abject women

In Divorcing by Susan Taubes (1969), the protagonist Sophie is trying to get a divorce. She is an abject woman by all measures and the book was described in a contemporary New York Times review as suffering from “the with-it cat’s cradling of lady novelists.” Sophie doesn’t really know what she wants from life. She’s in Paris in the throes of an affair, trying to puzzle meaning out of her existence. Being married to a famous scholar (her husband Ezra) gives her some uneasy sense of identity and then becomes unbearable. Ezra talks too much, picks arguments, and then wears her down in slow and painful circles until she lets him win. Afterwards, he’s sated. We sense this is an erotic pleasure for him.

Divorcing is heavily entangled with Freudian psychoanalysis. Ezra’s desire towards Sophie is convoluted by his sadism. He wants her to be more abject, to beg him to fuck her or beat her, to delight in being reduced to nothing. Sophie understands the exercise intellectually but is incapable of doing it satisfactorily. The problem isn’t really physical. She doesn’t get jealous, isn’t possessive or irrational enough, essentially isn’t enough of a woman. Early on in the relationship, she proposes they live together without getting married or being tied down. Ezra insists on a traditional marriage but sees his desires as transgressing, converting the marriage into something more taboo. Sophie sees the situation for what it is: she is “trapped in a bourgeois marriage.” An Englishman in Ibiza tells her she just needs “money and a happy affair.” Ezra tells her to get an analyst. Neither solution can get her out of her life.

Traditional analysis famously doesn’t have much of an end point. It’s basically a narrative process, a form of meaning making, and the book mirrors that. Sophie is a Hungarian-Jewish refugee who fled the Nazis, like Taubes herself, and the book explores different narrative forms, including a rabbinical trial, wild dreamscapes, letters, filtered memories, converting the analytic process into something more creative. Sophie has lived a traumatic life but it’s not a trauma story. Rereading Divorcing, I wondered what kind of book it would be if it drew upon newer forms of therapy instead. A lot has been made of how personal essays mine trauma, how (mostly) women tend to frame their experiences in pseudo-therapeutic language of harm and victimhood, how widespread grievance politics are. I think that’s true to some extent and certainly exacerbated by the voyeuristic forms of autofiction and personal essay writing that are trendy right now. But a lot of the critiques of this kind of writing are also couched in pseudo-therapeutic language about “good boundaries” and “toxic relationships,” about non-monogamy as a form of “abolition,” about figuring out where to get your various needs met, as if shopping in a marketplace of fulfillment. These (mostly) women brag about achieving gender equality in their interpersonal relationships (whatever that means), about refusing passivity and not putting up with bad behavior of any kind. If you’re good to yourself, the idea seems to be, men will be good to you. If they’re not, break up.

There’s a creeping strain of entitlement to this idea, a suggestion that abuse happens to other people who haven’t learned how to escape the traps of patriarchy. But it’s also just weirdly chaste and moralistic. It frames love or desire as unhealthy and basically avoidable. Love isn’t rational after all and lovers are tyrants. Sustaining intimacy requires an ability to sublimate your ego to some extent and to flatten the boundaries between yourself and another person. There may be an ideal way to do this (although I don’t think it’s that formulaic) but desire is wonky and specific and sometimes cruel. Being an abject woman isn’t about just being down bad; it’s also more desperate, filthier, more transgressive, about blood and fluids and the potential to be filled up in all kinds of ways. Abjection comes from psychoanalytic theory as a concept and represents everything that has been cast out of the social order, or transformed from subject to object. Everyone fears and loathes abjection, that’s the whole point of it. The disaffected young women in heteropessimist relationships who people contemporary fiction and clickbait-y essays aren’t really abject, they’re just fulfilling some very obvious piece of a traditional gender role.

It’s partly this tension that Annie Ernaux explores in Passion Simple, her auto-fictional novel based on an affair she had in her 40s. She doesn’t really respect her lover on an intellectual level and they don’t spend all that much time talking. Her desire is almost purely physical and reduces her as such to a body, and to a body that she is constantly trying to sublimate into her lover’s body. Writing years later, she wonders without moral judgement how people can undergo such intense erotic desire and what kind of self you’re left with afterwards. Particularly as a woman and as a writer. The book is mostly about Ernaux waiting by the phone, waiting by the door, getting dressed, doing her hair, daydreaming. All the small rituals of being in love.

You could argue Ernaux is lacking in self-respect for her extreme obsession with this man who only talks about Stalin and vodka, who drives flashy cars, who has a wife at home, who is a chauvinist and an anti-semite. You could also argue that her detailed description of buying dresses and lingerie for him to see her in, of totally accommodating her schedule to his, of waiting sometimes for weeks or months at a time to hear from him (he always calls her and it is all on his terms) is unfeminist. But Ernaux is a writer and the book is about her, not about him, and all she wants to feel as much as she can feel during her time on this earth. The diary she kept at the time, published more recently, is pettier, more graphic, and slightly more involved with the man himself, but it’s still at its core her chronicle of waiting around to be fucked.

There’s a reason the protagonist of Divorcing goes to Paris to have her escapist love affair. The French seem to have a corner on this kind of pure exploration. In one of my favorite films when I was in college, Un Amour de Jeunesse directed by Mia Hansen-Løve, the 15 year old protagonist, Camille (Lola Creton), falls into a state of deep depression when her high school boyfriend, Sebastien, decides to go travel around South America with his friends and breaks up with her in the process. Camille and Sebastien are both very young and if he handles the situation poorly and immaturely, he doesn’t really do anything wrong or particularly surprising for that age. But this experience of being loved and left becomes the defining arc of Camille’s existence. When Sebastien reappears in her life years later, still indecisive, and still incapable of feeling as deeply as she does, or at least of expressing as much vulnerability, she crumbles again. None of her feelings have changed even though she has grown up. She tells him she has always loved him and he is spooked and wary.

When I first watched the movie at 18 or 19, in love, it felt like a story about the infinite depths of feeling. It’s surprising how much you can feel. Now, when I watch it, it feels more like a story about waiting. Sebastien isn’t a bad or abusive boy, but in an alternate version of the story that Hansen-Løve doesn’t tell, he’s on his hero’s journey of self-exploration while Camille waits for him at home. He wants the depths of her feelings because it helps him work out his own confused feelings, it’s like a safe landing for intimacy, but he also wants to come in and out of her life at will. He’s young and careless but his behavior forces her into a passive role, endlessly feeling, endlessly forgiving. A trope if there ever was one.

By the end of the film, Camille, like Annie Ernaux, has moved on. She has fallen in love with someone else, a more mature and different kind of love that, it is implied, will not burn her up. She’s not a victim of Sebastien but she is a victim of a particular kind of feeling and a particular kind of dynamic to which she falls prey and which drastically alters a decade of her life. Would enough CBT have broken the pattern for her and helped her get free of her first love? Maybe, but then what would anyone ever tell stories about?