Feminism, Glenn Close, and the Curse of the Crazy Woman

Essays
June 29, 2017 | 3 books mentioned 15 5 min read

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As we learned from Misery, the story of the woman who holds a man captive can never be a glamorous one. Over the course of Stephen King’s 1987 novel, we’re led to understand that Annie’s insanity—her insecurity, her obsession—is inextricable from that which makes her unlovable, a given long before she ever stumbles across the luckless object of her affections, her favorite writer, in the wreckage of his car. Dowdy and deranged, Annie forces him to rewrite his final novel according to her whims, crooning, “I’m your biggest fan,” over his tortured body.

covercoverAnd indeed, what could be beautiful or romantic about a woman with the violent upper hand, the muse forcing herself on the artist—never mind that the gendered inverse (see: Scheherazade’s dilemma) is the stuff of literature? A story about woman holding a man against his will, especially if she seeks to exploit his creative labor…Well, that’s just crazy. And for women, crazy, as we all know, is not a Good Look.

While Glenn Close boasts a career spanning more than 40 years and dozens of awards, including six Oscar nominations, she’s still best-known for her portrayal of Alex, a woman who attempts to murder her married lover in a fugue of jealousy and rage. The story of Alex—otherwise known as 1987’s Fatal Attraction, the film for which Close received one of those six nominations—is one whose histrionics and gendered ableism have brought with it both critique and dismissal in the three decades since its release. And though Close herself has undoubtedly continued to thrive, she also hasn’t been able to escape its shadow.

coverSuch a legacy may sound like a curse—but then, Close does crazy so well. This spring, she returned to Broadway to reprise the starring role in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s adaptation of Sunset Boulevard, and she’s as captivating onstage as she is in her best movies. Once more, she takes on Norma Desmond, the silent film actress fixated on her past glory from the shadows of obscurity, still ready for her closeup decades after the world has moved on to talkies (and to younger leading ladies). The plot ignites when Desmond hires screenwriter Joe Gillis to doctor the script that she’s convinced will spell out her big comeback, and though his capture isn’t quite as obvious as the one masterminded by Misery’s Annie, his gradual (co-)dependence on his new benefactress proves to be just as deadly.

Since Boulevard’s original film release, the role has become famous for its tragic, hysterical femaleness, and is for that reason vulnerable to one-dimensional renderings of empty, and even harmful, stereotype. But despite this, Close somehow succeeds in recreating a character whose humanity permeates the Palace Theatre, like a furious cloud of gold that envelops audience all the way up to the nosebleeds.

Close is good, almost distractingly so. As an audience member, I spent as much time enjoying the production as I did wondering just how she does it. Is it the suppleness and subtlety of her craft, for which James Lipton once praised her on Inside the Actor’s Studio? Is it the way she injects even the most heartrending of Desmond’s dramatics with narcotic, knowing camp? Is it in the way her presence, as commanding as her voice—its raw power somehow undiminished as the 70-year-old scales countless flights of stairs over the course of the 200-minute show—so masterfully balances bottled panic with profound and searching pain? Whatever the reason, only a seasoned artist could embody the crazy woman, a figure infamous for her unwantedness, without sacrificing an ounce of soul, or a whit of glamour.

Her performance is all the more remarkable considering the fact that humanity is not something the crazy woman is typically afforded, as critics of Fatal Attraction were quick to point out. This archetype, the creation of a society in which a woman who desires (what she doesn’t have; what she shouldn’t want; what is inconvenient or dangerous for male authority) must be institutionalized, silenced, or worse, is deep in the bedrock of our culture. Though Alex and Norma embody slightly different kinds of failed female revolt—the former as a woman professional, the latter as a woman artist—both are in conversation with hysteria, one of the 19th century’s most prevalent (and most gendered) diseases of the West. On film and in subsequent stage adaptations, Boulevard’s subtextual warning that women’s ambition, creativity, and desire for sexual fulfillment are the causes of unhappiness and undoing still comes through loud and clear. After all, the original film, released in 1950, starred a woman who was born in the heyday of Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, a pioneer in the study of nervous conditions who urged Charlotte Perkins Gilman to treat her hysteria by abstaining from her work as a writer, and to “never touch a pen, brush or pencil,” as long as she lived.

But even in the 21st century, Desmond still exists in the crosshairs of the 20th, an unsettling bridging of contemporary and Victorian gender dynamics. Regardless from which perspective she’s viewed, she’s still forced to star in the spectacle of her own artistic destruction, and as the villain, to boot. Such is her due, for the woman who is too needy (which means she believes she deserves happiness); too self-obsessed (though that same brand of self-obsession is how Boulevard’s Joe aims to fight his way to stardom); or too selfish (another quality that Gillis, played almost dandily by Michael Xavier, can unquestioningly deploy), no success goes unpunished.

More revealing than the spectacle of the crazy woman are the ebbs and flows of her presence in popular culture. At the moment, the cynical rehashing of old classics and dreamscapes for new entertainment is all the rage. One of the most prominent characteristics of the so-called Golden Age of Television is its mobilization of nostalgia, exhuming artists overlooked or misunderstood because of their gender (as well as other identities; nothing, least of all the crazy woman archetype, is untouched by the ravages of white supremacy). Slowly but surely, we’re beginning to revisit geniuses once dismissed as too narcissistic (Nina Simone), mercenary (Joan Crawford and Bette Davis), or selfish (Eartha Kitt) to be taken seriously. Though an incredible boon to the viewers of our time, none of this, of course, does Desmond, and the dead women she represents, any good: After all, it was the unforgivable sin of insanity, and not her own artistry, that garnered her a place in the celluloid pantheon.

The spectacle of female humanity was recently addressed by Jess Zimmerman in her brilliant Role Monsters series with an essay on the rapacious, relentless harpy. “In isolation,” writes Zimmerman, “female ambition is laudable, the kind of thing asset management firms make statues about. In context, it’s considered monstrous.” Even now, at a time when American women can ascribe to feminism with comparatively little fanfare, insisting on one’s own humanity as a woman is still an act of monstrosity—one with which ugliness and craziness, the two things that women are supposed to fear most, is always elided.

