This
fall ABC premiered its much advertised new series, Betrayal. Joining the ranks
of Scandal and the recently renewed Mistresses, Lori Rackl, blogger for the Chicago Sun-Times, argues that the
network acronym may as well stand for Adultery Broadcast Network. Although a bit overdone at the present
moment, I was eagerly awaiting the show’s debut since I’ve long studied the
female sexual awakening theme in narratives.
It didn’t take long for me to lose my enthusiasm.
Other
critics have slammed the show for the stilted dialogue and lack of chemistry
between the main lovers, so I won’t wax on about that. What bothered me was twofold. First, as with most sexual awakening stories,
the plot was predictable (it was advertised to look like a television version
of the film Unfaithful – which I
discuss below – and that’s, more or less, what it is, plus a side storyline
about a murder trial connected to a corrupt corporate family). Betrayal
tells the story of Sara Hanley, a photographer who begins a love affair
with Jack McAllister, a lawyer from a powerful family involved in Chicago-style
crime. Their affair becomes all the more
complicated when Jack is pitted against Sara’s husband, an up-and-coming,
ambitious prosecutor in a complicated murder trial. However, I can get past recycled storylines,
so what really bothered me was the fact that this show threatened a thesis that
I developed years ago while a graduate student.
As
a young scholar when I studied this theme I claimed that television shows,
because of their serialized format, were more progressive with plots grounded
in a female sexual awakening. While
films and novels often ended with some sort of punishment (usually a death),
television shows because of their need to continue on were forced to have much
more tentative (and tame) punishments for cheating women. So when Betrayal’s
first episode opened with a shot of the main character bleeding out from a
gunshot wound, I almost threw my remote at the television screen. What I didn’t know then, that I know now, is
that the show was pitched as a limited-run series comprised of 13 episodes. (This is probably a good thing because with
its dismal ratings, it had no chance of being renewed and some are shocked ABC
is letting it finish out its run). So as
a limited-run series, by its construction (and narrative constraints), it makes
sense that it falls in line more with film and print narratives centered on
this theme. (If you want to slip back into
time and read a little excerpt from my dissertation, feel free to read on and follow
the youthful arguments of media scholar newbie).
In my
dissertation I studied two literary texts and one film that showcase the way
that the feminist sexual awakening theme appeared in romantic narratives
throughout the 20th century.
The first text was written in 1899, kicking off the new century, and the
other two were published just as it closed. Surprisingly, or not, the
differences were not quite as striking as the similarities. I then analyzed the way this theme shifts
once it hits the televised small screen, arguing that it had more feminist
potential in this format.
The Awakening
One of the first literary texts to openly
tackle this theme of women’s sexuality was Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. Written
at the turn of the twentieth century, this controversial novella is centered on
the life of Edna Pontellier. This text,
foreshadowing concerns Betty Freidan would raise in The Feminine Mystique five decades later, deals with the
restrictive domestic role of the housewife.
With the critique of patriarchal society, traditional marriage
arrangements, and motherhood itself apparent throughout every page of this
novel, it is not surprising that second-wave feminists recovered this text and
adopted it into their alternate canon during the 1970s. The narrative starts when the Pontelliers are
on summer retreat with various other Creole families. It is not until an intimate friendship sparks
between her and Robert Lebrun that she realizes her unhappiness in that role
(or that any other emotion registers within her, in all actuality). Up until this point, Edna resigned to the
fact that she had taken “her place with a certain dignity in the world of
reality, closing the portals forever behind her upon the realm of romance and
dreams,” and apparently life, love, and passion correspondingly (Chopin
19). The love affair that awakens Edna,
forever altering her life, is actually of the most innocent nature; the two (in
the true nature of a Victorian text) never fully act on their feelings. In order to prevent such indiscretion, Robert
Lebrun (the object of Edna’s newly realized desire) leaves for Mexico to pursue
a job venture. Without him she is a
deflated being, “her whole existence [is] dulled, like a faded garment which
seems to be no longer worth wearing” (Chopin 49). And despite Robert’s good intentions, the
damage is already done, passion, emotion, lust, and sensuality has been
awakened in this protagonist and there is no turning back.
