The Bitch Is Back Wicked Women in Literature

BITCH
Is Back Wicked Women in Literature
The
Sarah Appleton Aguiar
The Bitch Is Back
The Bitch Is Back

Wicked Women in Literature
Sarah Appleton Aguiar
Southern Illinois University Press Carbondale and Edwardsville
Copyright 2001 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 04 03 02 01 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aguiar, Sarah Appleton, 1957 The bitch is back : wicked women in literature / Sarah Appleton Aguiar. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. 1. American fictionHistory and criticism. 2. Women in literature. 3. English literatureHistory and criticism. 4. Women and literatureUnited States. 5. Women and literatureGreat Britain. 6. Feminism and literature. 7. Villains in literature. 8. Evil in literature. I. Title. PS374.W6 A36 2001 813'.5409352dc21 ISBN 0-8093-2361-3 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-8093-2362-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
00-039506
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: The Season of the Bitch 1 1. To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type 13 2. The Male Perspective 34 3. Women Reading and Women Writing the Bitch 57 4. Revising Literary History 80 5. The Art of Becoming a Bitch 98 6. Syzygy 114 Coda: The Bitch Code 134 Notes 139 Works Cited 155 Index 167
Acknowledgments
his book is the product of several years of my questioning the depictions of women and their roles in literature, especially those female characters who have been recognized as unquestionably villainous. And the results of my inquiry, while surfacing in conference papers and class discussions and culminating in this volume, are only the beginnings of the answers. My experience is by no means unique; to the range of remarkable feminist critics whose groundbreaking and socially crucial work precedes mine, I add my voice. First I would like to thank my editor Karl Kageff, who encouraged this project and offered guidance, and I am also grateful for the expert assistance of copy editor Shana Harrington. I would also like to thank editors John Gehner and John K. Wilson. Many colleagues, friends, and family have also offered invaluable contributions. I would especially like to thank Carol Osborne, Mica Howe, and Laura Liljequist for reading portions of the manuscript and offering much crucial insight. I am most appreciative of support from my Murray State University colleagues, especially Ann Neelon, Squire Babcock, Thayle Anderson, Roy Helton, and Kevin Binfield, and also for the vitality of my students, especially Leslie Rowland, Allyson McNutt, Bryan Peters, Susan Hancock, Charlotte Farmer, and Kim OMalley, who participated in classes while this book was being written. I am particularly grateful to Peter Murphy, my department chairperson, and Kenneth Wolf, dean of humanistic studies, for granting me release time to work on this project. Elise Leatherwoods research assistance has been a dependable godsend. Jacqueline Normand, Michael Menard, Suki Bisbing, Kathleen Berry Guglielmi, Susan Fisher Henthorne, and Richard and Janice Normand deserve credit for the bountiful gifts they have bestowed. My family holds my most profound love and gratitude, and to my husband, Jesse, and to my children, Sam and Jill, I can only offer this work as a tribute to their enduring faith in me and for their sacrifices made. And finally, as always, my deepest dedication and appreciation goes to Lynn Z. Bloom, mentor and friend, for her tireless encouragement and for granting me the inspiration that has come from working for and studying with this remarkable woman.
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Acknowledgments
Murray State University provided me with a generous grant to complete this project. I would like to thank the Twentieth-Century Literature Conference for providing me with the opportunity to present the original version of what would become this book and for a later presentation of portions of chapter 5. I also appreciate having the opportunity to present critical ideas at Middle Tennessee State Universitys Women and Power Conference and the Perspectives on Human Evil Conference at Oxford University in England.
The Bitch Is Back
The Season of the Bitch
Introduction The Season of the Bitch

Theres a name for you ladies, but it isnt used in high society outside of a kennel. Joan Crawford in The Women (1939)
mportant tasks facing early second-wave feminist authors were to refute literary misrepresentations of females as dimensionless, to subvert preconceptions of objectified characters, and, of predominant importance, to create memorable women full of complexity and character.1 These feminist authors strove to render their protagonists and supporting female casts with complete, full strokes; to grant them not just existence but subjectivity as well. And they succeeded. But somehow, somewhere along that road to subjectivity, mixed with the refuse discarded at the curb, something had been lost. That vital woman, empowered with anger, wit, ruthless survival instinctsthe bitchhad been banished from the pages of feminist fiction. In a 1994 lecture, Margaret Atwood pointedly asked: But is it not, today well, somehow unfeministto depict a woman behaving badly? . . . When bad women get into literature, what are they doing there, and are they permissible, and what, if anything, do we need them for? Atwood laments the absence of evil women in women-authored literaturethe Lady MacBeths, Medeas, and Jezebelsreplete with the scurvy behavior often practiced by women against each other and the Seven deadly Sins in their female versions (Spotty Handed). Indeed, reading late-twentieth-century fiction by women, readers such as myself have been hard-pressed to find even a hint of feminine wickedness among the scores of virtuous victims of oppression,2 the searchers for identity and self, the liberated, illuminated, empowered, and subjectified heroines. Alas, what happened to the village gossips, calculating gold diggers, merciless backstabbers, sinful sirens, evil stepmothers, deadly daughters, twisted sisters, hags, bags, and crones? Where, oh, where had Scarlet OHara been hiding?
Introduction
Indeed, where were they all hiding? These womenthe dark destroyers, the femme fatales, the overt bitchesare, of course, still part of the cultural fabric. They are the villainesses populating daytime dramas and bodice-ripper novels. They are the seducing and castrating Delilahs of popular film, such as Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. They are the raging, aging harpies who are often comically depicted on television, such as Roseanne and Bea Arthur. They are the subjects of dozens of mournful tunes lamenting an eternal profusion of faithless women, and they find their way onto the lurid canvas of many an artist. Yet for all of her ubiquitous presence in every other form of media, the bitch had been noticeably absent from the feminist literary canon. Until recently. Certainly, it is no wonder that the bitch was ostracized from the pages of the fledgling feminist fiction of the early years of second-wave feminism. Careful to avoid detrimental portraits of their female characters, feminist writers concentrated on presenting positive images. Faced with the challenge of creating role models for women, as well as dispelling false stereotypes, authors wrote feminine versions of quest narrativesthe female bildungsroman3rendering characters who were intent upon discovering their true identities distinct from patriarchal and mythical constructions of women. These characters led a ringing charge against the evil patriarchy, urging and provoking their readers to join the crusade: Subjectify thyself! For example, Mary Gordons Final Payments, a late 1970s female bildungsroman, narrates the story of Isabel, a woman who has sacrificed the years of her young adulthood to care for her stroke-incapacitated father. When her father dies, Isabel is ill prepared at age thirty to join the world. As narrator she remarks, Do not think that because I did not weep, because I am capable of ironic statements about his behavior, I attach to my fathers existence less than a murderous importance (9). She must find out who she is, stating that after they lowered his body, I would have to invent an existence for myself (10). Aided in her quest by her two childhood friendsclearheaded, logical Liz and gentle, artistic EleanorIsabel moves from her fathers house, locates an apartment, joins the workforce, and gains a lover. Yet the strain of her new existence proves to be too much, and Isabel gives up, replicating her previous way of life by moving in with her fathers former housekeeper, a disagreeable and demanding elderly woman. Isabel, admitting to missing the self-sanctifying martyrdom she had enjoyed as her fathers nurse, recognizes, I had wanted to give up all I loved so that I would never lose it. I had tried to kill all that had brought me pleasure so that I would not be susceptible (244).
Isabel finally reaches out, and in her spiritual rebirth into a new existence, she acknowledges, It came to me that life was monstrous: what you loved you were always in danger of losing. The greatest love meant only, finally, the greatest danger. That was life; life was monstrous (248). The concluding portrait of Isabel is one of her beginning, finally, a journey toward her own identity, firmly flanked on either side by Liz and Eleanor. In her quest for selfhood, Isabel will now begin to develop her consciousness by integrating her different selves, represented by both Liz and Eleanor. She will, the reader may infer, begin by eradicating the empty selflessness she embraced while caring for her father. Alice Walkers 1982 Pulitzer Prizewinning novel, The Color Purple, another prominent example, features female protagonist Celie, who also travels the long and difficult road of self-discovery. Her successful quest depends upon her growing ability to overthrow the constraints of an overtly male-dominated society, a process that is facilitated by bonding with her equally oppressed sisters. She begins her story in secret letters to God as a means of validating her own being. Celie has been given in marriage to a man who denies her existence except as a convenience to keep his house, raise his children, and be the receptacle of his sexual needs, and her only positive connection, her sister Nettie, has been sent from Misters house when she refuses his sexual advances, leaving Celie bereft of any means of positive communication. The tenor of the story changes with the arrival of Misters mistress, Shug Avery. Under the tutelage and love of Shug, Celie begins to gain a sense of selfhood one that grows as the story unfolds. Ultimately, Celie becomes empowered, and her travailslike the travails of Jobcease; she is richly rewarded by her blossoming sense of self-worth.4 These heroines and the many others like them in such novels as Erica Jongs Fear of Flying, Maxine Hong Kingstons The Woman Warrior, Margaret Drabbles The Radiant Way, Fannie Flaggs Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Paule Marshalls Praisesong for the Widow, and Anne Tylers Breathing Lessons are by no means lacking in merit nor should the fictions be censured for failure or artifice. However, taken as a whole, the body of literature has demonstrated a conspicuous void. The major female characters in the works could be classified as nearly wholly virtuous, although reality more than suggests that female is not, nor should be, classified as synonymous with virtue. 5 Ironically, in feminisms goal to eradicate the traditional stereotyping of female characters particularly the demons and fiends that have proliferated throughout literary historythe resulting literature may seem equally as biased in its promotion of female nobility.
Introduction
The Bitch
A long-established premise in feminist literary criticism contends that traditional representations of women in male-authored, and often in female-authored fiction that has been influenced by the masculine tradition, have been, at best, static, mythic, lacking in substance, depth, and complexity.6 Elaine Showalter writes in her introduction to The New Feminist Criticism: In its earliest years, feminist criticism concentrated on exposing the misogyny of literary practice: the stereotyped images of women in literature as angels or monsters, the literary abuse or textual harassment of women in classic and popular male literature, and the exclusion of women from literary history. (5) As part of this project, for example, Joanna Russ identified the ubiquitous portrayals of women most prevalent in fiction in her 1972 essay What Can a Heroine Do? Or, Why Women Cant Write: You will not find women [in the literature] but images of women: modest maidens, wicked temptresses, pretty school-marms, beautiful bitches, faithful wives, and so on. They exist only in relation to the protagonist (who is male). Moreover, look at them carefully and you will see that they dont really exist at allat their best they are depictions of the social roles women are supposed to play and often do play, but they are public roles and not the private woman; at their worst they are gorgeous Cloudcuckooland fantasies about what men want, hate, or fear. (3, my emphasis) It is not surprising to note that many of the more vehement feminist attacks against the prevailing representations of women in the literary canon as well as popular fiction, film, and other media have been aimed toward the endless and pervasive portrayals of woman as the bitch. Russ describes this impossible woman as beautiful, irresistible, ruthless but fascinating, fascinating because she is somehow cheap or contemptible, who (in her more passive form) destroys men by her indifference and who (when the male author is afraid of her) destroys men actively (34). In countless representations and variations, this character is deemed irredeemable, ultimately condemned to a life(less) sentence. The word bitch, derived from the Old English bicce, is defined as the female of the dog, fox, or wolf. The slang version, meaning bad, lewd, or ill-tempered woman, seems to have developed during the Renaissance when such authors as Shakespeare and Thomas Hobbes adapted the word to connote evil and unfaithful women (Kelly 2). The metaphor was used to describe a woman who acted like a
female dog in heat, demonstrating licentious behavior, or a woman who called unsuitable attention to herself.7 The words meaning has evolved very little in the ensuing centuries; its potent associations are as strong as ever. In this analysis, I intend to refer to the more contemporary connotations surrounding the meaning of bitch; my definitions, as will be articulated in more depth in later chapters, are derived from examining, primarily, the negative female archetypes most fully developed in the psychological analyses of Carl Gustav Jung, although my particular focus will follow the evolution of these archetypes as rendered in the works of several feminist archetypal theorists. The bitch has been present in literature for centuries; she is recognizable as the monstrous presence in Greek tragedy, and she appears in numerous biblical incarnations as well as classical and cultural mythologies. The bitch, by her very definition, is the embodiment of female evil: the foil for literatures icons of morality and the scourge of the male hero. The bitch and her dark, soulless existence act as a potent warning for her female readers: There, but for (patriarchal) grace and (feminine) good manners, go I. In American fiction, for example, as Leslie Fiedler notes in Love and Death in the American Novel, female characters were traditionally bifurcated into Fair Virgin and Dark Lady, the glorious phantom at the mouth of the cave and the hideous Moor who lurks within (296). Likewise, Richard Chase, in The American Novel and Its Tradition, recognizes that women in [James Fenimore] Coopers novels tend, as they do in so many of the works of his great descendants, to be seen obliquely and with a rather covert displeasure, or unhappy fascination, or secret vindictiveness (64). Both Fiedler and Chase mark the conspicuous lack of redemptive females in American fictions; while good women do exist, they are almost always relegated to the background. Or, if they manage to play a significant role in the literature, their deaths may be virtually assured by the last page. All through the history of our novel, Fiedler continues, there had appeared side by side with the Fair Maiden, the Dark Lady (296). American literature is full of Dark Ladiesthe shrewish Dame Van Winkle; the beautiful and debased Zenobia in Hawthornes The Blithedale Romance; the conniving Kate Croy in Henry Jamess The Wings of The Dove; Fitzgeralds amoral Daisy Faye Buchanan; Tennessee Williamss caustic Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Faulkners carnal child-bitch Judith Sutpen in Absalom! Absalom! This is only the smallest of samplings. European literature similarly contains a myriad of versions of the bitch figureAlison in Chaucers The Wife of Baths Tale, Shakespeares Lady MacBeth, and Flauberts Emma Bovary, to name just a few. Shared qualities among these female characters include an appropriation of the male sphere, a seemingly in-congruent knowledge of evil, and, of course, a lack of moral and sexual virtue.
Introduction
Many delight in symbolically castrating the males in their stories; others stridently refuse to accede to the roles the patriarchy demands of them. Beverly Gross contends that the bitch means to men whatever they find particularly threatening in a woman and it means to a woman whatever they particularly dislike about themselves. In either case the word functions as a misogynist club (148). Yet, as evidenced in the works of several late-twentieth-century feminist authors who dared to portray wicked women, the bitch character has long been misrendered. Possessing power and intellect, the bitch is not necessarily as malevolent a figure as she has been commonly portrayed (although she is most definitely a threat to the established order). Splintered away from her ancient role as part of the triple goddessmaiden, mother, croneher powers have been portrayed separately from the redemptive, nurturing, and spiritually guiding influences of her positive incarnations. In fact, what becomes clear in certain feminist fiction that celebrates the reclamation of the bitch is that the female protagonist finds that the bitch is, in reality, a necessary part of herself. Denying this crucial piece of her being in an attempt to conform to traditional standards of femininity directly results in her inability to maintain a meaningful existence. Feminist writers have long cautioned women against subscribing to the patriarchal ideals of womanhood, and in this regard, a woman who does not acknowledge her own inclinations toward evil, unsavory behavior, flaws, failings, and downright nastiness may find herself as objectified as any other silenced heroine. Indeed, morality itself may reside in the heart and mind of the bitch.
The Archetypal Bitch

The psychoanalytic theories of Carl Gustav Jung have given rise to a form of literary criticismarchetypal criticismthat posits fundamental standards of male and female characters pervasive throughout fiction, a criticism, like many others, that has undergone scrutiny and revision by feminist theorists. Jungian archetypal criticism, as Bettina Knapp defines it, takes the literary work out of its individual and conventional context and relates it to humankind in general. . . . This unique approach lifts readers out of their specific and perhaps isolated worlds, and allows them to expand their vision, and thus to relate more easily to issues that may confront them and to understand their reality as part of an ongoing and cyclical reality (x). Archetypal literary critics who work in the Jungian tradition examine symbols and characters in literature to find recurring, or archetypal, patterns.8 Archetypes, Jung tells us, are primordial types . . . with universal images that have existed since the remotest times (Archetypes 5), and these patterns find their genesis in what Jung labeled the collective unconscious, a universal and un-
ceasing stream or ocean of images and figures which drift into consciousness with contents and modes of behavior which are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals (Collected Works 9, 642). According to archetypal literary critics, then, the reader is aided in her understanding of literature by her innate knowledge of these omnipresent and basic types and by her ability to apply this knowledge to her reading. The archetypes perform specific functions in the individuals psyche. As integral components of the unconscious, archetypes manifest themselves as projections, influencing the individuals reactions toward others. Jung posited that the psyche is governed by polarities; Ann Bedford Ulanov explains: Jung understands the psyche to be a self-regulating system structured in polarities, such as consciousness-unconsciousness, reason-instinct, love-hate, etc. The polar tension between the opposites is the source of the psyches energy as well as the matrix for its functioning and its growth into wholeness. (27) One polarity in the psyche is constituted in the dynamic forces of both male and female elements in the unconscious. In essence, each individual harbors contrasexual aspects in the psyche: either the masculine (animus) if she is a female or the feminine (anima) if he is a male. A psychologically healthy individual maintains a balance of these elements; an abnormal individual may be found either to lack one element or to possess too much anima or animus, depending on the persons gender. According to Jungian archetypal criticism, then, the bitch is the female who is dominated by animus. As Ibry Theriot recognizes: The result is a woman who cannot be secure in her role as a woman, primarily because she is controlled by forces which are basically alien to that role. And this woman is the bitch archetype. Usually, she is first characterized in literature by an insatiable thirst for material security. In order to achieve this material security, she represses her role as a woman and becomes aggressive in a masculine manner. Consequently, she is often portrayed in literature as the manipulating, domineering, scheming woman who will try anything in order to get what she thinks she needs to be secure. (121) Inherent in the above definition is the assumption that the malevolent female is one who usurps her role from the masculine domain. And, ironically, the bitch is then condemned for acting like a man, for displaying the very same traits a male hero might be lauded for possessing: assertiveness, command and leadership, an
Introduction
acquisitive nature, intellect, persistence, ambition, and self-preservation instincts. This woman, in order to regain psychological health, must integrate her animus in her psyche and thus cure herself of these unfeminine attributes. However, as Roberta K. Rigsby points out, Jungs psychology is a psychology of men . . . and his discussions of womens experiences are marred by his poorly developed idea of the animus. She contends that the conventional Jungian model simply agrees with the stereotypes of masculine and feminine, benefiting men at the expense of women (180). The Jungian model is, therefore, suspect (although not completely invalid).9 Stereotypical portrayals of characters, of course, regardless of whether they are male or female, preclude the possibilities of subjectivity; the result is a caricature rather than a fully functional and individualized persona. Feminist revisions of archetypal literary criticism reject the inherent male/female binary oppositions found in Jungian archetypes and contend that we should not confuse the word archetype, in the literary sense of a recurrent image, symbol, or narrative pattern, with Jungs definition of an acultural, wordless, and transcendent essence (Pratt et al. 100). Feminist archetypal criticism, as will be discussed in chapter 1, recognizes fluid types while resisting stasis in characterization. The result of integrating the feminist articulation of archetypes with Jungs perceptions is the development of more fully individuated feminine types, types that need not sacrifice powerful instincts formerly associated with masculinity.
The Millennium Bitch

Recent years have seen a number of popular culture references to the bitch. She is gaining trendy, positive recognition in music (Meredith Brookss Bitch), the bestseller list (Elizabeth Wurtzels Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women), comics (Listening to Your Inner Bitch), web sites (The Bitch Page), and, of course, T-shirts (Zero to Bitch in .5 Seconds!). Yet, as Gross notes, the label bitch still contains rhetorical connotations that remain unequaled by any other label: The metamorphosis of bitch from the context of sexuality (a carnal woman, a promiscuous woman) to temperament (an angry woman, a malicious woman) to power (a domineering woman, a competitive woman) is a touchstone to the changing position of women through this century. As women have become more liberated, individually and collectively, the word has taken on connotations of aggressive, hostile, selfish. . . . Judging by the contemporary colorations of the word bitch, what men primarily fear and despise in women is power. (151) The label bitch, as Gross notes, is a potent indictment against women, a pejorative
pronouncement that most women seek to avoid. Laden with implications of heartlessness, carnality, self-absorption, avarice, maliciousness, and deception, the bitch is a lonely figure, shunned and denounced by all. The rhetorical power of the word suggests a woman who is incapable of the desirous traits of true womanhood, especially love, loyalty, altruism, and self-sacrifice. There are, however, indications in contemporary culture that the season of the bitch is fast approaching. Certainly, the traditional stereotype of this figure maintains its tenacious hold upon the imagination; yet substantial reevaluations are taking place. Indeed, even the essential idea of what an archetype truly constitutes has undergone dramatic transformation by contemporary, particularly feminist, theoretical criticism. Prominent questioning of such standardized ideas as Jungs version of the anima and the animus and what a realistic feminine process of individuation would entail has given rise to a reassessment of Jungian archetypal criticism and the subsequent development of a feminist archetypal criticism. Chapter 1 discusses the potential values of this criticism in conjunction with feminist revisions of the conventional female archetypes. Using a traditional Jungian archetypal reading of Nurse Ratched in Ken Keseys One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, the strengths and limitations of Jungian archetypal criticism are demonstrated; this analysis is then supplemented by a rereading of the character with feminist implications. The different approaches to Jungian archetypal criticism, particularly with the possibilities of feminist interpretations, suggest enhanced dialogue between the female literary character and her reader. In conjunction with the theories of Ann Bedford Ulanov, Emma Jung, Annis Pratt, and others, an understanding of the bitch archetype becomes critical in the reevaluation of literatures traditional tendency to stereotype malevolence in women. Yet, rather than rejecting the theories of archetypal criticism, feminist revisionists examine Jungs ideas of individuation that subscribe to wholeness and integration. A valuable tendency toward acceptance of the negative side of archetypal images is advocated. Chapters 2 and 3 recount various historical renditions of the bitch. From her ascent in antiquity through her near demise in feminist literature, the bitch has barely evolved. Failing to ascribe motives or, for the most part, any forms of origination for her behavior, the male-authored literature has tended to wholeheartedly censure the character without benefit of careful consideration. She is charged guilty without standing trial. Certain authors imply that she is born evil, an autonomous malignant entity whose self-serving and malicious nature is inherent in her character. And therefore, by implication, any female may be susceptible to this flaw because it is self-bestowing and requires no causal motivation. In chapters 2 and 3, I examine a range of characters drawn from
10
Introduction
traditional literature and popular fiction in order to compare the similarities of the textual bitch. That her character shows very little in the way of distinctive differences in these types of literature is yet another indication of how little depth the bitch has been granted. Chapter 2 looks at the many faces of the bitch as portrayed in male-authored texts. Her representations are legion. Mythological and biblical charactersthe genesis of the negative archetypesshare sisterhood with the many ensuing bitch figures that populate the plays of Shakespeare and the fictions of Charles Dickens, Frank Norris, Henry James, John Steinbeck, Norman Mailer, and others, as well as characters from popular fiction. Her inhumanity reigns in this literature; she is characterized as heartless and, in most works, is relegated to infamy as a monster who indulges her bad behavior without cause or motivation. Similarly, fiction written for female readers and conventional women-authored literature in many cases has tended to be as hopelessly condemnatory as the malewritten literature in its renditions of the bitch. Starting from the vantage point of childrens literature, chapter 3 examines the literature written for and read by girls and women. From the wicked women of fairy tales to the dastardly females in girls fiction and the evil foils in popular romances and Gothic fiction, the bitch wreaks devastation throughout the pages. Nor are literary works exempt; chapter 3 also analyzes such prominent characters as Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopins The Awakening and Edith Whartons Undine Spragg from the novel The Custom of the Country. The bitch in female-authored literature varies little from her representation in male-authored literature, although small differences exist in some of the works. The bitch may be more fully rendered, endowed with at least some motivations for her actions in such works as Judith Guests Ordinary People and Toni Morrisons Jazz. Or, in the case of Edith Whartons The Custom of the Country or Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper, the bitch may be seen as having been fashioned by an antagonistically patriarchal society. For the feminist author, the act of revision serves a dual purpose; not only is she concerned with an updated and humanist telling of an established narrative, she also accepts the task of granting female characters previously denied subjectivity and complexity. And often those characters are the ones who have been adversely presented. Literary revisions of canonized literary texts are the focus of chapter 4. These revisions write the other side of the story, retelling the tale from the viewpoint of the vilified antagonist. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys reexamines Bertha/ Antoinette from Charlotte Bronts Jane Eyre, the quintessential madwoman whose character had previously lacked subjectification. Alice Hoffmans Here on Earth likewise revises the story of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff from Emily Bronts
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Wuthering Heights and seeks to partially exonerate the prevailing portrait of Catherine. Jane Smileys A Thousand Acres, Anne Tylers Ladder of Years, Margaret Atwoods Cats Eye, and Laura Esquivels Like Water for Chocolate each focus on a previously unexamined female figure from Shakespeares King Lear and share her story from her own vantage point. And while Ladder of Years, Cats Eye, and Like Water for Chocolate reflect the viewpoint of a modernized Cordelia, Smileys novel works from the perspective of Goneril, one of literatures most fiendish women, partially redeeming her. Chapter 5 examines several recent texts written by women for evidence of the bitchs humanity. If the bitch is not a born bitch, then what factors contribute to her making? By examining three primary textsFay Weldons The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Margaret Atwoods Cats Eye, and Toni Morrisons Sulait becomes evident that the making of the bitch involves a variety of factors: psychological, social, and economic. The bitch is often a dispossessed individual whose struggles for selfhood and agency necessitate drastic measures. That these measures are not valued by the surrounding society contributes to her detrimental portrait. The bitch often refuses to accede to the demands of a patriarchal society; she develops a strength that assists her in overcoming victimhood. Ruth Patchett in She-Devil flatly rejects the role of patiently suffering ex-wife; Elaine in Cats Eye must rebel against her victimization if she is to survive a brutal childhood; and Sula and Nel in Sula need to revise their definitions of good and evil as well as their responses to the women in their lives or risk obliteration of their selves. Each character takes extreme measures to persevere, measures that label her as a bitch. Chapter 6 concludes the study by focusing on two novels: Paradise by Toni Morrison and The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood. These texts not only provide a defense of the bitch but also contend that she is a vital individual. She is part of every woman, and according to these texts, she should not be apologized for, or worse, eradicated (if this were even possible). Morrison and Atwood revise the traditional archetypes, rebelling against stereotypical representations of the bitch; both authors also offer radical critiques of the male/female opposition so prevalent in psychological interpretation. The otherness of the convent women in Paradise and Zenia in The Robber Bride is revealed to be a critical ingredient of womanhood, not merely a masculine projection. The conflicts present in the psyches of Atwoods three protagonists as well as Morrisons characters are also less indicative of male/ female struggle and more of female/self conflict. In other words, neither Morrison nor Atwood writes the bitch in terms of femininity or masculinity; the otherness of these bitches is rendered in terms of the whole self. Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, and Pallas in Paradise and Tony, Charis, and Roz in The Robber Bride are seriously
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Introduction
hampered by their rejection of their evil selves, and they are only able to expand their selves when they accept the bitch, the image that is necessary for survival. Working with radically revised versions of archetypes, chapter 6 engages in a reconceptualization of what truly constitutes female evil.
To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type
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1 To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type

Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say. Jason Compson in William Faulkners The Sound and the Fury
hy even consider using Jungian archetypal theory to illuminate feminist conceptions? By their very nature, archetypes seem to connote universal and essentialist properties that are in direct contention with feminisms professed adherence to fluidity, growth, and revision. The myths, characters, ideals, shadows, and negative manifestations of Jungs collective unconscious appear to be unchanging and, indeed, unchangeable; as Demaris S. Wehr notes, Critics of Jungs psychology . . . often dismiss archetypes as Platonic ideal forms. Wehr further states that for critics analytic psychology . . . looks for, and finds, universalsand . . . excludes the particular, as well as the social context . . . [and the archetypes] replicate the worldview and situation of the person or persons to whom they are revealed, or who are reflecting upon them (xxi). Annis Pratt adds, Jung and his followers have sometimes been accused of stereotyping, clamping down excessively rigid simplifications upon complex phenomena (Pratt et al. 3).1 In addition, Estella Lauter and Carol Schreier Rupprecht observe that instead of being explanations of reality experienced by females, archetypes of the feminine [have] become categories to contain women (7, my emphasis), and Mary Daly charges that particularly seductive [in Jungian Psychology] is the illusion of equality projected through Jungs autocratic animus-anima balancing act, since women are trained to be grateful for complementarity and token inclusion (280). If a theory can give rise to such negative speculation, what could possibly be in it for feminism? And if, as stated in the introduction, feminism seeks to abolish the stereotypical portraits of women that have plagued readers for centuries, then what possible purpose could a theory that supposedly depends upon such generalized yet rigid characteristics serve?
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Simply put, feminist literary theorists cannot afford to ignore Jungian archetypes, just as Jungian psychology cannot afford to dismiss feminism; the archetypes that Jung defines are staples in literature. That is, Jungs archetypal descriptions of the male and the female are not only pervasive in literary culture, but the descriptions are also often accepted as recognized standards for human behavior. And, as Roberta K. Rigsby warns,since Jungian thought is a superbly useful tool for analyzing the Western male psyche and its projections, feminists lose when they assume it has no relevance to their own enterprise (182). Thus, reason suggests that engaging in a reevaluation of Jungian archetypal analysis is a necessary exercise for feminists who work toward the reclamation of literatures female characters. In the end, simply put, more may be accomplished from working within the paradigm than from working without. The feminist archetypal theorist endeavors to work within the highly recognizable Jungian framework and within its legitimated and useful theoretical structure; however, she also perceives the adaptability of those structures. In their introduction to Feminist Archetypal Theory: Interdisciplinary Re-Visions of Jungian Thought, Lauter and Rupprecht state that the purpose of feminist revision of Jungian archetypal theory is to reformulate key Jungian concepts to reflect womens experiences more accurately (3). Jungian archetypal theory has been problematic for feminist critics for a variety of reasons, three in particular. First, while Jung and his followers analyzed and discussed the male psyche in depth, the territory of the female remained largely unexplored; the assumptions Jung did postulate, moreover, tended to be suspiciously one-dimensional. Second, Jungs female archetypes are based on a conception of opposition; according to Jung, the female is the antithesis of the male, and thus the female types are created in contrast to the primary male types.2 Feminist scholars find this view to be artificial and lacking a basis for reality. Third, as mentioned, the connotation of the word archetype is one of fixed identity, a concept firmly at odds with feminist adherence to the possibilities of subjectivity, growth, and even transcendence.3 In conjunction with a central concept in Jungian thoughtthat each archetype possesses a fixed positive and negative sidefeminist authors especially reject the either/or criteria for feminine identity: the popular angel/whore division that has plagued female characters for centuries. Jungian archetypal theory, however, is not a simplistic formula. As Bettina L. Knapp explains, Jung diverged from his mentor Sigmund Freuds psychoanalytic philosophy by studying the intellectual and not merely the sexual development of the individuals psyche (ix). This exploration gave him insights into primordial images, archetypes of the collective unconscious.4 Drawing parallels between the
15
workings of the individual unconscious, shown in images produced in the dreams of his patients, with the universal recurrent eternal motifs found in religions and works of art, Jung thereby enlarged the scope of psychotherapy. (ix) Jung recognized these images in his patient analyses and in the art and literature of history and different cultures, believing that the archetypes are basically intuitive, conceived upon a human sharing, common from culture to culture, in the visionary (Baird 42). The archetypes are collective unconscious projections, such as the anima and animus, in contrast to the Shadow, which Jung defines as a potentially conscious projection that is a personal, same-sexed, negative side of the personality (Aspects 167). And the archetypes are based on preexistent, objective images in the human psyche and can be dominated, depending on the sex of the individual, by a masculine figure (the Father, the Hero, the animus) or a feminine (the Great Mother, the Wise Woman, the anima), residing as latent entities in the psyche until stimulated by an experience that brings the archetype into play. Although the collective archetypes exist in the unconscious as inherent, objective entities, the content of the archetypes depends on the individuals past experiences from a personal and/or cultural conception. Jung explains that archetypes are endowed with a possibility of representation which is given a priori. That is, the archetypes are not fixed representations in terms of their qualitiesthese are culturally defined; only the forms of the archetypes are standardized, up to a point: The archetype in itself is empty and purely formal. He further explains that representations are not inherited, only the forms, and in that respect they correspond in every way to the instincts, which are also determined in form only (Aspects 107). The archetypes become part of the collective unconscious through an intuitive acceptance by the individual; for example, the individual recognizes an inherent memory that allows her to identify her behavior by equating it to the patterns of behavior found in others as rendered in the arts or as observed in the social context. Erich Neumann further defines the concept of archetype through emotionaldynamic components or reactions: The dynamic, the effect of the archetype, is manifested in energetic processes within the psyche, processes that take place both in the unconscious and between the unconscious and consciousness. This effect appears, for example, in positive and negative emotions, in fascinations and projections, and also in anxiety, in manic and depressive states, and in the feeling that the ego is being overpowered. Every mood that takes hold of the entire personality is an expression of the dynamic effect of an archetype. (34)
16
The behavioral pattern (emotional reaction) is then projected into the consciousness but without the individuals conscious knowledge that such a projection is occurring. The reaction may be manifested as a response to the individuals own conduct, as the recognized pattern of anothers behavior, or as instinctual reactions to another individual based on that individuals perceived likeness to the unconscious archetype. For example, a man might unconsciously express hostility to an intuitive female as a manifestation of his archetypal recognition of her as the Witch, or a female might idolize a man because of her unconscious recognition of him as the Hero. Jung theorized that a balance of unconscious imagesthe anima in the males unconscious5 and the animus in the females unconscious6assist in governing the healthy human psyche.7 These contrasexual archetypes influence the individuals conscious and are, as noted, often projected onto another of the opposite sex. In the case of the males anima, Jung believes, what is not-I, not masculine, is most probably feminine, because the not-I is felt as not belonging to me and therefore as outside me, the anima image is usually projected on women (Archetypes 27). Thus, the characteristics that a male believes he perceives in a woman, whether positive or negative, might not be a realistic interpretation; he might merely be projecting his own fears and insecurities or his unexamined acceptance of his own anima onto the actual female persona. As the above quote makes clear, Jung sees the feminine as not-I, and thus the feminine is the Other, in most cases, the estranged identity. For example, Jung states that for the son, the anima is hidden in the dominating power of the mother, and sometimes she leaves him with a sentimental attachment that lasts throughout life and seriously impairs the fate of the adult (Archetypes 29). The anima, depending on the males identification withor his fear ofher, is traditionally realized as either good (i.e., the Virgin) or bad (i.e., the Whore).8 Yet Jung asserts that the male must encounter and accept the anima, an experience that enacts rebirth and social acceptance for the male. However, as mentioned, the males notion of his anima may often be erroneously conceived. The male projection of his anima may be equated to his fear of being regarded as womanish, impotent, or homosexual. In fact, however, [the anima] has nothing to do with the reality of living women, but with an awareness on the part of males of an inherent weakness in themselves, which they name femininity, or effeminacy or woman, which they attempt to exorcise by projecting it upon really existent women as well as the women of their fantasies, Daly contends (35960). The males distrust of their feminine side, Jungian analysis rationalizes, is not equalized in their apprehension of the female projection of the animus. Similar to the males fear of his own feminine side and his projection of
17
that fear onto actual women, the male also fears the animusa womans masculine side.9 Women, therefore, have been advocated to reject possession by the animus. According to Jung, for the female, the experience of encountering the animus is much different from the male experience; her encounter manifests itself as an obstacle to her full development. While a woman naturally possesses Eros, the feminine emotional and intuitive elements, she also contains unconscious elements of Logos, the masculine intellect and rationalizing elements. Jung regards a womans Logos as a compensatory factor needed to offset imbalance in the psyche (Archetypes 121). Yet, as he further clarifies, Eros is an expression of [a womans] true nature, while their Logos is often only a regrettable accident. It gives rise to misunderstandings and annoying interpretations (Aspects 171).10 Clearly, while Jung is concerned with the necessary integration of Eros into male consciousness as a toward individuation, he does not regard Logos as a favorable characteristic for women. The basic problem, however, for feminists working with Jungian archetypal theory is not Jungs definition of anima and animus; it is the tendency for Jungians to confuse woman with anima. As Carol Christ asserts, Jungians do not distinguish between the feminine as a compensatory aspect of the male experience and the feminine as the primary mode of experience in women (67). That is, Jungian analysis does not tend to take into account the difference between the male psyche and how it interprets the feminine and the actual consciousness of the female. Ulanov allows that women have traditionally adopted this misconception as well: the lack of ease of women with each other, their bewilderment about their own feminine reality suggests that even for females, images of the feminine hold a much needed contact with contents and perspectives (19). Women themselves are uncertain as to what constitutes an authentic self, a reason, perhaps, why women are prone to criticism and fear of many female types: the Mother, the Siren, and especially the bitch. Northrop Frye relates that in literature the double-edged power of the archetypes for good or evil is reflected in the stock black-and-white patterns of romantic characters: there is a wise old man and an evil magician, a solicitous mother and a wicked stepmother, a heroine and a siren or a temptress, a hero and a traitorous companion. (Forming 27)11 The Jungian reliance upon binary oppositions posits that for every positive archetype, an equally negative archetype exists. For example, the antithesis of the Great Mother is the devouring or terrible mother,12 the virgin reversed becomes the whore, the opposite of the goddess is the demon, and so forth. Each of these negative incarnations may be seen as a variation of the bitch.
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The bitch, in Jungian archetypal terms, theoretically suffers from the psychological malady of excessive animus.13 As Theriot notes, When a woman has too strong an attachment or antipathy for the image which creates the animus within herher father, for examplean imbalance occurs in the personality for neuroses or psychoses. He continues, As a consequence, this woman becomes dominated by the masculine element within her unconscious being which, in turn, affects her conscious being (121). Jung contended that the animus-possessed woman was an aberration; she risked obliterating her femininity (Aspects 98). He explained that possession of the female psyche by the animus resulted in the undesirable traits of being obstinate, harping on principles, laying down the law, dogmatic, world-reforming, theoretic, word-mongering, argumentative, and domineering. In particular, the animus-possessed woman is characterized by second-rate thinking (Archetypes 124). According to Jung, this woman maintains an unhealthy psychological condition because the females consciousness does not naturally know how to be male. As Wehr explains, Jung believed that a woman . . . when possessed by her animus will act like an inferior man. That means, for Jung, that she will insist, shrilly, on the rightness of her opinions. Not being at home in the male world of logic and facts, when she does enter this territory she does it ineptly (65). Moreover, because she is taken in by this secondrate thinking, she erroneously develops an egotistical regard for her intellect and a belief in her own superiority, resulting in aspirations toward power and prestige, striven for in inappropriate ways (Ulanov 43). The character of Big Nurse Ratched in Ken Keseys One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest is an appropriate figure to analyze in traditional Jungian terms.14 The story, narrated by Chief Bromden, a supposedly deaf and mute asylum inmate, relates the struggle of Randle P. McMurphy, another inmate, against the dominating head nurse of the Acute and Chronic ward. A symbolic retelling of the life of Christ, the novel glorifies McMurphys existence in the ward as a savior who sacrifices himself to save his fellow inmates from a most insidious evil in the form of Nurse Ratched.15 The Chief s initial portrait of Nurse Ratched immediately characterizes her as a beast and inhuman: a machine, big as a tractor, an inanimate being with flesh-colored enamel. Yet the Chief is also quick to note that she is a woman: A mistake was made somehow in manufacturing, putting those big, womanly breasts on what would of otherwise been a perfect work, and you can see how bitter she is about it (11). The Chief recognizes that Nurse Ratched is irritated that she is a woman; he implies that she suffers acutely from a lack of femininity and that she has overcompensated for this lack by overdeveloping her animus. Nurse Ratcheds primary characteristics are, in Jungian analysis, decidedly masculine. She is logical, organized, a leader, and very powerfuljealously so. While
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her Logos as a negative and inept utilization of masculine properties is manifested in her control over the ward, her insistence on adhering to a schedule, and her unwillingness to adapt, her natural Eros has been so subordinated it appears to be nonexistent except as a perverse parody. When McMurphy bounds into her ward, intent on enlivening his prison-turned-commitment sentence, Nurse Ratched obviously feels threatened. This is her ward, one in which she maintains command and sets the rules. She tolerates no opposition, lacking the spirits of both community and compassion. A doctor who briefly worked in the ward described her: Since I started on that ward with that woman I feel like my veins are running ammonia. I shiver all the time, my kids wont sit in my lap, my wife wont sleep with me (31). McMurphy accuses Nurse Ratched of being a ballcutter, the quintessential castrating female, and he is quick to form his own opinion: Hooowee, Ive seen some bitches in my time, but she takes the cake (57). Nurse Ratched initially underestimates McMurphy and declares at his first group therapy meeting, We might as well dispense with him now (45). When her patronizing and manipulations that have been so successful with the other men fail with McMurphy, she first subtly and then overtly displays her power. Starting with politely veiled threats, Nurse Ratcheds battle with McMurphy escalates into multiple electroshock therapy sessions for McMurphy and culminates with his frontal lobotomy. Her insistence on maintaining her power is limitless. Many of the men on her ward are suffering from a form of symbolic castration; Billy Bibbit, the Chief, and Harding, in particular, have been rendered impotent by their inability to speak. Like Ruckly, the lobotomized patient who can only howl Ffffffuck da wife in response to whatever is asked of him, these three patients have similar limited responses (21). Billy has a debilitating stutter that impedes his ability to communicate.16 The Chief pretends to be deaf and mute; he is particularly terrified about the possibility of Nurse Ratcheds discovering he can hear. Finally, Harding appears to be fluently conversant; however, in examining his speech patterns it becomes obvious that his impressive verbiage masks an equal difficulty in communicating: Hardings words circle and dodge in his desperate attempt to conceal his real fears. Of course, there is a terrible irony in the final portrait of Nurse Ratched: unable to speak because of McMurphys attempted strangulation, she is reduced to communicating by writing on a notepad. In the end, it is Nurse Ratched who has been castrated by being forcibly silenced; her animus has been muffled and her power rendered mute. Nurse Ratched is about fifty years old, past childbearing age, unmarried and, significantly, technically old enough to be the mother of many of the patients. In fact, the Public Relations man often describes Nurse Ratched as motherly (37). Coupled with Nurse Ratcheds castrating tendencies, this image of mother is terrifying to the men on her ward. As Jung explains:
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For a man the mother typifies something alien, which he has yet to experience and which is filled with imagery latent in his unconscious. . . . The mother has from the outset a decidedly symbolical significance for a man, which probably accounts for his strong tendency to idealize her. Idealization is a hidden apotropaism: one idealizes whenever there is a secret fear to be exorcised. (Archetypes 106) Billy, Harding, and the Chief all suffer from a deep hatred and fear of their mothers; this hatred is then masochistically projected onto Nurse Ratched.17 The men on the ward look to McMurphy to act to save their dwindling manhood after he demonstrates his contempt for Nurse Ratcheds power as well as his own ability to undermine her authority. The Chief, Harding, and Billy are incapable, as of yet, of defiance against the mother. Each of the inmates given a detailed description by Kesey has, ironically, adopted the Big Nurse as a surrogate mother figure. And, as the novel makes indisputably evident, none of these men has a positive image of the mother. Dale Hardings wife, Vera, is executed as a nymphomaniacal bitch, slinging such innuendo at her husband as Oh Dale, you never do have enough, do you? (158). A few moments later, she loudly accuses him of homosexuality (159). Her dominance over Harding and her belittlement of him cast her into a malignant maternal role. Harding, however, seems to perversely enjoy the encounters because they allow him to respond with a few zingers of his own, deriding her bad grammar as well as her class, or lack thereof. Harding, however, after delivering his barbs, scuttles back to the womb in the form of Nurse Ratcheds ward. The Chief also regards his mother with hatred; he tells McMurphy that his mother grew to be twice his Papas size. The Chief s mother, a white woman, had apparently forced her husband, the tribal chief, to sell off everything, . . . the tribe, the village, the falls to the government. The Chief states, [My Papa] fought it for a long time till my mother made him too little to fight any more and he gave up (187). The Chief s symbolic retribution against his mother takes the form of spying on Nurse Ratched, mutely condemning her. Billys relationship with his mother is the most problematic. A coquettish woman, Mrs. Bibbit seems determined to force her son into perpetual childhood; she teases her son, Sweetheart, do I look like the mother of a middle-aged man? (247). Every time Billy attempts to assert his manliness, his mother thwarts his intentions. Mrs. Bibbit is the proverbial castrating mother, one who will sacrifice her sons manhood in order to defy her own aging and mortality. Leslie Horst contends that Billys mother is the ultimate seductive, devouring Oedipal mother (15). When Billy is discovered with the prostitute Candy (an encounter during which his stutter has been cured), Nurse Ratcheds pronouncement that she will
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inform Mrs. Bibbit of her sons indiscretion prompts Billys suicide. Horst notes that all these [mothers] are bitches, and in fact, with the exception of Candy and Sandythe ubiquitous whores with hearts of goldno females in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest are rendered as redemptive (15). It is McMurphy who displays the most virulent hatred of women in the novel. He views women as sexual objects (twitches) or bitches. There are no exceptions. Although it is obvious that McMurphy has a definitive hatred of authority, he handles the rabbity doctor with tact, allowing the doctor to think that he is the instigator of policy change. Yet he will not grant Nurse Ratched even the semblance of compliance unless it suits his own purpose, and even then, when he realizes that Nurse Ratched holds the power of his psychiatric commitment, his acquiescence is an exaggerated parody. McMurphys sabotage of Nurse Ratched takes the classic form of sexual dominance: he challenges her femininity. The men concur with McMurphy that Nurse Ratched needs to have a man just throw her down and solve all her worries, but they also concur that she is too disagreeable to attract sexual attention (166).18 McMurphy leaves crude sexual notes under the toilet bowl rims for Nurse Ratched to find during her inspections; he loudly speculates about her breasts, even asking her just what was the inch-by-inch measurement on them great big ol breasts that she did her best to conceal but never could (138). McMurphy also, symbolically, breaks the glass partition, Nurse Ratcheds protection, that separates her from the men, an act that Barry H. Leeds contends is an act of sexual aggression (26). McMurphys sexual harassment of Nurse Ratched is particularly uncomfortable because it is a very public activity. He is unrelenting, performing his campaign with great aplomb as an empowering spectacle for the men.19 Conversely, however, McMurphy finally overpowers Nurse Ratched by promoting her femininity (Maxwell 141). McMurphys final insult, triggered by Billys suicide, is to tear off the front of Nurse Ratcheds uniform, exposing her massive breasts to the rest of the inmates, and for this act McMurphy is lobotomizedan operation that destroys his Logos, the essential quality of his masculinity. In essence, what McMurphy has done is to enforce Nurse Ratcheds femaleness; once this has been accomplished, Nurse Ratched loses her power. In fact, most of the inmates who had been voluntarily committed decide to leave. Even the Chief breaks free and escapes. McMurphy forces Nurse Ratched to confront her female psyche. By exposing her breasts, he compels acknowledgement that her projected animusher masculinity and its inherent claim to poweris false.20 Thus, she cannot reign over the ward because she is indeed a woman and therefore is unfit. Moreover, McMurphy also forces her essential paradoxical nature to the forefront: if she is a surrogate maternal presence for the men of the ward, her duplicity in usurping
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a male role is bared as the sham it truly is. This frees the men from her dominance by allowing them to exorcise their guilt. That is, this action allows them to openly hate their castrating and controlling mothers; they no longer need to suffer under delusions of inadequacy stemming from their aversion to the women who bore them. The reader may infer that the Chief will regain his tongue/phallus now that he may clearly blame his mother, and, likewise, Harding will no longer allow his wife to profess her disgust. Both men have regained their symbolic potency. There are many inherent problems in this Jungian analysis of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. Although the process highlights the psychological motivations of the male characters and explicates the processes whereby the male characters enact their own recoveries, the character of Nurse Ratched is static and, significantly, one-dimensional; she is granted no extraneous reasons for her behavior. She is rendered an inhuman monster, utterly beyond redemption. First, in terms of binary opposition, Nurse Ratcheds character is afforded no means of validation. She is portrayed as not-female, yet because she is biologically female, she cannot be male either. She is nothing but a container for the males projections. Second, because she is a deviant from normal psychological feminine patterning, she must either be cured or be destroyed. Nurse Ratched, however, possesses an archetypally fixed identity; thus, destruction is the only possible recourse. All of the major male characters are afforded the possibility of growth, change, transcendence, and even nurturingeach is allowed to confront his anima, yet Nurse Ratched may merely change from powerful to powerless.21 The paradox of Nurse Ratched is that she is needed to function as the Other; the men will not allow her to be anything but the object of their projections: the Terrible Mother.
What Is a Woman to Do?

How can feminists work within a theoretical framework that enables interpretations that are in such radical contrast with feminist goals to refute exactly the kind of representations embodied in the one-dimensional analysis of Nurse Ratched? This question calls attention to the need for a revision of archetypal theory, a revision that incorporates realistic representations of the female psyche. Roberta K. Rigsby notes that critics who are skeptical of the idea of feminisms union with archetypal theory ask a paradoxical question: wont feminisms natural questioning of the archetype result in the archetypes demise (193)? The answer seems to be no. Feminist questioning and re-envisioning of archetypes can only result in the enlarging of meanings that surround the types, in corrective readings, and perhaps in the addition of contemporary significance to the traditional values associated with the archetypes. The very nature of an archetype precludes the
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possibility of its extinction. Moreover, feminist archetypal criticism may provide enhanced purpose for texts authored by women and about women, providing access into nontraditionally written works of literature that, in particular, consciously revise the male literary heritage. A crucial similarity already exists between archetypal analysis and feminism, residing in the comparative processes of individuationthe integration of the polarities of the psycheand subjectificationthe process of achieving selfhood and the power that arises from it. Both are recognized to be ongoing and lifelong processes, and both processes enact positive changes in the individual. And, just as feminism has utilized such central principles of traditional male criticisms as Marxist theory, deconstruction, and New Historicism, Jungian archetypal criticism offers additional significant means for the analysis of literature and womens roles in that literature. One vital ramification for a revised archetypal criticism may be found in the traditional power that archetypal criticism claims in what Wehr calls meaningmaking: From within Jungs framework, dreams, fairy tales, myths, and other forms of folklore contain wisdom and direction for our lives. . . . Jungs psychology can open up new worldsnot only those of dreams, fairy tales and myth, but also of poetry, music, dance, arts, and crafts. For Jung, the unconscious was the source of creativity, and Jungian psychology often releases creativity hitherto unexpressed. (6) Feminists may use Jungian archetypal theory not only to examine the making of meaning in symbols but also to subvert or reinvent established meaning or to reinscribe lost meanings. Indeed, the historical appropriation of the archetypal figures has not, in fact, been static. Feminist revisionists, among others, have successfully reevaluated figures from myth, the Bible, and other forms of literature and art. As Pratt explains: A dogmatic insistence on preordained, invariable sets of archetypal patterns would distort literary analysis: one must not deduce categories down into a body of material but induce them from images, symbols, and narrative pattern observed in a significantly various selection of literary works. (Pratt et al. 5) And, as Albert Gelpi reasons, the feminist can accept the authenticity of the anima and animus not as metaphysical absolutes but as psychological factors whose images are, to some extent at least, culturally and historically conditioned but are actually operative in the psyche and need to be engaged and integrated (378). Ulanovs assertion is that we can expect that the images of the animus
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and the anima will change as new contents are personified. We might even expect a progressive and gradual development in anima figures, for example, from witch to seductress to beloved (37).22 The value of Jungian archetypal criticism, particularly for feminism, outweighs its possible detriments. Jungs emphasis on the feminine implies its significant worth, one noticeably lacking in many other types of psychological criticism; moreover, Jungs assertion that recognition of the feminine is essential for both male and female psyches opens up the possibility for the revaluing of the feminine. As Cynthia A. Davis recognizes, Applications between anima [the male definition of his feminine element within his psyche] and female self [the lived experience of women] provide an opening for central analyses of theme, characterization, point of view, and narrative consciousness (112). Thus, although Jungs archetypes have come under significant and often legitimate criticism, his recognition of the value of both the masculine and the feminine holds liberating implications for the female archetypes, including the figure of the bitch. Yet archetypal revision is not an easy labor, however it is proposed. Naomi Goldenberg contends that feminist archetypal revisionists have several options in working with Jungian archetypal criticism. The first is to work strictly within Jungs paradigm; the second is to start from the beginning and search for true female archetypes, a difficult but not impossible task, as Pratts work indicates;23 and the third is to redefine the archetypes themselves, an approach most significantly accomplished in the work of Ulanov (44849).24 Each of these approaches has drawbacks. Jungs unrevised theories tend to reproduce readings, such as the one of Nurse Ratched, that demonstrate a critical misunderstanding of the realities of women. The creation of new archetypes by reading through womens literature is also problematic; the analysis of women-authored archetypes would need to account for the male influence enacted through the literature, and it would be extremely difficult to separate the original forms of womens consciousness from the forms resulting from adherence to tradition. The third optionredefinition is in accordance with Jungs own assertion that archetypal content is not fixed, and thus this option seems to be the more accessible approach if the tendencies to polarize and universalize are carefully monitored.25 A feminist archetypal reading endeavors to contrast the womans lived experiences against the interpretation of her character as rendered through a negative projection of the male anima. To demonstrate, a feminist archetypal rereading of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest may reevaluate Nurse Ratcheds negative traits, attesting that she is not an irredeemable figure but rather a legitimate representative of a feminine type. For example, as part of her employment, Nurse Ratched is required to maintain
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control over the ward.26 And, in examining the text, it is clear that she is not autonomously in power over the ward at all; Nurse Ratched answers not only to the male doctor but to a variety of staff as well. That her ward requires fewer aides is a testament to her efficiency and her effectiveness, and that the male staff accepts her recommendations cannot be attributed only to their fear of her. She has obviously gained respect for her methods and successes. It is also evident that in the past Nurse Ratched has encountered little opposition, although the males in her ward imply that she deals severely with complainers. In fact, when McMurphy asks Harding Is this the usual pro-cedure for these Group Therpy shindigs? Bunch of chickens at a peckin party, Harding responds as if hes never before considered that the sessions are anything but normal therapy (55). It is McMurphy who introduces the idea that Nurse Ratched is malevolent: She may be a mother, but shes big as a damn barn and tough as knife metal (57). Harding tries to defend Nurse Ratched by relating that she is known for her charitable work on her days off, doing generous volunteer work (58). But McMurphy wears him down until Harding collapses, murmuring Oh the bitch, the bitch, the bitch. In the presence of McMurphys virile hatred of women, Harding concedes, We are the victims of a matriarchy here (59). Hardings enlightened rationale for his change of perceptions comes from his new belief that Nurse Ratched is a sly manipulator. While Harding admits that Nurse Ratched never directly accuses, he states, She has a genius for insinuation (60). Insinuations, however, are tricky. Is Nurse Ratched actually insinuating, or does Harding read her words through his new projection of her, now that McMurphy has enlightened him to her true role: that of the terrible and castrating mother? Nurse Ratched is independent. She is not susceptible to the false charms of a male such as McMurphy because her ego is self-reliant and is not dependent on male validation. Her occupation is a central factor in her self-valuation; she takes enormous pride in her abilities, managerial and therapeutic. Yet the most compelling evidence for Nurse Ratched is not her efficiency but rather that most of the ward members are voluntarily committed to the ward. They are, as an astonished McMurphy discovers, free to leave at any time. McMurphy asks, incredulously, Tell me why. You gripe, you bitch for weeks on end about how you cant stand this place, cant stand the nurse or anything about her, and all the time you aint committed (16768). While Billy stammers that he hasnt the g-guts to leave, the rest of the men aim their eyes at McMurphy like a row of rivets, leveling a challenge (168). Harding, especially, realizes that McMurphy will be unable to resist that challenge and waits, a high, excited pitch in his head for McMurphys inevitable reaction (169). Sure enough, that afternoon McMurphy
26
breaks the glass partition. The men vicariously enjoy McMurphys sadistic treatment of Nurse Ratched and project their hostilities through himan activity that Nurse Ratched mediates, attempting to channel those hostilities productively. Her methodology does have potentially therapeutic benefits; rather than symbolically castrating the men by silencing them, she encourages speech. Her group therapy sessions are meant to encourage articulation and the expression of hostility in a socially acceptable mannerby communication instead of by physical aggression. And the men actively respond. The Chief notes, observing the group therapy session, For forty-five minutes [the men] been chopping a man to pieces, almost as if they enjoyed it (54). And while the Chief also believes that theyve been maneuvered again, by Nurse Ratched, the mens obvious relish for the peckin party implies that the session cannot have been solely staged by Nurse Ratched without the willing, even avid, participation of the men (54). As one of the few women with whom the male members of the psychiatric ward are in contact with, Nurse Ratched must suppress her femininity to a degree. And, because the men have extreme difficulty in accepting the feminine, Nurse Ratched must create a controlled environment that allows the men to express their fear of the feminine; she adeptly mediates between manifesting the feminine maternal presence and manifesting a strong animus-dominated persona. She allows a certain amount of projection, yet she does not allow unmediated hostility. By learning to negotiate with heras surrogate mother, woman, and feminine, but also rational and logicalthe men should be able to transcend their own psychic trepidations and project a positive experience onto their relationships with other women. Nurse Ratcheds adoption of a masculine side is not counterfeit; as Wehr acknowledges, Jungs psychology does allow women to claim [the qualities of natural female authority, logic, and rationality] via their masculine side (122). Nurse Ratched, then, represents both sides of The Mother: not only is she the terrible, castrating female who symbolizes mortality and fear of the unknown, but she is also The Great Motherthe nurturing giver of life who provides space for growth and security (Ulanov 198). Each woman possesses these types of dual archetypal images in her unconscious, and feminist archetypalists understand that the suppression of the negative image can be as detrimental to a womans psyche as can suppression of the positive. Karen Elias-Button writes that women are beginning to claim the dark mother as representative of female powers . . . no longer does she reflect either a theological (the god[dess] as transcendent power) or social (the goddess as grasping mother) situation that women feel powerless to change (36). Not only may the suppression of the feminine by a woman be injurious to her psyche, but obstruction of the animus may also result in equally adverse behaviors that are particularly damaging to a womans ability to develop her self, rendering her powerless.
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The Face(t)s of the Bitch

The bitch is not a singular archetypal figure; unlike the particular dominant anima projections such as The Mother, which tend to overshadow all other male projections, the animus is plural (Jung, Aspects 96). As Emma Jung explains, For women the animus appears as . . . a group of fathers, a council, a court, or some other gathering of wise men, or else a lightning-change artist who can assume any form and makes extensive use of this ability (26). In identifying with the animus, the woman may find ostensibly positive aspects of the benevolent father or wise man, but the bitch usually associates with the negative manifestations: a violent and ruthless tyrant, a cruel task-master, moralist and censor, a seducer and exploiter, and often, also, a pseudo-hero (29). Her adoption of any or all of these personae results in mimicry, and because she is not male, she may not be able to rely on the males unconscious balance with anima to prevent the more malevolent auspices of the archetype. Yet the plural nature of the animus is not just confined to its projections; feminist archetypalists also note the collective nature of the animus-generated behavioral patterns in women. The work of Ann Bedford Ulanov focuses on the dual images of female archetypes, recognizing four structural forms: the Mother (the type most recognized by Jung), the Amazon, the Hetaira, and the Medium, or Medial Woman.27 Ulanov proposes that identification of the feminine using these archetypal forms indicates the characteristics a woman exhibits and the identification the individual woman has most responded to in her unconscious: the fathers anima, the mothers animus, the literal mother, or the rejection of all parental identification. Explains Ulanov, Each pair of forms of the feminine is a set of opposites: the Mother and the Hetaira and the Amazon and the Medium (194). Implicit in this schema is the theory that the Mother cannot also be the Hetaira and that the Amazon and the Medium are also incompatible. And although every woman has, unconsciously, all of these forms already existent in her psyche, one form usually predominates. According to Ulanov, individuation may occur in the woman not so much by integrating male and female as by integrating all four archetypes as much as possible into her consciousness, a lifetime task (19495). The Mother. She is Eve and she is Medea; she is Demeter and she is the primal Goddess. Identifying with the feminine present in her own mother, she is regarded as both giver of life and, paradoxically, taker of life. Her central incongruity is that while she gives birth and bestows the wonders and joys of living to her child, she also condemns that child to the inevitable disappointments and failures of life, mortality, and death (Jung, Aspects 110). Such a character is Eva Peace in Toni Morrisons Sula. As the Great Mother, Eva finds the money she needs to support her children by letting a train sever her leg and then collecting the insurance money. However, as the Terrible Mother, she burns her son, Plum, to death.28
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The Mothers feminine strengths lie in maternal solicitude and sympathy; the magic authority of the female; the wisdom and spiritual exaltation that transcend reason; any helpful instinct or impulse; all that is benign, all that cherishes and sustains, that fosters growth and fertility. On the negative side, the Mother archetype may connote anything secret, hidden, dark; the abyss, the world of the dead, anything that devours, seduces, and poisons, that is terrifying and inescapable like fate (Jung, Aspects 110). Also on the negative side, the Mother may tend to renounce her own subjectivity, living for others. This tendency is masochistic, and often the Mother is accused of projecting her own unfulfilled aspirations onto her children or others for whom she has sacrificed. She is, according to Jung and Freud, the source of innumerable complexes and neuroses. That she may inspire guilt in her offspring seems to account for some of the hostility that is projected onto her. In Aldous Huxleys Brave New World, for instance, the mothers psyche and influence are believed to be so psychologically detrimental to children and adults that biological motherhood is abolished. The mother-complex in the daughter, according to Jung, produces several unpleasant behavioral patterns, all of which may be manifested in the bitch.29 In the case of the daughter who experiences hypertrophy of the maternal element, the daughter submerges her personal Eros to the singular goal of motherhood. Thus, Jung theorizes, without her children she lacks existence. If motherhood is denied to her, or if she finds herself in a situation where her status as mother is inconsequential, she experiences a loss of the self on which she has come to depend. Therefore, she tends to sacrifice any activity or situation of this type. Her appearance of self-sacrifice, however, actually masks a strong will to power in the subjugation of her children to the purpose not of their eventual independence but of validating her existence. The overdevelopment of Eros, another manifestation of the mother-complex, results in a daughter who is jealous of her mother and who thus projects a strong rejection of the maternal instinct. This daughter engages in a contest with her mother and, according to Jung, becomes the classic homewrecker, following an incestuous desire to possess her father. The mothercomplex may also compel a daughter toward an unhealthy identification with her mother, leading to a passive and inert identity. Living a shallow existence, this daughter has a personality so utterly devoid of selfhood, she is an empty vessel. Finally, Jungs fourth identified category of a mother-complex takes the form of resistance to the mother. This daughter molds her life and her responses to lifeincluding her own femininityin direct opposition to what her mother has exemplified. She resents anything that mirrors her mother, but because she is indeed female and cannot escape all that represents her mother, she is dangerously self-destructive (Aspects 11519).
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The Hetaira. She is Aphrodite and she is Circe. She is Mary Magdalene and she is the Muse. She is inspiration and she is the concubine. Identified with the masculine through her attachment to her fathers anima, she is the soul mate and companion of the male, but she is also the seductress who tempts man away from productivity. In Henry Jamess The Beast in the Jungle, May Bartram acts as loyal attendant waiting for John Marchers potential to manifest itself. May is referred to as Marchers kind, wise keeper, and she had in fact a wonderful way of making it seem, as such, the secret of her own life too (436). She is dedicated and patient, yet her unshakeable faith in him may actually work to promote his inactivity. As Marcher waits for the great cause of his life to present itself, he does not give up the ship at least in part because of his faith in Mays belief in him: Her knowledge simply settled it; he would have been sure enough by this time had she been wrong (434). The Hetairas strengths lie in her ability to communicate intimately with the masculine. She is acutely attuned to the males fears and desires without evoking the maternal. She can be selflessly supportive and generous. Negatively, however, the Hetaira may be unable to make any permanent commitment to her own attitudes or to an actual relationship but may instead have to lead a life of emotional wanderings and merely tentative attachments (Ulanov 203). The dark side of the Hetaira is manifested in the image of the Whore, and the most powerful materializations of the bitch are often incorporated in the image of the Hetaira. Carrie Meeber, protagonist of Theodore Dreisers Sister Carrie, climbs her way up the social ladder over the financially and sexually ruined body of Hurstwood, the second man she has been mistress to. In the same way, other unrepentant sexually active women, such as Lady Chatterley, Kate Croy, Temple Drake, and Brett Ashley, are also deemed whore-bitches, not only for their sexual immorality but, more importantly, for their faithlessness and refusal to become proper women of society. The Hetaira/Whores deep understanding of the male psyche can enable her to exploit males. She can use her innate knowledge of his fears, weaknesses, and desires to adversely wreak havoc on the man. She is adept at displaying the male-projected image of desire for the feminineparticularly the sexualized imagesand knows how to act, and dress, the part. And because of her prominent relation to the animus, she often exhibits a deep distrust of other women, projecting the male fear of women onto the feminine. If she is allowed to escape death in her pages, she is almost always condemned to a painfully solitary existence. The Amazon. She is Mary and she is the Siren. She is Joan of Arc and she is the sexless Wise Woman. Identifying with her mothers animus, she is primarily an independent woman: Her sovereign alliance is to something femininethe
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expression of her own feminine goals and purposesrather than the fulfillment of a male person (Ulanov 205). Barbara Coles, in Doris Lessings short story One off the Short List, reacts to the self-gratifying advances of the lothario Graham Spence, a sycophantic journalist, with exhausted indifference. Ironically calling her a slut because of her wearied capitulation to his boorish demands, Graham fails to achieve an erection. Barbara administers to him, hoping he will leave once he achieves satisfaction, which, of course, he does not (1827). Grahams fury increases as he realizes that he maintains no power; she finds him infinitely insignificant. The Amazons positive powers are those of equality, particularly in feminine friendships and relations. She is possessed of a strong will and pride in accomplishments. She is loyal to those she cares for and to causes she deems worthy. The Amazon maintains the traditional qualities of leadershipif she is respected. Negatively, the Amazon might be outwardly industrious but inwardly passive. She might also, in rejecting the feminine side of her own psyche and her mothers, become sexually repressed, cold, and uninvolved (Ulanov 206). Her dark side might also manifest itself in power trips and in stridency in stubbornly held beliefs. She may insist on getting her own way and demand until she does. She often inspires loathing in individuals because she overtly disdains her own association with the traditional feminine qualities of selflessness, nurturing, and dependency, causing other women to either fear her or regard her with suspicion. Also, because she rejects the feminine, men may shun her as well, labeling her unwomanly or a lesbian. In William Faulkners A Rose for Emily, the protagonist insists on maintaining her own existence, which the townspeople continually refuse to allow as they wish her to sustain her position as icon and memorial to the antebellum South. Emilys truncated womanhood manifests itself in the form of a bloated and stubborn woman, one whom, it is discovered on her death, cohabited with an eroticized corpse; she is the monstrous apparition of the independent female. The Medium. She is Dantes Beatrice and she is the Witch. She is the medicine woman and the fortune-teller. Relating with herself, she abandons identification with the mother figure, the mother figures animus, or the father figures anima and develops an ego of her own (Ulanov 208). The Mediums strengths lie in her intuitive perceptions. Strongly spiritual, she possesses healing powers. She listens intently and nurtures instinctively without possessive intent. She is organic, attuned to the rhythms of life, ceding to the natural rather than imposing structure. Shanita, in Margaret Atwoods The Robber Bride, may appear to be a parody of the New Age mystic; however, her ability to foretell does not manifest itself only in reading crystals and Tarot cards. She has an uncanny business knack, predicting the trends
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that will keep her shop in business, and she gives perceptive advice to Charis, assisting her in her quest. Negatively, the Medium, if she lacks the certainty of a strong ego, tends to turn into an agent of confusion or destruction (Ulanov 209). Her natural intuition, if she does not trust it, can cause chaos; her omens and prophesies might lead the beneficiary into the wrong direction. She may be regarded, paradoxically, as unnatural in contemporary culture because of her rejection of the material. And, because of her alertness to signs, she may respond vaguely to direct influences. She may be perceived as lacking common sense or as being overly emotional, and she may be naive and gullible. Because of her tenuous connection with the concrete and rational, men may either project their desire for the innocent and unspoiled upon her, or they may fear her strong affinity with Eros. Beatrice in Hawthornes Rappucinis Daughter originally inspires the male protagonist to view her as the innocent maiden occupying her rightful place in the unspoiled Eden of her fathers garden; however, when he discovers her secret poisonous affinity, he regards her as the duplicitous witch who has ensnared him. Similarly, Frieda Haxby Palmer, the old crone/witch in Margaret Drabbles The Witch of Exmoor, who lives in a decaying hotel in an inhospitable region of western England, successfully casts spells on her materialistic children, who are aching to get their hands on her wealth. Kelleher Jewett states that Frieda belongs in a fairy tale or a Wagnerian opera; she is the all-powerful fairy godmother, the witch who knows the secret incantations and where the skeletons are hidden (33). Yet, in the vein of the Medium who does not understand her omens, Friedas machinations almost cause the suicide of her chosen grandson, Ben, a young and intellectually gifted boy who cannot handle the stress that Friedas cursing last will and testament has wreaked upon the family. These four types encompass almost every aspect of the feminine, according to Ulanov; however, their applicability to literature is not, nor can be, universal. For instance, because many male-authored female characters have little or no inner consciousness, the attribution of a feminine archetypal form becomes nearly impossible. Daisy Fay Buchanan in Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby, as an example, may seem to be a manifestation of the Amazon as siren, yet she lacks the rounded attributes of that figure. She is not independent, and while she certainly exhibits signs of passivity and a lack of initiative, her personality is so one-dimensionally rendered that her unconscious motivations are impossible to deduce (Ulanov 205 6). Described as a bitch, Daisy is merely a tissue paper substitute for the feminine; in fact, most of her actions are dictated as responses to the action of the male she is in contact with: Tom, Nick, or Gatsby.30 Daisy is not an actual character; rather, she is the projection of male fantasies. In contrast, the bitch maintains an active
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presence. Rather than being the inert agent of a mans progress or destruction, the bitch manipulates, schemes, and forcefully adds to the progression of the plot. Daisy is an object; the bitch is a subject.
The Damned Bitch