With Sunset Boulevard, Close returns to the stage at a time in which women and non-cis-male people across demographics are watching a reinvigorated assault on hard-won rights and liberties. While the monstrosities of misogyny and sexism play out in daily life, her embodiment of a woman made monstrous by her desire for better feels a lot like bearing witness. Curse though it may be, it’s also Close’s most beautiful legacy.

writes about culture, sexuality, and genderqueer embodiment. Their first novel, link the earthquake room, is now available through TigerBee Press. They tweet at @k8bushofficial.

Essays

Salinger in Vienna

Essays
November 10, 2010 | 3 books mentioned 9 7 min read
Part of the sadness here comes, of course, from a young woman being robbed, senselessly and viciously, of her life. But it is sad, too, in the way it deprived a young man, a man who hadn’t even known her that well, the luxury of remembering her without bitterness, of being able to ask lightheartedly: “I wonder what So-and-So is up to?”
Essays
| 3 books mentioned 9 7 min read
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Essays

‘The woman writes as if the Devil was in her…’

Essays
February 1, 2010 | 3 books mentioned 11 6 min read

1.
Edmund Wilson encouraged his second wife Mary McCarthy’s first forays into fiction by shutting her in a room for three hours and asking her to write a story. Author Shirley Jackson’s husband Stanley Hyman, a literary critic and writer for The New Yorker, devised strict writing schedules for her. And with the money from Jackson’s royalty checks, he purchased a dishwasher to make more time for her writing. Alice B. Tolkas tended to domestic duties so that her partner, Gertrude Stein, could pursue her literary endeavors. As Stein said, “It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around and do so much nothing, really do nothing.”

Stein’s statement sounds like an exaggeration, but is it really? While most writers don’t have the dispensable time to become geniuses of Stein’s definition, writing requires a certain amount of intellectual autonomy. One common bond linking McCarthy, Jackson, and Stein—three women featured in Elaine Showalter’s history of American women writers, A Jury of Her Peers—is that their spouses allowed them the time and solitude required to imagine, write, and produce. Even if their spouses’ approaches were controlling or their motivations questionable, the writing flourished.

Showalter also profiles Catharine Maria Sedgwick, a popular writer from the early 1800s who never married. Sedgwick felt deeply ambivalent about remaining single, which is reflected in her story “Cacoethes Scribendi,” in which a group of four sisters, one married, take up writing as a hobby.  The daughter who refuses to write seduces and marries the only eligible bachelor in town. With his proposal, Sedgwick writes, the girl’s mother and aunts “relinquished, without a sigh, the hope of ever seeing her an AUTHOR.” Sedgwick implies that marriage and writing are antithetical, and that a woman loses hope of becoming an author, and perhaps even remaining one, once she’s married.

Of a contemporaneous writer, Fanny Fern, Nathaniel Hawthorne critiqued:
The woman writes as if the Devil was in her and that is the only condition under which a woman ever writes anything worth reading. Generally women write like emasculated men, and are only to be distinguished from male authors by greater feebleness and folly; but when they throw off the restraints of decency and come before the public stark naked… then their books are sure to possess character and value.
While social mores have changed, books written by women about marriage and other domestic topics continue to crowd Hawthorne’s categories of “feebleness and folly,” and flourish. We need not look far for proof. Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest book, Committed, topped the New York Times Best Sellers list last week. The book’s narrative wrestles with the issue of whether or not Gilbert should remarry (she does). While some women writers and collections featuring their stories, such as This Is Not Chick Lit, attempt to thwart expectations of the usual modes of feminine domesticity and decency, they remain a minority. At least these women are no longer considered possessed.

Likewise, the anxiety of maintaining the distance and time to write within a romantic relationship continues to plague women (and men alike). Henry James’s “The Lesson of the Master” touches on this conundrum from the male perspective. In James’s story, the fledgling writer Paul Overt takes advice from the esteemed “master,” Henry St. George, and chooses his writing over pursuing a potential paramour. Overt travels abroad and pens a well-regarded novel, but returns home to find that the happy and unproductive St. George nabbed his girl. Overt wonders if he made the right choice by following intellectual passion instead of romance. Or if he really needed to make a choice at all.

2.
Speaking of romantic choices, at HTMLGiant Nick Antosca recently posted a provocative list of reasons why writers should not date writers. He claimed that writers are less likely to let their significant others use writing as an excuse to avoid social obligations. But I’m wondering if he’s wrong, and that writers should date writers, who will likely understand the importance of clearing time and mental space to write. In spite of the control McCarthy’s and Jackson’s husbands exerted, their marriages show that liaisons with other writers can help make the space to write within the constraints a relationship. What matters most, it seems, is the agreed upon arrangement.

Katie Roiphe (of recent note for her New York Times essay about the sad state of male sex writing, which Sonya responded to here) wrote about unconventional couplings in her book, Uncommon Arrangements, which profiles seven unusual marriages in Britain between 1910 and World War II.  Roiphe calls them “marriages à la mode” (a name she borrowed from a Katherine Mansfield story) to underscore the ways these couples, triads, and more complex entanglements sought imaginative, and at times almost untenable, set-ups to fulfill their needs and romantic desires.

These arrangements didn’t provide equal satisfaction for everyone involved, but for the writers who flourished a few common foundations aided their craft. Having money helped matters, of course. The young journalist and novelist Rebecca West was seduced by the older, established, and very married H.G. Wells, who fathered her child. He provided a house for West and their son, but he also chose to stay with his wife. This may have been a wise decision on Wells’s part—because it also helps as a writer to have a wife. By wife, I mean a partner who tends to the cleaning and cooking, watches the children and oversees the social affairs. Gender doesn’t matter, although in these cases a woman always occupied the role. An extremely devoted friend also suffices.

Take Katherine Mansfield as an example. Her on-again, off-again and highly impractical romance with the writer and editor John Middleton Murry developed out of a sense of mutual respect but offered little stability. When Mansfield contracted tuberculosis and had to spend winters abroad due to her health, Murry remained at home in England. Instead, Mansfield’s friend Ida Baker accompanied her, cared for her, and even woke to toast her in the middle of the night when she completed a story. These were some of Mansfield’s most productive years.