At the summer’s close, Edna returns to the
city and discards her societal duties (the entertaining of acquaintances, the
caring of the children) and she even refuses to conform to her husband’s direct
demands and expectations. Toward the end
of the story her husband is working out of town, her children are residing with
other family members, and she has adopted quite the independent lifestyle, one
of new social circuits and a (now acted upon) love affair with Alecee
Arobin. Despite this new relationship,
her heart still longs for the absent Robert who started her down the sexually
charged life-changing path. As the novel
comes to a close, Edna packs up her family household, moves to a small
residence on her own, and Robert returns.
Their feelings are finally vocalized but they only materialize in the
form of an affectionate embrace and kiss.
Before any further development can occur, Robert disappears yet
again. Edna returns to the scene of the
summer, the lake that once intimidated her.
As she reflects on her position in life, and her inability to escape
from it, she walks out into the water, committing suicide.
There is much
critical debate as to the ultimate meaning of the novel’s close. Scholars question whether Edna’s suicide is
an escape from patriarchy to be celebrated or a resigned retreat to be
criticized (both of which would at least highlight her autonomous decision
making) or, quite differently, an indirect punishment assigned to her for
breaking the ideological norms of her community (which would mean that she is not
in control of this last decision but instead is forfeiting control to the
larger cultural powers surrounding her).
Some read the ending as a heroic yet tragic escape from oppressive
ideology that is only possible in this fictional community through death. I read the ending as a less than heroic, and
certainly tragic, escape from the patriarchal system, but an escape that
certainly could be read as a banishment (and hence a type of punishment) from
the system that Edna can no longer exist in after her awakening.
Unfaithful
Although the theme of
sexual awakening has been well studied by literary scholars for centuries, film
scholarship has also attended to this notion since its explosion in the
1970s. However, its findings, and the
products they study, are a bit different as this motif translates itself across
the media divide. One recent cinematic
example that can be read against The Awakening is Adrian Lynne’s Unfaithful
(2002) starring Richard Gere and Diane Lane. The narrative of this piece is
not much unlike the previous print ones:
a marriage that outwardly looks solid is shaken when the female
protagonist, Connie Sumner (Lane), begins a surprising love affair with
twenty-eight year old, French book collector, Paul Martel (Olivier
Martinez). Unlike the novel, the wife of
this film seems to have even less reason to cheat. Connie seems happy with her family role,
though perhaps bored by the routine, and the film opens with scenes that depict
a relatively active and satisfactory bedroom life with her husband, Ed (Gere). Nonetheless, the excitement of the affair,
the seduction by the younger man, the exoticness of his city dwelling, and the
new experiences he can offer her lures her into an affair that spirals out of
control.
Like The Awakening,
this film ends with death hinting that infidelity will always result in
punishment. This is not surprising, being that scholars like Suzanne
Leonard argue that stories about unfaithful women often combine the
reinforcement of dominant ideologies with pleasurable feminist subversions of
the status quo. In these situations the
pleasure of abandoning marital duties and embarking on sexual voyages could
definitely be considered subverting the status quo. Likewise, the reinforcement of the dominant
ideologies is also prominent in both the novel and the film with said reinforcement
being accompanied with the death penalty for subverting the status quo to begin
with. However this text deviates from this normal formula in that the death
comes in the form not of Connie, but of her lover Paul after her husband
discovers the affair. In a dramatic
scene, Ed has not only discovered that Connie has been cheating on him for
weeks but that she has given her young lover a gift that he himself had given
to her. This item, a snow globe housing
two dancing figures, was meaningful to him because he had enclosed (without her
knowledge) in its base a picture of their family and a message stating that
she, his beautiful wife, was what made every day worthwhile. The giving away of this gift pushes the husband
over the edge and in the midst of a panic attack he strikes out at Paul and
cracks open his skull with the snow globe.
Right after this death, in perfect Hollywood timing, the wife calls and
leaves a message on Paul’s answering machine (which Ed hears) stating that she
is ending the affair.
