Flaubert does this too in his exquisite concentration on clothes — sneering at the bourgeois and their wedding clothes, Emma’s gown trailing in the dirt. He makes fun of Emma’s desire for finger bowls, reducing Emma to her frivolities. And yet, she was a stylish woman stuck in the boring country. I feel a tremendous empathy for her.
Fitzgerald’s writing of the flapper-character (who is always a character) is also mostly surface, style. Nicole Diver in Tender is as excessive and frenetic a shopper as Emma (and this is given as some sign of instability). Her shopping is as inventive and associative as her speech. One (incomplete) list: “She bought colored beads, folding beach cushions, artificial flowers, honey, a guest bed, bags, scarfs, love birds, miniatures for a doll’s house and three yards of some new cloth the color of prawns.”
Fitzgerald’s heroines are defined by their enigmatic character. The riddle of the Sphinx-like woman. In his novels I crave a more dimensional character who doesn’t exist only through the male narrator’s gaze. The truth is that Fitzgerald never wrote complex female characters — they lacked interiority. (Although Nicole, with the interior monologues she’s granted at the end, is probably his most fleshed-out female character, but most of the time she’s given associative sense-impressions but not any real consciousness.) Even though the flapper, by her essence, is enigmatic, there is not much attempt to really get at the truth of a complex and contradictory self hidden somewhere underneath.
I love that Kate Moss has her engagement ring modeled on Zelda’s — it’s too perfect — the archetypal cipher of our time echoing and fetishizing the ideal cipher of the modern era.
Gloria in The Beautiful and Damned, especially, is written without reflection or empathy. It’s like Fitzgerald wrote his wife and took out all of her charm and brilliance. Except for the very tangential mental patient who is a painter in Tender, none of his female characters are artists (by contrast, Lawrence does make the character based on Katherine Mansfield an artist in Women in Love, unlike Flaubert with Bovary, or Djuna Barnes with Robin Vote, a character that is a composite of two women who were artists, the Baroness and Thelma Wood).
They depict her like Jinny in The Waves—the socialite all body and babble, not Rhoda, alienated wannabe writer, when maybe she is BOTH.
And yet D.H. Lawrence was rapturously read by so many female writers of the modernist period — Anaïs Nin wrote a study on him, praising him for his androgyny. I wonder if this is because they weren’t aware of or were dismissive of other women-penned precursors or peers. Virginia Woolf doesn’t even bring in contemporaries when crafting a female literary tradition in Room. It’s remarkable how some women writers go out of their way to prevent comparison. Probably the most generous writer of this period towards other women writers was Nin, who was snubbed in her attempts to connect with both Djuna Barnes and Anna Kavan, about whom she wrote rapturously in her text The Novel of the Future. But did these women really feel Lawrence wrote the closest mirror of who they were, in all their intricacies, beaming back at them?
He writes a book in an attempt to understand her (but really, this is an attempt to unravel himself, she is merely the shadow who haunts). He wants to crack into her interiority, her impenetrability.
(It is never really about her, these tales of courtly love.)
In The Ravishing of Lol Stein Marguerite Duras is critiquing, I think, these modern novels starring the alluring cipher — her fuguer Lol Stein is watched over obsessively by the narrator, Jacques Hold. Yet she is also voyeur, lying deliriously in the field of rye, watching Jacques get it on with her former best friend, Tatiana. She wants to escape this oppression of being the one watched, made into an object of curiosity. I love that anecdote about Lacan telling Duras in a basement bar that Lol V. Stein is a “clinically perfect delirium” and Duras dismissing this later, in an interview: “When Lacan says, ‘She knows, the woman knows…’ Those are a man’s words, a master’s words… The reference is himself…”
The symbol for the Acéphale society — Off with her head! This is the defining cry of these “major” modernist texts. Off with her head! The king dictates to his Alices. Her interiority taken off (from Henry James’s Daisy Miller to Fitzgerald’s Daisy).