Retaining separate residences, a room of one’s own if you will, also provides space for lovers to write. The writer Vera Brittain married the academic George Catlin, who offered her “as free a marriage as it lies in the power of a man to offer a woman.” When he found a teaching position at Cornell, she moved with him across the Atlantic, but after the first year she returned to England and stayed. Roiphe writes: “It was [Vera’s] elaborately articulated position that a woman must be productive, and if that productivity was compromised by her domestic arrangements she had an obligation to change them.” And so Vera enlisted her dear friend Winifred Holtby as a third party in their marriage. Winifred would share the London residence, the expenses, and travel as she liked. She was Vera’s housemate and back-up nurse. Mary Wollstonecraft’s unlikely marriage to William Godwin (unlikely in that both opposed matrimony in their writing) never resulted in cohabitation. According to Cristina Nehring’s account of their romance in Vindication of Love, Wollstonecraft and Godwin kept separate flats, twenty doors apart, and sent notes to each other via a messenger.

3.
In contrast to these rather dated romances, Chris Kraus’s epistolary novel I Love Dick depicts an even more ostentatious arrangement between a husband and wife named Chris Kraus and Sylvère Lotringer, the Columbia professor, editor, and philosopher who is also Kraus’s real-life husband. As Chris’s infatuation with her husband’s colleague Dick develops into an all-consuming obsession, Chris devises ways to seduce him. She talks candidly with Sylvère about her obsession in hyperbolic exchanges reminiscent of those shared by teenage girls.

Chris and Sylvère are no longer having sex, but the external charge Dick supplies reignites their passion, at least temporarily, as husband and wife start collaborating, by writing love letters to Dick on Chris’s behalf. Sylvère makes phone calls; he imagines he’s Charles Bovary to Chris’s Emma. Chris continues to write, passionately and desperately. She turns her love-induced graphomania into performance art, and then into an epistolary novel. We as readers are led to believe that the letters she wrote to Dick, in turn, form the foundation of this book. For Kraus, love wasn’t just inspiration, it was art, it was all.

Chris’s obsession with Dick is central to the novel, but he also remains removed. Her husband, in turn, provides encouragement, companionship, and, surprisingly, acts as a collaborative accompanist within her fantasy.

If I Love Dick portrays a contemporary marriage à la mode, it also reflects the ways that the feminine role has changed—and resisted change as well. Kraus admits that in spite of her husband’s renown in the art world, at the time she wrote the book, no one took her seriously. Her anonymity gave her freedom to take risks.

Falling in love didn’t stunt Kraus’s writing. It inspired her. She said in an interview, “when you fall in love with someone the greatest rush is that you can be so many more sides of yourself with them than with anyone else in the world.” Dick’s distance allowed her to imagine, to fantasize, to write her fantasy into existence. Kraus has certainly thrown off the restraints of decency, and of privacy. No doubt, Hawthorne would pay her the compliment.

[Image: Virginia Woolf’s writing desk in her study in Rodmell, England.]

Essays
| 3 books mentioned 11 6 min read
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Essays

Strange Flights

Essays
September 9, 2011 | 3 books mentioned 2 6 min read

In April 2001, I was offered the most interesting part-time job I’ve ever had. For $7.25 an hour I began working at my local airport, where I would don a United Airlines uniform and learn all the ins and outs of commercial aviation.

This was outside of Bozeman, Montana, where I had recently moved for a Master’s program in English. My airport job paid the rent all spring and summer, as I covered many of my co-workers’ shifts; within a few months I could practically run the airport by myself. I remember the startled look on passengers’ faces when they’d see me boarding them at the upstairs departure gate after having just checked them in for their flight downstairs a half hour ago; and then they’d see me outside a few minutes later loading their baggage onto the plane, before finally hopping onto the diesel push-back Tug and sending them down the taxiway. It was a small airport, and the airline employees were trained to do every task.

Starting in the fall of 2001, my other part-time job commenced: teaching freshman composition three mornings a week as part of my graduate work. This involved reading the essays of dutiful ranchers’ children and transplant trustafarians alike, with the former group having a more intuitive knack for descriptive prose.

September 11 was my day off. On my days off, when I was off fly-fishing or hiking, I would find myself subconsciously tracking inbound flights and takeoffs, distant jet blasts and glints of silver in the sun. I remember the absence of planes that day as a kind of kink in the muscle memory that any job creates over time: where Delta’s 737 usually flew overhead from Salt Lake City at noon, there was only silence and sky.

I was scheduled to work at the airport the following afternoon, on September 12. But first I had a class to teach. It was my first time teaching at the college level, and we were only a few weeks into the semester; I was 23 years old. I recall sitting in a discussion circle with 30 freshmen on that day, not really knowing what to say.

As I tried to direct attention to our course anthology, I remember one student who was so upset that he blurted out in class, “We need to bomb people, NOW!”

When I tried, in my most affected professorial tone, to gingerly ask the class to consider the construction of the “we” in this claim, and whom exactly it was “we” should bomb, the same student screamed back at me, “ANYBODY!” His idea seemed to be that by inflicting firepower by air on other people, the United States could steal the show: the products of our military jets would be the focus of attention, and take away from the spectacle of four commercial airliners having gone rogue.

And a spectacle it was. When I walked over to the student union after class for lunch, I saw that several large TV screens had been wheeled into the open spaces between the seating areas. Some students filtered in and out of the dining hall like normal, scooping out helpings of macaroni and cheese; other students stood transfixed, watching reruns of the planes crashing again and again and again into the towers of the World Trade Center. The event was being familiarly looped, and the ambience of the instant replay created a warm, somewhat stale sensation — despite the chillingly fresh content.

That afternoon, I drove out to the airport for my shift. I had tried to call in to figure out if flights were on time, or if I even had to work — but the lines were all busy. I decided to play it safe and just show up. When I got to the airport, the scene was one of stunted pandemonium. The terminal seemed at once totally chaotic and oddly frozen. Yes, my manager explained, I was still needed for work; but there were no flights due in or out that day. However, they could start back up at any moment — so we had to be ready.

In the meantime, there was a line of skittish passengers to deal with, people who were scheduled on flights that were not going to depart. These passengers didn’t realize, perhaps, the scope of what had occurred the day before, how all the commercial airlines had simply been grounded into the unforeseeable future. Not that we airline employees knew any better: the best we could do was reschedule the passengers on flights a day or a week later, send them off with newly printed itineraries, and cross our fingers.

After assisting a dozen or so confused and distraught passengers who were feeling the logistical back-blow of what would come to be called 9/11, I went back into the break room and saw my manager Lance taping onto the wall a few photographs of himself directing a C-130 Air Force cargo plane onto our taxiway. This was one of the strange flights that had landed at our airport the day before; Lance had taken the roll of film to a one-hour photo lab that evening and had them printed out, and now was displaying them like little trophies. Lance told me excitedly that a Stealth bomber had landed in Bozeman, too; but it had refueled and taken off again before anyone could get a picture of it.