The film ends with
Connie loosely accused by police officials for Paul’s death, which Ed tries to
cover up, and she becomes aware that her own husband has caused it. The couple continues on with the cover up and
struggles to get past the event with two poignant scenes indicating that they
may be able to do just that. The first
is when Connie discovers the love note inside the snow globe that has survived
despite its use as a weapon. The second
is the final scene of the movie. The
couple is at a red light with their son asleep in the backseat and Connie
begins begging for them to simply run away and disappear. The two verbally fantasize about driving off
to Mexico and living on the beach. (The
idea of a seaside escape should now seem quite familiar). The last scene is them embracing in the front
seat as the streetlight turns repeatedly green and red during their stalled
state. However, as the camera zooms out
viewers see that they are ironically parked at a street light right outside of
the police station as the bold letters “P-O-L-I-C-E” glow ominously in their
backdrop. This final scene hints that,
despite their renewed solidarity, the couple will not get their Pacific escape
and that punishment still might come. In
analyzing this final frame it becomes obvious that the police and legal system
function in this film as the didactic housewives and societal conventions of
the Creole society in Grand Isle did for Edna in The Awakening. Although different in form, both
authoritative forces rule out the possibility of happiness within the
constraints of their culture’s conformity and/or the opportunity for unharmed
escape when trying to escape it.
The Bride Stripped Bare
A century after Chopin’s shocking text, this theme
of sexual awakening still thrives.
Although Hollywood is often the prime outlet to explore and refashion
this feminist theme, literary texts continue to do so as well. Originally published anonymously, The
Bride Stripped Bare,1
takes on this motif in slightly different format. It should be noted that the “anonymous” nature of this book now faces much
scrutiny, most often in the form of accusations of it being a clever marketing
gimmick. Within less than a week of the
book being sold to publishers, the 36-year old Australian writer, Nikki
Gemmell, was “outed” as being the author. To add to the hype, it was not long
before it was well known (and even “reluctantly” self-reported) that Gemmell
bore a striking resemblance to the main character making the text
quasi-autobiographical and all the more interesting to readers and reviewers
alike. Gemmell claims that she had fully
intended on putting her name on the novel but realized early on in the writing
process that she was censoring herself (2).
Gemmell says her goal was to “say all those thing we may think, but
never actually say–especially to our lovers” and that the anonymity allowed her
to do this (2). She suggests that
perhaps “complete sexual honesty (is) the last frontier that feminism has to
tackle” (Gemmell 2).
Unlike Chopin’s regional text, The Bride
Stripped Bare, in true neo-postmodern form, is an interesting hybrid of
experimental postmodern feminist literature and popular new age romance
novel. Following the postmodern practice
of bringing attention to the constructedness of literature, the instability of
textual boundaries, and the unreliability of authorship, this text is a story
within a story. The prologue is a letter
written, presumably by a fictional character, to a publishing house. The woman who pens this introductory letter
says she is the mother of the anonymous author, and that she found the
manuscript (which actual readers then go on to read) on her daughter’s laptop
after her mysterious disappearance (and assumed death). She felt that her daughter would have wanted
the piece published. This is where the
story begins.
Although the aesthetic of the piece differs
greatly from Chopin’s novella, the plot bears a remarkable likeness, except, as
one would expect of the age, for the fact that it is more sexually
explicit. The Bride Stripped Bare
begins its unique second person narration with the protagonist “secuming [sic]
to the sexual ritual” that is one’s honeymoon (4). The text first gives voice to sexuality as
she remembers her first sexual experience, and right away readers know that
this will be a book that does not shy away from frank discussion: “As for the first time you fucked, well, you
remember the sound, as his fingers readied you between your legs, not much
else. Not even a name now” (The Bride
5). The vignettes expose the marital
relationship as comfortable, happy, sexually active, but sexually unfulfilling
(although not at first realized as being such) for the wife. Some of this repressed sexuality starts to
seep into the journal-like text passages:
“just the sight of a man’s chest can make you wet. You’d never say an expression like that to
him, makes me wet” (The Bride 10). The sexual imbalance within the bedroom
enters into the journal writings as well:
“Your husband… must make love on his terms, which isn’t often. You usually make love in the mornings to take
advantage of his hardness upon waking.
