at a moment in the 1850s and 1860s when marriage was being reassessed as a legal contract, with profound social implications” (Taylor 2). The late 1800s were a time of active feminist agency and marked the initial motion of the Women’s Movement. Women were beginning to fight to acquire more basic rights, especially the right to property, which was granted in 1870 and reinforced in 1882 with the Married Women’s Property Act (Stott 12).
However, it is within the confines of a society pre-Married Women’s Property Act that Wilkie Collins wrote The Woman in White in 1859. The plot features largely the desire for inheritance, as Sir Percival Glyde, goes through great lengths to first secure a legitimacy by falsifying the marriage between both his parents (he was born of an illegitimate union), and to then acquire Laura Fairlie’s, his fiance, inheritance through deceit and robbing of her identity. Through both of these key plot points, Collins deconstructs the institution of marriage: the falsification of Percival’s parent’s marriage
proves the flimsy nature of marriage as not a divine and holy act under God, but as a mere contract easily forged; and the exchanging of identities
between Laura and Anne, due to their resemblance, demonstrates the flaw in inheritance laws that both robs Laura of her identity literally and
metaphorically, as without any lawful protection, a husband is technically permitted to go through ridiculous means in order to acquire her property.
Collins to plays with different social codes in marriage on the late Victorian era. In addition to having his characters question the wholesome sanctity of matrimony through their actions to secure economic wealth, Collins also uncovered the greediness that lied beneath the conservative views of marriage. When the narrative is observed through a legal lens, it was a union that had come to center more on property than on love or sanctity: women acquired social security through marriage while men acquired women as a sort of property; the sexual taboo of the Victorian era secured men’s ownership of their wives’ sexual activity, in turn securing the legitimacy of an heir to their own wealth. Additionally, Carolyn Dever
argues that this deconstruction allows for the distribution of “the emotional intimacy ordinarily credited to marital love among three figures, rather than the conventional two” (113). Collins victors not traditional marriage
between a man and a woman, since both end up being fraudulent in nature, but the sisterly bond between Laura and Marian, demonstrating marriage is not the only union that can be held as exemplary and holy. “The union of Laura and Marian is the novel’s most fully realised ‘marriage’, if we
consider marriage a union based on emotional depth, mutual trust, and the presumption of permanence” (Dever 114). The importance of such a
demonstration in literature of unions is fundamental as it opens up the way to future possibilities and destabilizes the absolute power held by men within marital unions.
Collins frequently maps the positive components of companionate marriage on to same-sex sibling or sibling-equivalent relations, or on to relationships that are for one reason or another not recognised by the law. In contrast, he often presents legal marriage as a sinkhole of deception, hostility, abuse and grubby materialism at worst, and at best a site of placid, jog-trot boredom (Dever, 114).
It is important to remember that he contextualizes these nuances for a union within the oppressive restrictions surrounding heterosexual
marriages that places all the power on the man and none on the woman, and emphasizes that such a union leads to discord and deception.
In conclusion, both Jane Eyre and The Woman in White attempt to demonstrate the imprisoning state women find themselves in in a largely patriarchal society that disfavors viewing women as more than mere property. Both novels offer an alternate example for what a marital union should be like, and what it would look like without the oppressive weight of limitations for women. The novels are limited, however, in their time frame as they battled the most basic rights for women. With the twentieth and twenty-first century women’s rights movements fought and brought forth
the full liberation of women as property and housewives, but the images of an ideal woman within a marital union remained and are reflected in more modern novels such as Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train.
Chapter Three: Subverting Madness in Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train
As previously discussed, marriage in the Nineteenth century centered on attributing roles to men and women. Though there was a shift towards a more romanticized idea of marital unions, it remained a well-established institution that had support from State laws and Church laws (Kelsey 242).
“Girls were conditioned to take on a submissive role within marriage and were led to believe that all their future needs and interests would be taken care of by the husband they ‘chose’” (Kelsey 242). As Stephanie Coontz points out that in the subject of contemporary marriage: “Like it or not, today we are all pioneers, picking our way through uncharted and unstable territory” (304). The shifts in economic, political and reproductive patterns over the last two hundred years and the gradual detachment of the married couple from traditional institutions, laws and customs has changed the role marriage plays in modern Western societies (Coontz 304). For example, the divorce revolution in the 1980s saw divorce rates at fifty percent, and
women who received a higher education were viewed as less likely to marry and have children (Coontz 284, 306). The increase in divorce rates was viewed up until the Twenty-first century, and well into the century, as a harbinger of the end of the nuclear, wholesome marriage and family life.