The next day, I rummaged through the files on my desk, and found an essay that appeared in the Spring 2001 Patagonia outdoor clothing catalog. This short piece was called “Homage to Faizabad,” and it was written by the journalist Rob Schultheis; he was covering a drawn-out war in Afghanistan. The essay begins beautifully:
We’ve been flying for nearly an hour, with nothing below us but the raw gorges and snow-covered peaks of the Hindu Kush. Somewhere down there are villages, fields, roads and trails, and the war we have returned to cover, but it’s all lost in distance, space and scale in the vastness that is Afghanistan.
Schultheis goes on to describe the isolated town of Faizabad, including the friendly people he meets amid the wheat fields, pastures, and poppy fields. I took this essay to campus the following day and photocopied it for my students; in class, we took turns reading it aloud, slowly, paragraph by paragraph. We talked about the expository strategies that the author employed, including the initial focalizing mechanism of an aerial view; we also talked about the real people depicted in the essay, people caught up a long history of conflicts and power struggles in this place freshly glossed in the news, Afghanistan.

Over the next several days I kept arriving at the airport to work only to face passengers who felt immobilized, and who were becoming increasingly frustrated that air travel had not started up again. As airline employees, we were not trained to explain the conditions and contingencies of a national state of emergency — instead, we would concentrate in front of our computer monitors, fingers clicking away, and rebook the passengers on theoretical future flights, exuding less confidence by the day in the following day’s departures. Still, it was our job, and so we carefully rescheduled passengers using a booking system that increasingly felt like dabbling in postmodern fiction: we were creating complex itineraries that would never be.

Some passengers came back to the airport day after day trying to fly out of Bozeman. Their travel clothes became rumpled looking, and they had less confidence on their faces every time they came through the sliding doors of the terminal. It became more of a travesty with each day: people showing up with full suitcases and long faces, only to trudge back to the long-term parking lot a couple minutes later, after we had turned them away. Yet sure enough, one day a full plane flew in from Denver, and air travel was back on.

By the end of the semester I was teaching my students about narrative perspective, and we were discussing how things could be examined from multiple angles. My students read Mark Twain’s “Two Views of the Mississippi,” and we parsed his two takes on the riparian landscape: that of the Romantic river gazer, and that of the jaded riverboat worker. Now, it seemed as though there was a third perspective we needed to talk about, one that we had encountered in Schultheis’ essay: the view from above. For at this point the news was flooded with aerial reconnaissance images of Afghanistan, including the Tora Bora region that looked not so unlike our own Tobacco Root Mountains stretched out across on the western horizon. There were contrails over those peaks; and on the news we could see weirdly congruous imagery of peaks on the other side of the planet, rendered by other planes with different intentions.

Like Twain’s philosophical quandary about getting to know the river, and thus losing a sense its innate beauty, our own romance with flight had become complicated. For myself, I could no longer treat the Gallatin Field airport as a simple workspace; I saw it enmeshed in politics and power, territory and populations. This was no mere “regional” airport — it was part of a fraught global matrix where all flights were strange flights, and travel was never an isolated endeavor.

 

Image courtesy the author

Essays
| 3 books mentioned 2 6 min read
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Essays

Ethical Vampires, Part II

Essays
April 14, 2010 | 3 books mentioned 3 9 min read

Part I of this essay explains how the vampires of our historical moment–exemplified in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight and Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels–have had a crisis of conscience and changed their ways. They’ve become more human (wearing Grateful Dead t-shirts, driving Mustangs) and more humane (not murdering people to feed on them). This reformation means different things for Harris and Meyer. Harris uses it to explore the dark, vampiric side of human nature, while Meyer, mistakenly, thinks that she can vanquish the vampiric altogether (she can’t and doesn’t, though possibly she doesn’t realize this).

Through her contact with vampires, the danger and intrigues and moral conundrums they bring into her life, Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse discovers her own primitive, uncivilized self—and a capacity for violence. Sookie may be friendly, hard-working, kind, and generous most of the time, but when she drinks from vampire Bill a second time, she begins to feel her own vampiric longings and potential:

A little ripple of madness went through me . . . I drank and saw visions, visions all with a background of darkness, of . . . going hunting, the thrill of the run through the woods, the prey panting ahead and the excitement of its fear; pursuit, legs pumping, hearing the thrumming of blood through the veins of the pursued.

In later books this “primitive self, the truer me,” as Sookie calls it, rises to the surface when she’s threatened. Several times she kills in self-defense without remorse. She is attracted to several men at once, and acts on these desires without feeling ashamed of them.

Twilight’s moral universe is rather different. The wariness of fixed, inflexible human characters and easy moral absolutes, continually apparent in Sookie’s world (in which the only consistently demonized social group is the fundamentalist, occasionally terrorist anti-vampire church, The Fellowship of the Sun) is absent in Stephenie Meyer’s. This is in part because Meyer’s heroine, Bella Swan, a sheltered, self-absorbed teenage girl, narrates the majority of the Twilight novels. 

Kenneth Turan, reviewing the first Twilight movie in the Los Angeles Times, argued that the film succeeds, “because it treats high school emotions with unwavering, uncompromising seriousness. Much as you may not want to, you have to acknowledge what’s been accomplished here.” Turan is right: the movie succeeds because, like the novels, it takes adolescent emotions—in all of their naive absolutism and world-consuming intensity—very seriously.

Bella certainly believes, as only young lovers can, that no one has ever loved as she does, that her love will be eternal and absolute, that no man before Edward has ever been so deserving of love. And Meyer’s plot allows this to be true. From the first time she sees Edward, Bella is filled with a fascinated reverence for his beauty.  He and his family are all “devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful.” Edward in particular, has “the face of an angel,” and his face, Bella insists, is the outward sign of transcendent, spiritual beauties: “Edward had the most beautiful soul, more beautiful than his brilliant mind or his incomparable face or his glorious body.”

Bella feels this—without qualification, without doubt—through all of the two thousand and some pages of her saga, and Meyer seems fully invested in her teenage heroine’s worldview. Edward becomes like a drug to Bella: “Edward’s lips were like a shot of some addictive chemical straight into my nervous system. I was instantly craving more.” When she’s away from him, “each tick of the second hand aches like the pulse of blood behind a bruise.”