The fundamental value of the bitch lies in her refusal to become what Luce Irigaray refers to as a use-value for man: like the character of Daisy, women are marked phallically by their fathers, husbands, procurers. . . . Woman is never anything but the locus of a more or less competitive exchange between two men (355). The bitch, in contrast, takes herself off the male market; she determines her own value. Because of her repudiation of the traditional, patriarchally defined feminine role, because she wont play nice with the boys, the bitch is exiled from the patriarchal playground. Yet, in that denouncement, the bitch has found a space of her own. Her locus of power comes from her own Isle of Elba, where she might be empress, untouchable by the male powers. The bitch is a master/mistress at challenging the prevailing social order. Catherine S. Quick notes: Certain female figures are labeled villainesses because they embody certain characteristics or perform certain actions which potentially threaten the patriarchal construction of the feminine, and thus the construction of the masculine. Tradition, therefore, must portray these women and what they represent as evil in order to undermine any power they might exert over patriarchy. (44) Quick, like Hlne Cixous in her landmark essay The Laugh of the Medusa, points out that the most threatening aspect of the bitch is her refusal to maintain feminine silence. Cixous argues: You have only to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And shes not deadly. Shes beautiful and shes laughing (246). In her essay, Cixous recovers an archetype from patriarchy, contending that the goddess Medusa, a threat to the patriarchy because of her autonomy, was not in fact evil. Her crime was to speak the truth and thus disempower the male.31 Medusa, exiled into what Cixous refers to as the dark continent, seems to prefer her escape from the restrictive world. In fact, Medusa protects her new kingdom from all interlopers; she silences, by turning to stone, the trespassers who would contaminate her space with their playground rhetoric. The greatest transgression of the bitch may just be that she does not want to play in the playground. She is as capable of taking care of herself as she is as capable of speaking for herself. Well, what is a woman to do? As Michele Pessoni recognizes, the term patriarchy denotes a psychic state of mind, a consciousness which often exhibits signs of
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hostility toward nature as well as any quality traditionally associated with the feminine: nurturance, community, contiguity (440). Yet if a woman attempts to eradicate these traditional qualities from her psyche in order to avert the patriarchal hostility and instead cultivate the very qualities that the patriarchy prizes in itselfrationality, individuality, competition, and solitary achievement she is labeled a bitch. And then, in a vicious cycle, if she repents and pursues the traditional feminine roles and values, patriarchy disdains her as woman. Damned if she does; damned if she doesnt. Ultimately, it is precisely this observation that renders the arguments against feminism versus archetypal theory invalid: neither of the patriarchal polarities is acceptable to either men or, ultimately, women. Because patriarchy deliberately promotes confusion for women as to their roles, virtues, morals, and value32 and because it engages in projected hatred for the feminine and disdain for the masculine in the feminine, feminism cannot afford to dismiss archetypal theory as wrong or meaningless. The archetypes contain invaluable clues on how to negotiate the feminine, how men view women, and how women view themselves. The answer to the question To arche the type or not to arche the type? seems to lie in the process of integration. Even Jung acknowledged that the original archetypal figures incorporated opposition within: In Western antiquity and especially Eastern cultures, the opposites often remained united in the same figure (Aspects 132). Jung relates that Western theology forced the splitting of divinity into good and evil halves, and the resulting binary opposition lent credence to the belief that that which is not good must be evil and that which is not-I must be Other. This binary opposition has worked to support the existing power structures in the maintenance of domination. If the I and the not-I can exist in tandem, the power structure becomes endangered; dualism and plurality threaten. And yet feminists themselves have contributed to the binarism of female images. By presenting and validating only positive images of women in history, the arts, and literature, the resulting portrait of women had been decidedly one-sided. The bitch, for all of her negative connotations, does possess a power that traditional definitions of femininity make impossible for women. And thus she must be dragged back into the light, retrieved from her cave; she is a part of every woman.
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The Male Perspective
2 The Male Perspective

Theres not any such thing as a woman born bad, because they are all born bad, born with the badness in them. William Faulkner, Hair
eslie Fiedler writes that literatures Dark Lady represents the threat of both sex and death; she is a bearer of poison (296).1 In male-written literature, the bitch has maintained a long and illustrious career; from Homer to Hardy, from Milton to Mailer, she is indicted in scores of literary works for her avarice, immorality, and bad temperament. As noted in the introduction, she reigns in historical Western mythology and drama, she perseveres through several biblical incantations, and she rampages her way merrily through the literary canon, (dis)gracing the pages of the most prestigious of authors. As Charles G. Masinton recognizes, the great antagonist in male literature is frequently Womanif not a specific woman, then what she represents (45). In traditional male-authored fiction, the poisonous bitch is often an insatiably voracious figure. Devouring the souls of her victims, she seduces, betrays, murders, castrates, and mercilessly abuses those whose gentler and finer natures allow her to trample them. In an unholy display of her over-rapacious animus, she exudes carnality, sensuality, and intrinsic wisdom in the sense that she manipulates an intimate knowledge of man to use against him to further her own desires. In other works, the bitch transgresses against the female heroine, both to comparatively highlight the virtuous womans goodness and to act as an insidious emissary of patriarchy; doing the dirtiest of dirty work, she is a double agent in the gender battles. Yet what are her motivations? Her rewards? What is the impetus for her behavior? In much of the literature, the answer to that question remains an enigma. As Joanna Russ ironically notes in What Can a Heroine Do?: Now it is as useless to ask why the Bitch Goddess is so bitchy as it is
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to ask why the Noble Savage is so noble. Neither person really exists. . . . No man in his sense ever says of himself to himself: I acted nobly because I am a Noble Savage. His reasons are far more prosaic: I did what I did because I was afraid, or because I was ambitious, or because I wanted to provoke my father, or because I felt lonely, or because I needed money, and so on. Look for reasons like that to explain the conduct of the Bitch Goddess and you will not find them; there is no explanation in terms of human motivation or the womans inner life; she simply behaves the way she does because she is a bitch. (6) The reasons for her behaviorindeed, even the satisfactions she receives from her dastardly plotsare a mystery.2 She is shunned and reviled; her visage is an icon of heresy; she is held up as a paragon of shame like the heads of criminals impaled on pikes along London Bridge. She has no real existence in much of literature; she is a caricature, a bogey woman whose mission it is to frighten women away from desiring her particular powers: autonomy, self-interest, sexuality, certainty. The mythological and theological female figures that constitute the core of the malevolent archetypes that resurface repeatedly through the literature of history provide no concrete answer to the question of the bitchs motivations. Jungs belief was that the malignant female figures in myth are the founding mothers who reside in the males unconscious and are embodied in the anima, leading him to posit that confronting his anima is a fearful process for man, underscoring his fear of femininity in himself that is then projected onto women. Yet the multitude of evilly portrayed women in literature cannot all be mere projections of male fears of the anima, can they? Mary Daly unequivocally states, Patriarchy perpetuates its deception through Myth (44), and Alicia Ostriker adds, It is thanks to myth we believe that woman must be either angel or monster (316). From Pandoras damning of mankind to the evils of a worldly existence to Clytemnestras murder of Agamemnon, from Medeas horrific and bloody revenge to Circes inexplicable desire to turn men into swine,3 patriarchal mythology displays a rampant hatred and overlying fear of women. Similarly, the Bible perpetuates the notion that women, unless firmly kept under the patriarchal thumb, are to be approached with extreme caution. Biblical representations of the bitch include many such infamous women, such as Eve, accused for generations as the ostensible cause of mans fall from grace; Delilah, whose symbolic castration/haircut of Samson resulted in his loss of physical strength; Judith, who decapitates Holofernes following her seduction of him; and Jezebel, pagan queen whose adherence to the religion of Baal earned her not only religious condemnation but a curse that her body would be eaten by
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dogs.4 Each of these women serves as warning to the faithful, delivering a potent admonition: Thou shalt not let woman have power (or, for that matter, choice). Although the bitch in male-written narrative possesses stereotypical and generalized characteristics, such as an insistence upon autonomous power, an unpleasant nature, and a conspicuous lack of conventional morality, she does appear in several distinct manifestations. Common in male literature are several subtypes of the Bitch: the domineering shrew (Amazon), the Witch (Medium), the femme fatale (Hetaira), and the devouring mother (Terrible Mother). To these Jungianbased categories, another particularly malevolent incarnation may be added: the castrating bitchqueen of modern literature.
The Domineering Shrew

Leslie Fiedler writes, The figure of Rip Van Winkle presides over the birth of the American imagination; and it is fitting that our first successful homegrown legend should memorialize, however playfully, the flight of the dreamer from the shrew (xx). Ravenously lusting after mans proper authority, Washington Irvings Dame Van Winkle is the twisted sister of such notable nag/bitches as Chaucers Alison in The Wife of Baths Tale, termagant Katharina in Shakespeares The Taming of the Shrew, gold digger Gloria in Fitzgeralds The Beautiful and the Damned, Dickenss shrill Mrs. Joe in Great Expectations, emasculating Martha in Edward Albees Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf, power-mad Lady MacBeth, and, of course, pure-bitch Margot Macomber in Ernest Hemingways The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. Delores Barracano Schmidt, defining the Great American Bitch, notes her ubiquitous presence in twentieth-century American male fiction, recognizing that in this fiction the domineering shrew is to blame for marital unhappiness, infidelity, divorce, alienation. . . . She destroys [mans] masculinity and then scorns his weakness (904). The shrew is ever depicted as the victimizer of her weak and ruthlessly henpecked husband, and her behavior is rarely explained; however, the fiction implies a tacit assertion that she has hidden her natural venom prior to ensnaring the man into marriage. Frank Norriss novel McTeague chronicles the life of a young giant, selftaught dentist McTeague, whose comfortable and contented existence of napping and drinking steam beer lacks only one thing: It was his ambition, his dream, to have projecting from [the] corner window a huge gilded tooth, a molar with enormous prongs, something gorgeous and attractive, a quite modest, albeit gaudy, desire (4). Unfortunately, this pleasant existence of McTeagues will shatter upon his meeting and marrying Trina Sieppe. Trina has come to the Dental Parlors at the behest of her cousin/suitor Marcus to have a broken tooth fixed. McTeague is both agitated and threatened by Trina during this initial encounter: These young girls disturbed and perplexed him.
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He did not like them, obstinately cherishing that intuitive suspicion of all things femininethe perverse dislike of an overgrown boy (23). But, as he works on her teeth while she lies anesthetized and inert in his chair, the keenness of his dislike of her as a woman began to be blunted (24). After several sessions, Mac begins to feel the male virile desire in him tardily awakened, aroused itself, strong and brutal: Suddenly the animal in the man stirred and woke; the evil instincts that in him were so close to the surface leaped to life, shouting and clamoring. It was a crisisa crisis that had risen in an instant; a crisis for which he was totally unprepared. Blindly, and without knowing why, McTeague fought against it, moved by an unreasoned instinct of resistance. . . . Dimly he realized that should he yield now he would never be able to care for Trina again. She would never be the same to him, never so radiant, so sweet, so adorable; her charm for him would vanish in an instant. (2731) McTeague does succumb, however, and kisses her, grossly, full on the mouth, and regrets it: Why could he not always love her purely, cleanly? (32). Ruing the foul stream of hereditary evil, like a sewer he feels she that has initiated, thus transforming him into a lustful male, he asks Trina to marry him, once she has regained consciousness of course (3233). Inherent in this scene is McTeagues preconceived notion that woman is evil; he values her only as much as she retains inaccessible purity, yet he feels he must possess herthe age-old paradox. Woman as virgin is the epitome of the males desire; but once she has succumbed to that desire, she is no longer the virgin and therefore is no longer desirable. In his ambivalent perception of woman as negative, he will cast her into yet another negative image once she becomes his wife: oppressive harridan. During the engagement, Trina wins five thousand dollars from a lottery ticket, and instead of asking McTeague how to use the winnings, she decides to invest it and draw the interest. It is at this point that Trinas parsimonious nature begins to unaccountably manifest itself (Hochman 184). And what at first appears to be clever frugality quickly becomes obsession. Trina pinches pennies and lies about her savings, sacrificing luxuries and necessities in order to add coins to purse, becoming, as Barbara Hochman notes, a driven, ravaged, obsessive miser (184). Amassing a small fortune in a secreted cache, Trina nags McTeague about his spending habits, and in controlling the purse strings, Trina threatens her husbands masculinity. Moreover, Trina channels her Eros into the acquisition of money
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instead of nurturing McTeague, eroticizing the tangible coins as she tastes them and rolls naked on her bed with the money. When McTeague loses his business, Trinas fixation with money becomes even more pronounced, and she bears McTeagues physical abusepinching and gnawing on her fingers until two need to be amputatedrather than part with her adored coins. When McTeague ultimately murders his wife, her behavior has left little reason for the reader to mourn her demise, and even the knowledge that McTeague has savagely beaten her and left her to die a lingering, painful death does not mitigate reactions to her unsympathetic portrait. The reader is never acquainted with the reasons for Trinas gold lust. She is first portrayed as a well-off, pleasant, naive young woman, and her radical reversal of demeanor remains unsupported, leaving the impression that she derives pleasure from depriving McTeague and that her true nature had been duplicitously hidden from McTeague during the courtship. Trinas actions also suggest that she perceives her power to be a monetary one, and that her animus manifests itself in control of the purse strings. Trina is portrayed as masculineespecially after McTeague loses his means to an incomedisdaining feminine pleasures of dress and decoration in favor of collecting the coins. Having acceded to societal demands that she fulfill the feminine role by marrying, Trina refuses to succumb to the role of subservient wife; instead, she wrests control from the unwary McTeague, who has erroneously assumed that Trina, like the golden molar, would act as inert symbol of his comfortable life.
The Witch
Women who reject subjugation have always found themselves open to the charge of heresy: witchcraft. The Odysseys famous sorceress, Circe, is charged with spellbinding Odysseus into remaining her sexual prisoner, forgetting his swinish crew and his faithful wife, Penelope. Jezebel, principally due to her position as high priestess of Baal, is likewise branded a witch while attempting to enthrall Elijah. Although the more stereotypical portrayal of witches in their sexless crone or hag guise can be found, for instance, in the weird sisters of Shakespeares MacBeth with their duplicitous prophesies and their mysterious conjuring, it is the succubitic and sexually treacherous female who inspires the most fascination, and dread, in male protagonists. The Witch embodies malevolence for male writers in several senses. Because she is usually an unattached female, her disregard for male protection renders her suspect. Her reliance on nature instead of Logosin such characters as Malorys Morgana le Fay in Morte dArtur, Spensers Acrasia and Duessa in The Faerie Queene, Joseph Conrads totemic African woman in Heart of Darkness, H. Rider Haggards
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She Who Must Be Obeyed in Shealso causes concern in males, especially when her natural sensibilities are successfully employed (Dijkstra 129). Ironically, however, the woman is not allowed to rely upon logic or rationality either; thus, the endemic and convicting portrayals of the Witch serve to underscore the fear of female power. For example, John Updikes treatment of women as witches, detailed in The Witches of Eastwick,5 reflects the male need to restrict and reform transgressing and powerful women. The gist of the novel is that womendeserted, divorced, or widowedmay conjure up a demonic power because they are bereft of a mans stabilizing influence. Updike has stated: Now that divorce has become common, what do women do with their freedom from male or patriarchal authority, and how do women handle power? It was a convention of feminist thought, at least in the sixties and seventies, that men were murderous in their use of power, and that women, were they allowed power, would of course not be. . . . So I was trying to explore, on the realistic level, the whole question of power in women. Would it become less murderous in female hands? And, of course, my thought was, it wouldnt. (Plath 264) As it happens, the women are unable to control their power, led as they are by Eros instead of rationally male Logos. In the end, Alex, Jane, and Suki willingly cede their powers; their final act is to conjure up their perfect man and happily revert back into the stable and secure world of matrimony. In 1860, in his novel Great Expectations, Charles Dickens created old-crone witch/bitch Miss Havisham, who maneuvers her surrogate daughter, Estella, into becoming the agent of her revenge against her fortune-hunting, no-show bridegroom of many prior decades. The self-desexed Miss Havisham uses her seemingly elemental knowledge of the masculine in her overly developed animus to expertly train Estella as an apprentice who will manipulate Pip as human guinea pig into a position of precarious vulnerability; under Miss Havishams tutelage, she will learn the art of sabotaging her future husband. And although Miss Havishams crimes against Estella brook pity for Estellas subsequent inability to love, her betrayal of Pip is what is ultimately perceived to be her greater sin (Meisel 284). Pip, like Jay Gatsby, had wed his unutterable vision to Estellas perishable breath; therefore, when Estella rejects him, due to the machinations of Miss Havisham, he is bereft of purpose. And in Great Expectations, unlike in The Great Gatsby, the hero is not afforded the release of death. Pips life and hope, especially in the first version of the novels ending, are thoroughly shattered.
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As with most depictions of the bitch, Miss Havisham does not tell her own story; she is interpreted through the masculine narrator, and thus the reader never hears her motivations for her actions (Romig 18). The reader learns her story as Pip does, through the gossip of males. Miss Havishams nephew Herbert Pocket tells Pip that she was a spoilt child. Her mother died when she was a baby, and her father denied her nothing (166). Herbert relates that a man who was not a gentleman bilked her out of enormous sums and then abandoned her on her wedding day (16870). Thus, she waitsdressed in decaying bridal clothingpatiently and ceaselessly waiting for the terrible atonement she wishes to exact in her witchy lair, surrounded by the fetishized objects that serve to keep her hatred powerful.6 All the symptoms of the Medium/Witch are in order; Miss Havisham is the antithesis of the Wise Woman. Lacking feminine identification because of the death of her mother, she is equally devoid of masculine identification due to her fathers weakness. Her ego has been portrayed as so inflated by her obsessive will that it contains very little room for either maternal or paternal influences. Her potential, therefore, as Wise Woman has been thwarted, inverted into the character of false prophetess. Curt Hartog states, At the center of Dickenss portrayal of women in Great Expectations lies a stark and melodramatic image: women, lacking the capacity to love, become destructive to themselves and to men. Like predators, they must be held firmly, even violently in check (249). As one of the many malevolent females in this novel, Miss Havisham takes the sole recourse she has toward power: she will make a man, or more than one if she is successful, become as bereft and miserable as she has been rendered.7 Miss Havisham goads Pip, stoking his growing admiration for Estella, and she also seems to instigate in Pip a deep disgust with his home and lot in life. He feels a shame he has never felt before and attributes this shame to Miss Havishams influence. He begins to dream of becoming a gentlemana dream meant to make him worthy of Estellayet the reader may infer that Pip is merely a practice target for not only Estella8 but Miss Havisham and Mrs. Joe as well; as a male child, he is one of the few males that the unhappy women may wreak their vengeance upon. Upon receiving news of his great expectations, Pip misinterprets Miss Havishams mission for him, and he sets himself up as a fairy tales protagonist with Miss Havisham as fairy godmother:9 She reserved it for me to restore the desolate house, admit the sunshine into the dark rooms, set the clocks a-going, and the cold hearth ablazing, tear down the cobwebs, destroy the verminin short, do all the shining deeds of the young knight of romance, and marry the Princess. (216)
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Miss Havisham feeds the vision, urging him to love Estella: If she favors you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to piecesand as it gets older and stronger it will tear deeperlove her, love her, love her! (223). Pip is convinced that Miss Havisham wishes him to become the Prince Charming, whose quest it will be to rescue Estella/Rapunzel from her tower. Pip blindly refuses to recognize that Miss Havisham is no fairy godmother but rather the negative version of the archetype: the witch who has incarcerated Estella. However, by the end of the novel, Pip has learned which fairy tale he is really in: In shutting out the light of day, she had shut out infinitely more; that, in seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker, I knew equally well. And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world? (37071) The fairy godmother has been defrocked, revealing the Witch/bitch instead of the benefactress. Miss Havisham will be severely punished in the novel. Estella, bred to be frigid and indifferent, also naturally rejects Miss Havisham. In horror, Miss Havisham recognizes the creature she has trained; You stock and stone! exclaimed Miss Havisham. You cold, cold heart! (283). Miss Havishams initial punishment is to feel the misery of loneliness. She has not shunned the world; the world shuns her. Likewise, when Pip learns of Miss Havishams subterfuge, he tells her, I am as unhappy as you can ever have meant me to be (333). Professing his love for Estella, Pip causes Miss Havisham to experience the pain of a long-suppressed conscience; in this meeting with Pip, she falls to her knees, weeps, confesses, begs forgiveness, and cries out, What have I done! What have I done! (370). She speaks now with earnest womanly compassion in her new affection (371). The agony of her remorse and the nature of her humble and self-effacing penitence are yet additional punishmentspunishments that effectively annihilate her once powerful animus. Finally, Miss Havisham is burned; the clothing she has worn for half a century catches the flame and disintegrates. That Miss Havisham dies as the result of a fire is a seemingly fitting end for her character; after all, the traditional death sentence
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for the hag-crone-witch is to be burned at the stake.10 She dies, hysterically attempting to justify her actions as well as apologize for them. The power of the bitch has been burned from Miss Havisham, and instead of reveling in her magnificent obsession, she is reduced to pathetic whimpering in naked shame. From all viewpoints, Miss Havishams excesses are inexplicable. Her jilting by such an odious bridegroom may be seen only as fortuitous, and thus her behavior cannot be justified except through reason of insanity. Yet Miss Havishams successful plotting reveals a calculating logic and perceptive foresight. Once again, the actions of the bitch defy logical understanding. A contemporary version of the Witch in her guise as malevolent muse can be found in Stephen Kings Misery. Annie Wilkes, bodice-ripper novelist Paul Sheldons biggest fan, finds him half dead from a car accident. Delighted to mother him back to health in her makeshift hospital/hostage cell in a desolate Colorado mountain farm, Annies eccentricity evolves into evil when she realizes that Sheldon has killed off her beloved heroine Misery Chastain in his latest book. Forcing him to burn his newer and more literary manuscript, Fast Cars, Annie insists that Paul bring Misery back to life, threatening him with dire consequences if he should fail her. Although Annie does not possess a spiritual witchcraft, she nonetheless casts her spells in forcing Paul to do her bidding. As Kathleen Margaret Lant points out, Annie seizes the role of the (literary) creator, compelling Sheldon to write her narrative: When Annie Wilkes . . . inhibits or usurps the creative process, she threatens the artists autonomy and masculinity. She immobilizes him, she even begins to cut off pieces of his body, hinting that she will ultimately excise that most essentially masculine partshe will castrate him (93). The Muse is supposed to inspire and gently guide, not threaten and demand, and certainly not amputate body parts. Sheldon, even before Annie invades his creative omnipotence, resents this woman; in realizing that he has been fed intravenously, he thinks that she has raped him back into life (6). His revulsion toward Annie is an overt reaction to the revulsion he feels toward all women, for Sheldon displays an acute hostility toward the female readers who have read him into fame and fortune. He reviles their stupidity in reading his trashy novels as well as their voracious appetites for more of his novels. Of course, the hostility he professes is actually a projection: he abhors his own anima, his feminine self that allows him to so fully tune in to his female audiences desires. Sheldon thus deplores his feminization at the hands of Annie; equating himself with Scheherazade, he mind-fucks Annie with pieces of manuscript in return for his life and rails against the state of whoredom Annie has forced him into (King 66). Sheldon, like McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, will regain his masculinity by overpowering Annie in a horrifying rape scene (Lant 104). In
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burning Annies text, the one she has forced him to write, he is symbolically burning Annie the Witch. Using the semiburnt pages of the novel that Annie has forced him to write, he forces himselfas embodied in the manuscriptdown Annies throat. King makes this scene vividly real as Sheldon shouts, Im gonna rape you, all right Annie. Im gonna rape you because all I can do is the worst I can do. Suck my book. Suck on it until you fucking choke (292). Sheldon reasserts his masculinity, rapaciously reclaiming his maleness from Annie the usurper, and defeats the Witch by destroying her power. For Sheldon, this recovery is accomplished by his reasserting the proper hierarchy of gender.
The Femme Fatale

By far, the most ubiquitous bitch in literature has been the fallen and fiendish femme fatale, a harlot who triggers an often unconscious male fear of womens power and sexuality, both potential weapons of destruction (Horn and Pringle 3). The whore is a staple in fiction, and as Horn and Pringle recognize, until recently she has most often appeared in male-written fiction. Horn and Pringle note, Over and over again male writers have cast the prostitute in limited fictional roles, as a type rather than a real person (2). Sometimes portrayed as a victim (such as Stephen Cranes Maggie in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Defoes Moll Flanders) or as an earthy, heart-of-gold prostitute (such as Nancy in Charles Dickenss Oliver Twist) or as an innocently adulterous heroine (such as the protagonists in The Scarlet Letter, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Lady Chatterleys Lover, and Tess of the dUrbervilles), she is more often rendered as deceitful and deserving of her low social stature. Linking carnality with a thirst for material gain, the whore-bitch reigns. Take, for example, calculating Becky Sharpe in Thackerays Vanity Fair; William Faulkners sexually promiscuous females, most notably Temple Drake in Sanctuary; 11 Nana in Emile Zolas novel of the same name; the evil female vampires of Bram Stoker; Faye Greener in Nathaniel Wests Day of the Locust; Carol Kennicott in Sinclair Lewiss Main Street; and Mildred Rogers in Somerset Maughams Of Human Bondage. Granddaughters of Delilah and Circe, these women use their sensual and sexual charms to ensnare men and then bilk them out of their fortunes or their manhood. And while most of the femme fatales deliberately direct their malevolence toward a male figure, the hetairian bitch is also depicted in an antagonistic position against another woman as the male characters henchmana hetairian role in the sense of its concubinal/partner-in-crime connotations. In Henry Jamess The Portrait of a Lady, for example, Serena Merle is condemned far more in the novel than is the self-serving, villainous Gilbert Osmond.12 Serena is the one who is ultimately banished into exile for her calculating treachery, while virtuous Isabel Archer returns to her emotionally abusive and misogynist husband. The reader
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may infer that while Gilberts behavior is excusable because he is a man, Serena Merles is not excusable precisely because she is not a man. Jamess novels return over and over again to the portrait of the negative hetairian female; some examples are Kate Croy in The Wings of the Dove, Olive Chancellor in The Bostonians,13 and Charlotte Stant in The Golden Bowl. Fiedler notes that these dark counter-virgins circle nervously about their destined prey drawn by an ambivalent love (304). In the cases of Kate and Charlotte, the object of that ambivalent love is clearly a male character; however, in The Bostonians, Olive is enamored with a woman. In The Portrait of a Lady, Serena Merles love object is less distinctly drawn: Osmond? Pansy? Isabel? Herself? Serena Merle is the classic Hetaira; her portrait is one of a woman who is secretive, devious, worldly, and perhaps tragic (Stafford 119). She is ever allocated to the supporting role and is never the star. Moreover, Serena lives a vicarious existence; existing on the fringes of others experiences, she lives what might be seen as parasitically: she is the perpetual guest. For example, Serena accepts Isabels offer to be her traveling companion at Isabels expense. The reader is first introduced to Serena through the naive eyes of Isabel Archer, Serenas future protge, who will accept her as a mentor. She is described by Isabel as a Bust . . . a Juno or a Niobe, like a German of high degree, perhaps an Austrian, a baroness, a countess, a princess. . . . She was, in a word a woman of strong impulses kept in admirable order (22829).14 Serenas rationality, experience, and even somewhat cynical knowledge will contrast sharply with Isabels initial romantic gullibility, her maidenly innocence; however, as the novel progresses, the figure of Serena Merle will provide a comparative image of the woman Isabel is developing into. Isabel almost immediately finds herself desiring to emulate Madame Merle and justifies this impulse by thinking, The more ones under a good influence the better (242). Her enamored view of Serena is not even tainted by Serenas confessionsI know a large part of myself is in the clothes I choose to wear. Ive a great respect for things!the mantra of the bitch (253). Isabel remains firm in her positive reactions, refusing even to believe Serenas candid self-observationsIve been shockingly chipped and cracked. I do very well for service yet, because Ive been cleverly mended (245)and her admission of being very ambitious! (251). Serena, serving as guide and social patroness to Isabel Archer, is another woman who first appears to be an incarnation of the fairy godmothera fairy godmother who will remold Isabel into her own image rather than endowing her with gown, coach, and glass slippers, particularly when she discovers that Isabel has inherited a fortune: Ah, she cried, the clever creature! (260). Serena, with her sophis-
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tication, tact, and civilized charm, will then introduce Isabel to the prince in the form of Gilbert Osmond, and the two will live happily ever after. Of course, Serena is playing fairy godmother/faithful Hetaira, but her spells are meant to benefit her former lover Gilbert and their child, Pansy, as well as to vicariously realize her own ambition. Isabel, with more than just a touch of arrogance, simply assumes that Serena Merle finds her extraordinary, claiming Isabel as worthy apprentice. She finds it impossible that Serena might have an ulterior motive in soliciting her company and arranging a meeting with Osmond. For instance, when Serena congratulates Isabel on making a good impression on Osmond, Isabel coldly replies, Im under no obligation that I know of to charm Mr. Osmond (299). In fact, Isabels opinion of Serena Merle begins to become marred, as if, perhaps, Isabel feels she has surpassed the woman. She complains to Ralph that Serena is exaggerated (301); she views Serena as armed at all points (451); she feels that she has lost the desire to know [Serenas] clever trick (452). Isabel belatedly realizes that Madame Merle had indeed made her marriage to Osmond, and she also feels as time goes on that there was not so much to thank her for (454). Ultimately, Isabel concludes that Serena is wicked and deeply false (565). Belatedly she comes to the realization that Serena and Osmond had obviously been lovers; thus, Serenas allegiance had not been to her but to Osmond all along. Isabel tells Mrs. Touchett, She made a convenience of me (618). Marjorie Perloff contends that the actual villainess of the novel might be Isabel Archer and not Serena (416). Stafford similarly contends, We see developed a kind of interchanging coalescence, Isabel becoming something of a Serena Merle, Serena Merle becoming something of an Isabel Archer (121). Isabel has learned the lessons of her mentor well; her hetairian desire to float Gilberts boat may be viewed as a vicarious desire to aggrandize herself.15 Although due to the equation of Isabel with Serena, it might be tempting to conclude that James is somewhat exonerating Serena, the punishments for both women are quite severe. Isabel is condemned at novels end back to the inhospitable arms of Gilbert Osmond, Serena Merle will return to America, and each of the hetairae is doomed to remain outside the realm of personal attachment. In particular, Serena, in returning to America, will have lost all sense of herself. Because she has only existed as an extension of another, Serena has made no permanent commitments, and she will be cut off from her tentative but sustaining attachments (not to mention her separation from her daughter). Without purpose, Serena, aged and beyond the possibility of the ambitious marriage she had desired, will be condemned to the lonely fate of all hetairae/whores who lose their seductive powers.
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A contemporary femme fatale, Carolyn Polhemus, the power-slut murder victim in Scott Turows Presumed Innocent, is, as Amelia Jones contends, distorted by projected [male] anxieties (297). Ironically contrasted against the good woman, Barbara Sabichhousewife and graduate student, who turns out to be the murderessCarolyns rapacious sexuality and take-no-prisoners rise up the legal and political ladder positions her as rabidly dangerous. Jones notes, Polhemus is exhibitionist, highly sexualized as desired/desiring woman. She is also extremely masculine, phallic, in her absolute focus on getting ahead in her career . . . she succeeds professionally through a particularly feminine sexual duplicity, soliciting favors through seduction (3034). And, as is often the case, the protagonist Rusty Sabichis depicted as powerless to resist the wiles of this femme fatale; he confesses, I was devastated by my passion. Riven. Decimated. Torn to bits (105). Sabich describes Carolyn as like a newborn come into the world with certain organs missing (377). He tells of being overwhelmed by her jangling jewelry and her light perfume, her silk blouses, her red lipstick and painted nails, that large heaving bosom and her long legs, that splash of bright hair (33). Utterly transparent in her drive up the political ladder, Carolyn nonetheless enthralls the otherwise astute Sabich. Sabich relates that, following her initial overtures, in a pit of darkness, my obsessions took on a sabering quality, and knowing that I had entered the region of the real, I began to feel, simply, fear (63). Carolyn keeps her seduction keen until Sabich declares that he will not run in an upcoming election. Understanding that her prey has lost his value, Carolyn discards Sabich and leaves him inconsolably bereft; Sabichs masculinity has suffered a severe blow. Thus Sabich ultimately decides that her death is a positive experience, both freeing him from enthrallment and freeing herself as well: She was like a spider caught in her own web (377). Carolyn, while actively displaying her femininity, is paradoxically masculine; she is trying to prove that she had balls (30). She has had her tubes tied, and as Jones asserts, Polhemuss anatomical lack provisionally endows her with the phallus . . . because it subverts the social norm that requires willingness to procreate as the key element in confirming a womans femininity, it labels her as deviant and dangerous (305). Moreover, like Nurse Ratched, Carolyn fails at both femininity and masculinity; Jones notes that her use of sexuality to gain career advancement marks her as outside the nature of femininity, and yet she transgresses the masculine role precisely by flaunting her femininity to obtain the promotions (305). Paradoxically then, the femme fatale is not, as popular culture presupposes, a sexual creature at all. These women are desexed, their carnality linked to power, their libidos linked to material quests; their very humanity remains questionable. Implicit in their various depictions is the assertion that they are beyond redemption; death is the only salvation.
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The Devouring Mother