The legalization of divorce did not, in fact, announce the end of marriage, but the beginning of women’s rights to be respected within the marriage
institution. Unions that were unhappy were no longer forced by antiquated institutions to remain together, but were free to leave a potentially toxic environment. This is something discussed in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, where Maureen Dunne, the mother of Nick Dunne, divorces her husband after years of verbal abuse. “He never beat her, but his pure, inarticulate fury would fill the house for days, weeks at time” (Flynn 66). Before the divorce, Nick describes his mother as having been thin. After the divorce,
“my thin, pained mother got fat and happy […] as if she were supposed to be that way all along: a deflated balloon taking in air” (Flynn 67). The narrative thus shows the positive aspects of divorce, demystifying it as a purely negative consequence of modern marital views, and showing its positive effects.
While Jane Eyre and The Woman in White demonstrated the precursor to marriage, the courtship, the investigative game of attempting to unravel the mysteries of a potential mate and marriage, Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train play within the bounds of marriage and the after effects of
marriage. The setting of both novels are, like the Victorian novels, domestic.
Scarcely do either novels pass the Bechdel test, with most female
characters discussing a man, or their relation to a man. Additionally, both novels’ protagonist remain trapped in a toxic marital environment, setting the stage for madness, maddening rituals of repetitive actions. While Rachel, in The Girl on the Train, is divorced, she is still constrained by the false accusations her husband inflicted upon her while they were married.
Her alcoholism brings her back to him, either physically or by phone. Amy Dunne, from Gone Girl, prefers to construct an elaborate plan to frame her husband for her murder as revenge for his infidelity, instead of enacting her right to divorce him, leave and be free.
Rachel is tormented by the lies told to her by her husband while she was drunk, his false accusations of her violence towards him when in reality, he was violent towards her. Her inability to conceive during their marriage, to fulfill a role set by society within the narrative, as well as the loss of her husband to another woman is also a driving factor in her continued search and investigation of the meaning of marriage, her past and the murder of Megan Hipwell. Unlike Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train offers an exit for the narration. While Amy and Nick remain trapped in a maddening, damaging marriage resembling a game of he-said she-said, Rachel’s insidious self- destructive cycle finds an end with the discovery of her husband’s culpability in both the murder of Megan, the lies he told her and his repeated infidelity.
In The Girl on the Train, Rachel’s failed attempts at getting pregnant affects her on a psychological level, and it is repeated in several passages that it is a main factor in her low self-esteem and descent into alcoholism and madness. Her equating a childless marriage with incompletion can be seen as largely attributed to societal pressures set by her family, her circle of friends and her age group. When trying to pinpoint the starting point of her decline, she says “[m]aybe that was the moment when things started to
go wrong, the moment when I imagined us no longer a couple, but a family;
and after that, once I had that picture in my head, just the two of us could never be enough” (Hawkins 77). The strength of Rachel’s imagination is set- up from the first page of the novel when she says “[m]y mother used to tell me I had an overactive imagination; Tom said that too” (Hawkins 15), but the narrative does not lead us to believe an overactive imagination was solely to blame for Rachel’s connection of childlessness with worthlessness.
“The thing about being barren is that you’re not allowed to get away from it. Not when you’re in your thirties” (Hawkins 111). This allusion to the unforgiving aspect of being thirty and childless is associated with her close entourage of friends, which the reader can only assume is composed of people her age, all having children. “My friends were having children, friends of friends were having children, pregnancy and birth and first birthday parties were everywhere” (Hawkins 111). This excludes her not only from her network of friends but also, in her mind, excludes her from the network of people who are in their thirties. This effectively gives her a sense of alienation and isolation, which is further aggravated by the topic of her barrenness becoming an acceptable conversation of inquiry among her family and friends. “At some point our childlessness became an acceptable topic of Sunday-lunch conversation, not just between Tom and me, but more generally. What we were trying, what we should be doing, do you really think you should be having that second glass of wine?” (Hawkins 111). By having the subject go from a private to a public sphere, her “failure cloaked
me like a mantle, it overwhelmed me, dragged me under and I gave up hope” (Hawkins 111). Rachel privately views her inability to bear children as a failure, and by this inability becoming a topic of inquiry and critique, e.g. “should you be having a second glass of wine?”, the effect of failure is reinforced by others and becomes imbedded in her psych. She expresses frustration at having been the sole individual in the relationship to be blamed for their childlessness, and “resented the fact that it was always seen as my fault, that I was the one letting the side down” (Hawkins 111).