In order to enjoy the Twilight novels, you have to be willing to enter into this intense emotional and hormonal fundamentalism, the twin of the moral fundamentalism apparent in Meyer’s refusal of nuance and ambivalence in favor of an either/or approach to good and evil. You have to believe that Edward and Bella’s love is eternal, unqualified, rare, imperturbable—that it will never waiver or end. Meyer’s plot never calls these teenage certainties into question. The final pages of the novel find Bella more certain than ever of her love for Edward: “No one’s ever loved anyone as much as I love you.”  Nor does Meyer’s saga question the goodness of the Cullens—though other than Carlisle, the doctor vampire, they don’t do any useful work in their community, aren’t particularly friendly or generous, and generally seem to live only to satisfy their own material desires (for cars, clothes, travel).

And even by the generous standards of fantasy, there’s something obscene about Twilight’s happy ending. It denies its heroine nothing and asks nothing of her. No major characters die in Twilight; no one has to sacrifice or lose anything they love, especially not Bella. Meyer suggests repeatedly that Bella’s determination to be made a vampire so that she can be with Edward forever will require heavy sacrifices on her part: that she will not be able to see her parents or her best friend again, that she will not be able to have children, that, when she gets pregnant with Edward’s vampire baby, carrying it to term will kill her. But none of these sacrifices are required.

The final book, Breaking Dawn, promises that most sacrosanct of fantasy conventions, an epic battle between the Cullens and the Volturi (evil vampire royalty who still feed remorselessly on humans and who believe that Edward and Bella’s half-vampire/half-human child, Renesmee (a name Bella invents by combining her mother’s name and that of Edward’s mother), presents a threat to the vampire community as a whole). However, when the good and bad vampires finally gather on the field of battle, Bella’s new vampire talent–the ability to shield all she loves with an invisible, impenetrable force field–immobilizes the enemy. The battle’s over before it starts. And so begins happily ever after “forever and forever and forever” for beautiful, rich, immortal Bella Cullen, who will spend eternity with her beautiful, rich, immortal family, eternally in love and in lust with the god-like Edward. It makes Harry Potter, with its dead parents, friends, classmates, teachers, and relatives, look like brutal realism.

Reading Meyer against Harris is a lesson in the varieties of fantasy. Meyer’s fantasy is total—as much a fantasy about human nature and love as it is a generic fantasy.  In Twilight, perfect happiness and love, perfect goodness, and perfect material satisfaction are all bestowed on the heroine. Harris’ fantasy, by contrast, is temperate, self-aware. Sookie is a waitress; she’s never been to college; she has no health insurance. In between her forays into the luxurious and exciting world of vampires, she worries pretty constantly about money—medical bills, her need for a new car, a new roof.

Harris’ characters are also readers of genre fiction. We see a Tami Hoag suspense novel tucked into Sookie’s coworker’s apron; Sookie’s grandmother reads Danielle Steele; Sookie repeatedly professes a love of romances and mysteries. In True Blood, we catch a glimpse of Sookie’s grandmother reading a Charlaine Harris novel. These images of escapist reading in Harris’ own novel series don’t allow her reader the sort of total immersion fantasy that Twilight demands. Harris’ novels show you yourself engaged in fantasy (Look! That’s me! That’s what I’m doing—reading vampire-romance-mystery novels, just like Sookie’s granny, trying to forget about being unemployed/bored senseless by work/behind on the mortgage!).  And through Sookie’s incessant money worries Harris incorporates into her fictions the mundane oppressions that create the need for escapist literature. In this, Harris’ books offer a metacommentary of sorts on their own social and emotional function and that of genre fiction more generally (and please forgive me for using the word “metacommentary” about the Sookie novels–I know it’s at least silly, possibly profane). Sookie dates and goes to work for the vampires just as I might pick up one of Harris’ vampire mysteries: to leave the real world and all of its tedious, squalid hassles behind.

Harris knows what her books are and what they do and she won’t let her readers forget it. She forces you to see yourself trying to escape your own life and in so doing she refuses you the total fantasy that Meyer offers—she reminds you that escapism and fantasy are just that—fantasy and escapism: They are not real, they are not ultimately the solution to the oppressions of daily life.  Like Sookie, I always have to go back to the hassles of real life (unemployment, health insurance, family drama)—have to close the book, leave behind the vampires in all of their impossible glamour and titillating danger.

Harris is also keenly aware that class as much as race is at the heart of our cultural myths about vampires. Sookie works for vampires because she’s poor and they are wealthy (through long lives and disdain for human laws, circumstances the Harris vampires are unapologetic about). They pay well and she can’t afford not to, despite the dangers this work inevitably entails. And Sookie’s unabashed about how dazzling and tempting the luxuries of vampire wealth are to her as a small town barmaid, though the money’s not so intoxicating that it keeps her from being regularly revolted by the machinations and violence that vampire business usually entails (Harris’ vampires are engaged in business or work of some kind, unlike Meyer’s).  Making money is bloody, dangerous work—a truth that Alan Ball‘s True Blood makes queasily literal.

On her first assignment for the Viking vampire and nightclub entrepreneur, Erik Northman, Sookie gets a Carrie-style blood soaking when she (using her telepathic powers at Erik’s behest) discovers that Erik’s vampire partner has been embezzling. The vampire embezzler is staked and erupts into a fountain of blood–gasp and guffaw-inducing in its abundance. Anna Paquin, who plays Ball’s Sookie and wears a lovely white dress in this scene, ends up as red and slick and gooey as Erzsébet Báthory after one of her blood baths (see Part I of this essay for more on her).  

And this pretty much sets the tone for all of Sookie’s vampire work: she ends up bloody, battered, sore, almost dead.  It’s working for the man—er, vampire. It’s another day in the salt mines. Harris doesn’t have any illusions about what it means to be socially vulnerable, to live somewhere around the poverty line. While part of Sookie’s motivation in accepting the vampires’ lavish payments for her telepathic services is definitely the allure of their world of beauty and intrigue and money, sometimes, even when she’d rather not, Sookie feels like she doesn’t have much of a choice—as a single woman with no college education or health insurance whose day job is waiting tables and whose savings are dwindling.