Male authors damn the women who refuse motherhoodsuch as Ibsens Hedda Gabler, who is disgusted even by the suggestion of maternity, or Euripidess Medea, who kills her sons in retaliation for Jasons betrayaland they also condemn the women who bear children and who are then less than successful at mothering such as Pauls mother in D. H. Lawrences The Rocking Horse Winner, who values material wealth even above the life of her son, or Maisies mother, Ida Farange, in Henry Jamess What Maisie Knew. In fact, relatively few favorable mothers are present in male fiction and drama. For instance, Shakespeares Gertrude in Hamlet and Lady Capulet, Juliets mother in Romeo and Juliet, exemplify destructive selfishness: their refusal to sacrifice themselves for their childrens sakes results in the deaths of Hamlet and Juliet. Yet, conversely, the women who do devote themselves to their children are also subject to reproach; their very devotion spells disaster for their entrapped children. Mrs. Compson in William Faulkners The Sound and the Fury reigns as one of literatures most malignant mothers. Ellen Douglas awards Mrs. Compson the worst of Faulkners females medal for her whining self-pity, selfishness, capacity for self-destruction, lovelessness, and obsession with respectability [that destroys] her childrens lives (156). Yet Mrs. Compsons faults of whining hypochondria and wallowing in pathetic indignation at her own choice of a marriage partner pale in contrast to her self-absorbed motherhood. She considers Benjies mental incapacity to be a personal trial; Caddys sexual indiscretions and resultant pregnancy rouse in her only a desire to save her own name from scandal; and, to her, Quentins suicide is similarly scandalous rather than tragic. Mrs. Compson does declare devotion to her son Jason; however, her very favor adds to Jasons corrupt nature, allowing him to believe that he is removed from the mundane aspects of life, including familial respect. Georges mother, Elizabeth Willard, in Sherwood Andersons Winesburg, Ohio, deludes herself into believing that her son is being stifled by his father when the textual evidence suggests that it is she who is impeding his successful entry into manhood. An invalid of indeterminate diagnosis, Elizabeth is the agent of guilt who reduces her son to a terrible apathy. Caught between his desire to escape and his responsibility to his mother, George wavers hesitantly upon deciding a course for his future. And while Georges father also inhibits his son by insisting he join the familys failing business, Anderson suggests that Elizabeth is feeding upon her sons will. By openly despising her husband (although her hatred takes the form of silent martyrdom rather than shrewish behavior), Elizabeth manipulates George into self-hatred by compelling him to despise his own masculinity.16 In other words, particularly because his mother is an invalid, George is unwilling to rebel against
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her masochism; therefore, he is unable to reject her. George cannot bear the guilt of such a self-liberating action. Yet George has also internalized his conflict with his mothers dominance, resulting in his diminished ego and masculine potency. Elizabeth prays, God may beat me with his fists. I will take any blow that may befall if but this my boy may be allowed to express something for us both (40). Yet Elizabeth also prays, Do not let him become smart and successful either, revealing her need to control her son (41). She makes her son feel awkward and confused, and she spies on him, silently willing him to become the agent of her own release (42). Struggling with her husband, Tom, whom she blames for the truncation of her own life and dreams, Elizabeth waits for George to defy his father. Elizabeth even considers stabbing her husband in order to enact Georges Oedipal conflict. And when George tells her that he will leave the town, Elizabeth wants to cry out with joy because of the words that had come from the lips of her son (48). Elizabeth does not realize that George is escaping not merely from his fathers expectations but from his mothers control as well. Popular culture has fetishized the devouring mother, portraying her as a clichd monstrosity of negative motherhood. From Norman Batess mother-induced psychopathological behavior in Alfred Hitchcocks Psycho to the snarling, satirical portrayals of the interfering mother in film (Throw Momma from the Train, Wheres Poppa?), she has been endowed with the extraordinary power of being responsible for withholding manhood from her real and surrogate sons. Late-twentieth-century literature has found the idea of the mother to be especially problematic; her traditional persona of self-abnegation and altruistic nature has been shaken by feminist arguments, and contemporary male authors have responded with threatened warnings. Janet Angstrom in John Updikes Rabbit novels drowns her infant in an alcoholic haze, for example, and Helen Garp in John Irvings The World According to Garp is inadvertently responsible for the death of her young son, Walt, due to her adulterous affair with one of her students. One contemporary novelist with a string of devouring mothers in his published record is Pat Conroy, who vilifies the mother again and again in his books. Exemplary of the mothers in Conroys novels is Lila Wingo, mother of the three damaged Wingo children in The Prince of Tides. Described as beautiful by her adoring/despising son Tom, Lila is mercilessly indicted throughout the novel. Toms hatred is apparently initiated when his mother draws the eight-yearold boy into her bed and tells him that she loves him best. Repelled and disgusted by Lilas confession, Tom grows to reject the feminine, culminating in the near destruction of his marriage. When Toms twin sister, Savannah, tries to commit suicide again, Tom enters into a professional-turned-personal relationship with a female psychiatrist who teaches him, perhaps, to accept the women in his life. Referring to her, tellingly,
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only by her last nameLowensteinTom vents his mother-hatred to her in his autobiographical sessions. Lila has betrayed her son, selling herself to her second husband with the price of Toms patrimonial lands and thereby causing the death of Toms brother, Luke, who turned guerrilla terrorist to regain the land. She has discredited Toms image of his father by revealing him to be a violent and uncouth man. But most of all, she has been responsiblebecause her beauty incurred the notice of a psychoticfor the literal rape of young Tom. Lilas quest for happiness, tacitly affirmed by Conroy, is the poisonous catalyst for the Wingos childrens many tragedies, even though she insists, Im worth every bit of . . . worship (602). Lila is driven in a quest for material gain, even, Tom believes, at the expense of her own children. Lila tells her son: I think I could have been the First Lady. . . . I simply feel that I have all the qualities that would make a dignified and worthy First Lady for our country. I think I would have been an asset as the helpmate of the president or perhaps a governor. I have a real talent for entertaining that no one knows about. And I love to meet the people who count. I sometimes think of all I could have been if I hadnt met your father in Atlanta that day. (586) Of course, Lila is also implying that she would prefer not to be the mother of the three Wingo children, and Tom asks, Why do you blame me for the fact that Henry Wingo is my father? (585). One of Lilas great sins, according to Tom, is that she disempowered his father, showed him to be nothing more than a pathetic bully. And, because Tom has lost his vision of his father as a masculine ideal, his own manhood has suffered a potentially fatal blow. For Tom, having lost his ability to relate to his father, the task of finding his own masculinity is treacherously difficult. Because he was raped during the summer following his high school graduationjust as he was poised on the cusp of adulthoodhe feels emasculated. On a rainy night, while Henry Wingo is out shrimping, the Wingo household is invaded by three prison escapees, one of whom has been fixated on Lila for years. While his mother begs for help, Tom is overcome by impotence and succumbs to his own violent rape while the other convicts are raping his mother and sister (477). Saved by the older brother, Luke, the family is forbidden by Lila to call the police; she insists, This didnt happen (485). By denying the significance of the ordeal to her children, Lila forces Tom, Savannah, and Luke to repress the violation of their sexuality and identity. As further humiliation, Lila gives Tom a Kotex to staunch the blood from his torn rectum, reinforcing his sense of emasculation. Tom tells Luke, Shes making it seem as if it was our fault somehow, blaming Lila for her inability to deal with
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the trauma (486). Lila even makes her children swear never to tell anyone about the incident: She told us she would cease being our mother if we broke that promise (489). And it is this secret that irrevocably wounds her children. Toms sexual development and his maturity remain static until he is finally able to tell the story to Susan Lowenstein. Yet his revelation only brooks a partial reconciliation with his mother. The final pages of the novel detail Toms acceptance of his father, and Lila is relegated to the deep background as the deficient mother who may be only forgiven for her crimes but never understood.
The Castrating Bitch

The castrating bitch is a marvel of integration. In her character, she has incorporated all of the bitch stereotypes: domineering shrew, witch, femme fatale, and devouring mother. Demanding, devious, sexually predaceous, egocentrically possessed, she chews men up and leaves them bereft of their manhood. She is particularly devout in her soulless quest to acquire the phallus for herself. Yet, even with her quadrupled power, she will find no victory in male-authored literature; her rewards will be at best an unrelenting existential loneliness and at worst death. The castrating bitch found her most lucrative breeding ground to be twentiethcentury American soil. And while she most certainly trounced her way through other continents in other centuries, her American incarnation may be the most vivid and the most damaging. America is female, writes Judith Fetterly. To be American is male; and the quintessential American experience is betrayal by women (18). Similarly, Delores Barracano Schmidt contends that many of the canonized male writers of the twentieth centurysuch authors as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgeraldcreated The Great American Bitch Archetype (901). For example, as Beverly Gross notes: The fascination of [Hemingways Lady] Brett Ashley [in The Sun Also Rises] is that she lives and loves like a man: her sexuality is unrepressed and she doesnt care much for monogamy. She turns her male admirers into womenMike becomes a self-destructive alcoholic, Robert a moony romantic, Pedro a sacrificial virgin, and Jake a frustrated eunuch. . . . Lady Ashley is not a bitch because she is nasty, bossy, or ill-tempered. . . . She is a bitch because she overturns the male/female nexus. What could be a more threatening infraction in a Hemingway novel? (152)17 Although, as Schmidt notes, the castrating bitch reached full bloom during the male angstridden 1920s, her role has not diminished in the ensuing decades. The women in Bernard Malamuds 1952 novel, The Natural, work in their
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various guises to steal hero Roy Hobbss potency, as symbolically portrayed in his magic phallic bat, Wonderboy. Unlike the popular film version, in which Roy is portrayed as a kind of healing savior, Malamuds original version focuses on how evil women corrupt the gifted man. The novel is, in fact, a retelling of the Fisher King myth with Roy depicted as Sir Percival or Arthur himself (Wasserman). In the book, after Roy has sold his soul to the owner of the team, the Judge, for thirty pieces of thousand dollar bills, the phallic Wonderboy is irredeemably broken in two, symbolizing the destruction of the masculine and the ultimate victory of the bitch.18 As Lucio Ruotolo recognizes, Malamuds egotistical heroes prove incapable of dealing with, much less loving, women (329). In The Natural, the initial instigator of Roys defeat is Harriet Bird, the woman in black, who shoots Roy on the eve of his big league baseball tryout, rendering him powerless for the next fifteen years. She is depicted as a woman who is less and more human (65). Roy believes that she has stolen his destiny, although a close reading might suggest that she, as the agent of destruction, has not punished his male power but has delivered an injunction against his heretical proclamation that he is the best (39). The next bitch who thwarts Roy is Memo, Morganatic in every sense, the temptress for whom Roy sells out (Wasserman 442). Memo has an unwanted sexual encounter with Roy on his first night back in the big leagues, and he becomes enthralled even though he is warned away from her by the Judge and her uncle, Pop Fisher, the manager and part-owner of the team. Memo poisons Roy and engineers his agreement to fix the pennant game and sell his soul. Roy hates his mother, telling Memo that she was a whore. She spoiled my old mans life and relating a hideous story of her drowning a black cat in her bathtub and then forcing Roy to get rid of the carcass (203). In the women Roy pursuesHarriet and Memo, both of whom are depicted as calculating whores he finds only a feminized masculinity willing to destroy in order to gain power. Harriet, though granted no motivation for her murderous quest to destroy the best of mensports heroesis obviously wreaking some terrible vengeance against all men by killing their idols. And Memo, ostensibly mourning the death of her lover at Roys self-defensive hands, may be equated with Harriet, seductively leading him to destruction by attempting to force him to sacrifice his ideals. Iris Lemon, although more sympathetically depicted, also weakens Roy and contributes to his spectacular downfall. Iris, unlike Glenn Closes portrayal of her in the film, is not redemptive, although she might have been had Roy recognized her beneficial nature. Iris, as an innocentalthough a mother and grandmother at the early age of thirty-threeis representative of the triple goddess: maiden/
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mother/crone.19 Offering Roy a symbolic redemption if he will accept hershe states, I hate to see a hero failIris exemplifies the morality Roy has rejected due to his monomania (167). Daring to strive for the unachievablebreaking for all time every baseball record, a form of immortalityRoy refuses conventional immortality through procreation. Therefore, Iriss revelation that she is pregnant, although temporarily giving Roy a reason to defy the Judges attempt to fix the game, is not strong enough. Her revelation muddles Roys direction and thus inadvertently causes his final defeat. In essence, if Roy had not been seduced by Harriet and Memo, he may have achieved his goals. Also, if Iriss presence had not changed Roys mind, his abject humiliation at failing might have been mitigated. In The Natural, all malignant forcesgreed, corruption, impotencyare embodied in woman. Yet, in the end, it is Roys blind insistence that the women are indeed powerless that traps him. His ego will not allow him to contemplate that Memo had set him up, that Harriet would shoot him, or that Iris with her half-old, half-young body could grant him strength. Roy is utterly shattered; in fact, the morning newspaper carries the threat that the baseball commissioner will be erasing Roys records. Another infamous bitch created in 1952, Cathy Ames Trask, in John Steinbecks East of Eden, embodies the particularly inhuman nature of the traditional bitch character. East of Edens narrator leaves no room for reader conjecture as he describes Cathy: I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents (82). He reflects that there was a time when a girl like Cathy would have been called possessed by the devil. She would have been exorcised to cast out the evil spirit, and if after many trials that did not work, she would have been burned as a witch for the good of the community (83). And of course, within the tradition of the bitch, Cathys special field of knowledge is sexuality.20 The narrator describes Cathy as having a face of innocence and a childs figure, qualities that belie the nature of her evil (83). Akin to Nabokovs Lolitaanother girl-child mysteriously endowed with primal sexual knowledgeCathy possesses an innate knowledge of depravity that has no known source, giving rise to the assumption that Cathy has been born with a mysteriously conjured malignancy in her.21 Nearly everyone in the world has appetites and impulses, trigger emotions, islands of selfishness, lusts just below the surface. And most people hold such things in check or indulge them secretly. Cathy knew not only these impulses in others but how to use them for her own gain. It is quite possible that she did not believe in any other tendencies in humans, for while she was preternaturally alert in some directions she was completely blind in others. (85)
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Cathys precocious childhood is peppered with insinuations of carnality. The narrator implies that Cathy possesses an elemental eroticism that results in two boys imprisonments, an older mans suicide, and numerous questionable assignations, all occurring before Cathy reaches adulthood. Cathy as the bitch has not gained such status through any articulated external circumstances; she is, therefore, by implication, irredeemable. Cathy attempts to flee her home shortly after her sixteenth birthday, and after having been thwarted by her parents, she murders them. Cathy then proceeds to her seemingly inevitable profession: whore. It is only upon a miscalculation she takes a drink that ostensibly lowers her inhibitions and allows her true nature to blaze forththat she is savagely beaten and forced to rely upon others for assistance. Cathy crawls her way to the farm of Adam and Charles Trask, the two brothers whose destiny it is to repeat the story of Abel and Cain. Adam, quintessentially innocent, seems marked for favor, while Charles, bewildered by his own mark of evil, struggles with his own unfulfilled yearnings for acceptance and deliverance from his rage. Motherless Adam and father-neglected Charles are both ill equipped for dealings in a complex world as Adam recognizes only the illusions of a romantic existence and Charles is likewise blinded by a cynical recognition of mans (and womans) failings. Thus, Adams nurturing instincts fail to allow him insight into Cathys true nature, while Charless perceptions condemn Cathy: Shes just a twobit whore. I wouldnt trust her with a bit piecewhy, that bitch, that slut! (141). Cathy understands CharlesShe had respected Charlesand Charles probably would have killed her if he could (586)but Cathy marries the naive Adam for the protection she needs to recuperate. Adam, in a gross miscalculation, then moves Cathy to California against her wishes. Perhaps Adam did not see Cathy at all, so lighted was she by his eyes. Burned in his mind was an image of beauty and tenderness, a sweet and holy girl, precious beyond thinking, clean and loving, and that image was Cathy to her husband, and nothing Cathy did or said could warp Adams Cathy. She said she did not want to go to California and he did not listen, because his Cathy took his arm and started first. (152) Cathy moves with him and stays only long enough to bear twinswho might have been fathered by either Adam or Charlesand prepares to leave. When Adam tries to stop her, she coldly and indifferently shoots him to prevent him from impeding her flight, her action instigating a symbolic impotence in Adam. East of Eden metaphorically associates Cathy with Eve.22 Eves crime, assisting in the fall of man, arises from her piqued desire to possess knowledge, a trait
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reserved for males. Yet Cathys scorn for Adams innocencehis failure to acknowledge the lessons of good and evilis revealed by Steinbeck to be a paradoxical fear of the unknown: her own inability to learn from the tree of knowledge. Over and over again, characters come to the conclusion that Cathy lacks something. Adam is finally partially freed from Cathy when he tells her upon visiting her at her brothel: You dont believe I loved you. And the men who come here with their ugliness, and the men in the [sexually explicit] picturesyou dont believe those men could have beauty in them. You see only one side, and you thinkmore than that, youre surethats all there is. (442) Adam, in his epiphany, states, I think you are only a part of a human (442). Similarly, Cal is liberated upon discovering his mothers lack: Im my own. I dont have to be you. . . . I think youre afraid (53334). Steinbeck suggests that what Cathy lacks are the crucial ingredients necessary for womanliness; bereft of motherly impulses and equally unwilling to acquiescence to a socially prescribed role, she possesses qualities associated with the masculine.23 Cathy is an astute businesswoman,24 patiently building her clientele with specialty services and then shrewdly protecting that business. That the business is a particularly sadistic brothel and that she protects it by resorting to blackmailing her clients is unmistakably immoral, but that immorality makes her operating methods no less effective or successful. Cathy possesses business sense that is in direct contrast to the agricultural and business failures of Adam, a further indication that she has castrated her husband and usurped his potency for her own use. Cathy as bitch is, not surprisingly, allied with the masculine. The symbolic twin of Charles, Cathy shares his masculine nature. Both share the mark of Cain in the form of scars that disfigure their foreheads. Both are astute in business and finance, but both consistently miscalculate the motivations and possibilities of those who surround them. Each is dominated by the paternal Logos and is noticeably devoid of the feminine Eros. And both finally resort to hiding from the world rather than attempting to understand that which escapes them. Cathys animus-possession is highly stressed. In essence, Steinbeck suggests that she has castrated the Adam in order to steal his potency, to possess the phallus for herself. Adams inertia and inefficacy following Cathys abandonment then may be blamed on her. His quest has been stolen, his dreams effaced, his power absconded with. And Adam, unlike other males in literature who forcibly retrieve their severed manhood from the bitch who has stolen it, has been rendered so thoroughly impotent by Cathy that he is too powerless to regain his potency, even when he realizes her true nature.
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In contrast to Adam Trask, Stephen Rojack in Norman Mailers An American Dream refuses to be passively castrated. He regards his wife, Deborah, as the great bitch (16). Symbolically rendered as the daughter of the Devil, Deborah was conceived when her business tycoon father, Barney Kelly, prayed to the Devil to help him father a child. And like Satans daughter, Sin, in Miltons Paradise Lost, Deborah and her father engage in an incestuous relationship. Such an abomination, of course, must be annihilated. Thus, Rojacks violent murder of his wife is rendered as redemptively emancipatory rather than repulsive. Charles G. Masinton argues that Stephen Rojack must actually engage in mortal combat with his wife Deborah before he can begin his journey toward health and freedom (44). Rojack strangles and breaks his wifes neck after she has tried to damage his masculinity by kicking him in the groin, a clear reference to her castrating tendencies. Yet, as Fetterly contends, Mailer elaborates false dreads in order to obscure the real [existential] dread and fills his world with the mythology of female power and male powerlessness, with castrating bitches, teethed wombs, murderous females, and delicate erections forever in danger of being destroyed (156). Mailer suggests that Rojacks murder of Deborah is a positive action, necessary to destroy her succubus-like possession of his soul (Masinton 49). And, although Rojacks social status will be destroyed, he manages to regain his inner integrity. As he is snapping Deborahs neck, Rojack envisions a heaven, some quiver of jeweled cities shining in the flow of a tropical dusk (35). At Deborahs actual death, he gains a sensation of new grace (36). Metaphorically, Rojack steals his wifes power; he believes that by overpowering her he has not only liberated man from the castrating clutches of the bitch, but that he has claimed her potency for his own. The tenacious power of the castrating bitch can be vanquished by nothing less than her complete eradication. Fetterly contends that Rojacks deliverance from Deborah is a metaphor for his achievement of manhood: His [sexuality] is something that must be continually created against [her sexuality] (177). Thus, in Deborahs destruction, Rojacks masculinity is permanently consummated; he states, Deborahs dying had given me new life (91). His experience is so fulfilling that, following his murder of Deborah, he has a sexual encounter with Deborahs maid, Ruta, perhaps to reify his new sense of potency. When he returns to Deborahs corpse, he wants to kill her again, kill her good this time, kill her right in order to reexperience his fulfillment (52). Certainly not all strong and defiant women have been deemed irredeemable bitches by their male creators. Lysistrata, Antigone, the Duchess of Malfi, Shakespeares Cleopatra, and Faulkners Caddy are all women who defy the patriarchal powers but who are also afforded respect or partial exoneration for their actions.
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Audiences mourn the deaths of Antigone, the Duchess, and Cleopatra as true losses, Lysistrata evokes admiration, and Caddys loss of her daughter is considered a tragedy. And, although most of these women are also left mad, dead, or bereft at the end of their stories, the reader feels sympathy and loss at their fates. Moreover, as will be discussed in the following chapter, not all bitches have been created by male authors. The bitchs ubiquitous presence in allnot just male-written literature attests to her lasting endurance.
Women Reading and Women Writing the Bitch
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3 Women Reading and Women Writing the Bitch

If you cant say anything nice about anybody, come sit by me. Olympia Dukakis in Steel Magnolias (1989)
t hardly needs to be stated that male authors are not solely responsible for the existence of the bitch in literature. She has memorably inhabited the pages of countless popular and renowned female-authored works, from bodice rippers to English 101 Literature Survey syllabi staples. She flamboyantly plays the supporting role in numerous types of popular fiction written predominantly for female readers, including various types of childrens literature, best-selling romance novels, and steamy thrillers, and she has enlivened the plots of scores of classic womens novels. The bitch, in all of her formulaic glory, maintains little gender bias in terms of her creation. The historical reason for this may be, as Elaine Showalter suggests, because of [women novelists] tendency to project and expand their own culturebound stereotypes of femininity (Female 271). Thus, it would be an exercise in futility to attempt to ascribe absolute differences between depictions of the bitch as rendered by male and female authors; however, some discrepancies in the character are noticeable in some of the literature, the most predominant difference being the inscription of motivations for the behavior of the bitch character. As discussed in the preceding chapter, the bitch is often the catalyst for the action in fictions written by men. Her manipulations, or resistance to her manipulations by the protagonist, often seem to direct the courses of action. Yet, in male-authored literature, her motivations are generally inexplicable; that is, this body of literature fails to analyze the external and internal factors that may have contributed to her creation. In contrast, the bitch in much literature written by women may be seen to be motivated by recognizably devious, self-centered gains, combined with, in some cases, a distinct lack of self-worth.
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The Childhood Bitch

The traditional body of fiction written for girls1 is brimming with a multitude of female villainesses, harping and carping through their stories, casting loathsome spells, spinning malevolent plots, stealing children from their mothers arms (or men from their true loves hearts), and inspiring fear, distrust, and revulsion. These are the women nightmares are made of, and many can be found in the volumes of fairy tales, the first fictions a girl may be exposed to.2 If the reader aspires toward the role of child-bride princess, she has many potential choices to emulate, yet the images present in the tales are far from complimentary toward most of the secondary female characters. The Brothers Grimm collections of fairy tales (and their Disney-fied film counterparts) are laden with witches, crones, sorceresses, hags,3 shrewish wives, villainous sisters, disgruntled fairies, and, of course, homicidally evil stepmothers. Cinderella is cruelly taunted and sadistically enslaved by the unfeeling woman who purports to be her guardian, as are both Rapunzel and Snow White. Jorinda, in Jorinda and Joringel, is transformed into a nightingale at the whim of an evil owl witch, who keeps her collection of maidens-turned-birds in gilt cages. Gretel must escape the clutches of a cannibalistic witch; the infant Briar Rose is cursed by an unreasonable fairy and must sleep for one hundred years before the curse may be broken (by a male, of courseone with presumably necrophiliac tastes). The infant princess in The Raven is changed into a bird when her crying irritates the Queen, her mother, who is in all probability suffering from postpartum depression. In all of these horror stories, the first lesson to be learned by readers is this: stay away from powerful females, especially if they are older than adolescent age. The stories hold a second lesson: aspire not to power or autonomy thyself. The proud and haughty princess in King Thrushbeard is punished by her father by being forced to marry an abusive beggar who, in an apparently ironic happy ending, later reveals himself to be one of her previously rejected suitors (26). Lucky princess! The Twelve Dancing Princesses tells of sisters who resort to drugging suitorsand thus condemning them to deathin an effort to cling to the freedom they have to escape each evening into a mystical world where they might dance with handsome and attentive (but not marriage-minded) princes. They are outsmarted by a poor and wounded soldier who discovers their secret with the help of yet another old woman. The soldier is rewarded with the promise of a kingdom; the eldest princess is then, of course, doomed to an enforced marriage. The third lesson follows from the second: be a good girl, and do what you are told. Tales tell of girls who are rewarded for being diligent in their housework and kind to strangers (Cinderella and Snow White and Rose Red) and of those who pass extreme tests to prove their love of a man or men, usually brothers
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(The Twelve Brothers and The Lady and the Lion). Faithful John recounts the story of a princess who is kidnapped by a lovesick prince and cajoled into marriage, and who must later agree to let her twin sons be decapitated for the sake of a male servant. In The Goose Girl, a princess traveling to meet and marry her betrothed is tricked by an evil waiting woman, who takes her place as the bride. The waiting woman, when discovered, is sentenced to be put stark naked in a barrel stuck with nails, and be dragged along by two white horses from street to street till . . . dead, apparently for her aspirations toward the upper class (74). Mary Daly writes that the Wicked Queens and Hags of these stories are in actuality symbolically disguised male figures: She, that is, he, is the archetypal Drag Queen, the male stepmother, the other side of Prince Charmings multiple personality. . . . [S/He] is able to trick the princess because [s/he] dissembles, falsely re-sembling the true Queen, the Wild Witch, the dis-membered Goddess (351). These she-males bear out the Jungian implications of animus-possession women who are so thoroughly captivated by their male unconscious sides that they bear little resemblance to the truly feminized female protagonists. The wicked hags and stepmothers betray their vicious jealousy toward the beautiful and virginal maiden and refuse to honor her moral superiority, which derives from innocence. These women are almost always brutally destroyed for their heresy, as in the cases of Snow Whites stepmother, who is put into red-hot iron shoes and forced to dance to death, and the witch in Hansel and Gretel, who is broiled to death. Or, if the protagonist manages to escape the clutches of her false mother, as Rapunzel and Cinderella do, the evil woman is banished from the story altogether, creating the impression that she is expendable. Hans Christian Andersen creates even more depraved females, such as the sadistic sea witch in The Little Mermaid and the icy, heartless Snow Queen, both of whom may be equated with the Lord of the Underworld through their active promotion of sin. Andersen, with his dark Christian undertones, equates his villainesses with irredeemably evil natures, possessed by a fiendish desire to destroy the goodness that condemns them to villainy. Even more disturbing is Andersens unrelenting condemnation of naughty young girls. In The Red Shoes, young Karin covets a pair of pretty shoes, and Andersen implies that she obtains them at the expense of her mothers life. Karins punishment is a sentence of perpetual dancing until her feet are cut off and the shoes dance away. The Little Girl Who Trod on a Loaf descends into the eternal hell of the Marsh King because the little girl is too proud to get her shoes dirty. These terrifying visions obviously promote patriarchal restrictions on women, promising damnation for autonomous inclinations or for any attitude except abject humility. The young
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girls do not even need to be bitchy to be castigated by their creator; they need only demonstrate an individual longing or self-awareness. Longer works of fiction written for older readers also perpetuate the bitch archetype. While some characterssuch as Louisa May Alcotts Meg and Amy in Little Womenare virtuous girls whose charity and sweetness are meant to compel emulation, characters such as Jo in Little Women and Mary in Frances Hodgson Burnetts The Secret Garden4 need to become enlightened into a world of traditional womanly virtues. These characters display a change of heart from headstrong, willful youth to serene, accepting young woman, narrowly escaping a life sentence of bitchiness. However, the wicked older woman, though lacking magic powers in these realistic novels, still exists. In A Little Princess, the protagonist, Sara Crewe, is the precocious and imaginative seven-year-old daughter of a young and indulgent man who leaves his motherless daughter at Miss Minchins Select Seminary in London. Saras wealth and noble bearing immediately incur the jealous dislike of the headmistress, Miss Maria Minchin. Following her fathers death four years later, Sara becomes a prisoner, forced to work for Miss Minchin as a scullery maid and to live, halfstarved, in a rat-infested and unheated attic because Miss Minchin has found herself several hundred pounds in debt for expenses incurred for Saras benefit. Sara is graced with many admirable qualities, especially her vivid and vivifying imagination and her much-noted humility; these qualities are directly contrasted with Miss Minchins sadistic and torturous nature. In one scene, for example, the starving Sara finds a fourpence on the street and buys some warm rolls. She notices an urchin huddled in rags and gives her five of the six buns, while Miss Minchin seems to take delight in depriving Sara of common necessities and finds pleasure in Saras pitiable condition. Saras pathetic state eventually incurs the notice of the schools wealthy and invalid next-door neighbor, who instructs his servant to feed, clothe, and warm the child. Sara awakens one morning to find her frozen garret magically transformed by quilts, slippers, a fire, and hot tea and muffins. Once Miss Minchin realizes that Sara has a benefactor, she restores Sara to her former position. In true fairy-tale fashion, Sara discovers that the man next door is her fathers former partner, and she is rescued from Miss Minchins evil clutches. Elizabeth Lennox Keyser notes that although Burnett tells her reader that Miss Minchin has a narrow, unimaginative mind, the real problem is that she is lacking in simple humanity (234). The character of Miss Minchin is rather thinly drawn, yet the adult reader may infer that her mean spirit and sordid mind derive from spinsterhood as well as her years as surrogate mother to her pupilsgirls whose future prospects are considerably broader than her own presumably were (275). Miss Minchins timid and ineffective younger sister,
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Miss Amelia, calls her a hard, selfish, worldly woman, suggesting that Miss Minchins overdeveloped animus does not allow her to exhibit empathy (308). Yet it is exactly Miss Minchins worldliness, her strong Amazon tendencies, that enables the sisters business to thrive. Miss Amelia is a silly woman, incapable of dealing with the students or the financial end of the school; thus, it is Miss Minchins hardness that provides the means for the school to flourish.5 Keyser praises the novel by stating, Saras story, if one reads between the lines, recounts the triumph of emotional honesty over self-deception, active opposition over passive aggression, and acceptance of reality over romantic compensation (241). However, Miss Minchin is obviously not included in this triumph. Although she fawns over incoming students and their parents (a good, if shallow, business practice) and Sara may legitimately accuse her of lying, Miss Minchins emotional honesty is clearly evident. She is not a warm or particularly nurturing woman: she is (as the schools reputation attests) a good educator and businesswoman.6 Phyllis Bixler Koppes recognizes that like the Cinderella tales, Burnetts stories do not emphasize a change within the main character but rather in the recognition of that characters true nature (193). Saras true naturekind, creative, humble, honestis meant to be contrasted with Miss Minchins harsh rationality. Miss Minchin is a descendant of Cinderellas stepmother, and just as Cinderellas stepmother is punishingly portrayed in the fairy tale, Miss Minchin will be discredited as her treatment of a bereft pupil becomes known. Though the novel attempts to educate its young readers into the virtues of true womanhoodthere is no doubt that Sara will ultimately make a brilliant marriage and become a good wife and motherit also warns its readers against growing into a hard-hearted woman like Miss Minchin. The lesson is clear: to avoid the fate of a lonely and hated spinsterhood, do not act like a man.
The Popular Bitch