Cole’s penis often doesn’t feel hard enough, as if it’s thinking of
something else,” “… he likes you vulnerable.
And to teach you, to introduce you to new things. You didn’t look closely at a penis until you
were married, didn’t know what a circumcised one looked like. You wonder, now, how you could’ve had the partners
you’ve had and never really looked” (The Bride 16-7, 24-5). This continues on even more directly in other
passages: “He’s never given you an
orgasm. He assumes he has. You’re a good actress–a lot of women are, you
suspect,” and “sometimes you wonder if your husband really likes women”
(The Bride 50, 57).
Some critics have
attacked the novel’s use of 2nd person, claiming it to be “didactic”
and/or “disturbing” as it “forces the reader to be part of the story.” Although many would not disagree with the
accusation that the text is didactic (most blatantly during the lessons), I
would suggest that part of what makes this novel’s narration enticing is this
use of 2nd person and the activity it requires of the reader in
transporting herself imaginatively into the plot.
Not far into the novel, the wife (unnamed
like the author) discovers that her husband, Cole, is having some sort of
affair (perhaps only emotional) with her best friend Theo, who ironically works
as a sex therapist. This discovery is
the catalyst that allows her to stumble into an affair, and hence a
Chopin-esque sexual awakening, of her own.
She meets Gabriel Bonilla, a forgotten actor and struggling writer. They strike up a flirtation and friendship
that, despite the attraction, does not develop into a sexual relationship at
first. Of this meeting, she writes: “you’ve walked back into the sun, it’s warm
on your back. You have a new friend in
your life, to play with, to be young again with, to wake you up” (The Bride 104). And when she momentarily thinks that she will
never see him again because she has misplaced his phone number, she feels quite
the opposite, as if she might die from that lack of feeling, of
possibility. But they do meet again and
yet still do not have sexual relations.
At this point in the story, the protagonist
begins receiving love letters and gifts in the mail sporadically. The first gift was a vibrator. Assuming the letter was from him (although it
was really from her estranged friend Theo who wanted to give her a sense of
wonder, excitement, and flattery) the wife propositions Gabriel only to
discover he has never been with a woman.
And here a whole different set of “lessons” begin:
Where to begin, you are the teacher and
before you is the blank slate: God the
responsibility of it. You gather your
thoughts, you mustn’t rush. You don’t
want him experiencing anything of the hurt or disappointment you’ve so often
felt. How many women get the chance to
do this, with a man, to break their virginity?
It must be utterly memorable for him, something to savor for the rest of
his life. (The Bride 194-5)
After that, weekly lesson begin; she even categorizes and numbers
them: “One, the removal of clothes,”
“Two, the touching, the licking,” “Three, the clandestine public kiss, fully
clothed,” “Four,” inanimate objects/props, “Five, the vibrator,” “Six, porn
magazines,” “Seven, wrists bound to the bed posts,” “Eight, the shower,” “Nine,
sleep,” “Ten, the fuck” (The Bride 201-3). The experience fulfils the main character and
her sexuality awakens as she trains him:
Gabriel’s not afraid of your sexuality. Your pleasure is giving him pleasure, it
arouses him and he asks nothing physically of you in return: no one has taught him to do that, to expect. He’s your first lover who’s utterly selfless,
there’s no request to go down on him, it’s purely unselfish, feminine sex. Your orgasms are becoming increasingly
intense… (The Bride 208).
This sexual awakening, however, is unable to be restricted to just her
novice lover. Her new bold desires carry
over back to the husband from whom she has been abstaining. When she has her first orgasm with her
husband and starts sexual experimentation within her marriage, her lover
becomes jealous, and increasingly does so until she decides she must stop the
lessons, but not the extramarital sex.
In fact, the relations she strikes up next completely lacks the intimacy
that she had with Gabriel; she embarks on meaningless sex with a group of cab
drivers. Her initial invitation
showcases this: “I want to have sex, do
you want to sleep with me, I need it, please…
Two of you would be good, you add” (The Bride 229-30). And the experience is what she expected: “They don’t respect you. You are nothing but a vessel, a series of
holes to be filled up” (The Bride 231).
