“One has a profound, if irrational, instinct in favour of the theory that the union of man and woman makes for the greatest satisfaction, the most complete happiness.” In your opinion, has the rise of the ‘Strong Female Character’ in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries had an impact on this view?
How do you know you're not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: "I like strong women." If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because "I like strong women" is code for "I hate strong women." Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
The “first great lesson”, writes Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, is to “write as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman.” [1] “Sex-consciousness”, [2] particularly when it is specific and angry, is poison to creative freedom. Woolf envisages a female novelist who will not see men as “the opposing faction”, will not “waste her time railing against them,” nor “ruin her peace of mind” doing so.[3] The spirit of androgyny and the commonality of the sexes as pre-requisite characterise Woolf’s view of the future of fiction.[4] Yet in recent years some of the most resonant creative work by women has arisen from an intense awareness of gender, particularly within the context of relationships, dissecting the ideal of “union of man and woman” as never before.
Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is a portrait of the death of a marriage, and, as one of its first lines suggests, a tale of mutual destruction: “What have we done to each other?” Amy Dunne is a modern woman: she is untroubled by the struggle for Suffrage, to which Woolf attributes the rise of sex-consciousness,[5] and sees Jane Austen’s marriage plots as quaint tokens of femininity. [6] She recalls thinking of her husband as her “equal” and their marriage as “the most perfect union”.[7] But when she is confronted with his infidelity, the injustices of gender begin to emerge. Her ‘Cool Girl’ monologue lists the demands made on women by men: to eat mindlessly without gaining weight, to enjoy the archetypally masculine pastimes of football and video games while still fulfilling the ultimate feminine function of being “hot”.[8] Amy goes from discussing “Nick”, to “a man like Nick”, to “men”.[9] He becomes transparent, anonymous, an everyman. Nick does not love Amy, but Cool Amy,[10] a construct, wearing what bell hooks refers to as the “mask” of patriarchal femininity.[11] Nick and Amy’s union is proven hollow, cleaved in two by sex-consciousness.
“History,” writes Sue Asbee in her examination of A Room of One’s Own, “has been divisive for the sexes.” [12] It follows that union must overcome values and behaviours which, while not inherent, have been deeply ingrained over time. Beyoncé’s Lemonade is another contemporary exploration of infidelity as a catalyst for sex-consciousness. Denial, her adaption of Warsan Shire’s For Women Who Are Difficult To Love, includes the line: “In the tradition of men in my blood you come home at 3AM and lie to me.” [13] Men here are undoubtedly the “opposing faction”: betrayal is not an individual act but a historically, almost inevitably, male trait. As the narrator tries “to close my mouth more... to be softer, prettier, less... awake”, she becomes aware of her own deference to submissive femininity.[14] Her response to injustice is to shrink and deny herself, as female perceptiveness and assertiveness seem incompatible with love. The line “I swallowed a sword” evokes medieval, male-coded violence and the performance of impossible feats, just as Amy in Gone Girl is required to eat endless hotdogs while remaining a size 2, to be “a girl who doesn’t exist”.[15] Beyoncé speaks of erasing one’s identity to preserve a union.