Popular reading for young women includes many types of formulaic novels. From authors such as V. C. Andrews, who enthralls adolescent girl readers with her depictions of female-abused and incestuous young heroines, to the ever-popular Danielle Steel, whose novels depict historical and contemporary rags-to-riches stories, popular romances remain one of the highest-selling staples of the female market; however, as Ann Barr Snitow notes, The books are permeated by phallic worship (192). The ultimate goal for the heroine of the Harlequin romance and its scores of imitators is, as Snitow contends, a glorification of romantic love and, of course, marriage (195). The heroine herself is a study in blandness: not too attractive,
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not sexual (or, severe in her control of her sexuality), lacking a past that might have any hint of scandal or impropriety (in fact, her parents rarely crop up at all), neither too old nor too young, and possessed of an occupation that firmly conforms to feminine values (teachers, nurses, decorators, and fashion designers abound), she is solidly ensconced in the same middle-class values as her readers. The heroines of the romance novels almost always discover that if they wish to be regarded as feminine, they must submerge their willful impulses (or reduce these impulses to charming displays of naive but spirited innocence) or risk the fate of the female antagonist: rejection by eligible males and female companions. Therefore, these heroines never stray from feminine territory. The heroines antithesis is, of course, the bitch.7 She is transparent in her material desires (she usually desires the hero because of his wealth and not because of his other attributes, which are usually hidden from all except the heroine), yet her catty nature does inspire a cathartically negative response from the reader, who would otherwise find little stimulation from the heroines unrelenting goodness. That is, the scheming machinations of the Bitch provide contrast from the heroine and likewise allow the reader to vent a certain amount of righteous indignation against this individual who would interfere with the promised reward of the virtuous woman. And what is this reward? Why, marriage, of course. A close cousin to the Harlequin romance novels with their contemporary settings and everywoman heroines, the Gothic romance novel follows a formulaic development of female characters in historical settings. Joanna Russ outlines the standard blueprint for this type of novel: an attractive (but unaware of it) young heroine arrives at a brooding house isolated in the country. Here the heroine meets the Super-Male and another woman; this woman is at the same time the Heroines double and her oppositevery often the Other woman is the Super-Males present or dead first wife . . . or the woman the Super-Male appears to prefer to the Heroine. The Other Woman is (or was) beautiful, worldly, glamorous, immoral, flirtatious, irresponsible, and openly sexual. (Somebodys 33) The Gothic romance maintains a particular dependency on the bitch character; as Janice Radway asserts, most Gothic romances contain a virtuous heroine and an evil female foil, who is used as a contrast for the heroines virginity, romanticism and desire for love (150). Radway contends that the function of the evil female foil is to suggest that sexual aggression by women cannot lead to love and indeed may destroy it and to show that women who subordinate their capacity to care for others to an extreme individualism associated with vanity and desire for material things will never realize their truest selves (154). The Gothic bitch, though generally stereotypically portrayed as a femme fatale, uses her sexuality not for
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carnal pleasure but for acquisition; she is equivalent to contemporary twentiethcentury characters, such as Carolyn Polhemus in Scott Turows Presumed Innocent, who sleep their way to the top. The bitch, for example, Rebecca in Daphne du Mauriers Rebecca, exerts her enormously malignant power after her death. The unnamed heroine, as timid and insipid as any of the romance novel heroines, blindly fears the unknown: her dead rival, the first wife of Maxim de Winter. Unfavorably comparing herself with the sensuous and socially adept Rebecca, the second Mrs. de Winter believes that her husband mourns Rebeccas death and has chosen his second wife as a pale substitute. She laments to Maxim, How could I ask you to love me when I knew you loved Rebecca still? (271). Her fears fed by Mrs. Danvers, the darkly malignant housekeeper, the second Mrs. de Winter becomes suicidally despondent. But true knowledge of Rebeccas character arrives in the nick of time to save the day: unfaithful to her husband, the lascivious Rebecca was actually a bitch! In Victoria Holts novel Mistress of Mellyn (1960), generally regarded as the groundbreaking popular (as opposed to literary) Gothic romance novel, Martha Leigh, worthy but plain Cornwall governess, gains the attention of Connan Tremellyn, the master of the manor. Toward the end of the book, the reader learns of the unscrupulous nature of the fiendish villainess, that diabolical woman, Celestine Nansellock, who is masquerading as a family friend (233). She has murdered Connans first wife, unbeknownst to the other characters, and schemes to marry Connan to possess his house. When Connan announces his engagement to Martha, Celestine tries to kill Martha by sealing her up in a tomblike hidden room, where Celestine has already stashed her first decomposing victim. Although Celestine is not described as sexually appealing, her avarice supports her status as bitch. Particularly as contrasted with Marthas empathetic kindness toward her illegitimate charges, willful and spoiled Alvean and the orphaned Gilly, Celestines lust for an inanimate house is portrayed as monstrous. The obligatory role of the bitch, however, is not merely to act as contrast to the virtuous heroine. She appears also ostensibly to benefit the reader. It may be assumed that the female reader takes comfort in equating herself with the lessthan-spectacular heroine, a positive association. Or maybe not. By denigrating the bitch, who is part of every womans psyche, a negative projection may occur in the female reader that may lead to self-hatred. Juliann E. Fleenor notes, In the Female Gothic the ambivalence toward the female (good and evil) has been internalized. The ambivalence toward the female self leads to self-disgust and selffear rather than fear and disgust of something outside her (11). This self-disgust mirrors the males projected response to the denigrated female character. Karen Stein recognizes that male disgust with womens sexuality, the male hatred and fear of womens procreative power and her otherness, lies at the root
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of the Female Gothic. . . . Objectifying women and casting them as praiseworthy or blameworthy types diminishes the threatening power which women hold for men (124). The ambivalent theme of female sexuality is especially prevalent in the historical romance, or bodice ripper, a later and more explicit version of the romance novel. This type of novel overtly emphasizes sexuality, and the heroines journey tends to be a journey toward sexual awakening. While some authors, such as Rosemary Rogers, write of heroines who have multiple sexual encounters (most, however, take the form of rape),8 others, such as Kathleen Woodwiss, maintain the sexual integrity of the heroine, pitting her against an exaggeratedly libidinous bitch. In The Flame and the Flower, Woodwisss first novel, the heroine, Heather, is deflowered by Brandon Birmingham in a case of highly contrived mistaken identity. She becomes pregnant, and Brandon is forced to marry her. Brandon, surly but handsome, rails against this enforced marriage and swears never to touch her again in passion. The innocent and frightened Heather feels relief at this pronouncement yet unknowingly but continually tempts her manly husband. A long Atlantic sea journey provides the backdrop for the glowing skin of Heather to be teasingly revealed during her endless baths and for Brandons rigid control as he feels his wifes supple body lying next to his: His body heat was like a magnet, drawing her close while she slept (209). Of course, Heather begins to feel a glimmer of love for Brandon during this trip, notwithstanding his numerous temper tantrums. The course of the novel is enlivened, however, with the appearance of wicked, tall, buxom, beautifully blond Louisa Wells, Brandons former fiance, at the ships dock (239). Louisa is described often as flaunting her voluptuous body. She is viciously jealous of Heather, primarily because she has lost an adept bed partner and, more importantly, because of her lost crack at the fabulous (of course) fortune of the Birminghams. The many passages describing Louisa note her rouged nipples provocatively peeping beneath a transparent dress, her gaping necklines revealing generous cleavage, her sultry and purring voice, and her familiar handling of men. Yet, for all of her numerous flauntings of flesh, Louisa is defeminized, depicted as greedy and grasping and devoid of Heathers charms of innocence and good manners. When Louisa threatens to besmirch Heathers reputation, Brandon roars, Shut your mouth, bitch (447). At the end of the novel, Louisa is condemned to a particularly degrading death. Raped and strangled by a hideously deformed man who, of course, accepted Louisa as a poor substitute of Heather, she is not mourned. In fact, Brandon and Heather reconsummate their marriage in the dead Louisas house. The bitch has been thoroughly annihilated, and thus, aggressive female sexuality has been consigned to defeat as well.
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What is the popular appeal of these novels? As Leslie Fiedler notes, The Pure Young Maiden . . . is almost invariably a dull and embarrassing figure, a monster of virtue (75). Her story is always predictable, and the novels rarely, if ever, delve beneath the surface. For the tamer Harlequin romance, Snitow contends that Harlequins fill a vacuum created by social conditions. When women try to picture excitement, the society offers them one vision, romance. When women try to imagine companionship, the society offers them one vision, male, sexual companionship. When women try to fantasize about success, mastery, the society offers them one vision, the power to attract a man. When women try to fantasize about sex, the society offers them taboos on most of its imaginable expressions except those that deal directly with arousing and satisfying men. When women try to project an ideal self, the society offers them very few attractive images. True completion for women is nearly always presented as social, domestic, sexual. (197) For the more risqu novels, the appeal, of course, lies in vicarious sexual pleasures. The reader may experience, and reexperience, a glorified loss of virginity and ensuing sexual (fictional) fulfillment from the safe confines of her armchair. Yet it is also possible that the vicarious pleasure of these novels is enacted through the secondary female character. Yes, the bitch is condemned for her avarice and duplicity, for her carnal displays and indiscriminate lustful nature, yet she is also thrilling. It is indeed possible that one of the vicarious pleasures in reading these novels may be found in a submerged admiration for the villainess. Certainly Scarlett OHara, one of literatures most infamous bitches, captures her readers esteem. Scarlett tops nearly every readers top-ten list of favorite bitches. She has shocked generations of readers and has appalled and delighted with her narcissistic escapades, yet, paradoxically, she has been adored, mimicked, canonized, and celebrated by her female readers. Virtually no one dresses up for Halloween as Melanie, the good character; Scarlett is ever the belle of the costume party. As material for fantasy, Scarlett commands a starring role as siren. Her sexual allure is undeniable.9 Yet Scarlett is also legendary for her tantrums, her lack of charity, her blind insistence on pursuing the wrong man, her drinking, her stubbornness, her avarice, and a whole host of additional flaws. Daring to challenge the patriarchal power of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, Scarlett builds a profitable business, restores her familys plantation, marries a rivals fianc (the first time), marries her sisters fianc (the second time), marries a fortune (the third time), and fiddle dee dees anyone who challenges her will. Scarlett relates to her father, Gerald, more than to her sweet, ladylike mother, Ellen. In molding her personality, Scarlett refuses to accede to the exaggerated
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feminine modesty and humility prescribed for southern women. Baring her shoulders during the day, eating in public, dancing while in widows weeds, driving unescorted, cursing, drinking, Scarlett breaks the social conventions. Yet the power she possesses also enables her to support the plantation, work the cotton fields, and help save her charges from a marauding deserter. Scarlett is a bitch, but she is also a survivor, beholden to no one for her sustenance. Her readers applaud her outrageous behavior and champion most of her endeavors. While Scarlett is punished by the loss of Rhett for her foolish (but naive) obsession with Ashley, she is seen as admirable.
Motherly Aims
While the preceding examples have been culled from popular fiction, canonized literature written by women has not escaped the scourge of the bitch. From Jane Austen to Margaret Atwood, the bitch may be found lurking in the pages of the most celebrated female authors. For example, Mrs. Reed, one of the villainesses in Charlotte Bronts Jane Eyre, not only puts her nieces life in jeopardy by having her incarcerated in a sadistic boarding school, but she also willfully withholds the monetary means for Janes later financial independence. As a stock character, a representative of the evil step/foster mother, Mrs. Reed seems to have little redemptive value portrayed as a classic example of a woman displaying an unfeminine lack of charity toward another female. Yet Mrs. Reed is endowed with motivations for at least part of her evil behavior; she confesses on her deathbed to have nurtured a jealous grudge toward Jane because of her late husbands love for the infant Jane. And, because Mrs. Reed is only a stand-in mother figure, her afflicted motherhood is mitigated by the fact that she is Janes caretaker and not her biological mother. Bronts purpose for creating Mrs. Reed, as Nina Baym recognizes, is that Jane Eyre is replete with images of ferocious female power and Jane turns to Rochester, at first, as a refuge (165). Jane perceives the spheres that are ruled primarily by women, such as the widowed Mrs. Reeds household and the boarding school, to be inhospitable places, causing her to turn toward the male arena for solace and protection; in Janes world, there is no such thing as female nurturing or mother-love. Yet Mrs. Reed also needs protection. As a widow who possesses minimal powerunder English law she is merely a guardian for her son, the legal inheritorMrs. Reed must cater to her son in order to be cared for herself when he gains control of the finances. Therefore, Mrs. Reed must act as a surrogate male and deny any inward nurturing she might have harbored for Jane, the object of her sons cruelty. Her antagonism toward Jane is, admittedly, misdirected, a fact she acknowledges when dying by informing Jane of her inheritance; however,
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her choices have also been limited. Although Mrs. Reed is in no way exonerated in the novel, her behavioral motivations are in some way explicable, notwithstanding their unethical nature. A biological mother, Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopins celebrated The Awakening also rejects her mother-woman calling (26). Contemporary reviewers, scandalized by Ednas behavior, condemned Chopins portrayal, exhorting Edna to flirt less and look after her children (Petry 52). In 1909, Percival Pollard raged, So skillfully and so hardily does the book reveal the growth of animalism in a woman, that we feel as if we were attending a medical lecture (67). Hugh J. Dawson scolds, When the needs of [Ednas] children prove burdensomealthough the services of a houseboy, a maid, a cook and a nurse would seem to make her tasks less than exhaustingshe casually exempts herself from such obligations. . . . The inconstant wife is an inconstant mother (5). Edna, in examining the women who surround her at the Pontelliers vacation retreat, discovers that she lacks the qualities of the mother women who reign along the shore with their broods of children; her husband, Lonce, accuses her of inattention and habitual neglect of the children (24). She feels a distinct lack of fulfillment with the prescriptions of motherhood, and she is unable to sacrifice herself to its altar; she tells Madame Ratignolle, I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldnt give myself (67). Wayne Batten notes, Society in this novel offers women only one role, and Edna is not a mother-woman (86). Yet, as Dorothy H. Jacobs recognizes, Edna is forced to accept maternity as an undeniable limitation (92). Ednas discontent flowers, and she estranges herself from proprietorial husband and children.10 She briefly takes a lover yet remains unsatisfied. Ultimately, perceiving no outlet to maintain a distinct existence, Edna chooses to take her own life, thereby abandoning her young sons. At the end, she thinks of her husband and sons: They were a part of her life. But they need not have thought that they could possess her, body and soul (137). Ednas suicide seems to have been prompted by her witnessingfor the first timechildbirth, and her awakening to the enormity of the life sentence of motherhood. Edna concludes that her attempts at emancipation are doomed to failure; she cannot erase the past or her children. Ednas lack of mothering is revealed in the novel, as Cynthia Griffin Wolff recognizes, in that the children are always accompanied by a nurse whose presence frees Edna to pursue whatever interests she can sustain. . . . Her emotional relationship with them is tenuous at best (239). Yet Edna has not grown into the mother-woman stage of life; she is still a child herself, and her emancipatory
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struggles have followed the path of maturity and experiences that she has never lived. She has left the authoritarian household of her father only to join the equally paternalistic household of her husband. Failing to achieve any autonomous existence, Edna projects Lonce into the role of father and continues a virtually unbroken cycle of early adolescence. Her infatuation with Robert LeBrun, for example, mimics the adolescent crush she had experienced on the matinee idol and the young officer she cherished in her youth, and her removal from her husbands house is her attempt to imitate an independent life denied to young women prior to marriage. Yet, for all of her endeavors to will herself into a new and self-reliant existence, she cannot continue to ignore the reality of her motherhood. Margit Stange asserts that Ednas motherhood seems arbitrary, externally imposed and unwilled (211). Significantly, Edna had been drugged during the births of her two sons and thus had been removed from the birthing process, enabling her to discount the experience. Cristina Giorcelli states that, following the births, Edna returned to a virginal state (133). In fact, part of Ednas awakening is the growth process a woman must undergo in order to fully mature, a process that has been culturally truncated in Chopins contemporary times. In other words, Ednas failure as a mother may stem from patriarchal repression of women to develop autonomy and self-possession; by Ednas removal from the birth of her sons through anesthesia, Ednas mothering impulses have never been awakened. Judith Guests Beth Jarrett in Ordinary People is representative of the bitch as Terrible Mother in the psychoanalytic age; unlike Edna Pontellier, however, Beth has sacrificed herself to motherhood, yet she, like Edna, also cannot find sustenance in that role. Beth, a thirty-nine-year-old woman and mother of one son dead from drowning and another almost dead from suicide, is portrayed alternatingly through the voice of her recovering son, Conrad, and her husband, Calvin. Con, as he is known, depicts his mother as emotionally devoid and overly concerned with appearances. The novel reveals Cons struggle to articulate his anger at what he feels is maternal rejection, a process that the novel initially seems to assert will allow him to heal. Cals and Beths older son, Jordan, has drowned during a freak summer storm on a lake. Unable to forgive himself for survivingCon believes that Jordan was the better son and personCon slits his wrists several months later. He is put into an asylum for eight months, and the novel opens after he has been home for a month. Conrad is tenuously holding on; petrified to reveal his anxieties to his father and his mother, he is particularly anxious about disrupting his mothers firmly maintained illusions. Beth, pretty and socially adept, needs to control her environment. She keeps a firm rein on her emotions and, it appears, manipulates the order of her familys
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existence into a perfect picture. However, the death of one son and the attempted suicide of another have shattered her carefully wrought vision. Her response is to insist upon continuing and not acknowledging the problems. As her sister-inlaw recognizes, Emotion is her enemy. She wants everything to go smoothly, to go right. You know. The way shes planned it (203). Beths self-control is her means of survival, and yet it is not a rejection of her femininity. Rather, Beth has, perhaps, oversubscribed to the ideals of patriarchal femininity. Cal remembers Beth experiencing the havoc of young motherhood: Her figure, tense with fury as she scrubbed the finger-marks from the walls; she bursting suddenly into tears because of a toy left out of place, or a spoonful of food thrown onto the floor from the high chair. . . . Everything had to be perfect, never mind the impossible hardship it worked on her, on them all; never mind the utter lack of meaning in such perfection, weighed as it was against the endless repetition of days, weeks, months. (8990) Clearly, Beths overdeveloped animus manifests itself as a rigid adherence to rationality, order, and control. Yet, from a feminist standpoint, Beth may be seen as frantically attempting to validate her self and her role in the patriarchal family. Victoria Szabo and Angel D. Jones endorse Beths overdetermined actions, contending that in the novel the excision of women is required for the men to function effectively (45). Beth, aware of her lack of motherly tendencies, needs to believe that she has a purpose. Her hysterical insistence on her housekeeping rituals equals her control of her only domain. Ironically, at novels end, she leaves the household, perhaps acknowledging the inevitable: that she never was validated or needed. Con relates that his mother never visited the asylum, and Beth becomes incensed when anyone discusses the incident. Beth also never calls her son by name; in fact, she never speaks directly to him at all. Con tells his psychiatrist that his mother doesnt love him, that she cant forgive him, and in a voice curt and flatwithout hope, he tells his father, She hates me. Theres nothing I can do about it (12021). Con, too, has subscribed to the ideals of the patriarchally defined mother. He feels cheated and angry that his mother does not fit the traditionally defined role of mother. Though she might be housekeeper extraordinaire, socially charming, attractive, intelligent, athletic, aesthetically adept, because she fails at adequately mothering her child, she is a failure as a woman. Beths motherhood instincts are continually called into question; when she finally does talk about the attempted suicide of her only remaining son with Cal, she shallowly focuses on the mess and not the act: He made it as vicious, as sickening as he could! The bloodall that blood! Oh, I will never forgive him for
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it! He wanted it to kill me, too! (237). Yet Beth denies that she hates Con: Mothers dont hate their sons! I dont hate him! But he makes demands on me. He tries to blackmail me! (238). Beths admission is an admission of failure failure of motherhoodthat categorizes her as an unfeeling bitch. Con suffers from classic male paranoia. He dreams of castration; he feels guilt for masturbating, and he fears homosexuality (156). All of these problems he blames on his mother. Cal also begins to characterize his wife negatively. At first, he has blamed himself for Cons attempted suicide, and the narrative relates that he does not believe himself to be innocent. It has to be his fault, because fault equals responsibility equals control equals eventual understanding (34). Yet, throughout most of the novel, he shifts the blame to Beth. He had been repeatedly warned about Beth; his law school mentor, for example, cautioned, Shes not a sharer, Calvin. Its you who will end up doing all the sharing (174). Cal tells his sons psychiatrist that he feels that he is on a fence, trapped between the needs of his son and the demands of his wife (147). The novels crisis occurs on an evening when Beth has learned that Con had quit the swim team a month earlier: I would have told you, Conrad says, if I thought you gave a damn! Con releases his pent-up anger and attacks his mother, and the wellspring of anger erupts, engulfing them all (109). He accuses her of trying to hurt him; he exposes her narcissism and her uncaring nature: The only reason you care, the only reason you give a fuck about it is because someone else knew about it first. You never wanted to know anything I was doing, or anything I wasnt doing; you just wanted me to leave you alone! Well, I left you alone, didnt I? (110). When Cal tries to encourage her to talk to Con, she responds: No! I will not be pushed!. . . I will not be manipulated (112). It seems as if it is necessary for Beth to be destroyed in order for Con to heal. Yet Cons healing is a multilayered process, and, crucially, he begins to exonerate his mother. Although Beth is indicted throughout much of the novel, as Con begins to work through his own fears and anxieties he begins to understand his mother. Con realizes, for example, that his mother is afraid of strangers, and he wonders: Why hasnt it ever registered before? (193). He begins to see his mothers failings not as reflections of his own inadequacy as a son but as part of her humanity. The first step of this realization occurs during a therapy session. Cal says, I think I just figured something out. Whats that? Berger asks. Who it is who cant forgive who (11920). He begins to understand that he is blaming his mother for his own problems. And whereas Beth certainly has her imperfections, Con needs to take responsibility for the course of his existence and not just wallow in blaming his mother. Just as he needs to forgive himself for being the survivor of the storm on the lake, he needs to forgive his mother for her inability to express her love to his expectations. Cons critical moment of self-acceptance comes as he
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accepts his mother: And he goes to her, then, without any hesitation; it is what he has come downstairs for, obviously. He bends his head, puts an arm around her in a quick, clumsy embrace (243). Beth is not a particularly admirable character; however, she is also not an irredeemable monster. No matter that she has turned out to be a deficient mother, Con envisions her possible return as positive, now believing that she knows it all, knows just as he does that it is love, imperfect and unordered, that keeps them apart, even as it holds them somehow together (263).11 Guest suggests that the bitch as Terrible Mother cannot be separated from the bitch as Great Mother. Her children must accept her, flawed as she is, if they are to accept themselves. The similarity inherent in the Terrible Mothers depicted by these writers is that Mrs. Reed, Edna Pontellier, and Beth have all found themselves trapped into the socially prescribed role of mother with little benefit of choice or reasonable escape. Another example, Charlotte Perkins Gilmans main character in The Yellow Wallpaper, is deemed ill by her husband because of her nervous behavior and her less-than-thrilled response to new motherhood. Combined with her pleasure in writingan unwomanly occupationthe protagonists desires to live in a populated portion of the house and to engage in stimulating pursuits rather than devote herself completely to the care of her child are deemed a slight hysterical tendency (646). Although the protagonist attempts to explain to John why she needs diversions, John dismisses her requests as emotional, responding to her with patronizing baby talk. Increasingly frustrated by the constraints placed upon her, the protagonist envisions a lady trapped in the hideous wallpaper that decorates her room/cell. As many have theorized, the lady seems to be a projection of the protagonist herself, rattling the pattern of the paper and struggling to break free.12 Could it be the bitch who lurks behind the pattern? Perhaps the protagonists identification with the woman who shakes the paper just as if she wanted to get out is a means of gaining a power that has been denied to her (655). In her final triumph over Johncreeping over him after he has faintedthe protagonist has found the strength to resist his rationality and becomes a revengingalbeit irrationalbitch. The protagonists only escape from motherhood, other than death, thus is madness. And whereas Mrs. Reed could rid herself of her foster daughter by sending her to boarding school, Edna, Beth, and Gilmans protagonist are unable to do so. They are simultaneously sentenced to life as mothers with little chance of parole. Recent female authors have gone to some length to exonerate the Terrible Mother. Dorothy Allisons Bastard out of Carolina forgives a mother who chooses her rapist husband over her daughter, demonstrating her weakness in caring for
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herself and her daughters. Rebecca Wellss novel The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood absolves the protagonists mother from the excessive drinking and child abuse detailed in an earlier novel, Little Altars Everywhere. Toni Morrisons Beloved likewise gives the reader insight into the mind of Sethe, a mother who has committed infanticide, and Louise Erdrichs Love Medicine similarly articulates the conditions for Junes abandonment of her son, Lipsha. And while none of these women are portrayed as commendable, they are also not depicted as monstrous. Medea is not a one-dimensional character.
Amazonian Purposes
The Amazon in much of women-authored fiction is the woman who has rejected motherhood. Depicted as particularly vile in much of the male-authored work as if her rejection of her biological function has tainted her mind and manner as wellshe is less caustically treated in much of the female-authored fiction. Some of the protagonists, such as Scarlett OHara, are married and have children, but their neglect of motherhood in favor of their own personal pursuits removes them from the mother category altogether. Some, such as Lady Caroline Bingley in Jane Austens Pride and Prejudice, are independent but awaiting marriage. Others have embraced the pursuit of material wealth, sacrificing their maternal and feminine instincts in favor of material ascendancy. An author closely identified with Jungs archetypal theories is Doris Lessing. In her early novel The Grass Is Singing, she renders a portrait of a woman who is clearly suffering animus possession, Mary Turner, wife of failing farmer Dick Turner. Despising her husbands economic impotency, Mary needed a man stronger than herself, and she was trying to create one out of Dick. If he had genuinely, simply, because of greater strength of purpose, taken ascendancy over her, she would have loved him and no longer hated herself for becoming tied to a failure (134). When Dick fails to succeed not only financially but also as a husband, Mary becomes increasingly masculinized, intimidating the African workers on the farm with a new cold, biting voice she has inherited from her father and a whip that she carries (161). Ultimately, Mary finds herself drawn to a native servant, Moses. Her sexual desire, previously unawakened, not only leads to her death but also destroys her aspiring power by unmistakably reminding her that she is indeed female. Joy/Hulga in Flannery OConnors Good Country People also rejects the feminine; she is proud of her intellect and her cynical rejection of the emotional. However, young Bible salesman Manley Pointera fitting namewill expose her suspect philosophy, her belief in existential existence. Gilbert and Gubar describe Joy/Hulga as the weak-hearted, wooden-legged, atheistical Ph.D. [who] is punished for unfeminine arrogance (112). Attempting to seduce the
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supposedly innocent salesman, Joy/Hulga is instead seduced herself by the startlingly knowledgeable Pointer, who steals her wooden leg, forcing her to acknowledge that her self-proclaimed status as Amazon/independent woman is false; she is as susceptible to feminine desires as are the women she professes to scorn. Both Mary and Joy/Hulga act the part of the bitch in their mistaken belief that they may avoid the strictures of patriarchy. While Mary relies upon her will to accept masculinization in the form of elusive financial independence, Joy/ Hulga attempts independence through her masculinized intellect. Both women are, however, doomed to failure because they are women and because their attempts to eradicate their femininity are unsuccessful. Significantly, both women are thwarted and betrayed by their own female sexuality; each falters when confronted with the phallus that renders her own animus to be a false imitation. Another type of Amazon/bitch representation that occurs in some works is the married woman whose disregard for her husband does not take the form of shrewish whining or scolding but rather an indifference to his dominant role in the marriage. For example, in The Awakening, Ednas first real step toward selfreliance comes when she refuses her husbands demand that she come into the house. Later, Edna will also refuse to have sex with Lonce as well as openly defy his requests to keep up appearances. Much of Edith Whartons fiction examines the conditions for women to maintain a self within the marriage or courtship relationships. Yet, as Margaret B. McDowell notes, the attempts women make in [Edith Whartons] fiction to become strong and independent never totally succeed. In a hostile or indifferent society women find no complete victory (524).13 Lily Bart in The House of Mirth is socially and economically punished for her refusal to marry, and Ellen Olenska in the Age of Innocence suffers from rejection and exile because her social position as divorced woman is deemed unfit. Whartons most vilified heroine, Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country, is a ruthless social climber whose thirst for wealth and position spells her sentence of failure to find social and economic satisfaction; she is clearly punished for her ambitions toward material security.14 Encouraged by her family to capitalize upon her beauty to enhance her social position, Undine, when asked by second husband-to-be Ralph Marvell what she expects, succinctly answers, Why, everything! and makes her way through several marriages in that pursuit (60). Undines blatant material quest identifies her as indisputably possessing the negative aspects of the Jungian bitch. For Undine, the men she uses are mere commodities, a vicious gender reversal. For example, Undine is not the passive receptor of marriage proposals; she initiates the proposals herself. Casting off men after they have served their purpose of propelling her up one more rung of the social ladder, she keenly chooses another to assist her upward quest.
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Undines initial navet, particularly of the social register, causes her to accept the marriage offer of Elmer Moffatt, a marriage that her parents quickly dissolve. Undine then manipulates an offer from the socially acceptable Ralph Marvell; however, Undine quickly realizes that she should have waited for a larger, wealthier fish. Subsequently, Undine baits her hooks several times, learning to equate marriage to a business proposition, one that might be dissolved by divorce when necessary. Wendy DuBow recognizes Undines more-than-capable business acumen, and the narrative reveals Ralphs feeling, during their honeymoon, that what hurt him most was the curious fact that, for all her light irresponsibility, it was always she who made the practical suggestion, hit the nail of expediency on the head. No sentimental scruple made the blow waver or deflect her resolute aim (103). Undine is a wholly awful wife and mother. Once having gained the prize (or, maybe, once having been awarded as the prize), she refuses to settle for the existence as a showpiece trophy as Ralphs wife. Bewailing her maternity, Undine bristles at her enforced confinement almost as much as she tartly rails against her lack of unlimited financial resources. Motherhood is an inconvenience, temporarily destroying her appearance and curtailing her pleasure time as well as her economic value in the social market (116). As soon as she can, she abandons husband and son for the excitement of Europe, failing to return even when she is notified of Ralphs illness. Later, she uses the threat of reclaiming her son to extort money from Ralph. Yet Wharton seems to suggest that Undine, because of her acute awareness of womens precarious economic position, is incapable of approaching any relationshipincluding her role as mother to Paulwithout considering it in light of its financial potential. Changing her religion as she would change her dress, Undine next marries a member of the European aristocracy whose desire for his wife to obey social conventions for women spells an immediate and adverse response in Undine. Goodbye husband number three! Undine, at the novels conclusion, has returned to Elmer, whose enormous wealth has now attracted her. However, the book ends with a portrait of a yet again discontented Undine: But under all of the dazzle a tiny black cloud remained (370). Elizabeth Ammons suggests that Wharton, rather than displaying her heroine as despicable, does not attack or even mock Undine Spragg (328). Rather, her attack is reserved for the institution of marriage among the leisure class. Because a woman is allowed no occupation other than wife/conspicuous consumer,15 her life necessarily becomes parasitic and vicarious (328). And although Undine does accept this role with such vigor that the role becomes redefined, her reasons for her bitchy behavior are clearly based on the expectations of her contemporary society. Undine, if she is to be beheld as a commodity for sale to the highest male
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bidder, sets and resets her own price on the market. Moreover, if she cannot exist independentlyfor it is a certainty that Undine despises the duties of a wife and would prefer to be the ever-lasting debutanteshe can at least control as much of her self as she can get away with.
Hetairian Motives
Another minor character, Jennie in Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper, acts as an extension of her brother, John, in repressing the protagonist. Jennie, unmarried and dependent upon her brother for financial support, spies on the supposedly invalid protagonist, reporting her behavior back to John. While the antagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper is unquestionably the patriarchy and the restrictions it places on women, Jennie is a female agent of the patriarchy who works antagonistically against the narrator.16 Jennies treachery against another female, like Mrs. Reeds contrariety, may be explained as necessary for her own survival. The reader may recognize that Jennie is compelled to report on her sister-in-law or risk ostracism from the family. Thus, Jennies role of the Hetaira in the companion manifestation of the form compels her loyalty to her brother rather than to the same-sex protagonist. The negative hetairian archetype is least represented in female-authored literature, especially in the Hetairas manifestation as the Whore.17 While many women are depicted as adulterousWhartons Bertha Dorset in The House of Mirth, Walkers Shug Avery in The Color Purple, Toni Morrisons Sulathere are very few representations of prostitutes, concubines, or whores in the canonized literature. More importantly, the Jungian conception of the hetairian bitcha woman identifying with the masculine through her attachment to her fathers anima, the seductress who tempts man away from productivityis rarely prevalent in any of the womens literature except the aforementioned popular fiction and romance novels. Whorish behavior in women-authored novels is almost always mitigated by the navet of the character or the horrendous circumstances the woman has been subjected to. For example, Jane Austens Lydia Bennett in Pride and Prejudice runs off with her disreputable army officer because she is too innocent to understand the ramifications of her action, and Mayella Ewell in Harper Lees To Kill a Mockingbird, who tries to seduce a black man and then falsely accuses him of rape, has been beaten and perhaps sexually abused by her father. Margaret Mitchells Belle Watling in Gone With the Wind is depicted as a mother who maintains her brothel to support her child, and An-Meis unnamed mother in Amy Tans The Joy Luck Club is a woman who has been condemned by male deceit into becoming Fourth Wife, or whore: Tricked, and then raped by an old businessman, she becomes pregnant and is forced to give up her exalted status
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as a widow to marry her rapist (Green 21718). Louise Erdrichs June in Love Medicine, while selling her body for drinks, is nevertheless rendered as a necessary member of her community, whose death is much mourned. Moreover, the reader gradually learns of Junes confusion of identity resulting from tribal despair. Women authors tend to depict fallen women not as evil manipulators like Steinbecks Cathy Ames Trask but as victims of a patriarchy that places value on womens sexuality but little value on a womans self. Anna Barton in Josephine Harts Damage may be read as a malevolent bitch figure who acts in a hetairian role; she engages in a sadomasochistic affair with the father of her fianc, Martynan affair that causes Martyns death. But Anna, too, is also portrayed as a woman who has suffered severe restrictions; her aggressive sexuality has been projected upon her by nearly every male she has been in contact with, including her possessive and brooding brother. Unable to purge herself of incestuous guilt, Anna responds to the physical pain inflicted upon her by the politician/doctor protagonist of Harts novel. The protagonist and Anna instantly recognize each other upon their introduction, and the protagonist relates that just for a moment I had met my sort, another of my species, implicitly acknowledging Annas connection to his psyche (21). Martyns father, however, does not see Anna just as his soul mate in pain; she also bears a strong resemblance to his own son: As I followed her towards the room, an image of a boy with dark curly hair and strong back moving before me made me shudder. It was a memory of an adolescent Martyn (98). When he asks her to tell him who she is, Anna responds I am what you desire, allowing him to create his own projection of who she is (37). His projection, therefore, is one of masculinization; his punishing vision of Anna is inextricably tied to his paternally manifested Oedipal role of deadly competition with his son. The protagonist, even before he engages in his affair with Anna, contemplates: She was the split-second experience that changes everything; the car smash; the letter we shouldnt have opened; the lump in the breast or groin; the blinding flash (30). Anna similarly warns him: I have been damaged. Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive (38). The protagonist calls her motherlike and a goddess, endowing her with a mythic and specifically female power (42, 153). However, his repeated associations of Anna with the masculineincluding his calling her his masterpromote his failure to regard her as wholly feminine. Although the protagonist never accuses Anna of outright depravity, he is careful to include allegations of her evil in his narrative. Characters rendered in terms of integritysuch as Sally, Wilbur, Ingrid, and Annas mother, Elizabethall articulate their belief that Anna is corrupt, a bitch. Most disturbing is the revelation that Martyn looks like Aston, Annas twin, who killed himself after witnessing
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Annas adolescent sexual encounter with a boy. The protagonist denies his own incestuous feelings by projecting them onto Anna and then tacitly incriminating her. Anna appears to be bent upon wreaking destruction. As her stepfather, Wilbur, remarks, she is a catalyst for disaster (97). Her much-repeated promise of everything, always to Martyns father contradicts her engagement to Martyn and is a powerful portent of the upcoming catastrophe. Attempting to deliver a message to Anna, Martyn breaks into the apartment where his father and his fiance are performing a violent act of sexual bondage. Murmuring Impossible. Impossible. Possible, Martyn falls backward over a banister to his death (154). Anna immediately leaves the country, writing later to her lover: I must take myself back from you. I was a fatal gift. I was the gift of pain which you sought so eagerly, pleasures greatest reward (192). Anna has kept her promise of everything, always, with the knowledge that the tragedy will consume Martyns father for the rest of his life. Harts depiction of Anna suggests that Annas evil is a projected evil. In attempting to be everything, always to a man while still maintaining her freedom, Anna has transgressed against the restrictions placed upon women. In order to do good, Anna is required to sacrifice her own desiressexually manifested in Martyns fatherand her psychological needsembodied in Martyns resemblance to her twin brother. The fact that Anna needs both men to accomplish wholeness of her self is commonly decried as evil; however, Hart suggests that the tragedy occurs because of the protagonists need to wholly possess Anna. Hart implies that Annas behavior is less whorish than personally therapeutic. In fact, Annas future husband, Peter Calderon, to whom Anna has candidly related all that has occurred, tells the protagonist: Its only now that she has finally said goodbye to Aston. . . . You were part of the healing process (190). Annas fatal mistake has been one of hetairian accommodation; in the paradoxical attempt to be everything, always to father and son, she has been unable to maintain her self.
Witchy Intentions
Margaret Atwood notes that there is a bumper crop of sinister Hecate-Crones. What can account for this? Where do all the Crones come from? (Survival 199).18 Yet the proliferation of witches in contemporary womens fiction demonstrates an ambiguous stance. While many of the witches are shown to be modern incarnations of medicine women, such as Miranda in Gloria Naylors Mama Day and the ancient aunts, Jet and Frances, in Alice Hoffmans Practical Magic, other fiction creates characters who are congruent with mythical portrayals of hags and demonic conjure women, such as Mirandas nemesis, Ruby, in Mama Day, who uses her power to jealously destroy the women she perceives are after her man. Likewise, Mabs in Fay Weldons Puffball is a woman with knowledge of natural
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poisons and herbal remedies. Mabs is attuned to natural power, conjuring storm clouds when irate and casting spells; her power is malevolently triggered by her active dislike of her children. In a less overt depiction of the witch, Toni Morrisons Jazz portrays women who have been living incomplete lives due to their disconnection from the intuitive powers of the female. In particular, Wild has been separated from other women and, also, her mother. From a Jungian point of view, this detachment from the feminine, even as it is an involuntary separation, results in a lack of identification with the mother; however, Wild has also been bereft of animus identification as well because her father is also unknown. Wild, lacking connections to the unconscious psyche, also lacks the assurance of a strong ego, becoming an agent of confusion or destruction (Ulanov 209). In Jazz, women of the 1920s, like many African women today, are wild because of the conditions in which they live (Mbalia 625). Mary Daly defines the word wild as living in a state of nature: inhabiting natural haunts: not tamed or domesticated . . . being one of a kind, not cultivated, not living near or associated with man, not amenable to control, and not yielding to a government authority; she contends that wild is the name of the Self in women. In the tamed state, women are domesticated, dedicated to the cult of male divinity. They are seduced into disloyalty to the Self, into false loyalties that fragment, that lead them further and further away from the Self and more and more into unwholesome alliances, into alienating discourse. Suavely persuaded of their own idiocy, they lose everything that is idiosyncratic, that is truly their ownpersonal, separate, and distinct. (34445) In Morrisons novel, the character Wild is both a real entity and a symbol of all of the novels women; for instance, both Violet Trace and Dorcas are also identified as wild during the course of the narrative, indicating their disconnection with the world and their selves. The narrator notes that the women keep busy because what is waiting for them, in a suddenly idle moment, is the seep of rage (18). Like the music that fills Harlem with its complicated anger in it; something hostile that disguised itself as flourish and roaring seduction, the truncated self-love of the women hides within (59). But because that anger is allowed no legitimate outlet, it makes the women dangerous, distorting their perceptions (77). Violet stabs a corpse instead of articulating her sorrow; Alice Manfred dreams of trampling her dead husbands lover beneath horses hooves; Dorcas mourns the burning of her dolls rather than the brutal deaths of her parents.
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The character of Wild in Jazz represents the hidden self of every woman. She is menacing, feared by men, but women recognize her power: A thing like that could harm you. Thirteen years after Golden Gray stiffened himself to look at that girl, the harm she could do was still alive. Pregnant girls were the most susceptible, but so were the grandfathers. Any fascination could mark a newborn: melons, rabbits, wisteria, rope, and, more than a shed snakeskin, a wild woman is the worst of all. (166) Wild gains the status of legend, giving birth to an unmothered son and then eventually disappearing into the cane fields, leaving only the traces of herself that are found by Hunters Hunter and her son, Joe Trace. When Joe first learns of Wild (without knowing that she is his mother), he grandly boasts that he will kill her, kill the wild and evil in women. He will make three attempts to locate Wild, but Joes quests to confront his mother end in ostensible failure. Wild remains an enigma, and Joe is ashamed: The small children believed she was a witch, but they were wrong. This creature hadnt the intelligence to be a witch. She was powerless, invisible, wastefully daft (179). Yet Joe is mistaken. As Eusebio L. Rodrigues notes: What we [the readers] are left with is what Joe sees in 1906: a cave, sunlit and set in a rock formation above a flowing river named Treason by white folks, and unmistakable signs of domesticity and peace (158). The witch Wild, given this description of her home, appears to be more of the Wise Woman archetype, the woman who is endowed with perceptive knowledge yet shunned by the world. The narrator, at the novels close, yearns to live in Wilds chamber of gold. She states: Id love to close myself in the peace left by the woman who lived there and scared everybody. Unseen because she knows better than to be seen. After all, who would see her, a playful woman who lived in a rock? Who could, without fright? (221). What is frightening about Wild is her insistence upon utter independence; she is seen as unnatural because she has little human contact. Labeled a bitch-witch, then, Wild represents what it costs women to maintain autonomy: hunted and feared, she, like Medusa, retreats from the world rather than face destruction.
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Revising Literary History
4 Revising Literary History