As the sexual exchanges continue and vary
throughout the story, the novel draws attention to the narrator’s purposeful
rejection of the monogamous relationship structure traditionally mandated by
society. Catherine Lumby argues that
even though “70s feminism released women from the expectation of having only
one sexual partner, serial monogamy has remained the norm for most people” and
this book is exists as an “experimentation” in what exactly it would mean to
remove monogamy from a relationship. But
to be clear, even in teasing out the notion of what could exist in the absence
of monogamy, The Bride Stripped Bare still can only offer up the
alternatives of promiscuity and adultery.
In all actuality it is a
short-lived experiment since even the awakened main character abandons her
quest to envision relationship possibilities outside of monogamy. The story shifts in the last third when the
main character becomes pregnant. At
first she is content in this new role.
However, Gabriel is still in her mind.
At nine months pregnant, after her husband suspects that she has,
indeed, been unfaithful, she travels out of the country to have one last
encounter with her trained lover.
Following lesson 131, the wife has her baby, a son. Seven entries later the novel ends abruptly
after the wife, Cole, and baby have crossed paths on the busy city streets with
Gabriel: “you catch each other’s eyes,
you pass each other without a flicker of recognition, just as you’d promised
each other once. But you both turn back.
He smiles secrets at you, for a fleeting moment. The crowd closes over you, and he’s gone” (The
Bride 369). According to the
mother’s postscript, her daughter disappeared later that afternoon with the
infant. The cliffside abandonment of the
stroller suggests suicide or foul play, although the possibility remains that
she may have faked her own death and run away.
The Bride Stripped Bare, Unfaithful, and The Awakening
explore women’s sexuality and the ways it is stifled in traditional
heteronormative relationships. However,
despite their celebration of women’s sexuality, both novels close with the
deaths of the main character and the film with the substitute death of her
lover. They seem to carry the
warning: look wives at what will happen
if you do wander and embark on infidelity.
You will be punished, you will forfeit your life (or that of your love)
for your temporary love affair. In
a harsh, yet amusing, online review of The Bride Stripped Bare, one
critic also noted this underlying message against adultery. Parodying the text’s actual layout, the
reviewer writes: “Lesson 139. If you think about having an orgasm as a
woman, you will destroy your stable married life which can only be a woman’s
true calling, be abducted by aliens, and burn in a fiery pit of hell.”
The difference between the outcomes of the
print texts and the cinematic one is not great, but it is still worthy of
note. In his work on erotic thrillers,
David Andrews argues that the adultery storyline (or female “awakening” plot)
almost always “proves disastrous in the short term” but “usually effects a
positive” (albeit) “post-feminist resolution in the end.” The post-feminist attempted return to the
nuclear family order, as seen in Unfaithful, is indeed tragic but not in the same sense as the endings of The
Awakening and The Bride Stripped Bare where the main characters
really do (supposedly) meet their tragic downfall (i.e. death) due to
consequences prompted by their own actions.
These three different texts each develop the
recycled theme of the female sexual awakening.
What is interesting however, is not the fact that, despite their
different delivery formats or the time periods from which they derive, they
share this common feminist theme, but rather that these diverse texts are able
to develop this theme efficiently because of a shared textual
characteristic–their singularity or textual autonomy. Taking on the finished form of novel or film
these examples function as isolated texts.
Their narratives exists free-standing with no direct relation to other
dependent texts; they are consumed as isolated wholes with rather limited
exposure/duration time and, as a result, this makes them quite different from
sequential narratives like the series or serial with its interdependency,
habitual consumption, and extended exposure/duration time. After looking at this latter type of text
(programs from prime-time television and daytime drama) in the next section of
this essay, it will become obvious that the theme of the sexual awakening fits
the media logic of the isolated/singular text well but that the motif must be
modified in order to fit the media logic of the interdependent/habitual text.
