Nov 15, 2019 11:33 PM
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/07/books...-rhys.html
EXCERPT (Leslie Jamison): The first time I read Jean Rhys’s “Good Morning, Midnight,” I was 22 and deeply committed to a life of volcanic feeling: doomed love affairs, binge drinking and other tentatively self-destructive hobbies. I needed blueprints for my epic sadness [...] The novel’s antiheroine, Sasha ... is the consummate literary sad woman, the superlative embodiment of an alluring silhouette: a woman contoured and whittled by her suffering, self-destructive and utterly destroyed.
[...] The ghost of Slvia Plath is the godmother of the afflicted woman trope, haunting us from the poems written before her suicide: “Dying / is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well … I guess you could say I’ve a call.”
Then there is Joan Didion, whose heroines wear affliction like an elegant cocktail dress — as if their pain had been plucked from the runways — especially Maria Wyeth of “Play It as It Lays,” who cries at night and wakes with swollen eyes to drive the Los Angeles freeways, picturing rattlesnakes in baby playpens and remembering “the bad season … when she had done nothing but walk and cry and lose so much weight that the agency had refused to book her.” It’s all there: the tears, the aftertaste of soured glamour, the waif-y anguish and the distinctly female quality of it all. Affliction even subtly shapes the journalistic persona Didion crafts for herself in her canonical essays: a rigorously unsentimental reporter writing about senseless violence and serial killers, picking apart the hollow promises of the American dream, but still facing all this darkness with a beguiling female fragility, plagued by migraines and existential angst, packing her own size 2 black cocktail dresses when she hits the road.
I built my own career on a collection of essays that simultaneously interrogated the trope of the afflicted woman and enacted it, presenting a narrator who drank too much and starved herself, got heart surgery, got an abortion, got hit in the street. The book seemed to strike a chord. You really made yourself vulnerable, people would tell me. I admire that.
Yet there was also a critic who wrote that the book “portrayed women as inherently vulnerable,” and that this made her so angry she ended up shouting, “Oh go [expletive] yourself, lady!” into her empty apartment. She went on, “I worry about making pain a ticket to gain entry into the women’s club.” Her ire tapped into my deepening anxiety that calling a woman “vulnerable” in relation to her writing was a way of praising her not for her artistry but for her exposure — for her willingness to make her fragility a public commodity.
When I returned to “Good Morning, Midnight” at the end of my 20s — newly sober, less enchanted by sadness — the novel almost nauseated me. I felt sickened by everything Sasha embodied: her weepy passivity, her adamant hopelessness. She was not only oozing self-pity, she also seemed self-righteous about it — convinced that her unhappiness held far more truth than the pretenses other people hid behind. Now I understood Sasha’s sadness as an exceptionality complex — as if she believed herself to be the only person who had ever known crippling despair. It wasn’t that I no longer saw myself in Sasha, it was that I hated the parts of myself I saw in her: perpetually reclining into a solipsistic relationship to her own affliction, as if leaning back onto a fainting couch.
[...] Just as it’s liberating to watch female sadness granted the dignity of complexity on the page — to watch it get angry, get petty, get public — it’s thrilling to witness a surge of books portraying other states of feeling entirely: female narrators contoured less by affliction and more by joy, pleasure, curiosity, surprise, delight. Chris Kraus documents her narrator taking pleasure in the intoxicating (and generative) force of an unrequited crush in “I Love Dick” (1997) and Kathleen Stewart explores daily sources of relief in “Ordinary Affects” (2007) — one car paying for the toll of the car behind; sleepy strangers gathered around the free breakfast buffet at an airport hotel. In “Wade in the Water” — the titular poem of her 2018 collection, dedicated to the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters — the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith writes about the ecstasy of confronting other women creating beauty with their bodies: “One of the women greeted me. / I love you, she said. She didn’t / Know me, but I believed her … / I love you, throughout / The performance, in every / Handclap, every stomp.”
If sadness once struck me as terminally hip, then I’ve arrived on the far side of 35 with a deepening appreciation for the ways pleasure and satisfaction can become structuring forces of identity as well. [...] This rumination on happiness points toward the vast range of aesthetic alternatives to sadness as a default narrative posture. It acts as an invocation — or, at least, an invitation — to think of happiness as something that might sharpen our thinking into focus, rather than blunting it. It suggests that What’s your pleasure? is a question that might direct us toward as much profundity as What’s your damage? It suggests that depictions of intimacy, delight and satisfaction might hold a different dialect of nuance than the drunken ramblings of Sasha at the Parisian bar; might offer even richer ways of bringing consciousness to the page... (MORE - details)
EXCERPT (Leslie Jamison): The first time I read Jean Rhys’s “Good Morning, Midnight,” I was 22 and deeply committed to a life of volcanic feeling: doomed love affairs, binge drinking and other tentatively self-destructive hobbies. I needed blueprints for my epic sadness [...] The novel’s antiheroine, Sasha ... is the consummate literary sad woman, the superlative embodiment of an alluring silhouette: a woman contoured and whittled by her suffering, self-destructive and utterly destroyed.