If she live long, And in the end meet the old course of death, Women will all turn monsters. King Lear in Shakespeares King Lear
drienne Richs much-quoted wisdomRe-Visionthe act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical directionis for [women] more than a chapter in cultural history; it is an act of survivalexhorts her female readers and writers to reinscribe their selves into reimagined pages (When We 18). And, perhaps, the most crucial step in rescuing the misrepresented bitch characterafter acknowledging the dilemma, of course is to reconstruct the textuality of the original villainess; a particularly effective means to accomplish this may be to recreate an alternative text. Kim Chernin acknowledges that the transformation of woman is a work of archetypal dimension and significance. To change fundamentally the nature of woman, it would be necessary to transform the archetype itself (148). And thus, feminist revisions of vilified female characters do attempt to broaden the outlines of the negative archetypes. According to Peter Erickson, re-vision can be represented in two ways . . . a conciliatory mode that urges moderation and balance or an oppositional mode that insists on a more uncompromising critical perspective (167). For example, in Paule Marshalls postcolonial revision of Joseph Conrads Lord Jim in Praisesong for the Widow, the protagonists journey reveals the rich legacy of her submerged African pasta journey that parallels that of Conrads Jim (Clarke 139). An oppositional reworking, The Handmaids TaleMargaret Atwoods revision of Nathaniel Hawthornes The Scarlet Letterrejects the self-abnegating role of Hester Prynne. While Offred is as passive as Hester, as Nancy A. Walker acknowledges, she does achieve control over the story in the act of actual narration, unlike the omnisciently narrated tale of Hester (Disobedient 151). Walker writes that the aim of such a revision is that it becomes a narrative rather than the narrative, a
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construct to be set alongside other constructs, removing the absolutist authority from the original (Disobedient 6). The feminist revisionist writer in active oppositional mode most often writes to recover a missing authenticity that may be lacking in the original work; that is, she writes a validation of womens roles from a reconceptualized point of view. As Mieke Bal pointedly asks, how can women rewrite themselves back into the history of ideology? (132). In this regard, feminist writers have engaged in numerous revisions, particularly of mythical characters, to uncover a depth that the ensuing ages may have stultified into caricature or stereotype. Margaret Atwoods Circe/Mud Poems, for instance, retells the story of Odysseuss sojourn on Circes island, presenting Odysseus as possessing free will and not as bewitched and mindless; the poet H.D.s Helen recounts epic history according to her female perspective; and poets as diverse as Alicia Ostriker, Anne Bradstreet, and Anne Hebert have reinvented Eve. Anne Sexton challenges the traditional depictions of fairy tale charactersas do Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, A. S. Byatt, and many othersand Adrienne Rich, in Diving into the Wreck, writes of the crucial need for women to reclaim their own myths. The list is long and illustrious. Literary revisions of earlier works are, of course, nothing new. Classic myths, originally derived from the oral tradition, have found their way into numerous written works. The Romans liberally borrowed from the ancient Greeks; similarly, contemporary fairy tales have their roots in a variety of cultural traditions. In fact, as noted, Jungian archetypal criticism suggests that all stories can find their genesis in a limited number of primal narratives. Diverse authors have long refashioned literature to present a revised philosophical viewpoint or to enable readers to reconsider the original interpretation of a story. Most of Shakespeares plays are revisions of earlier works, revisions that validate the Elizabethan age and Protestant ethics. James Joyces Ulysses presents a proletariat perception of The Odyssey, Homers epic legend. Steinbeck, in East of Eden, re-creates the biblical tale of Cain and Abel, questioning the traditional interpretation of evil. John Hawkes Second Skin offers a postmodernized version of The Tempest, and J. M. Coetzees Foe reworks Daniel DeFoes Robinson Crusoe from a postcolonial perspective. John Updike devotes three novels to his revision of The Scarlet Letter; A Month of Sundays (1975) retells the story from Hesters point of view, Rogers Version (1986) is Roger Chillingworths rendition, and S. (1988) is Arthur Dimmesdales tale. Each revised narrative attempts to recenter the original narrative from voiceless omniscience. For the feminist author, revision serves the triple purpose of renewing an established narrative, granting female characters subjectivity and complexity that had been lacking in the original narrative, and, to quote Walker, acting to expose or upset the paradigms of authority inherent in the texts they appropriate (7). In
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the newly retold narratives that recount the story through the consciousness of the bitch figure, the feminist author strives to grant motivations for the behavior of the bitch and to correct the previous assumptions that her actions are inhuman and thus lacking cause. In some, the bitch is even portrayed as possessing nobility. Alicia Ostrikers 1981 article, the aptly named Thieves of Language, hails the contemporary women poets who have engaged in revisionist mythmaking: Whenever a poet employs a figure or story previously accepted and defined by a culture, the poet is using myth, and the potential is always present that the use will be revisionist: that is, the figure or tale will be appropriated for altered ends, the old vessel filled with new wine, initially satisfying the thirst of the individual poet but ultimately making cultural change possible. (317) Feminist revisions of mythic characters, as Ostriker notes, contain no trace of nostalgia, no faith that the past is a repository of truth, goodness, or desirable social organization (330). Quite the contrary. Feminist revisions, particularly of stereotyped malevolent characters, seek to revalue their existence. For example, Hlne Cixouss landmark essay The Laugh of the Medusa, as noted earlier, significantly revises the male-written myth of Medusa, contending that Medusa was beautiful (246). Cynthia A. Davis states that the special significance of a female hero is not her representation of the Jungian feminine modea type primarily important to a male heros storybut the effect her gender has, as both physical and social reality, on the terms of the myth (116). Likewise, the purpose of reenvisioning a maligned female antagonist is not to clear her name so much as it is to reevaluate the original conception of the type, finding a clearer, more womancentered reading of the character as well as the motivations for her behaviors. For example, Sethe in Toni Morrisons Beloved is a character who bears strong resemblance to Medea.1 In Euripides play, Medea is sympathetically portrayed, up to a point. When betrayed by her husband, Jason, the man for whom Medea has forsaken her father and killed her brother, Medea kills their two sons in revenge. For this action, although possibly mitigated by the knowledge that Jason has abandoned his children along with his wife, Medea is synonymous with malignant motherhood. Similarly, Sethe also murders her child. Yet Sethe kills her crawling baby to save her from slavery; she says that she had hoped to send her to a safe place. Sethes lover, Paul D., cannot reconcile Sethes actions and tells Sethe that she is an animal, that her love is inhuman, articulating the male response to such an act. Unable to identify within his psyche to Sethes maternal reasoning, he instead relates to the child; he projects his horror of his own possible murder by a mother figure. He is unable to project a feminine, maternal desire for the childs salvation.2
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The effect of reading Medea through Sethes story encourages the reader to view Medea differently; Medea may have been trying to save her children from the lack of protection of a father: she too is attempting to protect her sons from the worlds cruelties. Euripides play clearly states that Jason had abandoned his sons, disinheriting them in favor of children to be produced from his new union, and thus Medeas actthough obviously one of revengemay also have been partially motivated to save her sons from a wretched life. In Beloved, Sethe, upon seeing Schoolteacher coming to reclaim her and her children, just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them (163). Likewise, Medea may believe that she is putting her children out of harms way. In another revision of Medea, wild girl Ying-ying in Amy Tans The Joy Luck Club aborts her child when her heinous husband abandons her for another woman. Expressing deep remorse, Ying-ying relates: I thought it was bad, because my body flowed with terrible revenge as the juices of this mans firstborn son poured from me (281). Suzanne D. Green notes that by aborting his baby, she does exact some revenge on him, yet it is a small victory (213). The novel is clear in its implication that Ying-yings husband does not return to her and thus would care little whether the baby was alive or dead. In terms of Medea, this revision of her story also suggests that Jason, in disinheriting his sons, is also unconcerned with their future. In addition, as Green states, the act of aborting her baby frees [Yingying] from a lifetime connection to the man who had treated her so badly; the act of killing her sons also removes Medea from a similar painful connection and unacknowledged obligation (213).
The Bronts and the Bitch

Feminist revisionists do not merely single out male-created mythical female figures for rescrutinizing. In 1966, Jean Rhys published Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel that reconstitutes the story of Jane Eyre and her beloved Mr. Rochester from the point of view of Rochesters mad wife, Antoinette/Bertha, locked in the attic. Although Antoinette cannot be labeled as a pure bitch because her anger and her crimes stem from madness, she is representative of the deviant woman, the woman who does not follow the prescribed feminine role. Gilbert and Gubar believe that Antoinette/Bertha is symbolic of Janes truest and darkest double . . . the ferocious secret self Jane has been trying to repress (Madwoman 360). Thus, Janes rage against the duplicitous Edward Rochester, Nina Baym contends, may be deflected onto an innocent victim, a victim who is also a metaphor for herself as Rochesters wife: The woman rather than
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the man becomes her adversary; that womans death is as necessary for Janes liberation as is Rochesters blinding (157). In Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette/Bertha has a chance to tell her own story, and the reader learns of the circumstances for her mad rage and hatred for the man who married her for her money, ripped her from her beloved tropical home, and incarcerated her in the chilly attic of an English fortress. In essence, Rhyss novel highlights the inescapable paradox of archetypal femininity. Mr. Rochester is repelled by his wife after, as Annis Pratt notes, she demonstrates sexual awareness: In Rhyss account, Rochester awakens her sexuality, only to be disgusted with it, horrified that a wife should enjoy sex (Pratt et al. 51). She is not offensive as long as she remains virginal and passive, but once she evolves from maiden into a state of sexual maturity, Rochester forces her into the final stage of madwoman/crone. Thus, Rochester truncates the progression of maiden/mother/crone by obliterating the fertile and biologically productive stage of his wifes existence, sabotaging her feminine progression. Wide Sargasso Sea exposes not only marital misogyny but the inherent fear man possesses of womens fertility and maternal stage. Alice Hoffmans Here on Earth continues the feminist trend of revising older and canonical works of literature. Just as Jean Rhys has delved beyond the madwoman of Jane Eyres Bertha Rochester, so too has Alice Hoffman reconceptualized the story of dark destroyer Catherine and brooding jilted lover Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights.3 In Hoffmans novel, Hollis (Heathcliff ) waits for March Murray (Catherine) to return to her New England hometown from California, where she has been living with her husband, Richard Cooper (Linton), anticipating the fulfillment of the readers fantasy of the reunification of Heathcliff and Catherine. Generations of readers have romanticized the legendary and overheated love story of Catherine Earnshaw and the foundling Heathcliff, lamenting Catherines infidelity to her theoretically destined lover (Karbo). For instance, Marianne Thormahlen recognizes that the love of Catherine and Heathcliff is often represented as an inexorable force, overriding the laws, conventions, and considerations of lesser mortals, even transcending the boundary between life and death (183). And, in catering to the publics rose-colored desires, for example, both the 1939 version and the 1970 film versions of Wuthering Heights omit much of the second half of the novel, which details the viler actions of Heathcliff following Catherines death. Each version presents a final version of Catherine and Heathcliff s ghosts blissfully reuniting to romp upon the moors. Nelly Dean, narrator of Wuthering Heights, admits to not liking Catherine; in fact, as Thormahlen notes, no one, with the possible exception of Isabella Linton (at least initially), cares for Catherine: Sure of Heathcliff s, and later Edgars, unconditional devotion, [Catherine] is basically uninterested in what anyone else might feel about her (184).4 Thormahlen goes on to dub Catherine a path-
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ologically egotistical character: To Catherine, Heathcliff is an extension of herself and an integral component of her egomania; this is why she cannot understand why marriage to Edgar Linton would separate her from Heathcliff (186).5 Sydny McMillen Conger similarly asserts that Catherine as a child is at once naughty and loving, disobedient and loyal, and a childish specter both terrifying and pitiful (96). Catherines status as bitch, although perhaps muted by her tragically young death, is confirmed both in the novel and in the later critical reviews. Terry Eagleton indicts Catherine: In a crucial act of self-betrayal and bad faith, Catherine rejects Heathcliff as a suitor because he is socially inferior to Linton; and it is from this that the train of destruction follows (101).6 Eagletons assertion aids in categorizing Catherine as an archetypal bitch; concerned with material gain in the form of Edgars capital, Catherines choice seems financially driven. Yet this portrayal of Catherine neglects her own contention that she truly loves Edgar: I love the ground under his feet, and the air over his head, and everything he touches, and every word he saysI love all his looks, and all his actions, and him entirely, and altogether (71).7 Destructive rage is apparent in the Catherine-Heathcliff relationship from the beginning (Schapiro 48). Thwarted in his desires as he has been thwarted in his quest for recognition and acceptance, Heathcliff justifies his increasingly immoral deeds by concentrating on revenge toward those he believes to have been responsible for his failure to achieve his desires. Like Jay Gatsby, who obsessively focuses on Daisy as the tangible locus of his quest for his vision of himself, Heathcliff rages at his inability to possess the living, and then the dead, Catherine. His childishly displaced anger attempts to destroy everything that he believes contributed to opposing a union between Catherine and himself. And whereas Heathcliff is prevented, for the most part, from venting his rage directly at Catherine by the protective presence of Linton, in Hoffmans Here on Earth, Hollis is able to direct that rage directly at March when she returns without protection. In a traditional Jungian analysis, Catherine may be seen as the embodiment of Heathcliff s anima, and Catherines much-quoted remark Nelly, I am Heathcliff indicates Heathcliff s role as personified animus (74). Barbara Ann Schapiro contends that Catherine and Heathcliff are a single, but deeply divided, self; therefore, it stands to reason that the two must become joined in order to integrate the missing halves of each others psyche (48).8 However, Catherines early death forestalls the possibility of such a union. Thus, Heathcliff s death is, ironically, the only possible means of integration or, in Jungian terms, individuation. Maria Koskinen asserts that Catherine and Heathcliff aim at the annihilation of self which can only be permanent at death and which makes death an orgiastic experience to them (212). That the reader longs for Heathcliff s death to com-
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plete that which has been rent apart throughout the novel by Catherines willful behavior is an indication of the novels imperative toward the consummation of Heathcliff and Catherine. Here on Earth provides the reader with a much different interpretation: Hollis as Heathcliff rejects the Eros embodied in March as Catherine. Although March might believe that at the core, theyre identical, Hollis is incapable of integrating his anima, and, indeed, he feels he must destroy March (121). Even the sexual aspect of the relationship is one of utter dominance: Hollis is a different kind of lover than he used to be. He was always sure of himself, but now he wants to be completely in control, and March doesnt fight that. In a way, its a relief. March doesnt have to think when shes with him, or make a decision, or state a preference (174). Hoffmans novel implies that the integration of the anima in Holliss consciousness is threatening to Holliss masculinity, and thus he is destructive toward the feminine even as he is obsessively drawn toward it. Here on Earth seems to take an assertion by Heathcliff to Catherine as an ironic statement; when Wuthering Heightss Catherine challenges Heathcliff to take revenge on her, Heathcliff meekly and apparently sincerely responds that even if she should torture [him] to death for [her] amusement, he could never turn on her (97). Hoffmans Hollis has no such qualms. His powerful rage, fed by years of resentment and a growing habit of vengeancehis occupation of destroying racehorses for insurance money, his marrying and beating the Isabella character, his destruction of Alan (Hindley), and his poor fatherhood of Hank (Hareton)all fuel an initially masked desire to destroy March, who is his symbol of all that has been denied to him. The history of March and Hollis follows a similar vein to Catherine and Heathcliff s history in Wuthering Heights; however, the lovers will fulfill the romantic readers desires by reuniting when March returns to her hometown for the funeral of the housekeeper who raised her. Yet, rather than reading a story of glorious reconciliation where each finds the missing half of soul and psyche, the reader discovers a startling tale of the obsessive and abusive Holliss systematic ill treatment of March. The very qualities that the readers of Wuthering Heights have celebrated in Heathcliff, when allowed to flourish unchecked, turn deadly. Hoffman exonerates Catherines perceived self-centeredness and materialism by revealing her abandonment of Heathcliff as an act of self-preservation. March, when first confronting Hollis after several years separation, is wrenched back into a painful reverie: You build your world around someone, and then what happens when he disappears? Where do you gointo pieces, into atoms, into the arms of another man? You go shopping, you cook dinner, you work
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odd hours, you make love to someone else on June nights. But youre really not there, youre someplace else where there is a blue sky and a road you dont recognize. . . . You always imagine that you see him, but hes never there. Its only his spirit, thats whats there beneath the bed when you kiss your husband, there when you send your daughter off to school. Its in your coffee cup, your bathwater, your tears. Unfinished business always comes back to haunt you, and a man who swears hell love you forever isnt finished with you until hes done. (123) March had invented a romantic story, one in which she is the heroine. Yet she also feels powerless to write her own story: She believed that all you wanted, you would eventually receive, and that fate was a force which worked with, not against you (7). Throughout most of the novel, March allows Hollis to write her destiny, convinced, somehow, that his passion endows him with that right. While Carol Siegel has argued that Wuthering Heightss Catherine is filled with antisocial passion and Heathcliff is her demonic slave (8), Hoffman renders a portrait that suggests an inverted pattern; March is antisocial because Hollis refuses to allow her access into the outside world once he has gained control of her. March comes to realize that she isnt even certain she exists without Hollis (174). In addition, Hollis is the enslaver; he incarcerates March in his house by disconnecting the telephone and disabling her car; he discourages all outside contact; he even steals her mail. March accepts her imprisonment, thinking that hell tell her what to do and what to think, and after a while, if she stays here long enough, what to dream as well (214). Yet, as March finally realizes, even with all that she has sacrificed for him, shes somehow not enough his (276). March, like Catherine, will never be able to live up to the romantic, idealized, and fictionalized woman Hollis has created in his mind. Like Catherine, March has a daughterfifteen-year-old Gwena child Hollis violently resents. Hollis complains, That baby was more important to you than I was (119), and his goal becomes one of forcing March to forswear allegiance to her child, to literally deny Gwens existence. He desires this because it will mean to him that the years after March left did not exist. He tells March, I think you were never married to [Richard] (154). This is the goal that compels him to continue with March even after it becomes obvious that he does not and cannot love her. When he strikes Gwen, Gwen leaves; however, even though Hollis has accomplished his goalMarch does, in fact, stay with Hollis and does not rebelhe is still not content. Although Hollis has succeeded in placing himself before Marchs obligation and bond with her child and has achieved primary statuseven above Marchs own self-preservationhe continues his abuse.
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March becomes increasingly ill during her captivity. And whereas Catherine Earnshaws illness in Wuthering Heights is perceived by Nelly to be a willfully suicidal illnessa childish temper tantrum and attention-getting ployHoffman depicts Marchs illness as a result of a combination of Holliss selfish behavior and a manifestation of Marchs loss of self. In fact, because the real March does not exist for Hollis (no woman could live up to his expectations), it is possible that Hollis desires Marchs death; that is, if the real March ceases to exist, he may, like Heathcliff before him, indulge himself with (false) memories of the idealized Marchhis preferred version of March. Thus, Holliss reunification with March constitutes a drive toward death. Finally, sick and weakened, March leaves Hollis on New Years Eve in a belated move toward self-preservation. After a particularly violent evening, March is able to view Hollis without sentiment: March sees that the boy she loved, the one who kissed her in the attic and promised to love her forever, is no longer inside him. . . . The boy she loves is . . . lonely, the way hell always be, with or without her (287). And if, in fact, Hollis had been the projection of Marchs animus, and she his anima, Hoffmans novel suggests that while Hollis violently rejects his animaa fact supported by his heinous treatment of women in generalMarch is dangerously weak without her possession of her own animus. In ceding all of her power to Hollis, she has virtually destroyed her self. Thus, in reexamining Wuthering Heights, it becomes clear that Catherine, by rejecting Heathcliff and marrying Linton, managed to shelter some portion of her self from an annihilating union. Thus, Hoffman suggests that the woman who cedes all power to the male, the woman who rejects the bitch, is in peril of losing her self.
The Shakespearean Bitch

A popular tale for feminist revision, King Lear forms the basis for several latetwentieth-century novels written by women: Margaret Atwoods Cats Eye, Anne Tylers Ladder of Years, Laura Esquivels Like Water for Chocolate, and, especially, Jane Smileys A Thousand Acres. While the primary character focus for the novels differs in several of the revisions, their stories suggest that a womans identity may be better found by moving against, rather than following or embodying, prevailing myths about women (Rozga 20). And whereas three of the novels discussed concentrate upon the damage done to Cordelia through her fathers insistent ego, Smileys novel finally allows Goneril her long-overdue rebuttal.9 All of the mentioned works actively (dis)inherit the traditional legacy of King Lears portrayals, suggesting that the daughters must be viewed as more than mere archetypal figures.
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Jane Smileys novel A Thousand Acres takes two of Shakespeares most wicked women as its source: King Lears Goneril and Regan. Smiley, according to Nancy A. Walker, reformulates Shakespeares King Lear to give narrative authority to the female characters and thus to expose and question the patriarchal patterns that Shakespeare and his contemporaries took for granted (Disobedient 78). Set in the American Midwest of 1979, A Thousand Acres recounts the story of the demise of the Cook family and the destruction of the family farm. The patriarch, Laurence (Larry) Cook, a contentious and disagreeable man, ceremonially divides his property among two of his three daughters; only this time, instead of the parceling off of a kingdom, Lears division occurs as shares in a family-run farming corporation. As in King Lear, the narrative focuses upon the elder daughters agreement to the division and the youngest daughters refusal. However, Smileys version of King Lears script radically deviates from the familiar tale as she adds details of the womens relationships with their father and, in particular, bestows motivations for the elder daughters actions. The narrator of Smileys novel is Ginny, not the Cordelia character as is the case in many other feminist revisions of King Lear. Goneril finally gets the opportunity to tell her side of the story of one of the most evil women in literature, the recipient of Albanys famous line: Proper deformity shows not in the fiend / So horrid as in woman (King Lear 4.2.6061). Mary Paniccia Carden allows that displacing the moral center of Shakespeares plot [by reading through Goneril/ Ginnys point of view], Smiley disrupts and decenters discourses that position the fathers perspective as the perspective of history (182). In fact, Smileys revision suggests that the primary transgression of Goneril/Ginny is not her ostensible cruelty to her father but rather her insistence on retelling the story from the feminine/daughter perspective, depreciating Lears perspective. Like most of the bitch characters in literature, Shakespeares Goneril and her equally evil sister Regan seem to have no legitimate basis for their more depraved actions. As Claudette Hoover recognizes, Influential critics of this century have agreed that since their motivations defy understanding, they must be regarded as representations, personifications, or symbols rather than individualized characters or even dramatic types (49).10 And Marianne Novy notes, Few of their lines carry hints of motivations other than cruelty, lust, or ambition, characteristics of the archetypal fantasy image of the woman as enemy (106). Hoover contends that Shakespeare drew the characters so that their inner motives are obscure (55); however, Stephen Reid notes that, given Lears professed greater fondness for Cordelia, Gonerils and Regans initial stance is one of necessary subservience to their tyrannical father (228). He further posits that, as evidenced by Lears towering rage at Cordelias momentary inability to express her love, Lears
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behavior toward his daughters is pathological: The slightest sign of petulant behavior in Goneril was [probably] met by something close to absolute rage (239). Thus, Gonerils behavior toward her father, once she has gained power, might be recognized as not only having motivationher rebellion against his tyrannybut also being a result of her own training: she responds toward him as he would respond toward her. Hoover also notes that, in his revision of the earlier and anonymous The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir, Shakespeare masculinized Goneril and Regan (50). The type of the masculine woman is unmistakable in the characteristics that Goneril and Regan display because of inflexible resolve to retain control over their new positions: directness, rationality, aggressiveness, and indomitable will. These qualities, almost exclusively accredited to men, are evinced in the daughters bald insistence that Lear acknowledge his old age, in the painful literalness of their responses to his pleas for gratitude and justice, and in the cold rationality of their arguments against the continued presence of his hundred knights. (56) Once again, the rationale for labeling woman as the bitch lies in her overly masculine psyche. Regan and Goneril, in becoming rulersironically not of their own volitionare then severely castigated for adopting the characteristics of a strong (read: masculine) monarch. Perhaps, the reader may wonder, Lear did not really mean for his daughters to rule? That is, he may have intentionally desired his daughters failures to adequately rule, sabotaging them when it became apparent that he was not, in fact, a necessity. Because Goneril and Regan are always held in contrast to Cordelia, several feminist revisionists have examined the conditions of Cordelias selfhood, rendering revised portraits of her refusal to profess an all-consuming love for her father. Moreover, these authors also posit the conditions of Cordelias existence and, by extension, the conditions of her sisters daughterhood as well. Atwoods Cats Eye relates the consequences of Cordelias rejection by her father and his patriarchal legacy.11 Cordelia, the youngest of three sisters, is trapped in a vicious legacy of self-hatred as she is subjected to the soul-withering nature of her fathers scorn, a malicious behavioral pattern that she replicates with her friends. Somehow having failed, like her namesake, to convince her father that she is worthy of his love, she is metaphorically banished from the kingdom. Cordelia makes her appearance in the novel after protagonist Elaine has already established a friendship with two other girls: Carol and Grace. Elaine returns from her summer with her family to find a new girl who is lanky, sinewy and dressed in corduroys and a pullover, unlike the other girls, who are wearing
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summer skirts (74). Thus, upon her first description, Cordelia is likened to a more masculine figure,12 especially when compared to her older gifted sisters, Perdita and Miranda.13 Cordelia quickly seems to assume a stance of strength and power as she brutalizes Elaine, yet the novel suggests that Cordelia is replicating her own treatment by her father. Cordelia and her sisters do not joke or drawl when mentioning him. He is large, craggy, charming, but [Elaine has] heard him shouting (77). Cordelias victim, Elaine, is torn between her fear of Cordelias vicious behavior and her equally potent fear of Cordelias rejection in an innocent yet deadly version of female/male, daughter/father patterns, and, as Stephen Ahern asserts, Cordelia uses Elaine in this classic patriarchal pattern of projecting what one is trying to escape/reject within oneself onto an Other (13). Cordelias tactics in tormenting Elaine are obviously repetitions and revisions of what have been said and done to her. For example, in one scene, Elaine is ostracized from the other girls by Cordelia until she thinks over everything she has said that day and [tries] to pick out the wrong thinga clearly parental admonition (122). Cordelia also repeats classic paternal reprimands: What do you have to say for yourself?; You should have your mouth washed out with soap; Look at yourself! Just look! (123, 143, 168).14 Elaine recognizes that Cordelia has been ruled by fear; she relates that Cordelias father . . . makes wry jokes, his smile is like a billboard, but why is she afraid of him? Because she is (175). Elaine, whose own father is benign, does, however, understand that darkness brings home the fathers, with their real, unspeakable power (175). During dinner with Cordelias family, the wolfish father complains to Elaine, Im hag-ridden (263). Cordelias father, as a revised King Lear, is a tyrannical and implacable ruler/father. Although Cordelia obviously strives for her fathers love and acceptance with her dithering, fumble-footed efforts to appease him, it is equally obvious that she is never granted her desire because she is somehow the wrong person (264). Elaine reports that Cordelias father can make you feel that what he thinks of you matters, because it will be accurate, but what you think of him is of no importance (263). Atwood suggests that Lears rejection of Cordelia is far more perverse than merely an egotistical father having a temper tantrum because his daughter will not lie to him. Atwoods Cordelia clearly models herself upon her father, acting in a masculine manner and adopting his own traits; she believes that she may find some sort of perfection in her fathers eyes by mirroring him. Yet, in order to emulate her father, she must also engage is his hatred and disdain for women; thus, she must also hate herself.15 Cordelia will never please her father, except, possibly, by total erasure of her self in metaphorical or literal death. And indeed, Atwoods Cordelia does disappear. Anne Tylers Ladder of Years also recounts the story of a motherless daughter, Delia Grinstead, the youngest of three, who like her namesake ultimately becomes
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the daughter who best demonstrates her love for her father. Delia, however, finds that in her attempt to please him, she sacrifices herself completely, even marrying his assistant and never leaving her fathers house. In her care of her father, she fails to gain her own identity, and following her fathers death, Delia at age forty finds herself adrift, a grown-up who has never emotionally grown beyond daughterhood.16 The novel relates Delias journey as she walks away from her family for over a year, creating the necessary autonomy she never possessed, even though Delia does choose to return to her family at the end of the novel, as is the case in many female bildungsroman novels.17 Ladder of Years revises King Lear, becoming a powerful feminist bildungsroman, enacting subjectification for a woman rather than relating a tale of destruction. Delias experiences mirror those related by Rita Felski in her definition of the female bildungsroman; they are difficult and painful, such as when her son finds her and asks her to come home, but her journey is presented as one of her necessary steps toward maturation (135). Felski writes: Individual development requires some kind of recognition of the contingency and uncertainty of experience; this form of knowledge is counterposed to the deceptive myth of romance, the ideological fiction of idyllic married bliss which provided an already written script without space for the articulation of dissent. (136) Delias unquestioning devotion to her father in Ladder of Years suggests a navet that stifles her ability to be a mother and wife in her own family. Thus, what appears to be selfish abandonment as Delia walks off a beach with very few possessions and no explanation is actually the only means by which Delia will be able to fulfill her familial responsibilities. She will return because she chooses to, not because she is required to.18 Tyler, in invoking King Lear, suggests that Lears daughters are destined to failure because they have never been allowed to develop self-love and self-gratification. In subjugating their selves, voices, desires, and ambition to the patriarchs influence, the Gonerils, Regans, and Cordelias must quell their own requirements to develop and mature. Tyler also suggests at the perhaps inadvertent cruelty of the father who selfishly allows his daughter to profess an all-consuming love. While Delia had never left her fathers house, marrying his junior partner and continuing her childhood habits of wearing girlish clothing and reading trashy romance novels, Delias new personalityMiss Grinsteadreads mature classics, wears adult clothing, procures employment, and maintains her own rented room. Delias new life is a timewarped and fast-forwarded version of the life she never had, and thus she finally is able to grow up. And it is only this maturing process that had been truncated that will allow her to cope autonomously with life without her father.
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Adrienne Rich, in Of Woman Born, argues that the loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter, is the essential female tragedy. We acknowledge Lear (father-daughter split), Hamlet (son and mother) . . . as great embodiments of the human tragedy; but there is no presently enduring recognition of mother-daughter (103). Laura Esquivels novel Like Water for Chocolate is a partially inverted retelling of King Lear that does focus upon a mother-daughter split. Daughters Rosaura and Getrudis portray Regan and Goneril, and Josefita (known as Tita), the protagonist/heroine, is a version of Cordelia, a Cordelia who has been successfully forced to profess an ultimate love and remain with her parent Mama Elena. Like Lear, Mama Elena insists on unconditional devotion from her daughter Tita; Tita is obligated by family custom to remain single and care for her widowed mother as long as Mama Elena shall live. And also like Lear, Mama Elena is not interested in a truthful protestation of love for her from Tita, only abject acquiescence to her will. Mama Elena, represented through the filter of awe and fear, refuses to allow Tita to marry her true love, Pedro, and instead marries Rosauro to Pedro, who agrees so that he might remain close to his beloved Tita (de Valds 79). Tita, obedient daughter, agrees in silent anguish. Yet Mama Elena is not triumphant in her daughters resignation to her will, implying that perhaps Lear too would remain unsatisfied had Cordelia mouthed a tritely dutiful response or even sacrificed herself completely to her father. Because she has tyrannically compelled an enforced loyalty from Tita, Mama Elena can never accept Titas compliant devotions. She cannot trust Tita, knowing that Tita has not chosen to care for her mother of her own free will, a lesson Lear never learns.19 Ultimately, Tita is driven mad by sacrificing herself to Mama Elenas will, screaming wildly, Heres what I do with your orders! Im sick of them! Im sick of obeying you! (98). At this, Titas first real rebellion, Mama Elena sends for a doctor to take Tita to an insane asylum for her insubordination, banishing her daughter from the Queen-dom. Bereft of compassion (even though she too has experienced a thwarted romance), Mama Elena remains implacable, and it takes the redundancy of paralysis below the waist (Mama Elena had negated her own sexuality long before she was attacked by bandits) for her to allow Tita to return. However, she still refuses to accept Titas love: It was as if Mama Elenas spit had landed dead-center on a fire that was about to catch and had put it out. Inside [Tita] felt the effects of snuffing the flame; smoke was rising in her throat, tightening into a thick knot and clouding her eyes and making her cry (127). Esquivel suggests that Lears narcissistic self-love, like Mama Elenas, would also have smothered Cordelia if she had not remained true to herself. In addition, Esquivel demonstrates that Lear, perhaps, would not have been placated if Cordelia had, in fact, lied; he may have continued his demands, disinheriting her (as he
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does with her sisters) as soon as she gave evidencevalid or notthat she had indeed lied. Jane Smiley stated in an interview that she never bought the conventional interpretation that the sisters were completely evil (Duffy). And, therefore, the most significant revision of Goneril (and Regan) in A Thousand Acres is that Ginny is not an insensitive, defeminized, inhuman monster. Both Ginny and Rose embody the traditional feminine nurturing impulses; in particular, they have divided the care of their more-than-capable father between themselves in addition to their own household responsibilities.20 On alternating mornings, Ginny rises early and travels to her irascible fathers house to make him his breakfast: I set out sausage, fried eggs, hash brown potatoes, cornflakes, English muffins and toast, coffee and orange juice (29). She and Rose make dinner for him at the time he appoints, clean his house, and arrange their lives to suit his demands. Their lives are spent in service to their father, even though both are grown married women. As in King Lear, Ginny/Goneril and Rose/Regan have not been allowed to speak their own words. Goneril and Regan, in proclaiming their love for their father, speak a ritualized script, the one Lear had written for his daughters, and in A Thousand Acres, Ginny and Rose know only too well how to read their scripts.21 Ginny says, Of course, it was silly to talk about my point of view. When my father asserted his point of view, mine vanished. Not even I could remember it (176). Similarly, the father, Larry, also does not speak the truth; Ginny realizes that theres always some mystery. He doesnt say what he means (104). When Larry does speak, due to his massive ego he expects his daughters to read his mind, to understand his implied subtexts. He has created an elaborate vision of reality: his implied wordwhich is subject to his immediate and arbitrary revisionis the law of the land. Larrys refusal to allow his daughters autonomy, or even to acknowledge their humanity, mirrors his awesome ego. His daughters belong to him; he allows them no space for their own husbands orin the case of Rosechildren. The daughters mother is dead, and Ginny notes that my mother died before she could present him to us as only a man, with habits and quirks and preferences, before she could diminish him in our eyes enough for us to understand him (20). Only the youngest, Caroline, has managed to escape, to move away and become a lawyer, due in large part to Ginnys and Roses mothering of her and sheltering of her from their fathers all-consuming influence. Ostensibly for tax purposes, Larry impulsively decides to incorporate the farm, the thousand acres, and divide the shares among his daughters. None are prepared for this because Larry has maintained an unrelenting authority over his farm for
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all of his adult life. As in King Lear, the two eldest accept while the youngest hesitates. Larry ruthlessly cuts Caroline out of the family, never even allowing her to speak, in a portentous demonstration of how he deals with obstruction. Immediately the plan goes awry. Larry fumes about his own imposed retirement, spending hours glaring out the window as his sons-in-law work the fields. As Carden notes, Larry feels he has lost the respect that goes with ownership (189). He soon starts drinking heavily and becomes more abusive than ever toward Rose and Ginny. In a revision of Goneril and Regans refusal to allow King Lear his one hundred knights and horses, Ginny and Rose, in this version, take away Larrys keys to his horsepower because of his repeated instances of drunken driving, including an accident.22 Larry then steals a farm truck, and when confronted by his daughters, he rages and curses Ginny. Larry Cooks curse reinvokes Lears curse upon Goneril, who has the power to shake [his] manhood (King Lear 1.4.288). Larrys overreaction takes the form of misogynistic and inappropriate (especially for a father) venom. Ginny recounts: A wave of exhaustion waved over me. I said, Fine. Do what you want. You will anyway. Spoken like the bitch you are! Rose said, Daddy! He leaned his face toward mine. You dont have to drive me around anymore, or cook the goddamned breakfast or clean the goddamned house. His voice modulated into a scream. Or tell me what I can do and what I cant do. You barren whore! I know all about you, you slut! Youve been creeping here and there all of your life, making up to this one and that one. But youre not really a woman, are you? I dont know what you are, just a bitch, is all, just a dried up whore bitch. (195)23 As Hoover argues in regard to King Lear, the anti-sexual curse of Lear is inexplicably directed toward Gonerils femininity (6061). Similarly, Oates questions King Lears yoking together of feminine evil and sexuality: It is not dramatically clear why the sisters cruelty to their father should be related to sexual desire (Is This). However, numerous references are made to Gonerils and Regans perverted sexuality; Lear himself alludes to Goneril and Regan as being embodiments of everywoman, complaining: Down from the waist they are Centaurs, Though women all above. But to the girdle do the gods inherit,
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Beneath is all the fiends. Theres Hell, theres darkness, theres the sulphurous pit, Burning, scalding, stench, consumption, fie, fie, fie! (King Lear 4.6.12329) In A Thousand Acres, the malice of Larry Cooks curse carries a doubly horrific significance because Rose is in remission from a cancer that has taken one of her breasts and Ginny has suffered numerous miscarriages.24 Furthermore, Larrys charge of whore is abhorrently ironic. Both Lears curse and Larrys curse point toward an underlying hatred of all that is feminine in their articulated desires for their daughters to be barren. And while King Lear never explains the patriarchs loathing of the feminine, A Thousand Acres illuminates the genesis of Larry Cooks antipathy. After Larry curses his daughters and rages off into a storm, the action, as Keppel notes, stays with Rose and Ginny rather than with Larry (109). It is on this night that Rose broaches the subject of Larry Cooks sexual abuse of his older daughters: He went into your room at night (190). When Ginny fails to remember, she considers that perhaps it was only Rose who had to endure the incest because Rose was prettier. Rose responds, Prettier doesnt make any difference. You were as much his as I was. There was no reason to assert his possession of me more than his possession of you. We were just his, to do with as he pleased, like the pond or the houses or the hogs or the crops (190). Ginny eventually gains partial recollection of her childhood; she remembers beatings by her father, a continual sense of being naughtydisobedient, careless, destructive, disorderly, hurtful to others, defiantand a childhood disgust with her body (300). In a toneless recitation, Ginny recalls: And so my father came to me and had intercourse with me in the middle of the night. I could remember pretending to be asleep, but knowing he was in the doorway and moving closer. I could remember him saying, Quiet, now, girl. You dont need to fight me. I didnt remember fighting him, ever, but in all circumstances he was ready to detect resistance, anyway. . . . I never remembered penetration or pain, or even his hands on my body, and I never sorted out how many times there were. I remember my strategy, which had been desperate limp inertia. (3023) In denying his daughters femininity, even while he avails himself of their bodies, and by suddenly making them rulers of the kingdom, Larry has initiated new possibilities of freedom and power for his Ginny and Rose. Each adopts the grasping nature of her father; each becomes consumed by the idea of possession; each subdues her hated false facade that Larry had insisted she maintain. Yet
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both Ginny and Rose mistakenly believe that Larry desires that his daughters develop a new strength inherited from him, when in fact, he wants them to fail; he wants his power to be validated through their failures. Cashing in on public sympathy after his expulsion into the storm becomes known, Larry acts like a man who has become senile due to ill treatment, yet Ginny notices, following Harold Clarks (Gloucesters) obviously plotted and rehearsed denunciation of Rose and Ginny, a look of sly righteousness spread over her fathers supposedly addled face (237). In a self-destructive and infantile rage, Larry reunites with Caroline and, through his pathetic masquerade, persuades her to sue for repossession of the farm. This act has disastrous consequences as a court order mandates that all construction on the farm must cease. For Ginny, Rose, and their husbands, the order spells financial peril and, ultimately, forces the farm into bankruptcy. Larrys behavior, then, and not Ginnys or Roses, destroys the kingdom. In addition to providing Goneril/Ginny (and Regan/Rose) with a voice, Smiley also endows the reader with the missing end to King Lear; she presents a vision of the kingdom after chaos ensues. In A Thousand Acres, the farm is bankrupted and sold off, Rose dies of cancer, and Ginny leaves. The full measure of Larrys actions unfolds. The kingdom he has striven to build, that he has cheated for and sacrificed his wife and daughters for, disappears into the anonymous acreage of corporate farming. In fact, as Ginny sorts through the possessions left before Larrys house is sold, she realizes that she wants nothing; none of the remaining possessions hold any meaning, just as the farm itself no longer holds any significance. Furthermore, Caroline abandons the farm as well. In this King Lear, Cordelia lives, yet she is unwilling to take responsibility for the kingdom/farm she supposedly has rightfully inherited through her virtuous allegiance to its king. As Keppel recognizes, Whereas King Lear concludes with only men remaining, as if to signal a return to the rightful patriarchal order, A Thousand Acres ends with only women, among them the sole representatives of the next generation [Pammy and Linda, Roses daughters] (11324). And, as Carden acknowledges, while [Ginny] lacks traditionally defined rewards of femininityshe has no money, no house, no man, no children of her ownshe has gained the alternate rewards of memory, knowledge, and voice (197). Significantly, Ginny chooses as her exile the life Rose had imagined their mother would have lived had she the courage to leave her husband; working as a waitress and being an adoptive mother to her nieces, Ginny chooses to carry on her matrilineal identity and forego her patriarchal inheritance. Ultimately, then, as Margaret Rozga notes, A Thousand Acres is not a King Lear story; Ginny, the child of an exploited land now in exile, no longer the dutiful daughter, no longer innocent, fashions a revision and readies herself to present a new mythology (28).
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The Art of Becoming a Bitch
5 The Art of Becoming a Bitch