However, she eventually succumbs to this role, not only when her husband’s sperm is medically confirmed as blameless, “[m]y husband’s sperm was active and plentiful” (Hawkins 110), but also when he cheats on Rachel with Anne and she becomes pregnant. “But at the speed with which he managed to impregnate Anna demonstrates, there was never any problem with Tom’s virility” (Hawkins 111). Virility is defined as “the period of life during which a person of the male sex is in full vigour; mature or fully developed
manhood or masculine force” (“virility”), and if it is not Tom’s virility, his manhood and masculinity, that is regarded as inadequate and failing, it is then Rachel’s womanhood and femininity that is questioned. “I was wrong to suggest that we should share the blame; it was all down to me” (Hawkins 111). Her childlessness no longer merely represents her lack to procreate, but also symbolizes her viewing it as a lack of womanhood, robbing her of femininity. She confirms this when she claims, “I liked my job, but I didn’t have a glittering career, and even if I had, let’s be honest, women are still
only really valued for two things- their looks and their role as mothers”
(Hawkins 112).
Throughout the novel, her infertility is used as a marker to describe herself in a self-deprecating manner. Her descriptors center around her failures, not just her infertility, but also what her infertility led to: her divorce and her alcoholism, while making note of her unattractiveness which, as mentioned above, is the other socially accepted and significant marker for womanhood. “I might be a barren, divorced, soon-to-be-homeless alcoholic” (Hawkins 77) she says when she is crying on the train. Her
barrenness is consistently equated to a sense of worthlessness, since to her she retains no womanly qualities. “I'm not beautiful, and I can't have kids, so what does that make me? Worthless” (Hawkins 112). Her sense of value is correlated to the time she believed herself to be fertile, that is before attempting to have a child, and after her discovering she is infertile. Her life before the attempt to have children is blissful and careless, wherein Tom saved her from grief after her father’s death and the house they purchased together offered her warmth and security. “I remember those first days so clearly, walking around, shoeless, feeling the warmth of wooden floorboards underfoot, relishing the space, the emptiness of all those rooms waiting to be filled” (Hawkins 77). The descriptions in those passages are akin to potential, the emptiness of the house “waiting to be filled” can be seen as symbolizing the womb. “Tom and I making plans: what we’d plant in the garden, what we’d hang on the walls, what colour to paint the spare room
-already, even then, in my head, the baby’s room” (Hawkins 77). During this time, she describes herself as having had willpower, “when I could run 10K before breakfast and subsist for weeks on 1,300 calories a day” (Hawkins 127). If this passage is to be taken as a description of what she was before believing herself to be infertile and thus unfeminine, then it offers the potential for a positive reading, since Rachel’s definition of womanhood subconsciously surpasses its value as merely a role in motherhood and attractiveness, and comes to be associated with willpower, strength and potential. However, this aspect of Rachel’s personality is overshadowed in most of the novel by the affect her barrenness had on her, her divorce and her alcoholism.
In contrast, Anna’s femininity and worth are, at times, reaffirmed by herself and other characters. She is the woman Tom had an affair with, and is the woman he marries and has a child with after his divorce to Rachel.
Her position as a replacement of Rachel’s puts in question the authenticity of her relationship and life. Since, as I will show, Rachel’s narrative
associates Anna’s motherhood with Rachel’s old house, and her life with Tom as secondhand of Rachel’s own, it is difficult to view Anna position in the novel as authentic or authoritative. As detective Riley mentions when questioning Rachel’s choice of keeping her husband’s last name, Anna is her “replacement” (Hawkins 117). She personifies the successes Rachel was unable to fulfill as a woman, and is living the life Rachel imagined to be her own. Anna fills up the spaces within Rachel’s old house, the role as wife to
Tom, and the role of motherhood to the child Rachel had imagined she would have with Tom. Rachel recalls the first time she looked at her house from the train after her divorce, noticing that “the cream linen blind in the upstairs bedroom was gone, replaced by something in soft baby pink”
(Hawkins 22) and “I still remember the pain I felt when I saw Anna watering the rose bushes near the fence, her T-Shirt stretched tight over her bulging belly, and I bit my lip so hard it bled” (Hawkins 22). The move into the house by Anna is described as an invasive and unintended secondhand inheritance from first wife to second wife. “Everything she has is
secondhand […] I want to call her back and ask her, what does it feel like, Anna, to live in my house, surrounded by the furniture I bought, to sleep in the bed that I shared with him for years, to feed your child at the kitchen table he fucked me on?” (Hawkins 56). Even Tom’s flirtations towards Anna are secondhand repeats from his courting Rachel. In the e-mail that
revealed Tom’s infidelity to Rachel, he had written to Anna “[d]on’t expect me to be sane, I can’t be, not with you” (Hawkins 51). This sentence is later described by Rachel as a recycled line in a letter he had written to her. “I’m going to tell her that the line he used with her – don’t expect me to be sane – he used it with me, too, when we were first together; he wrote it in a letter to me, declaring his undying passion” (Hawkins 56). The authenticity of the sentence is even further put into question when Rachel adds “he stole it from Henry Miller” (Hawkins 56). Though Anna, in her first person narrative, admits that she had been warned not to move into the house,