[...] The ghost of Slvia Plath is the godmother of the afflicted woman trope, haunting us from the poems written before her suicide: “Dying / is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well … I guess you could say I’ve a call.”
Then there is Joan Didion, whose heroines wear affliction like an elegant cocktail dress — as if their pain had been plucked from the runways — especially Maria Wyeth of “Play It as It Lays,” who cries at night and wakes with swollen eyes to drive the Los Angeles freeways, picturing rattlesnakes in baby playpens and remembering “the bad season … when she had done nothing but walk and cry and lose so much weight that the agency had refused to book her.” It’s all there: the tears, the aftertaste of soured glamour, the waif-y anguish and the distinctly female quality of it all. Affliction even subtly shapes the journalistic persona Didion crafts for herself in her canonical essays: a rigorously unsentimental reporter writing about senseless violence and serial killers, picking apart the hollow promises of the American dream, but still facing all this darkness with a beguiling female fragility, plagued by migraines and existential angst, packing her own size 2 black cocktail dresses when she hits the road.
I built my own career on a collection of essays that simultaneously interrogated the trope of the afflicted woman and enacted it, presenting a narrator who drank too much and starved herself, got heart surgery, got an abortion, got hit in the street. The book seemed to strike a chord. You really made yourself vulnerable, people would tell me. I admire that.
Yet there was also a critic who wrote that the book “portrayed women as inherently vulnerable,” and that this made her so angry she ended up shouting, “Oh go [expletive] yourself, lady!” into her empty apartment. She went on, “I worry about making pain a ticket to gain entry into the women’s club.” Her ire tapped into my deepening anxiety that calling a woman “vulnerable” in relation to her writing was a way of praising her not for her artistry but for her exposure — for her willingness to make her fragility a public commodity.
When I returned to “Good Morning, Midnight” at the end of my 20s — newly sober, less enchanted by sadness — the novel almost nauseated me. I felt sickened by everything Sasha embodied: her weepy passivity, her adamant hopelessness. She was not only oozing self-pity, she also seemed self-righteous about it — convinced that her unhappiness held far more truth than the pretenses other people hid behind. Now I understood Sasha’s sadness as an exceptionality complex — as if she believed herself to be the only person who had ever known crippling despair. It wasn’t that I no longer saw myself in Sasha, it was that I hated the parts of myself I saw in her: perpetually reclining into a solipsistic relationship to her own affliction, as if leaning back onto a fainting couch.
[...] Just as it’s liberating to watch female sadness granted the dignity of complexity on the page — to watch it get angry, get petty, get public — it’s thrilling to witness a surge of books portraying other states of feeling entirely: female narrators contoured less by affliction and more by joy, pleasure, curiosity, surprise, delight. Chris Kraus documents her narrator taking pleasure in the intoxicating (and generative) force of an unrequited crush in “I Love Dick” (1997) and Kathleen Stewart explores daily sources of relief in “Ordinary Affects” (2007) — one car paying for the toll of the car behind; sleepy strangers gathered around the free breakfast buffet at an airport hotel. In “Wade in the Water” — the titular poem of her 2018 collection, dedicated to the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters — the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith writes about the ecstasy of confronting other women creating beauty with their bodies: “One of the women greeted me. / I love you, she said. She didn’t / Know me, but I believed her … / I love you, throughout / The performance, in every / Handclap, every stomp.”
If sadness once struck me as terminally hip, then I’ve arrived on the far side of 35 with a deepening appreciation for the ways pleasure and satisfaction can become structuring forces of identity as well. [...] This rumination on happiness points toward the vast range of aesthetic alternatives to sadness as a default narrative posture. It acts as an invocation — or, at least, an invitation — to think of happiness as something that might sharpen our thinking into focus, rather than blunting it. It suggests that What’s your pleasure? is a question that might direct us toward as much profundity as What’s your damage? It suggests that depictions of intimacy, delight and satisfaction might hold a different dialect of nuance than the drunken ramblings of Sasha at the Parisian bar; might offer even richer ways of bringing consciousness to the page... (MORE - details)
