Beautiful Women, Desperately Wanting
Greta Garbo as Anna Karenina (1935)
Whatever happened to those stories of bored, beautiful women who threw themselves under trains or into the river, took arsenic or simply expired from the weight of sin? Strangled by frustrated ambition, they were, and raw emotion that couldn’t be hammered into the fine tracery of polite talk.
They were so common once. You couldn’t open a novel without meeting a Karenina, Bovary, or Vye. The House of Mirth: sleeping pills. Miss Julie: a razor. Hedda Gabler: a gun. Sexual conflict, or the rumor of it, spelled disaster.
It still astonishes me, the ferocity of their will to make men the clay of their ambitions. Hardy’s Eustacia Vye, desperate to leave her village, clings to a man who returned from Paris, only to find he doesn’t care to take her there. Emma Bovary, admittedly bourgeois and not terribly bright, can’t square her fantasies with her provincial life.
Depending on another person for psychological or economic fulfillment is a doomed project, if only because men are individuals with goals of their own. But beyond the home, the only playing field these women had was the heart.
The prospects for poorer women weren’t much better. This is why I find the popularity of British costume dramas a little troubling. Their sweeping landscapes and brocaded dresses disguise a basic fact that the better novelists knew well. More than gossip and society balls, courtship was a high-stakes game. Most women had to marry — and marry well — or else face hunger, illness, and hard labor. Austen never forgot this, and newer costume dramas are doing a better job of showing the darker side of the corseted world. The 1999 film of Mansfield Park takes us to the squalid, overcrowded shanties on the Portsmouth docks where our heroine would live, were it not for her rich relations. The BBC versions of The Forsyte Saga and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall don’t shy from domestic abuse and alcoholism in wrong, but nearly inescapable marriages.
You might say a suicidal heroine is better off because she chooses her own end, rather than having it forced upon her.
Millais' Ophelia (1852)
It’s a sign of the frustrated will to act. The only choice she’s given is whether to live or die. And die she does, most famously in opera and ballet (La Traviata, Giselle, Madama Butterfly, Manon Lescaut — ad infinitum.)
And then the century turned. Let’s start at 1900, with Dreiser: The ambitious Carrie plays mistress to powerful men on her way to becoming an actress in her own right. It’s her lover, this time, who commits suicide. 1928: Lady Chatterley, wife of a paralyzed lord, forms a primal connection with the gameskeeper and — lo and behold! — doesn’t get killed off for it. Lawrence, bless his heart, didn’t feel the need to “punish” his heroine after allowing her to explore such possibilities. 1920: Colette’s Léa teaches the young Chéri the ways of love and parts from him with a fond nostalgia. (I could cite any of Colette’s women, really.) The playing field was the same, but female characters were allowed to make rational choices about their own futures.
Today you’ve got bestsellers about career women striking out on their own in foreign countries to find themselves, whether Eat, Pray, Love or Under the Tuscan Sun. And plenty of fiction talks about warm-and-fuzzy women’s circles, like The Secret Lives of Bees or Toni Morrison’s Paradise. Or heck, the Jane Austen Book Club.
I’m being lazy, of course. There was no dramatic change in 1900. Ibsen’s Nora had left her dollhouse and her patronizing husband some twenty years earlier. Last week, a critic wrote in a review of “Julie and Julia”: “Most strikingly, this is a Hollywood movie about women that is not about the desperate pursuit of men.” We’re still making, and watching, “Desperate Housewives.”
If anything has changed, I suppose it’s the meaning of “desperate.” On the other side of desperation lies, not the poorhouse, not social ostracism or suicide, but the quest for self-actualization, of which love is a part. A quest that’s not particularly female or male, but human.