Lifes a bitch. Now so am I. Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns (1992)
nlike so many of the portrayals of the bitch in male-authored fiction, contemporary feminist renderings of the bitch suggest that she is not born a bitch, as was, for example, Steinbecks Cathy Trask or Turows Carolyn Polhemus; she is, instead, created by specific circumstances and, more importantly, by herself. This character makes the choice, either consciously or subconsciously, to reject the traditional roles open to her and to possess power, a power that is always presupposed to have been usurped from the male sphere. And although in most cases she does not reject her femininity, she does reject the social limitations of femininity. How she is able to do this depends on the resources available to her. Some characters determinedly opt to reject the traditional feminine roles, eschewing wifedom and motherhood, refusing to accept the love story as their script, or choosing to compete directly with men. Others find that their voyage toward the bitch is a course necessitated as the only means of survival. These characters must gain some sense of power within themselves or risk losing their identity, their subjectivity, their psychological well-being, or even their lives. Yet, as is often the case, the successful achievement of that power may then paradoxically result in another kind of loss of identity, subjectivity and well-being, altering the womans self-perceptions and the perceptions of those who surround her. The literature written by women that details the circumstances of becoming the bitch tends to focus upon the choices the characters must make as well as the lack of options available. The three pairs of characters highlighted in this chapter Sula and Nel from Toni Morrisons Sula, Ruth Patchett and Mary Fisher from Fay Weldons The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, and Cordelia and Elaine Risley from Margaret Atwoods Cats Eyeare doubled examples of women gaining and losing power and identity, each questioning her positioning in her sphere as female.
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With, respectively, the fates of dissolution, desertion, and insanity hovering close by, the women attempt to wrest control of their selves from the patriarchal communities that will determine their existences. In each case, however, the power gained by the individual womans seizing the power of the bitch also results in reduction of the characters selves. Each novel focuses upon a pairing of womenSulas Nel and Sula; She-Devil s Ruth and Mary; Cats Eyes Elaine and Cordeliaand in each novel, one of the characters is somewhat successful in acquiring power, while the other fails. Each (partially) successful characterNel, Ruth, Elainediscovers that the price paid for her power is the soul of another woman. And, in fact, her ostensible power is vacant of tangible energy. The evil of each bitch becomes a surrogate evil; that is, the vengeance of the bitch is misdirected toward another woman instead of toward the repressive forces she initially intended to challenge. Toni Morrisons ability to direct and free the language from its traditional and binary connotations is well established. Rather than suggesting the typical bifurcated view of woman as good or evil, or possessed of anima or animus, Morrison develops characters whose goodness and evil, femininity and masculinity, are ambiguously conceived, especially within conventional patriarchal definitions; as Deborah McDowell notes, Sula transgresses all deterministic structures of opposition (79). Given this knowledge, it is possible to examine Morrisons female characters from a primordial feminine viewone that is as untainted by patriarchal overwriting as possible.1 Anna Shannon contends that Sula demonstrates the idea that personal growth and fulfillment and the roles of wife and mother [are] mutually exclusive for many women (11). However, in the novel, even though Sula and Nel develop these mutually exclusive roles separately, paradoxically neither is successful. Moreover, while each has also desperately tried to become a unique woman, she has, ironically, re-created in her self the very female type she had sought to reject. Morrison, in Sula, creates a world that sharply deviates from the established and expected world of commonly accepted (white, Western, male) reality. Not only does she revise male archetypal mythsCain and Abel (Jones)and female archetypal mythsLilith and Eve (Seidel), Demeter and Persephone (Pessoni), the Great Mother and the Terrible Mother (Pessoni)but the novel also takes the premise that much of what occurs in it is the antithesis of what it appears to be. For example, Sula takes place in a black township known as the Bottom, even though it is actually located in the hills; Shadracks National Suicide Day signifies life affirmation; male and female roles are opposed (Page 62). And Sula herself, labeled as bitch by her neighbors, is indeed the towns moral center (112).2
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Morrisons novel narrates the story of two women, Nel and Sula, their family histories, their growing up as friends when their friendship was so close, they themselves had trouble distinguishing ones thoughts from the others, the demise of that friendship, and finally an epiphany of interconnection (83). In this process, both Nel and Sula become dangerously closed in their self-conceptions. In rejecting the oppositional aspects of each otherSulas arrant freedom and Nels assimilatory characteristicsboth become rigid, each condemning that which deviates from her own perceptions of what is moral. Nels upbringing has been marked by repression instigated by her mother, who is strongly influenced by white middle-class values. The narrator notes that Nel had no aggression; her parents had succeeded in rubbing down to a dull glow any sparkle or splutter she had (83). Nels mother, Helene Wright, epitomizes the immorality of feminine goodness; she is determined to protect her daughter from any corrupting influence, including Nels own skin color (Gillespie and Kubitschek 71).3 While Helenes hatred of her own blackness is clearly evident, her rigidity is self-imposed by her disgust at her Creole courtesan mother, Rochelle, while Nel secretly is exhilarated by hera foreshadowing of her fascination with Sula. Naana Banyiwa-Horne notes that Helenes lovely house with a brick porch and real lace curtains represents oppression to her daughter, Nel, but order to Sula, while the home of Eva and Hannah Peace, Sulas grandmother and mother, conversely represents freedom for Nel and constant flux for Sula (29). Sulas upbringing appears to be in direct contrast to Nels raising, because her mother, Hannah Peace, is utterly devoid of structure. She maintains a hedonistic stance as opposed to the self-denying Helene. Hannah rubbed no edges, made no demands (43). Neither mother likes her daughter, and both are distant (52). Her daughters approaching womanhood terrifies Helene, and Hannah confesses to friends, while Sula is eavesdropping, that I love Sula. I just dont like her (57). And, whereas Nels childhood is characterized by a strict series of admonitions, Sula is never censured.4 Both extremes, however, exact a price. Neither Nel nor Sula possesses a healthy psyche. Each is drawn to the other, therefore, partially to fulfill a void within her unbalanced self. Banyiwa-Horne writes, Sula is not a realistic portrayal of womanhood, but an exploration of that dimension of the feminine psyche or self which is often hidden from view because it is scary and too problematic to deal with (28). The novel that exposes this scary self that when suppressed spins off the Nels, whose imaginations are driven underground, and who sacrifice the challenge of living fulfilling lives to the acceptance of drab but safe, conventional existences. Similarly, when this scary self is uncontrolled, as in the case of
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Sula, it leads to a total absence of center around which to create a whole personality (28).5 As opposites, the girls complete each other, yet such a simplistic rendering of each womans characteristics will not hold throughout the novel. Nel states, Im me. Im not their daughter. Im not Nel. Im me. Me (28). Sula likewise tells Eva: I want to make myself (92). Yet maintaining these individual selves proves lonely for each of the girls. Separated from community, neither girl is able to judge herself from within a communal framework. Thus, both Sulas and Nels development is arrested. Each feels rejected by her mother, yet neither finds a fulfilling substitute for mother-love until they find each other. Divided from a feminine acceptance, each rejects identification with the feminine. Yet, as Morrison makes clear, the rejection of identification with the mother does not necessarily indicate that Sula and Nel automatically associate with the animus. Their union may be viewed as a different feminine identification, one that is not dependent upon male/female binary opposition. Sula as bitch is a radical revision of the Jungian archetypal bitch. Although she ruthlessly cuts off a piece of her own finger to demonstrate her power to a group of threatening males, contributes to the death of a small boy, watches her mother burn to death, and sleeps with her best friends husband, her actions are never dictated by a quest for material gain. The narrator notes, [Sula] was completely free of ambition, with no affection for money, property or things, no greed, no desire to command attention or compliments (119). Yet, as Morrison has also stated, [Sula] is a masculine character. . . . She really behaves like a man (Stepto 487). And Nel admonishes Sula by stating, You cant do it all. You a woman and a colored woman at that. You cant act like a man (123). Yet, in another interview, Morrison described Sula as daring, disruptive, imaginative, modern, outlawed, dangerously female (Unspeakable 269). Sula, in fact, does not possess an overabundance of animus. As integral part of the female triad of Eva/Hannah/Sula, Sula has very little association with the masculine at all. Women are less individuated than men: they have more flexible ego boundaries, Nancy Chodorow contends. For boys and men, both individuation and dependency issues become tied up with the sense of masculinity, or masculine identity. For girls and women, by contrast, issues of femininity, or feminine identity, are not problematic in the same way (199). In essence, the assumption that the bitch is created when she rejects the feminine, either because she rejects the mother or because she is too closely identified with the father, can be an erroneous presumption. In Sula, what appears to be rejection of the feminine, and particularly of the maternal figures, is not what constitutes Sulas perceived evil. Sula, as critics have noted, is possessed of a complete freedom. As a social pariah branded as different, [Sula] is the freedom against which others define
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themselves (Willis 39). This freedom may also be seen to include freedom from the influence of both the anima and the animus. Sula equates the feminine with the mother, and the images she has are of Evas resolute motheringburning her son Plum to save his manhoodand Hannahs lack of boundaries; thus, she rejects the models of femininity she grows up with. Yet, having had no strong male figure to identify with (a father, brother, or friend), Sula does not turn toward masculinization; she attempts to create herself without a defining gendered structure. Sula has a negated freedom then, and this lack leaves her with no sense of gender identification, explaining, perhaps, her failure to maintain a social placement. As the friend of the more conventional Nel, Sula endures in the community until Nels marriage and capitulation into a socially and gendered prescribed role. When Nel marries, Sula leaves. She attends a university and travels, but her lack of identification in the outside world compels her return to the Bottom. Sulas return is heralded by a plague of dead robins. Robins are, of course, a sign of spring and its symbolic properties of rebirth; therefore, Sula is seen as an evil portent. As Banyiwa-Horne recognizes, Sula elicits highly ambivalent responses, combining dread and appeal. The mystery and almost palpable sense of evil exuded by Sula tempt the majority of the inhabitants of the Bottom to believe that she is everything evil, that, in fact, she is a witch (150). The novel relates that the community of the Bottom comes to view Sula with the most magnificent hatred they had ever known (173). Yet, indeed, the perceived evil of Sula allows the not-so-virtuous townspeople to view themselves in favorable contrast. In comparing Sula to Lilith for example, Kathryn Lee Seidel notes that when the human community is cut off from [Lilith/Sula], men are free to tyrannize women, women remain submissive, and sexual autonomy for women is forbidden. The energy, passion, and strength of women thus become unavailable to the human community, which is left with a compliant, unhappy Eve figure [Nel]. (89) Morrison suggests that the townspeople need Sula, even as they profess hatred and disgust. The community begins to cherish their husbands and wives, protect their children, repair their homes . . . to protect and love one another against the devil in their midst (11718). In the latter portion of the novel, Sulas childhood friend Nel, taking her mothers place, serves as the novels ostensible moral voice indicting Sula. Shunning Sulas friendship after Jude, Nels husband, sleeps with Sula and deserts his wife, Nel contrasts herself with Sula, labeling herself as the good woman. However, on her deathbed, Sula challenges Nels moral categories:
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How you know? Sula asked. Know what? Nel still wouldnt look at her. About who was good. How you know it was you? What you mean? I mean maybe it wasnt you. Maybe it was me. (145) Eva later tells Nel: Just alike. Both of you. Never was no difference between you (169). Morrison suggests that to subscribe to traditional and conventional perceptions of virtue and evil is erroneous. If, for instance, Nel is the good character, how does the reader account for her rigidity? Monika Hoffarth-Zelloe observes that people like Nel often confuse innocence and self-denial with morality, and virtue with self-repression (116). Nels virtue is in fact questionable. Banyiwa-Horne, for example, compares Nels Dr. Jekyll to Sulas Mr. Hyde, an apt description of the Janus-like competing elements in one psyche, yet Nel and Sula are not one psyche (30). Nels rigidity is as negatively composed in her psyche as is Sulas lack of boundaries. While Sula may be seen in terms of the Amazon archetypal form, albeit the negative side of that archetype, Nel exemplifies the negative aspects of the Mother; these two archetypes, as noted earlier, are theoretically incompatible with each other. Sulas freedom translates into independence, yet that independence masks an inwardly passive personality; in rejecting the feminine side of her own psyche and her mothers, she becomes uninvolved (Ulanov 206). She is stubborn and inspires distrust in the community because she scorns the traditional feminine qualities of altruism, nurturing, and dependency. In contrast, Nel has masochistically renounced her own subjectivity, living for others. Yet Nel is also deeply unsatisfied in her role of mother, being unable to connect emotionally with her children, and she is so shattered by the loss of her husbandnot because she loves him but because he is symbolic of the respectability she cravesthat she wills herself to forget her connection with Sula. Her self has been so nearly eradicated that she is oblivious to her true feelings. Sula is not a cautionary tale for women to be virtuous; Morrison does not mean for her readers to condemn either Nel or Sula. In an interview, Morrison explained, I wanted Sula to be missed by the reader. Thats why she dies early. . . . I wanted them to miss her presence in that book as the town missed her presence (Stepto 478). Nel comes to realize that she has mistaken her friends autonomyand the power of that autonomyfor evil. She discovers that Sula is a part of herself; when she severs her connection to Sula, Nel loses an integral part of herselfthe part that has endowed her with strength.
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All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude. And the loss pressed down on her chest and came up into her throat. We was girls together, she said as though explaining something. O Lord, Sula, she cried, girl, girl, girlgirlgirl. It was a fine cryloud and longbut it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow. (174) Nels sorrow is, as she finally perceives, sorrow for that lost portion of herself that she had rejected when condemning Sula (Banyiwa-Horne 29). Sula, in transgressing the traditional roles of women, is branded as abnormal, evil, a bitch. Yet her demeanor and, for the most part, her behavior do not correspond with the labels. It is her difference that frightens her community into maligning her character, and it is her freedom that rallies the repressed against her; she is the potent evidence of their own privation. Ruth Patchett, protagonist of Fay Weldons The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, also wrests freedom from repression and also pays a tremendous price for her disruption. Ruths rebellion takes the form of refashioning her self from socially restrained wife into omnipotent bitch. Early in the novel, she proclaims, What I want is to take everything and return nothing. What I want is power over the hearts and pockets of men (26). The story of Ruth Patchett is, if nothing else, ludicrously implausible. Rife with medically impossible surgery, blatant contrivances, suspiciously fortuitous possibilities for Ruth (especially employment with the right person at the right time), She-Devil hovers on the very edge of a suspension of disbelief. Yet, as Ann Marie Hebert contends, Weldons feminine script is constituted in multiplicity and contradiction. Weldon uses humor, excess, exaggeration, and narrative negation to foreground the contradictions in the love story (22). And yes, SheDevil is a love story of sortsself-love inverteda story full of discordance and improbability. Ruth describes herself physically as tall and dark, thereby ascribing to herself the accepted appearance of the Dark Lady, contrasted against her nemesis, the fair Mary Fisher, who absconds with Ruths husband, Bobbo. Ruth tells us: I am as dark as Mary Fisher is fair, and have one of those jutting jaws that tall, dark women often have, and eyes sunk rather far back into my face, and a hooked nose. My shoulders are broad and bony and my hips broad and fleshy, and the muscles in my legs are well developed. My arms, I swear, are too short for my body. My nature and my looks do not agree. (5) Thus described as physically unappealing, Ruth lumbers painfully through her
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housewifely duties, blundering at every attempt to present herself as the Good Wife (26). Ungainly and clumsy, Ruth, with her hairy moles, is as unappetizing as any fairy-tale witch or goblin could be. Readers, in relating to the appearance of the negative Witch/Medium archetype, might expect no less than all the evil an aging havoc-wreaking harpy can conjure up. And they will not be disappointed. Soon after the novel opens, Bobbo, Ruths husband, leaves her and their two children to move in with beautiful romance novelist Mary Fisher. Ruth plots revenge against Mary by fiendishly reversing their roles. Ruth dumps her children on Mary and Bobbo,6 springs Marys mother from a nursing home to join Mary, and has Bobbo incarcerated for embezzling funds that Ruth herself has stolen. Finally, Ruth has herself surgically transformed into the likeness of Mary, purchases Marys assets and home, the High Tower by the sea, and regains her husband upon Marys death from cancer. Ruth describes her new life by stating I cause Bobbo as much misery as he ever caused me, and more. I try not to, but somehow it is not a matter of male or female, after all; it never was: merely of power. I have all, and he has none. As I was, so he is now (277). In the course of her lengthy revenge, Ruth transforms herself many times (nursing home attendant; Vesta Rose, prison attendant then employment specialist; Polly Patch, live-in household help and part-time masochist; Molly Wishant, priests housekeeper). A shape-shifter, Ruth ascribes her new power to that of transforming into a she-devil: She-devils are beyond nature: they create themselves out of nothing (133).7 Ruth as she-devil grasps all of the power she was previously denied. Living smack in the middle of Eden Grove, Ruths existence had been anything but paradisiacal. As Nancy A. Walker notes, Ruths is a willing departure from the Garden, not an expulsion, and it is the beginning of her quest for selftransformationa quest undertaken out of hate, not love (Witch Weldon 14). Her rage manifests itself into a virulent anti-love: I wouldnt be surprised if I wasnt the second-coming, this time in female form; what the world has been waiting for. Perhaps what Jesus did in his day for men, so I do now, for women. He offered the stony path to heaven; I offer the motor way to hell (192). Yet, Ruth-as-bitch is not, as may be initially inferred, the truest bitch of the novelat least, not at first. Mary Fisher, the ostensible victim of Ruths machinations, is revealed not only to be a classic home wrecker, but she is also the embodiment of the traditional archetypal Hetaira. In addition to possessing carnal appetites, engaging in husband stealing, and lusting over material possessions,8 Mary Fisher is a writer of very successful romance novels, novels that, as Hebert recognizes, conspire to uphold the feminine script (26). Ruth, in imagining Marys and Bobbos idyllic life together, concludes that Mary has striven to become the heroine of one of her own novels:
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Mary Fisher, dweller in the High Tower! Whats for dinner tonight? Perhaps you dont even know. Perhaps you leave that to the servants. And whos for company? Perhaps you have yet more lovers to choose from: to gaze out with you, through plate glass windows, over harbor and sea; to watch the moon rise and the sky turn color. Perhaps you never eat, but with a mind half on food, and half on love to come? Lucky you! (9) Ruth condemns Marys profession by stating that she tells lies to herself, and to the world (1). Mary, as Ruth perceives it, has betrayed her female readers, and Ruth says, I dont forgive her novels (211). If, as Hebert writes, for Ruth, representation literally becomes self-representation as she transforms her body into the normative female body, then might not Weldon be suggesting that the normative state of the female psyche is that of the bitch? (25). As Ruth states, Peel away the wife, the mother, find the woman, and there the she-devil is (49). By transforming herself into Mary, Ruth harnesses the power of the bitch, gaining command and mastery over Bobbo, the same mastery that Mary had previously held. For example, when Ruth purchases Mary Fishers High Tower by the sea, the sea has eroded the cliff upon which it perches. In a traditionally symbolic reading, it could be noted that the feminine sea has eroded the phallic tower; in other words, the woman, Ruth, is undermining the power of the patriarchy by gaining control over the man, Bobbo. However, ironically, prior to moving into the tower, Ruth shores up the cliff and reconfigures the harbor itself, thereby thwarting the power of the sea. In transforming herself into the portrait of femininity, the likeness of Mary Fisher, Ruth has, paradoxically, gained a masculine power. Thus, Ruth has missed the point; she has not transformed herself into the normative female at all. Instead, she has made herself into a monstrous parody of female, which is, of course, exactly how she previously considered herself. Ruths transformation into the bitch is not a triumph, although, as Alan Wilde observes, Weldon manages to keep the reader on Ruths side even as her acts become increasingly vengeful and destructive (404). In achieving her transformation, she has striven to lose her natural affection, or Eros, and thus she loses her humanity as well (162).9 As Wilde notes, Ruth has made herself as unnatural as Frankensteins monster, as cold as Galatea before infusion of life (413). In essence, Ruth has accomplished nothing more than remaking herself into the rigid model of the masculine ideal, an impossible male fantasy made flesh (259). Her plastic surgeon/sculptor, Dr. Black, advises her: Someone like you doesnt have to say anything. All you have to do is be (256). Thus, Mrs. Black rightly accuses her husband and his partner of being reductionists (259).10
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Rather than reveling in her hard-won power, Ruth becomes aware that she has condemned herself and succumbed to the limitations of a stereotypical figure. Ruths previous ability to adapt and develop is gone; she has lost the power of the she-devil. It is a hollow victory; Ruth, now static, encased in a painful body that she has stolen, describes herself at the last as a lady of six foot two, who had tucks taken in her legs. A comic turn, turned serious (278). Weldon insists that in order to become the bitch, Ruth has had to diminish herself. In Jungian terms, Ruth has deliberately nurtured her animus to the detriment of her feminine self. Certainly, Ruths business acumen, her complicated plots, and her steadfast dedication to achieving her ideal may be looked at as classic male qualities. Yet, for all that she has gained, she has lost the positive attributes commonly associated with the femaleshe feels nothing for her children or Bobbo, the man she sacrificed so much to either regain or revenge herself upon. Once her quest has been completed, she is nothing. While Ruth undergoes a deliberate quest to become the bitch, Elaine Risley, protagonist of Margaret Atwoods novel Cats Eye, becomes the bitch without her initial knowledge; however, this becoming is her means of survival. In a painful revaluation process, Elaine must come to terms with brutal childhood memories long-suppressed memories of the evil that four girlhood friends inflicted upon one another. Elaines memories focus upon one of her childhood friends Cordeliaas the instigator of the worst, bewildering punishments, punishments that included burial and life-threatening abandonment. Yet Elaine, upon much reflection, ultimately discovers that Cordelia was not, after all, her tormentor, but rather her mentor. Cordelia is a bitchalbeit a junior bitchbut she is also a girl who originally taps into a channel of assertive strength in order to protect herself against the more lethal forces the girls face. Cordelias crime against Elaine, therefore, is that she is willing to sacrifice her friend in order to save herself. Of more importance, Elaine, during her recollections, concludes that she too has learned well the lessons of becoming the bitch; Elaine acknowledges, I know myself to be vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly (163). The novel opens with middle-aged Elaine returning to Toronto, the city of her childhood, for a retrospective exhibit of her paintings. During this visit, Elaine traverses the terrain of her childhood in memory and the mindscapes of her present life. Elaines childhood history reveals that she was ill prepared to join the society of fledgling women. Living a nomadic existence as the child of a forest-insect field researcher, Elaine spent most of her young life in the company of her immediate family, trekking through the wilds of Canada while her father studied insect infestations. Thus, Elaine has no experience navigating the sometimes-treacherous waters of girlhood friendships when she finally comes into contact with other females.
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Cats Eye recounts the story of Elaine after her parents have moved their family into the newly built suburbia of Toronto, a raw and unfinished landscape, a lagoon of post-war mud (35). For the first time, Elaine lives in a real house and attends school. Separated from her older brother Stephen, the companion of her early childhood, Elaine realizes: So I am left to the girls, real girls at last, in the flesh. But Im not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I dont know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder. (50)11 Carol Campbell is the first to become friendly with Elaine: In a way she has to, because shes the only school bus girl in my grade (50). Carol begins Elaines indoctrination into the civilized world, a world ruled by absent but vaguely menacing fathers12 and bib-aproned mothers who seem not to notice what their daughters are up to. Carol is initially enchanted by Elaines ignorance of the feminine world and treats Elaine as a rare specimen, one to be socialized into the proper sphere of femininity. Carol introduces Elaine to the older Grace Smeath, whose favorite games include playing an authentically authoritarian school and fashioning ultrafeminine scrapbooks. Grace, because of her age and her enhanced economic status, is the leader of the three. She dictates the activities and is also the strongest of the group. At Graces house, the girls cut female figures and various feminine household possessions from Eatons Catalogues to paste on the pages of their hope chestlike scrapbooks. Elaine notes, I begin to want things Ive never wanted before: braids, a dressing gown, a purse of my own. Something is unfolding, being revealed to me (57). She begins to realize that her parents are considered strange because they do not participate in conspicuous consumption; however, she will also be taught not to ask for too much while negotiating this new world of girls. When Elaine returns from her summer field trip with her family, a new girl, Cordelia, has joined the group. Cordelia, youngest of three daughters, possesses knowledge beyond the scope of the other girls. She knows about the female body the older Elaine relates that the grotesqueries of the body were always of interest to hershe tells lurid theories of sexuality, and she somewhat damages the mystique of Grace by tacitly sneering at Graces family and clothing (7). Yet, as Elaine notes, Grace is still the desirable one, the one we all want (100). Cordelia, unable to become the natural leader of the group, becomes a tyrannical leader; it is Cordelia who instigates the periodic shunning of Elaine as well as the other punishments, although, as Elaines mother says much later, it was that Grace, not Cordelia. Grace put her up to it, I always thought (413).
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Molly Hite asserts that the tortures inflicted upon the nine-year-old Elaine represent her sacrificial status as scapegoat: Elaine is a surrogate victim, representative of the category girl, a stand-in for the others who use her . . . in order to displace their own suffering as members of a patriarchy (137). That is, the girlsCordelia, Grace, and Carolengage in the only power they possess, that of victimizing one of their own. Sensing Elaines navet, Cordelia torments Elaine in order to save herself from being chosen as the victim. Yet Cordelias power is only a substitute power; she engages in the vicious behavior as her only defense against the more powerful forces of Grace Smeath and, in particular, the fathers. Stephen Ahern asserts, Cordelia uses Elaine in this classic patriarchal pattern of projecting what one is trying to escape/reject within oneself onto an Other. Elaine rapidly internalizes Cordelias insecurity, and the malice it generates (13). Elaine suffers from anxiety and mutilates herself in an attempt to control her own pain: In the endless time when Cordelia had such power over me, I peeled the skin from my feet. . . . I would go down to the blood. . . . The pain gave me something definite to think about, something immediate. It was something to hold on to (120). She is torn between her fear of the girls and her fear of their rejection in an innocent yet deadly version of the female/male patterns. Ostracism from the coven is a far more severe punishment to Elaine than the pain she suffers at Cordelias hands or even the self-inflicted pain of her own mutilations. The fear of being labeled other by the girls and thus losing her badge of female compels Elaine to continue, even as the punishments become more daring and more severe. Grace, the silent leader, is the embodiment of patriarchal upbringing in both the familial sense and the religious sense, and she subscribes to the brutalization of her own sex, as does her mother, Mrs. Smeath, the bigoted, deadened Christian and bad-hearted ogress of Elaines childhood (McCombs 11). Elaine naively assumes that the mothers are unaware of their daughters sadistic behavior; however, she overhears Mrs. Smeath defending her daughter Graces participation in the tortures: What can you expect, with that family? says Mrs. Smeath. She doesnt go on to say whats wrong with my family. The other children sense it. They know. You dont think theyre being too hard on her? says Aunt Mildred. Her voice is relishing. She wants to know how hard. Its Gods punishment, says Mr. Smeath. It serves her right. (191) Elaine, writhing in shame, states, I hate Mrs. Smeath, because what I thought was a secret, something going on among girls, among children, is not one. It has
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been discussed before, and tolerated (191). Ahern notes that for Elaine, Mrs. Smeath becomes both the hypocrisy and the watchful vigilance of the society (11). Yet she is also crippled by her role in the patriarchal world. Mrs. Smeath upholds the traditional patriarchal valuesreligion, the sanctity of the home, motherthe values she believes Elaines family does not subscribe to, yet Mrs. Smeaths only power is over young girls, which is no real power at all. All of these experiences alienate Elaine from identifying with most women (although she does not reject her mother or a few other benign women). She believes her shunning of feminine influences enables her to walk in the spaces between the silent words surrounding [women], stunned broad, dog, bag and bitch (251). Elaine has, indeed, to use the words of Leslie Fieldler, bifurcated women into two groups: the Virgin of Lost Thingswhom she thinks has saved her from death and an impossible figure for Elaine to identify with (or so she thinks)and the bitch figures she grew up with. Thus, Elaine eliminates herself from the category of woman altogether, and, like Ruth Patchett, Elaine cultivates her otherness. Yet Elaines apparent rejection of woman is not analogous to embracing her animus. Elaine looks to her mother and feminine chores to escape the three girls; she is rescued from the ravine by a female figure. She doesnt reject the feminine so much as she rejects the bonds of femaleness. Elaines estrangement from the world of women as well as from her self begins on the day she is buried alive. Cordelia and Grace and Carol take me to the deep hole in Cordelias backyard. . . . They pick me up by the underarms and feet and lower me into the hole. Then they arrange the boards over the top. The daylight air disappears, and theres the sound of dirt hitting the boards, shovelful after shovelful. . . . Up above, outside, I can hear their voices, and then I cant hear them. I lie there wondering when it will be time to come out. Nothing happens. When I was put into the hole I knew it was a game; now I know it is not one. I feel sadness, a sense of betrayal. Then I feel the darkness pressing down on me; the terror. (112) And Elaines crucial rejection of the bonds of women culminates following the incident in the ravine when Cordelia taunts her and throws her hat over the edge of the bridge. Elaine, in trying to retrieve her hat, breaks through the ice and is submerged up to her waist as she is abandoned by her friends. Elaine finds this experience even more humiliating than the burial, and she almost freezes to death before she spies a female figure on the bridge whom she believes is the Virgin Mary. The figure tells her, You can go home now. . . . It will be all right. Go home and empowers Elaine to crawl away from possible death (201).
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Following the incident, Elaine subconsciously chooses to forget her victimization. The next time Elaine sees Cordelia, Grace, and Carol, she walks away: Nothing binds me to them. I am free (205). Cordelia no longer has any power over her, and Elaine suppresses all that has transpired. A few years later, Elaine is asked to walk to her new high school with Cordelia. And even though Elaine has repressed the memory of the events of her childhood friendship with Cordelia, Elaine acts suspiciously like someone who is enjoying a belated revenge. Cordelia now displays all of the vulnerability Elaine once possessed. Elaine, in eleventh grade, relates: I have such a mean mouth that I become known for it (247). She uses this mean mouth mostly on CordeliaI use her as target practice (248). Ahern believes that Elaine has switched places with Cordelia, assuming all of the mental problems of her alter ego; however, it is more than possible that Cordelia and Elaine have always shared similar traits (15). Judith McCombs notes that Elaine has become the stronger self of the two (12). Yet, Elaines appropriations of Cordelias tactics cannot be equated with gaining strength. In fact, it is during this period that Elaine laments her social insecurity and her feelings of being a misfit. What Elaine has learned from Cordelia is how to cover up powerlessness with the appearance of power; she learns how to act like a bitch. Later in life, Elaine gains some true power through her art (Beran 74).13 Whereas she celebrates many of those people who acted as positive influences in her life, she also enacts a powerful hatred in many of the other paintings. Elaine especially subjects Mrs. Smeath14 to humiliating representations on canvas: Mrs. Smeath sitting, standing, lying down with her holy rubber plant, flying, with Mr. Smeath stuck to her back, being screwed like a beetle; Mrs. Smeath in the dark-blue bloomers of Miss Lumley. . . . Mrs. Smeath unwrapped from white tissue paper, layer by layer. Mrs. Smeath bigger than life, bigger than she ever was. Blotting out God. (427) However many times that Elaine paints her, though, Mrs. Smeath remains unexorcised throughout most of the novel. It is only toward the end of Elaines inner journey that she begins to feel anything but hatred and terror for her subject. Elaines last encounter with Cordelia takes place at an asylum following Cordelias suicide attempt. Alternating between feelings of pity and anger, Elaine thinks, Its as if Cordelia has placed herself beyond me, out of my reach, where I cant get at her. She has let go of her idea of herself. She is lost (376). Yet Elaine also refuses to help Cordelia escape, and Cordelia charges, I guess youve always hated me (378). Of course, what infuriates Elaineand terrifies heris her own likeness to Cordelia. Yet Elaine, in her adult years, is bereft without Cordelia.
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Her rejection of Cordelia manifests itself as a profound loss of self. Coral Ann Howells contends that in Cats Eye [Elaine] is haunted by the past and her doppelganger Cordelia (Lie down, youre dead!) who represents the other half of herself, her dark mad twin (65). And McCombs similarly contends that Atwoods Elaine and Cordelia, then, are each others mirroring, complementary, and sometimes darker Others; and the basic narrative structure of their now-told womens story is their counterpoised rise and fall (16). The older Elaine muses, Im not afraid of seeing Cordelia. . . . Im afraid of being Cordelia. Because in some way we changed places, and Ive forgotten when (239).15 Elaine is still unable to pardon Cordelia. Forgiving men is easier than forgiving women, because, as Elaine states, women, know too much, they can neither be deceived nor trusted (399). Yet, because Elaine has removed herself from the category of woman, she feels that she knows nothing and indeed is nothing.16 And whereas McCombs contends that Cats Eye narrates a struggle against female evils, human and archetypal, and a quest for a female saviour, that saviour seems to be the bitch rather than Elaines imagined Virgin of the Lost Things (19). Elaine is, in fact, the lady she saw from the ravine. Until Elaine realizes that she has been her own saviorand that because Cordelia is inextricably part of her self, Cordelia is also a redemptive figureshe will be unable to mourn the loss of Cordelia. During a retrospective walk back into her old neighborhood, reendowed with the memories of her childhood, Elaine prays to Cordelia, Get me out of this Cordelia. Im locked in. I dont want to be nine years old forever (421). And Cordelia, it appears, responds. In her mind, Elaine replays the scene at the ravine; however, this time she tries to tell herself that she had not seen a figure on the bridge who spoke to her: There was only darkness and silence. Nobody and nothing (443). However, given Elaines repeated contention that she herself is nothing and her earlier recognition at the galleryI walk the room, surrounded by the time Ive made; which is not a place, which is only a blur, the moving edge we live in; which is fluid, which turns back upon itself, like a wavethe nothing she has seen is herself (431). Elaine first thinks she sees herself as a child but then recognizes the child to be Cordelia face closed and defiant. There is the same shame, the sick feeling in my body, the same knowledge of my own wrongness, awkwardness, weakness; the same wish to be loved; the same loneliness; the same fear (443). Elaine opens her arms to save Cordelia from being stuck in the wrong time and tells her, Its all right. You can go home now (443).17 In The Site of Memory, Toni Morrison asks while thinking about the friendship between women: What is it that they forgive each other for? And what is it that is unforgivable in the world of women? (116). Nels final vision
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in Sula is one of remorse, a painful need to find the lost completion of her self in Sula. Similarly, Sulas dying thought is Waitll I tell Nel (149). Clearly, Elaine forgives Cordelia in Cats Eye; the last vision Elaine has is one of regret. As she watches the two elderly women friends on the plane trip home to Vancouver, she muses, This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something thats gone, but something that will never happen (446). Even Ruth, upon learning that Mary Fisher is dying of cancer, weeps (254). In becoming the bitch, each woman has sacrificed her innocence. Each woman deliberately sets out to learn the knowledge of evil. And, significantly, each woman ultimately confesses that she is nothing. Sula and Nel, Ruth and Mary, and Cordelia and Elaine have all reduced themselves into a character lacking dimensions, bereft of the ingredients necessary to transcend the bifurcated images of women so prevalent in literature. Morrison, Atwood, and Weldon, in these novels, imply that the division of selveswhether or not such a division even encompasses anima/animus or male/femaledisrupts the womens ability to function. Sulas, Marys, and Cordelias failures result in their deaths or symbolic disappearance, while the survivorsNel, Ruth, and Elaineare destined to remain in the knowledge of their own incompleteness. For these characters, failure to achieve integration/individuation because they have neglected to or refused to recognize their other selves results in sorrow and loss.
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6 Syzygy
A strong woman is a woman in whose head A voice is repeating, I told you so, Ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch, Ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back. Marge Piercy in For Strong Women
ary Dalys study in feminism, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, issues a call to feminists to revise the myth of feminine evil: The naming, describing, and theorizing about good and evil has constituted a maze/haze of deception (2). As has been noted in previous chapters, the splitting of the feminine archetypes has resulted in binary opposites, each archetype divided into a positive side and a negative side, yet, as Nina Auerbach argues, once we restore the integrity of [the archetypes], we see that they intensify power rather than limiting it (9).1 However, the question remains, as Shoshana Felman asks, How can the woman be thought about outside of the Masculine/Feminine framework, other than as opposed to man, without being subordinated to a primordial masculine model? (9). One answer is to revise and broaden archetypal images and the thought patterns these images evoke, an idea supported not only by archetypal feminists but by Jung himself.2 Hlne Cixous has written, Men have committed the greatest crime against women. Insidiously, violently, they have led them to hate women, to be their own enemies, to mobilize their great strength against themselves (336). Women are taught to despise themselves, to distrust other women and to fear the parts of their selves that strive toward power. The myriad of bitch portrayals in myth and literature serve to underscore that self-hatred, teaching women to reject their own dark sides. In essence, as has been discussed, a false model of femininity is rendered: compliance, self-abnegation, fidelity, and opposition to this model are then decried as bitchiness, evil, malignancy.
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Yet, if the bitch is not a manifestation of gendered opposition in her psyche, then what is she? If the archetypes are to be revised, then what should form the basis of archetypal characterization? The answer may lie in the Jungian process of individuationthe integration of anima and animus, shadow and self, male and female, positive and negative. Ann Bedford Ulanov defines individuation as the integrative phase of development of the psyche, one that does not cease at adulthood but recurs throughout life whenever nonrational unconscious contents excluded by a conscious ego adaptation press for integration (7071). Individuation, according to Jung, is necessary for the psyche to become whole, a process that includes realization of our innermost uniqueness, and hence the process also means becoming ones own self, as differentiated from having only a collective identity, as a member of a certain family, or a group of people, or nation (Ulanov 71). For women who have been collectively labeled (as merely women, wives, harlots, angels, or bitches), the process of individuation is also a means of appropriating feminine power, a power that develops as self-esteem (ego) manifests itself. Ulanov contends that the aggressive and sexual instincts bring the ego into being. They accent the personalmy body, my will, my desire, instincts that are traditionally stifled in women (71). In fact, the aggressive and sexual instincts are, of course, some of the attributes of the unfeminine bitch, and, thus, because women are taught to reject these instincts, individuation remains a truncated process; women are perennially doomed to suffer as incomplete beings. Individuation is, however, a positive and necessary experience for women, Ulanov attests, because individuation allows a woman to develop a new relationship with her animus, no longer experiencing it as a projection but as an active and consciously related inward function of her psyche (274). Successful individuation anticipates that the negative functions of the animusJungs assertions of false intellect, for examplemay be positively employed; the woman will accept the masculine as it appears in her own feminine nature and become independent of patriarchal values and judgements that are foreign to her nature (Ulanov 276). The difference between the characters discussed elsewhere in this book and the ones who will be discussed in this chapter is that, while the existence of the former may have been explained, excoriated, or excused somewhat, the characters in Toni Morrisons Paradise and Margaret Atwoods The Robber Bride are not excused in the least. The bitch is found to have vital existence. No apologies, no excuses. Each woman comes to the realization that she has been seriously hampered by her rejection of the bitch. These characters engage in processes of individuation, successfully connecting their outer selves to their inner psyches without rejecting
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their negative projections. In fact, their socially branded evil selves are as necessary to their individuation as are their traditionally labeled positive qualities.
Individuation in Paradise
Morrisons novel Paradise can be read as an alternative to the Jungian individuation process for women. Many of the female characters in Paradise, particularly the major characters of Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, Pallas, and Consolata, are searching for the means to ratify their identities without relying on traditional male definitions of womanhood. Each character has broken away from her previous self-definition; however, each has also failed to find an acceptable alternative. Morrisons works reflect a critical revision of the traditional myths; she consciously adds feminine as well as African dimensions to the narratives of the Western tradition, refocusing the center of narrative authority. In Paradise, Morrison depicts two distinct versions of Eden, seventeen miles apart from each other, in an isolated region of Oklahoma. The first, the all-black township of Ruby, founded by a group of black families who were turned away by other towns of lighter-skinned blacks,3 bases its version of heaven on earth in the strict maintenance of its own exclusionary purity, refusing admittance to any who do not rigidly conform to its doctrine of no mixed blood, a particularly potent revision of the doctrines of white supremacy: these townspeopleprimarily the men cannot tolerate anybody but themselves (13). This utopia guards against what is Out There: Out There where your children are sport, your women quarry, and where your very person could be annulled (16). And thus this paradise remains closed to any but the direct descendants of the original settlers; the town even boasts of not having any shelter for strangers. Ruby as Eden questions the exclusive nature of the traditional rendering of Christian paradise yet still renders women as responsible for the fall of man. The parallel Eden is a feminine utopian community, a group of women who straggle into an abandoned convent that had originally been built as a decadent mansion, a paradise for its embezzler builder. Yet, as Pallas senses, the mansion is permeated with a blessed malelessness, like a protected domain, free of hunters, but exciting too (177). In contrast to the community of Ruby, all who are drawn to the mansions doorway are invited in: They took people inlost folk or folks who needed a rest, even a few males (11). Yet this paradise is also problematic in its composition; its total lack of structure, its androgynous nature, and its residual of hedonistic existence provides an apathetic refuge. When these two paradises collide, a fierce and abhorrent struggle ensues. The novel opens with the powerful words They shoot the white girl first (3). The first chapter tells of a hunt, a posse of men intent upon ferreting out
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the evil convent women and destroying them by shooting them like game or, as the handcuffs and ropes attest, lynching them. The patriarchy of Rubys justification for obliterating the women lies in their belief that the women are corrupt and depraved, slack and sloven, witches, harlots, abortionists, lesbians who are degrading God in perverse and evil ways; their target, they think is detritus: throwaway people that sometimes blow back into a room after being swept out the door (8, 4). Deacon Morgan, one-time adulterous lover of one of its inhabitants, hypocritically labels the convent a brothel (114). Another of the hunters believes that the women managed to call into question the value of almost every woman he knew (8). The evidence of the womens evil lies in the belief by Rubys males that the convent women are responsible for the towns troubles: Outrages that had been accumulating all along took shape as evidence. A mother was knocked downstairs by her cold-eyed daughter. Four damaged infants were born in one family. Daughters refused to get out of bed. Brides disappeared on their honeymoons. Two brothers shot each other on New Years Day. Trips to Demby for VD shots were common. (11) Although it is obvious that Ruby is changing due to the impact of the civil rights movement, mass media, and an increased awareness of the Out There by, particularly, Rubys younger generation, the men choose to blame the women instead of a natural social progression. And so, the men shoot these Bodacious Black Eves unredeemed by Mary in order to preserve their Eden (18). Led by Deacon and Steward Morgan, twin brothers who are the dictatorial elders of the town, this witch hunt is a diversion meant to give new purpose to Rubys policy of exclusion. As Patricia Storace notes, Rubys racism gives Morrison an opportunity to look at the multiple social consequences of exclusivism, with its seemingly inevitable connection with the social and political control of women, who must be supervised, since it is through their alliances above all that racial contamination might corrupt the population (5). Yet Morrison is also exposing the blurred boundaries between good and evil, life and death, masculine and feminine, in her depiction of the two manifestations of Paradise. The women of the convent, while they maintain distinct personalities, are viewed collectively by the men of Ruby as evil, a view that is meant to exclude the women who differ radically from the townswomen in anima-generated projections. The townswomensuch as Soane and Dovey, the wives of Steward and Deacon, and Sweetie Fleetwood, mother of the four damaged babieslive in quiet yellow and white houses full of industry; and in them elegant black women at useful tasks; orderly cupboards minus surfeit or miserliness; linen laundered and ironed
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to perfection; good meat seasoned and ready for roasting (111). And although these women also manage to make their way, often or occasionally, to the door of the convent as well, needing relief from the rigidity of existence in Ruby, the evil convent women are viewed as the Other, deviants from patriarchal Rubys definition of female. The convents first arrival is Mavis (a name derived from Mab, queen of the fairies and evil incarnation in the Arthurian legends), a representation of the Terrible Mother, or so she believes because her twin babies, Merle and Pearl, died in an airless summertime car, having been left there by while she went into a grocery store. A twenty-seven-year-old mother of four, Mavis has lived with an abusive husband and distrusts the masculine; she had never seen a man who didnt look like an unlit explosion (163). Along with denying her motherhood, she also denies her sexuality, remaining celibate following her flight. A virtually illiterate woman, hesitant and afraid, Mavis gains some authority during her stay at the convent. Her transformation is evident as she claims responsibility for Connie, clashes with Gigi, and learns to make decisions. Although she periodically leaves the convent, she always returns, bringing necessary supplies and medicine; she becomes a caretaker, a role in which she had earlier failed. Gigi, or Grace, running from the violence and anonymous killing of a riot, alights in Ruby, walking as if she had sapphires in her shoes, led by a story of intertwined fig trees and rhubarb pie. Brought to the convent in a hearse and contentious almost from the start, she exudes sexuality, which brands her a whore, yet her strength lies in her insistence on individuality. Mavis calls her a streettough bitch; however, Mavis has been taken in by Gigis ersatz tough facade (167): Provocative demonstrations, pamphlets, bickering, police, squatters, leaders and talking, talking, so much talk. None of it was serious (257). Gigi flees from her former life when she finds that her entertaining and adventurous activism does have a serious side, one in which small black boys are shot. Gigi is also the only one of the convent women to engage in sexual relations during the course of her stay. Tempting K. D., Deacon and Stewards nephew and heir, Gigi wounds his pride. Her likeness to the Hetaira form allows her to become destructive toward K. D. or so he believes, exploiting his desire of her. The next arrival is Seneca, a name equated with wisdom. Abandoned by her birth mother in a housing project, molested in a foster home, a cutter who slices her own arms and legs, Seneca mediates between Maviss and Gigis snarling antipathy for each other. Known as the peacemaker, Seneca is the one who said yes or I dont mind or Ill go (131). Senecas wish to please and her passive acquiescence render her susceptible to the bullying of her incarcerated boyfriend, Eddie, and the sexually sadistic Norma Fox, who pays Seneca to humiliate her. Seneca, having been abandoned, does not allow herself the luxury of anger.
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Although not rendered as evil or bitchy, Seneca nonetheless manifests the negative side of the Medium. Her distrust of her self will not allow her to assert a position of authority; she cannot advocate on her own behalf. Pallas Truelove, whose first name means wealth, is the final transient member of the convent/coven. The sixteen-year-old pregnant mistress of an artist/janitor who betrays her with her own mother, Pallas, in running away, has been terrorized by boys in a truck who ran her car off the road and forced her to hide out in a lake while they called Here, pussy. Here, pussy. Kitty, kitty, kitty (163). Her severance from both mother and father grants her an early and bewildering autonomy. As an Amazon figure, Pallas, like Seneca, lacks the strength of her character. Significantly, when Pallas is first brought to the convent by Billie Delia, she is mute, unable even to articulate her pain and feelings of betrayal. Likewise, Pallas also refuses to acknowledge that she is pregnant; she willfully denies not only her terrible experiences but the consequences of those experiences as well. The women are ultimately guided toward individuation by Consolata Sosa, a symbolically nearly blind woman who practices an ability to prolong life in others, although she wakes in the mornings herself to the wrenching disappointment of not having died the night before (221). Kidnapped in 1925 by a nun, Mary Magda, from Portuguese South America when she was nine years old, Connie has spent most of her life (except for a brief passionate affair with Deacon Morgan) attempting to pay back the nun she believes had rescued her. Never feeling worthy enough, Connie has relapsed into a lethargic woman waiting for her own death after the nun dies: Her rope to the world had slid through her fingers. She had no identification, no insurance, no family, no work. Facing extinction, waiting to be evicted, wary of God, she felt like a curl of papernothing written on it lying in the corner of an empty closet (248). In viewing the women who have come to live at the convent, Connie sees women with tales of disorder, deception and drift, . . . broken girls, frightened girls, weak and lying (22122). She allows the women to stay in the convent; however, she maintains her distance, giving advice when asked, yet never judging aloud. Whereas Mavis, especially, views Connies nonjudgmental nature as comforting, and even spiritually wise, she does not recognize that Connies refusal to judge is a form of passivity, a way out of humanity. Connies power will manifest itself once she takes responsibility for the women gathered in the Convent, once she gets mean, and, even, bitchy. Branded as bitches by Rubys patriarchy after they disrupt a wedding while decked out like go-go girls and Jezebels, Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, and Pallas incur the townsmens active hatred (56). However, what Morrison makes clear is that the townsmen have agendas other than merely ridding themselves of a few morally lax women. As Billie Delia recognizes, The real battle was not about life . . . but about disobedience, which meant, of course, the stallions were fighting about
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who controlled the mares and their foals (150). One manPersoncovets the convents land; anotherK. D.wishes to violently expunge Gigi, who rejected him. Steward wants to kill Connie for her supposed seduction of his twin, Deacon, the only happening in the twins lives that split their two-in-oneness. Jeff Fleetwood wants to destroy the women in the hope that he and his wife, Sweetie, may produce a normal child. Arnold Fleetwood wants to kill the women he believes aborted his grandchild. The hatred disguises a fear of the women, women who are living independent and productive lives, free from the restrictions of Ruby. And, it is true, the convent women do transgress against ideals of womanhood. Yet it is not Rubys version of womanhood that they betray but their own feminine selves that they have nearly shattered. By denying such emotions as anger and sexual desire, they are limiting their potential, living temporary and fugitive existences. Each uses the convent as a sanctuary: a sheltering place to gain refuge from the misery of her life. Yet, each also becomes cloistered, not only from the world but also from her self. By not confronting the sources of their misery, they may never heal or gain a sense of self. They will remain powerless. When Connie is nearing death, a mystical male figure appears. Connie had been lamenting her own meaningless existence, praying for death to relieve her of her sorrow, but she is given a chance at redemption. She takes the challenge of assisting in the rebirth of the other womens submerged selves. Much like Baby Suggs in Beloved and Alice Manfred in Jazz, Connie begins to preach a painful but therapeutic self-love, guiding the women through their confrontations with rejected womanhood. On the night she undertakes her task, she gathers the women to dinner and tells them, I call myself Consolata Sosa. If you want to be here you do what I say. Eat how I say. Sleep when I say. And I will teach you what you are hungry for. The women agree, recognizing that they could not leave the one place they were free to leave (262). Consolata helps the women gather together the fragments of their lives. Like the novels other wise woman, Lone DuPres, Consolata acts as a midwife, assisting the women in the births of their selves. She preaches a doctrine of accepting the good and the bad: Hear me, listen. Never break them in two. Never put one over the other. Eve is Marys mother. Mary is the daughter of Eve (263). One of the healing rituals entails each of the women drawing a life-size self-portrait, coloring in the outlines with what constitutes her being. Within the figural outlines, Mavis accepts her twins deaths; Gigi faces the terrifying violence she had been escaping as well as her familial connections with a death-row father; Seneca confesses her self-mutilation and begins to perceive that it was her mother, not her sister, who abandoned her; and Pallas admits that she is pregnant and that she hates her mother for having stolen her lover. Each woman embraces responsibility for who she is. And, ultimately, the women are no longer haunted (266).
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Nobody in Ruby has ever died (199).4 Thus, the community seems to maintain the immortality of a true paradise. Yet, as Richard Misner argues, cant you imagine what it must feel like to have a true home? I dont mean heaven. I mean a real earthly home. Not some fortress you bought and built up and have to keep everybody locked in or out? (213). Heaven on earth is ultimately an unsatisfactory experience: Human beings (as Morrisons other novels, especially [Jazz and] Tar Baby, imply) must leave Paradise in order to enjoy the fruit of knowledge and to experience love and pleasure and pain (Rodrigues 165). In pondering the nature of Ruby, Pat Best wonders what bargain has been struck to keep the town free from mortality, what has been lost by the citizens. She concludes that unadulterated and unadulteried 8-rock blood held its magic as long as it resided in Ruby. That was their recipe. That was their deal. For Immortality. Thus, as she understands, everything that worries them must come from women (216). The blood can only be tainted from impure children conceived by women. The convent women, then, represent all that is terrifying to Rubys men: mixed blood, sexual freedom, self-reliance (in women), the Out There, and, especially, progress. The patriarchal fathers of Ruby kill all five of the women. They shoot them like animals and watch two of them die in the convent, while the other three are gunned down in the fields. Yet, paradoxically, the men are unsuccessful at eradicating the womens existence. Something of their spirit survives, and Morrison implies that that spirit would have been erased if the woman had not claimed their own power. When the men return to clean up their mess, all of the bodies have disappeared. The men attempt to rationalize the experience, choosing to believe that some of the women did not die but rather fled, transporting the bodies of the dead with them. But this is not the case; the novels coda of dreams and visions leaves no doubt that the womens physical bodies have been destroyed. Each woman reappears in a dreamlike sequence to finish the task she has left undone and to fulfill the promise of her rebirth. Gigi appears to Daddy-Man, her convict father; Mavis is reconnected with her abandoned daughter, Sally; Seneca is found by her mother; and Pallas returns to her mothers house with her baby to collect her forgotten sandals. The reunions are brief and symbolic, and each of the women moves on; yet, although the women are dead, their power clearly survives. Daddy-Man dreams of his daughter, armed and dressed for battle; Sally perceives her mother as self-reliant and confident; Seneca is bleeding in her dream sequence, but she is being taken care of; Pallas is also self-reliant and in the company of caring women. Finally, Consolata is depicted in the true Paradise, a paradise characterized by mutuality rather than exclusivity. Paradise suggests that, for women, the power of the bitch is a critical ingredient of womanhood: paradise will never be achieved through passive acquiescence to the patriarchal ideal.
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The Integrity of the Animus in The Robber Bride