Meyer, on the other hand, attempts to obscure the workings of class and money in her books, but she acknowledges these even as she try to hide them. The first vampires, Vlad the Impaler and Erzsébet Báthory, fed on the lives and labor of their subjects. The Cullens, Meyer’s enlightened vampires, don’t literally feed on human beings—and yet their whole monied way of life is the product of a different sort of feeding on others, a metaphorical but nonetheless illicit sort of feeding. The Cullens’ beautiful houses, cars, parties, clothes—their leisured and essentially dilettantish lives (playing cards, hunting, driving Ferraris, composing melodies on the piano, shopping) are all funded by supernatural insider trading:

Edward had a lot of money—I didn’t even want to think about how much.  Money meant next to nothing to Edward or the rest of the Cullens.  It was just something that accumulated when you had unlimited time on your hands and a sister who had an uncanny ability to predict trends in the stock market

Vampirism, in its most basic structural form, is not a collection of campy trappings (pale skin, pointed canines), but the ability and willingness to appropriate the life, work, property, and livelihood of others. Edward’s sister Alice is psychic and while Meyer never shows Alice having visions of the future of the stock market, here Meyer rather unapologetically reveals insider trading as the source of the Cullen’s unbelievable wealth—this, and an unlimited time in which to wait for investment returns.  The Cullens, for all of their virtuous vegetarianism and pangs of conscience, are no better than the arch-villain Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone‘s Wall Street, no better than the host of “vampire capitalists” who, by some accounts, who brought the global financial system to its knees in December of 2008.

Bella is wary of the Cullens’ money while she is human, and she claims that this is because she has nothing to give in return:

Edward didn’t seem to understand why I objected to him spending money on me—why it made me uncomfortable if he took me to an expensive restaurant in Seattle, why he wasn’t allowed to buy me a car that could reach speeds over fifty-five miles an hour, or why I wouldn’t let him pay my college tuition…Edward thought I was being unnecessarily difficult.

But Bella, as usual, has it wrong. She’s wary because she knows it’s bloody money (never mind Edward’s condescending paternalism—which, creepily enough, is appropriate given that he’s around 100 to Bella’s 18). Bella’s wariness here is motivated by the same horror that made her recoil from her brief glimpse of a Volturi (i.e. evil, human-eating vampire) feast: a flock of unsuspecting tourists are ushered into the turreted throne room of the Volturi’s Italian castle and happily begin to snap pictures. In horror, Bella watches the doors close and lock on the unsuspecting lambs; she hears their screams as the feeding begins.

Intuitively, she recoils from the Cullens’ money for the same reason (at least while she’s human—once she’s a vampire she revels in it). The “vegetarians” no longer suck blood from human bodies, but they suck money from the labor of others through illegal means.  It’s not quite as physically repulsive or terrifying but it’s still not quite in line with Bella’s insistence that Edward and family are spiritually radiant individuals.

And so we’re back to the beginning, to Erzébet Báthory, Vlad the Impaler: remorseless aristocrats taking blood and life and labor from their poor.  Meyer’s vampire is no more enlightened for his vegetarianism, no better and no different than he ever was.  But Meyer doesn’t understand the difference.  The Cullens’ “vegetarianism” and its patina of moral evolution is enough for her—just so long as they don’t bite anyone outright, literally.  Harris knows better and uses her fantasy to teach as much: We’re the vampires, the vampire collaborators, now and we always have been—but vampires can be people too.

Essays
| 3 books mentioned 3 9 min read
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15 comments:

  1. Serendipitous that this essay appears today, so soon after yet another deflection from the issues via attack on a woman”s mental state by #45.

    I an not the only one who has made this observation, but this very website’s comment section is rife with a slew of such attacks against women with the temerity to disagree with certain prolific commenters’ opinions. Among other terms that have been used to describe me, that can think of off the top of my head:

    Obsessive-compulsive, hysterical, determined to find offense, humorless, and the good old all-purpose medical term: “Nuts.”

    We see you.

    Moe

  2. My understanding was that Close derided the portrayal of a women unhinged in Fatal Attraction, as she recognized years later the ramping up or exaggeration of a woman with Borderline Personality Disorder (or hysteria long ago), a severe non psychotic illness which causes great suffering and is engendered by early neglect and abandonment, and often sexual assault. This neediness caused by abandonment is scorned – to be deemed needy is the worst and yet to need is to be human. A reminder: women with borderline personality disorder are capable of great compassion and empathy, despite what Harvard proffesor Dr. Baron Cohen states in his book (can’t remember title) where he lumps women with BPD in with anti-social personality disorder and incapable of empathy. Excellent essay though.

  3. Well, change comes slow. Misogyny and sexism are monstrous, certainly, but where is the data about just HOW prevalent they are? If anything, the world of 2017 is vastly improved over the world of 1917, or 1947, or 1977, and we’re moving in the right direction on gender equality. Is it perfect yet? No, far from it, but I just wish the ID politics crowd could step out of the vacuum of the now and add a little historical context, or to show me some evidence that this problem is doing anything but getting better. It’s almost like they want women to continue be oppressed (or be perceived as every bit as oppressed as they were a hundred years ago) in order to validate their own worldview.
    As for Glenn Close, her legacy isn’t determined just by a showy role in Fatal Attraction. Damages continues to grow in regard as a critically acclaimed moment in the development of prestige TV, and her reputation as a film actress with over 50 credits, including fine work in Nine Lives, Cookie’s Fortune, Reversal of Fortune, The Natural, and The World According to Garp, is far closer to the hearts of cineastes than boiling rabbits (though I do think Adrian Lyne is a provocative European-style filmmaker whose body of work is impressive in its own right). Close also stops mid-play and tells people to put their damn phones away, so kudos to her for preserving the sanctity of the theatrical experience.

  4. @SeanH @SwogHolllow

    Just going to recycle a little Swog Hollow from an earlier piece on Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad. I am confident you will deem Swog one of that fine cohort of “clear-headed white male empiricists.”

    I believe this pretty much covers the waterfront.

    [Sean,

    Still “I refuse to think that somehow by mere dint of one’s status as a woman or a POC, they are somehow more fit to judge the objective reality of a situation than an objective, clear-headed white male empiricist”

    Is something you should think hard about. Women and POC probably know more than you about what it’s like to be a woman or POC. Try listening a little more and being turned off by the messaging a little less.]