But women have always struggled with identity, with being named. “Anonymity, writes Woolf, “runs in their blood.” [16] In Elena Ferrante’s The Story of a New Name, the narrator describes watching as her friend’s maiden name, written on paper, “goes towards” her married name, “is sucked up by it, is dissolved in it.” [17] Male influence is presented as corrosive. The older women of the narrator’s village, with their “hollow eyes and cheeks”, have lost their “feminine qualities” and been physically “consumed by the bodies of husbands, fathers, brothers”.[18] History is not simply “divisive” for the sexes but actively destructive to female selfhood. Union has meant not the unity of masculinity and femininity but the overpowering of the latter by the former. In Gone Girl, this amounts to identity theft: “He took away chunks of me with blasé swipes,” writes Amy. “He Giving Treed me out of existence.” [19] Loss of identity also means invisibility. “Why can’t you see me?” asks Beyoncé, arguably one of the most seen and heard women in the world. “Everyone else can.” [20] We are reminded that respect in public is not necessarily mirrored in private – if Jackie Kennedy is to be believed, to have power in the world is necessarily not to have power in bed.[21]
In one model of union, Woolf offers the image of the husband, returning from his work in “the law courts or the House of Commons”, to find his wife “among her children perhaps, or with a piece of embroidery on her knee”.[22] One barely need glance at the proportion of MPs and judges who are women today,[23] or the average length of paternity leave taken in the UK,[24] to appreciate the stubbornness of the idea of man and woman as breadwinner and “angel in the house” [25] respectively. But consider one of the most significant unions in public consciousness: the first couple. The public images of the last two Democratic first couples have been based on fierce mutual intelligence and political vision. When Michelle Obama’s speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention was considered near -presidential,[26] and Hillary Clinton won the presidential popular vote, it is difficult to imagine that the marriages of women of such stature could be anything other than equal. Progressive men, it is presumed, need Strong Women, and take inspiration from the “creative power which is in the gift only of the opposite sex to bestow” [27] without requiring them to perform submissive, patriarchal femininity. While the Clinton marriage, fractured by infidelity, can hardly be considered a standard-bearer for “complete happiness”, it is undoubtedly a partnership. Hillary Clinton’s appointment as head of a taskforce on the leading issue of healthcare reform in 1992 marked a shift towards practical co-operation between President and First Lady.
What now, then, is the state of that union? In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Arrangements, a highbrow piece of fanfiction based on Woolf’s own Mrs Dalloway, Melania Trump is portrayed as a woman of below-the-surface doubts, desires and convictions, her shrewdness tempered by a wish to preserve the “luxurious peace” she has found with Donald. The maintenance of this peace characterises her role in marriage: to mollify, to agree, to tell him “you will win,” even when that thought instils “terror” in her. [28] Adichie articulates, as Flynn does with the Cool Girl monologue and Beyoncé with Denial, the sacrifices women make to maintain unequal equilibrium. It is perhaps the opaqueness of Mrs Trump’s public image that has brought about such intricate speculation into her private world. Some have suggested, apropos of her body language and Mr Trump’s history of abuse[29], that she is “America’s First Victim”.[30] Others have noted that this narrative is racialized, with Mrs Trump effectively stripped of responsibility for complicity in her husband’s actions because of the notions of “helplessness” and “fragility” associated with white femininity.[31]
In any case, Mrs Trump’s physical absence since her husband’s inauguration,[32] her failure to champion any cause (excluding a vague overture to fighting cyber-bullying [33]), and her plagiarism of Michelle Obama at the 2016 Republican National Convention, [34] suggest that she has no wish to influence her husband’s office, nor indeed any political or humanitarian agenda to pursue. Considering Mr Trump’s previous comments on women, [35] for which words such as ‘demeaning’ and ‘reductive’ seem altogether too mild, one wonders if the world’s highest office is entering an age of what Woolf called “unmitigated masculinity”.[36] To call it this would perhaps erase, or excuse, the significant minority of women overall and 53% of white women who voted for Trump.[37] But his “locker room talk”, “penchant for dividing the world into winners and losers”,[38] and emphasis on “Work; and the Flag”,[39] suggest a performance of masculinity so nostalgic that one wonders if it is viable in the modern world, and so unadulterated that one wonders if it is viable at all.
In Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, the protagonist, Frank Wheeler, personifies what Woolf calls “self-assertive virility”.[40] Travelling home one night from his job in the city, he refuses to ride with the “beaten, amiable husks of men” in the train carriages (“beaten” because manhood equals victory) instead standing “erect and out in the open” on the iron passage between them. He feels “like a man”, and this feeling is one of euphoria, invincibility and easy dominance.[41] But the death of his wife leaves him a “smiling lifeless man” with a “soft, simpering giggle”. [42] We learn that women not only sustain Frank’s masculinity but allow it to exist in the first place. It is Maureen, his breakable child of a mistress, with her “flimsy” underwear and “wide and bright” eyes,[43] who affords him the role of “conscientious father”.[44] It is April, his brilliant, unsuspecting wife, who utters the words – “you’re a man” – that make him feel in “command of the universe”.[45] In Yates’ portrayal of male dominance and female submission, the latter is defined by the former, bringing to mind Heraclitus’ theory of the unity of opposites.[46] Masculinity, then, is never truly “unmitigated”, because it depends on the wilful practice by women of obedience as “an expression of love”.[47]
In one sense, it is difficult to find a greater literary challenge to Woolf’s theory of union between man and women than the marriage of Frank and April Wheeler. How can two people, equal in beauty and intelligence, build a union of such destructive inequality? A contemporary echo of this question is heard in Gone Girl. But the destructiveness of inequality is at the heart of A Room of One’s Own, and Revolutionary Road is perhaps a cautionary tale of what happens when men, to quote John Stoltenberg, “love manhood more than justice”[48]. Just as Woolf’s perfect, fertile “man-womanly” or “woman-manly” [49] mind requires concession to the opposite gender, happy union can exist only when men forgo the patriarchal masculinity that requires their dominance over women – a sacrifice that Frank refuses to make. Revolutionary Road is also a warning about what happens when female influence is stifled, not just in love but in the world: it is no coincidence that April Wheeler dies as a result of a botched illegal abortion.
The reverse of the perfect union of the sexes is the perfect opposition of the sexes. Works from Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire to Lana Del Rey’s Born To Die have conducted a sort of experiment into what Hannah Black calls the “disaster of straightness”,[50] in which femininity and masculinity are pushed to fatalistic extremes. Gender is polarised and essentialised into a hazy concept of red satin and roses, white t-shirts and big arms and fast cars, of beauty and fragility versus brute strength, and the result is violence and tragedy. Woolf would no doubt be glad at how outdated this iconography of dominance and submission - sex-consciousness in its purest form - now seems. In an age when any indication of resourcefulness, self-possession or independent thought is enough to brand a Female Character ‘Strong’,[51] the explicitly feminine weakness of Blanche DuBois comes across as radical. It would be anachronistic, even sexist, to write a contemporary character like her.
Yet the idea of men and women as opposing forces, of union as a battle, lives on. In Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, the narrator believes that men, with exceptions, are “unfit for romantic love” because “they want to be the destroyer and never be destroyed.”[52] The violent language of betrayal in Gone Girl and Lemonade reinforces the theory of the man as destroyer. “He killed my soul,” Amy Dunne declares.[53] Beyoncé’s narrator demands: “So, what are you gonna say at my funeral now that you’ve killed me?” [54] There is no co-operation here. Woolf’s theory of union between man and woman resulting in “the most complete happiness” is effectively bulldozed by the modern creatives she expected to reinforce it. By placing sex-consciousness at the core of their work, Beyoncé, Flynn and Ferrante may have been considered by Woolf to have had a regressive influence on women’s writing.
However, Woolf’s claim that “it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex” is undermined by the overwhelming cultural response to women who do. Lemonade was called “a revolutionary work of black feminism”,[55] and became the subject of a class at the University of Texas.[56] Gone Girl sold 7 million copies in 28 countries[57] and became David Fincher’s highest-grossing film.[58] Elena Ferrante was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in 2016 despite, in the tradition of women, being entirely anonymous.[59] The sheer number of column inches dedicated to discussion of these works suggests that the divisions between men and women, rather than stunting creative growth, are still fertile ground.
In the early months of a US presidency that will bring awareness of - and perhaps fears about - masculinity and power to the forefront of public consciousness, the utopian man-woman union seems distant. Rather than empowering female creatives to forget their gender entirely, it may be in the interests of feminism’s fourth wave that they expose and unravel sexual injustice where they see it, even if it is at the expense of their “peace of mind”.