The Sexual Awakening Theme on
TV (e.g. Sex in the City)
When studying the small
screen in regards to this common theme of sexual awakening, it is clear that
that the motif often shifts into sexual revitalization, sexual exploration, or
sexual amplification. In televisual
texts this motif is expressed through various types of relationships,
situations, and outcomes. For example,
unlike the tragic outcome of The Awakening, Unfaithful, and The
Bride Stripped Bare, this theme need not be developed solely through
showcasing extra-marital relations. Nor,
correspondingly, do these texts seem to require the didactic lesson against the
dangers of sexual satisfaction and the resulting end punishment if one acquires
it. Sex in the City, which
played a crucial role in cementing HBO’s cable dominance in the late 1990s, is
a clear example of television programming with an obvious focus on female
sexuality that escapes this practice common in the isolated texts. Although many television shows have played
up sexual encounters, none did so with such regularity (and with such a
gendered focus) in the primetime until the late postmodern period. Sex in
the City, although focused on more than just the titled act alone, fails to
offer an episode free of it in its six seasons on air. The show unapologetically shows its four main
characters in various relations monogamous and not, intimate and casual,
traditional and experimental, and so forth.
Secondly, no sexual trope is left unaired and the characters are rarely
punished as seen in the previous examples.
The four main characters often struggle with the inability to secure a
long-term mate (which may or may not be seen as a result of their sexual
activity) and Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall) has to fight off labels such as
slut and whore because of her open promiscuity.
The closest thing to a direct “punishment” that results from unleashed
sexuality is Aiden Shaw (John Corbett) leaving Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica
Parker) when she cheats on him with on-again-off-again lover Big (Chris
North).
This open treatment of
women and sexuality in primetime soaps (of which arguably a show such as Sex
in the City can be seen as a variation) can be attributed to its sister
daytime counterpart. Daytime soaps have
been showcasing the sexual awakenings of female characters with increased
regularity and explicitness for decades.
And, again, in this genre the punishment is lacking or minimal and
personalized. While soap divas do face
the consequences of adultery like the protagonists of The Awakening, The
Bride Stripped Bare, or Unfaithful, they are often minimal. A husband might leave, a friendship may end,
an illegitimate child will most likely be conceived (and the paternity will, of
course, be in question), but these personalized punishments are as short-lived
as the relationships that proceed and follow them. Without such a forgiving stance toward
infidelity, soap operas simply would not have a plot–monogamous, happy
marriages simply do not hold the viewers’ attention.
So,
if the examples from these two groups are looked at as falling on a thematic
continuum, one can see that the examples of romantic narratives pulled from the
isolated media range (works consumed in one segment, usually with little
frequency–a novel or film experienced once) are more drastic in their
punishments for women’s unrestricted sexuality.
The examples taken from the sequential media range (works consumed in
serial segments, usually with regular frequency–a primetime weekly soap or a
daily daytime drama) are less severe when judging women’s sexual choices. Although the free-standing texts are often
touted as being ideal feminist artifacts, they have less utility than their
sequential counterparts. The media logic
of the singular text provides the potential for a “great” narrative tale, a
catharsis even, but it is a short-lived, isolated experience that does little
to change the consumer in the long run.
While one can feel the thrill of bucking patriarchy by living
vicariously through Edna, Connie, or the adulterous bride, that thrill is
fleeting, as is the limited critique these texts offer up concerning the
dominant ideological system. What is
even worse is that these singular texts appear prone to escapist themes (and
experiences) that feminist scholars caution against. With the tragic suicide/death endings, the
three texts analyzed at the beginning of this essay provide tales of temporary
escape from heteronormative relationships and then they end (negatively
at that). Crucial to feminist work is
the notion of non-escape, of working within the patriarchal system to change
it. It is not a temporary task but a
non-ending endeavor that fits the thematic possibilities and structural logic
of sequential media.
If these examples are reliable examples of a
larger sample, then it might be safe to claim that the popular cultural
products consumed more regularly are offering up more possibilities for
exploring female sexuality. If this is
so, the utility of the serial, despite its lower cultural ranking, is
greater. Television shows may have the
potential to be powerful feminist tools to explore female sexuality.