As much as I love his Berlin Stories, Christopher Isherwood’s portrait of Sally Bowles is kind of a drag: she is a stylized vamp, with her painted green fingernails, her stained fingers, her powdered white face, her cherry lips. That darling costume, the black silk cape and little jaunty cap. Of course this is how this girl-as-character acted in real life, all flapperish, femme-fatale-fuck-me, a “character,” a “personality.” But Isherwood paints her too cruelly, a gold-digging grotesque whose mask is pulled away only temporarily when she has to have an abortion. “It seems to me that Sally, without the abortion sequence, would just be a silly little capricious bitch,” he commented, later. Yet what a cliché to have a female character show depth because of some forgotten maternal instinct, some convenient sentimentality — the Sally Bowles I have known, the cool art school girls, are not so simply read.
In The Berlin Stories, Sally Bowles asks the narrator, also called Christopher Isherwood, to ghostwrite an article about the English Girl for her. Tellingly, he doesn’t capture her. “‘It’s not snappy enough,’ she says.”
Sally Bowles was actually based on Isherwood’s Berlin friend Jean Ross, a newspaper correspondent who covered the Spanish Civil War, whose similarity to Sally is mostly surface: the saucy attitude, the sexual conquests. (The last name is apparently taken from his other friend Paul Bowles, although I like to think it’s from Jane, whose persona was all theatrical insouciance and refreshing eccentricity.) This isn’t the only case of a female character’s politics being stripped away in modernist texts. In Blue of Noon, Dirty is depicted as an apolitical libertine, even though Colette Peignot was, like Jean Ross, and like her friend Simone Weil, politically active in the fight against fascism. (Colette is fragmented into two characters, she is also the lovetorn Xenie, who is an activist, albeit a weak-stomached one.) And in their mythologizing of her Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille tend to downplay Colette Peignot’s politics, in favor of her performance of the self.
On the Internet (home of illuminating biographical fallacies), I read several times that Sally Bowles is based not on Jean Ross, but on Jean Rhys. Hard to see the Edwardian fragile girl being Sally Bowles (the mistake is perhaps the result of both the author and Isherwood’s character once having been English chorus girls). Sally Bowles is really like one of Jean Rhys’ saucy friends with bobbed hair with her in the chorus that she writes to in Voyage in the Dark. Like Maudie, the older, brazen friend. Maudie who asks at the beginning about the “dirty book” the 18-year-old heroine Anna is reading. Maudie says, adroitly to her: “I bet you a man writing a book about a tart tells a lot of lies one way or another.”
In Rhys’s novels, we get the interiority of the chorus girl. She writes the books about tarts that do not lie, giving voice to the girl who is always a character in a novel. Her between-the-war novels detail a feminine economy of the city streets, where women use and are used, where the sugardaddy is necessary for survival. They who are both preyed and prayed upon. These street muses are often seen as a sort of prostitute to the male narrator, and sometimes they worked as prostitutes. Or how they lived, how they got by, seen as a sort of prostitution. Holly Golightly hooked, too, yes she did. Their bodies could be rented. June Mansfield who worked as a taxi dancer in Times Square, rented out by the dance like a cab. (Henry Miller heard her discuss Strindberg, he bought a stream of tickets.) Wikipedia tells me that the Baroness “practiced prostitution”—although the reality was more complex: Elsa ran away from her middle-class family at 18, from her abusive father, looking for a lover, like Sally Bowles, to keep her “instyle,” Maudie encouraging Anna with her new male protector to get a nice flat and a fur coat, Elsa like Jean Rhys worked as an actress, chorus girl and artist’s model in Berlin and Munich. In a demimonde of the girl that Jean Rhys writes so well, these muses of modernism were conscious of their role in the exchange, conscious that they had to perform in order to be protected. Vagabonds and demimondes. They could be read as either con artists, or survivalists. A form of prostitution — sure, yes. That’s what Henry Miller means when he calls her WHORE (yet Henry Miller is no less of a whore as he documents himself in Tropic of Cancer, always begging and borrowing to get by, posing for erotic photos, considering a rich woman as protector, the difference again, who gets to name).