    “End Swog Hollow”

  5. Sean – good point re Close’s legacy not determined by one film.
    Moe – fight the good fight. xo

  6. Hey Moe,
    I’m all for taking criticism as well as dishing it out, but what’s wrong with being a clear-headed empiricist? I simply do not think that “women and POC probably know more than you about what it’s like to be a woman or POC” because THERE IS NO SUCH THING as “what it’s like to be a woman or POC.” There is no such thing as what it’s like to be a woman. There is no such thing as what it’s like to be gay. There is no such thing as what it’s like to be black. Etc, etc. This universalizing is the basis of racism, sexism, bigotry, and discrimination. To say that because someone is a member of a group that they INHERENTLY are a certain way, that’s racism. To say women are more emotional. To say blacks like fried chicken. To say that whites can’t dance. There is no universal experience of what it’s like to be ANYTHING.

  7. “There is no such thing as what it’s like to be a woman.”

    Well, bless your heart.

    Moe Murph
    Over and out on this thread

  8. @Sean

    Much of what you’ve written up there (against Essentialism) is Spot On… BUT (there’s always a but): look to the definition of “Empirical”. Doesn’t it privilege direct experience over observation-at-a-remove and hearsay? In other words, in discussions of Sexism/ Racism, wouldn’t Women and POC function as better “Empiricists” on the topics than Het White Fellers? Which is not to say that Women or POC *own* these conversations, but their (our) contributions, empirically speaking, are going to be more relevant than yours.

    As a Het male POC, I wouldn’t dare to presume to relativize the suffering/ Othering/second-classing of Women… for two reasons: 1) the Relative intensity of a pain is meaningless to anyone in Pain (ie, being drawn-and-quartered has got to hurt worse than a serious tooth ache, but tell that to someone with a serious tooth ache, in lieu of giving them morphine) 2) how would I know, from direct experience, how bad Sexism is now, compared to “then”, and should anyone be grateful that an absolutely unnecessary (but convenient) Evil has eased somewhat in a century? Surely there will be an urgency about making *all* of the Evil disappear? Especially if the Evil impacts one directly.

    But (again): it doesn’t impact *you* directly; from your distance, things appear to have gotten so much better that you feel people with complaints are exaggerating. You aren’t in possession of enough Empirical Evidence to judge; as a good Empiricist, you should be able to admit that.

    In ’95, I came back to America after a long absence and stayed with married friends in a lovely house by the lake. My old (White) friend had her own dog-walking/ sitting business and asked me, one morning, to check on dogs in two different houses (masters away on vacation). Doing this for her would have entailed letting myself into nice big houses in largely-White neighborhoods at the crack of dawn. Hilarious, right? I’m a Black guy of six feet tall… even wearing white tie and tails wouldn’t have helped. I had to beg off the request. My old friend thought I was being paranoid. She lectured me that there had been lots of “changes” in the US since I had left (remember, this lecture came to me in ’95) and that I had to “face these changes” and “move on”. Racism, she told me, was becoming a thing of the past. Nothing I could say could convince her otherwise.

    Don’t be like *that*, Sean! laugh.

    PS “There is no such thing as what it’s like to be black. Etc, etc.”

    But there is definitely such a thing as what it’s like to be persecuted/ degraded for being “black etc. etc”.

  9. I mostly hear where you’re coming from, Steven (and thanks as always for an articulate response), but there is such a thing as letting one’s life be too muhc governed by fear. If no black people take the job of dogwalker/dogsitter because of a fear of being perceived as a robber and shot by the cops, then progress never comes, right? Is it more dangerous for a woman to walk alone at night? Yes, but the women who do so in spite of the risk are the real feminists, no?
    Also, empiricism can cut both ways. I understand and fully agree with your point about direct observation (in a Masters & Johnson sort of way; you can’t just ASK people what they do in the bedroom, you have to literally observe and record stuff). But that said, certain experiences bias people. Are people who have lost children to drunk drivers really capable of being empirical about DWI laws? Should the widows of people who were killed on 9/11 be in charge of anti-terrorism policies? Too little experience is bad for empiricism, but so is too much.

  10. Sean!

    Ugh, as they say. Seriously: ugh. This is borderline loony (and a new kind of magical thinking, possibly):

    “If no black people take the job of dogwalker/dogsitter because of a fear of being perceived as a robber and shot by the cops, then progress never comes, right? Is it more dangerous for a woman to walk alone at night? Yes, but the women who do so in spite of the risk are the real feminists, no?”

    Sean, how will we put an end to Nigerian email scammers if *you’re* too risk-averse (and cowardly, even), to engage with them? More importantly, how will women put an end to domestic abuse if they keep selfishly leaving abusive households instead of sticking with it and taking beatings in the name of eventual progress that will come, after all the abusive husbands and “lovers” are simply worn out from beating them, posthumously?

    Well, I tried.

    Signed,

    Articulate Black Guy Steven

    PS And no, I will not “hijack” this thread with an off-piste cluster of responses to more and possibly equally absurd rejoinders. I have to mow the lawn, or something, instead. But, yeah: ugh.

  11. Come on man! You’re better than that, Augustine. You’re totally distorting what I say with limp analogies. If you’re going to use domestic abuse as an analogy, what you’re saying by refusing to water plants for a white family in a rich neighborhood is: “Because some women get beaten by their spouses or boyfriends, why bother dating at all.” Show a little gumption, man.
    Or look at it from the other side; what you are saying is that, by your logic of irrational fear, you would encourage a white person to reject a black friend who lived in “the ghetto” who asked the white guy to dogsit/be in such a neighborhood at a perceived “dangerous” time. How is that not furthering the problem? America (and the first-world west in general) is WAY safer than it’s ever been, and even taking into account that the request you received was 20 years ago, it still was recent enough to be a pretty safe activity. People live in fear because of the media. Crime is a fraction of what it was in the 70s. America is safe as hell and there’s very little violent street crime.
    Do black people sometimes get harassed by the cops in wealthy, largely white neighborhoods where there are hardly any black people? Sure. And on super super rare occasions they even get assaulted, and on even rarer occasions they get killed. Do white people sometimes get harassed by the natives in lower class urban neighborhoods where there are very few white people? Sure. And on super super rare occasions they even get assaulted, and on even rarer occasions they get killed. But to give up on interraciality or to just assume you will be the victim of violence if you “cross lines” is too fearful for me to support as being anything remotely approaching a logical or empirical approach to living one’s life.

  12. Sean

    Steve didn’t distort what you said. You said:

    “If no black people take the job of dogwalker/dogsitter because of a fear of being perceived as a robber and shot by the cops, then progress never comes, right? Is it more dangerous for a woman to walk alone at night? Yes, but the women who do so in spite of the risk are the real feminists, no?”

    This is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read. I have no words for this stupidity.
    Congratulations.

  13. This line is just classic. I can’t get over it. You have to break your brain in order to process the logic in this.

    “Is it more dangerous for a woman to walk alone at night? Yes, but the women who do so in spite of the risk are the real feminists.”

    Somebody should create a meme. The opportunities are endless.

    “Is it more dangerous to drive a car into a brick wall? Yes, but the dudes who do so in spite of the risk are the real car enthusiasts.”

    “Is it more dangerous to inject fentanyl? Yes, but the people who do in spite of the risk are the real daredevils.”

    “Is it more dangerous to eat 12,000 calories per day? Yes, but the people who do in spite of the risk are the real foodies.”

    “Is it more dangerous to jump down a mineshaft? Yes, but the kids who do in spite of the risk are the real athletes.”

  15. Toad,

    You just compared walking alone at night to driving a car into a wall. How am I the one with logical flaws in my rhetoric?

    Really, think about it. All your comparative examples are ridiculously dangerous. A woman walking alone at night is the essence of “take back the night,” it is the absolute essence of feminism–that a woman has every right to walk by herself at night that a man has, and that she should do so with just as much freedom and ease, and without fear of reprisal or harassment.

    You don’t have to break your brain at all to see the difference between my examples and yours.

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Essays

The Author Wore Prada

Essays
September 27, 2016 | 3 books mentioned 10 4 min read

This July, I published my first novel, An Innocent Fashion, the story of a queer, biracial millennial who spirals into a depression after landing his dream job at a fashion magazine. The book was aptly pitched as “The Bell Jar meets The Devil Wears Prada” — with one foot firmly in each of both the “literary” and “commercial” realms. Yet the latter half of this equation proved the source of a major frustration. Specifically, I was self-conscious about other people’s biases against fashion, the commercial (read: “unserious”) theme on which my whole novel pivoted. In interviews I downplayed the fashion element over and over, explaining that despite being set in the office of a fashion magazine, the book was complex, using fashion to explore deeper societal issues.

Part of my preoccupation with “seriousness” came with the territory of being a first-time author; I yearned to be well-respected, considered “good enough” for one’s work to count as capital-L Literature. But the other part stemmed from a truth I’d been fighting from a young age: that fashion, which I had been passionate about from a young age, was not a very serious or important subject.

I grew up within a tight-knit Cuban family in Miami, surrounded by traditional values including the sharp distinction between male and female gender roles. As do many others, I learned that fashion was “for girls,” the subtext being that as it was somehow lesser — a frivolity. Personally, I didn’t see why fashion should be considered inherently more trivial than any other form of creative expression — writing, for instance, or fine art. I maintained that fashion’s unfair reputation was a reflection of my conservative environment. But even as an undergraduate at liberal-minded Yale, where intelligent peers sometimes expressed a heady disregard for the sartorial sphere, the effects of an entrenched bias were still evident. Others didn’t think as highly about fashion as I did; everywhere I went, fashion was considered frivolous.

Many books that embraced fashion as subject matter seemed to confirm and perpetuate this notion. As far as I could tell, fashion-oriented books fell primarily into the category of chick lit — juicy reads like Confessions of a Shopaholic and Bergdorf Blonds, in which “fashion” was a code word for the same kind of guilty pleasures afforded by junk food and reality TV. Of course, the biggest phenomenon in this league was The Devil Wears Prada.

Because like the author of Prada, I too had been a fashion assistant when I wrote my book, Prada had made for an inevitable comparison to An Innocent Fashion from the start. But unlike my book, however, in which even the least likable characters defy overarching stereotypes, Prada devotes 360 pages (and the film equivalent, two hours) to driving home the idea that fashion is not only frivolous, but also, inexplicably, “bad” — and that the people who love it are some inevitable combination of mean, superficial, and/or stupid. Aspiring to a career in”serious” journalism — the protagonist Andy Sachs paints an unanimously damning picture of her colleagues: nasty, brutish, and dagger-heeled.

The result of this reductive portrayal of the fashion industry is that pithy stereotypes remain unchallenged — a missed opportunity.

After all, it wasn’t always this way. If, in many realms, fashion has had an unfair reputation as a shallow womanly diversion, in literature it was put to use by some of our most important authors.

Consider Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, in which, after her husband’s death, she can’t bear to throw away his shoes, which she compares to vital organs: “How could he come back if they took away his organs, how could he come back if he had no shoes?” There’s Sylvia Plath, whose novel The Bell Jar paints a portrait of a woman on the verge of losing her sanity, while working for the fictional equivalent of Mademoiselle in the ’50s. While the superficial magazine goings-on provoke the main character’s despair as she realizes her powerlessness to resist her destiny as a wife/mother/homemaker, she is frequently transfixed in earnest by the beauty of clothes and shoes, and “a whole life of marvelous, elaborate decadence that attracted me like a magnet” — making her relationship to fashion complex and real. In Edith Wharton’s society novels, corsetry and ruffles help Wharton make elegant, searing criticisms of class and gender inequality (“If I were shabby no one would have me,” says Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, “a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself”) — while who could forget the meaningful implications of fashion in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, or The Great Gatsby, or Gone with the Wind?

Contemporary books touting fashion as subject matter rarely, if ever, offer such depth or complexity, while those that revolve around fashion magazines nearly always feature a cast made up exclusively of privileged white women. This perhaps more than anything is what I hoped would distinguish my novel. Given the precedent set by annals of homogeneously populated chick lit, the main character isn’t who you’d expect. He’s a person of color, queer, and the opposite of rich — an outsider named Ethan for whom the glamour of fashion represents the inaccessibility of the American dream. In the Prada-sphere, Ethan would surely be reduced to a stock character — most likely, a white woman’s sassy gay best friend.

The need for nuanced representations of fashion in fiction has never been greater. Fashion offers a unique lens to view some of the most important issues of our time: class, gender, race, and sexuality. Depictions of fashion in literature can and should reflect that, providing new ways to engage with the dialogue of human progress, challenging our ideas about society and personal identity. These goals, after all, are at the heart of literature and fashion alike.

See Also: Clothes in Books and Ways to go Wrong

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

 

Essays
| 3 books mentioned 10 4 min read
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