In a June 1993 address to the American Booksellers Association, Margaret Atwood asserted: If women are all well behaved by natureor if we are not allowed to say otherwise for fear of being accused of anti-femaleismthen they are deprived of moral choice, and there isnt much left for them to do in books except run away a lot. Or, to put it another way: Equality means equally bad as well as equally good. (11) Perhaps the most fully developed representation of the feminist reclamation of the bitch can be found in Atwoods The Robber Bride in the form of unrelenting antagonist Zenia. Zenia torments the three protagonists of the novel: Tony, Charis, and Roz; she steals their men and ferociously preys upon their weaknesses and fears. Even death cannot stop Zenia; she has a tendency to rise from the grave when the occasion warrants it. Yet, as Lynn Z. Bloom and Veronica Makowsky attest, Zenia . . . is the secretand never-acknowledgedally of the trio of best friends whom she nominally betrays (170). Jung states that most people are content to be self-righteous and prefer mutual vilification (if nothing worse!) to the recognition of their projections (Aspects 174). In The Robber Bride, Tony, Charis, and Roz prefer to blame their inverted (female) animus figure for the ostensible evil in their lives rather than themselves.5 Yet their rejection of their own less than virtuous propensities stifles their existences, resulting in an insubstantial state of being for each. In the Grimms fairy tale The Robber Bridegroom, the evil male lures innocent young women to his lair in the woods with promises of marriage but devours them instead. The Robber Bride is an inverted retelling of this tale. However, rather than merely substituting genders, Atwood, like Morrison in Paradise, questions every aspect of the story. Thus, what appears as evil may not be; what appears as virtuous should garner another look. When Rozs twin daughters, Paula and Erin (collectively known as Erla, or perhaps, if the syllables were reversed, Pain) are young, they beg for fairy tales to be told with only female characters. In deference to the twins wishes, The Robber Bridegroom is changed into The Robber Bride, and when asked who they want her to murder, the twins remain true to their principles, they do not flinch. They opt for women, in every single role (327). Yet Tony, Roz, and Charis are not true to their principles; they have allowed Zenia to control their stories. Taken as three stages of femininityTony/Maiden, Roz/Mother, and Charis/ Cronethe protagonists appear to constitute a combined portrait of the complete woman, and, invoking this triad, Atwood reprises her well-documented use of the triple goddess figure.6 In traditional terms, the Great Mother is regarded as
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the embodiment of the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone, the three stages of life most women will pass through. In The Robber Bride, Tony represents the Maiden/Virgin, Roz is the Mother, and Charis is symbolic of the Crone, who was also regarded as the Wise Woman/Witch. Yet, in Jungian archetypal terms, the representations do not end with these figures. Working with the theories of Toni Wolff and Ann Bedford Ulanov, it is possible to delve more deeply into the psyches of the protagonists; Tony, Roz, Charis, and Zenia are also depictions of each of the four structural forms of female archetypes: Amazon, Mother, Medium, and Hetaira, respectively. Finally, as Atwood hinted in Spotty-Handed Villainesses, Zenia is also the shadow: She who loses her shadow loses her soul. Yet, as Atwood demonstrates, these women do not form a complete portrait. In ancient depictions of the Great Mother (for instance, her manifestation in Kali), the Goddess is both virtuous and evil. She, to maintain her power, cannot be divided. Tony, Charis, and Roz have rejected their darker sides; thus, they wield no real power, confirmed by the ease of Zenias conquests. The novel opens with three unlikely college friends bound together by their common misadventures with Zenia. Middle-aged Roz, Charis, and Tony meet for monthly luncheons that paradoxically serve not only to celebrate their survival from Zenias machinations and to validate Zenias ostensible death from a terrorist bomb five years earlier, but also to keep Zenia alive by ritualizing their memories of her. Shes here at this table all the same, thinks Tony. Shes here, were holding her, were giving her the air time. We cant let her go (31). It is during one of these luncheons that Zenia rematerializes: Tony feels a chill. The door must have opened. She looks up and into the mirror. Zenia is standing here, behind her, in the smoke, in the glass, in this room. Not someone who looks like Zenia. Zenia herself. (34, my italics) Zenia strides past Tony, Charis, and Roz, her perfume smelling dense and murky; sullen and ominous (35). She looks fabulous, like a high-fashion [photo] done with hot light so that all the freckles and wrinkles are bleached out and only the basic features remain. . . . Waves of ill will float out of her like cosmic radiation (36). Charis recognizes that Zenia is angry, and even though Zenia ignores the womenShes refusing to notice Charis, refusing deliberatelyit becomes apparent that she is furious, furious for having been summoned back (73). Tony asks herself, What is she doing here, on this side of the mirror? (37). Zenia, rather than striking Tony as the Other, appears to Tony as a mirror image, a shadow. Yet, similar to the relationship of Nel and Sula in Morrisons novel, Zenia is not, in fact, the binary opposite of the protagonists. In several places in
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the novel, each woman confuses her self with Zenia, or accuses Zenia of robbery robbery of her self. For example, Charis wonders about the parentage of her daughter: [Charis] has always known who the father was, of course. . . . But the mother? Was it herself and Karen sharing their body? Or was it Zenia, too? (296). And when Charis considers slitting her wrists with a bread knife, she thinks that Zenia has taken away that part of herself she needs in order to live (310). The narrative continues, recursively, as each of the protagonists recounts her childhood as well as her initial and devastating encounter with Zenia. Yet the various narratives are surprisingly similar, given the distinct nature of each woman. As Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis notes, At the beginning of her relationship with each of the three protagonists, Zenia . . . seems to create [a] kind of safe space for the women. (156). Tony may live vicariously through the daring Zenia and even play out her impending romance with West through Zenia before she dares to act. Tony thinks, She couldnt handle the implications [of a relationship with West], or the hope (144). Charis needs Zenia to nurture her into physical and spiritual health and to relieve her of the burden of Billy, the indifferent but bullying freeloader she lives with. Roz allows Zenia to manipulate her feminist magazine into a financially productive glamorous magazine, and thus Roz will not need to take the blame for selling out. Roz also uses Zenia to rid herself of her philandering husband; because it is Zenias fault and therefore not hers, Roz may then luxuriate in self-pity and, significantly, excuse herself of guilt. Tony meets Zenia during the 1960s. Shunned by other women, as indeed are Roz and Charis, Tony is at first uncomfortable with the intimacy of female friendship. Tony feels that she is different; she is particularly diminutive and childlike in appearance, treated as a pet by the other college women. She is also gifted with the abilityor defense mechanismto think, speak, and write ambidextrously, demonstrating her duality (Hudgens 49).7 Studying to be a history professor of war (raw) studies, Tony may be seen to represent the intellect.8 Tony violates Nietzsches pronouncement that man should be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior; thus, hers is a transgression against the feminine (91). Yet this is Tonys only significant sin against the patriarchy. In fact, Tony has suppressed her self, as her small stature symbolizes. Child of a suicidal father and an unhappy, carping mother, Tony is preternaturally alert, though naive, to the tensions of people. As a child, she often gets up in the middle of the night; she often makes the rounds, checking for damage (164). She describes herself as a foreigner, and her painful experience of being forced not to use her left hand only amplifies her feelings of alienation. To cope, she develops an intricate fantasy world, inverted, in which she is Tnomerf Ynot, her invisible twin. Ynot (why not?) is a good deal taller than Tony and stronger, more daring, like Zenia (153).
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The barbarians gallop across the plain. At their head rides Tnomerf Ynot, her long ragged hair flying in the wind, a sword in each of her hands. Bulc egdirb! she calls, urging them forward. Its a battle cry, and they are on the rampage. (164) Tonys fantasy is an internally empowering one; however, she prides herself on her objectivity and neutrality, and she will not let emotions control her. While she allows Ynot to grow and mature, and she does develop her intellect, Tonys emotional aspects, like her body, do not grow and develop. Even in her relationship with West and her subsequent marriage to him, Tony remains symbolically virginal.9 Tonys first female friend is Zenia. She meets Zenia while she is attending college and becomes enthralled with Zenias daring attitude and seemingly powerful defiance. Zenia is, it appears, the quintessential 1960s rebel, an apparently true Amazonian woman. Zenia seduces Tony with a pathetic tale of her past (as she will also do with Charis and Roz), and Tony is so enchanted she even forgives Zenia for having a relationship with the man Tony desires. Zenia, however, cons Tony into dishonestly writing a term paper for her, dumps West, and absconds with money blackmailed from Tony. Later, she returns, after Tony and West are married, and takes West away again. When she leaves this time, Tony has lost the security of her relationship with West. Tonys experiences with Zenia do, however, allow her certain growth; as Perrakis recognizes, Tony is no longer satisfied to withdraw passively to the sidelines of life (158). Tony thinks that if she werent so tiny. . . . If she were six feet tall and built like a blockhouse; if she had hips. . . . Then shed be threatening, then shed be an Amazon (23). Yet, although she does not know it, Tony is clearly representative of the Amazon. Relating to her mothers, Antheas, animus, Tonys feminine qualities are inhibited to the point that Tonys body has not matured; a premature baby nicknamed Guppy by Anthea, Tony lives in her mothers absent shadow. As noted, her emotional growth is likewise stunted; Tonys only lover has been West, and her sexuality is nearly totally repressed.10 Though fearing the loss of West, she is independent of him; her relationship with him is completely based on her inability to make any conscious demands of him: She knows how frangible he is, how subject to breakage (10). Her passivity and her undefined feminine quality, however, are what attract West to her, and he believes he is protecting hera fact Tony does not perceive until the end of the novel (Ulanov 205). Tony lives life through a paradoxically strong will. Though emotionally stifled, she controls her life the way she controls the battles on her basement sand table. Even in the best of times, daily life is tenuous to her, a thin iridescent skin held in place by surface tension. She puts a lot of effort into keeping it together, her
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willed illusion of comfort and stability. But, underneath is darkness. Menace, chaos, cities aflame, towers crashing down, the anarchy of deep water (38). Thus, Tony lives in a fort, a bastion: a Gothic brick house complete with a tower (20). She barricades herself and West into a fortress of will and intellect. Tonys fear of and obsession with Zenia, then, is manifested in her terror of the power that she believes Zenia truly possesses; Tony believes herself to be essentially powerless. In losing her first battle with Zenia, Tony later realizes that her most vulnerable point is her brain [as it is also, paradoxically, her strongest point]. Thats how she was trapped by Zenia in the first place; that was the temptation, the bait. Tony got suckered in through her own intellectual vanity (447). It becomes obvious that Tony needs to supplement her intellectual power in order to overcome Zenia during their final clash. Charis has inherited her grandmothers hands, endowed with powerful healing strength. A witch, Charis is numinous, possessed of clairvoyance and perception. She is intuitive and nurturing; she is attuned to the rhythms of life, though somewhat less than truly confident of her powers. She resembles a slightly faded advertisement for herbal shampoohealthful, but verging on the antique . . . earnest and distracted, and with an inner light (30). Charis may be symbolically viewed as the spirit; she feels her body to be an inconvenience (220). Lacking boundaries, Charis has great difficulty in grasping a hold on her self (Perrakis 160). She wasnt sure where the edge of her body ended and the rest of the world began (68). Alienated, though benignly, and ethereal during her college years, Charis is unable to make connections. She later meets Billy by adopting him, a refugee draft dodger. Capable of boundless generosity, Charis is also self-destructively passive. Her friends Roz and Tony alternately grant her generous esteem for the clairvoyant healer she is and, Charis believes, think of her as Hysterical, a nitwit, a flake (70). Charis is the Medium. The medial woman is immersed in the psychic atmosphere of her environment (Toni Wolff 9). She is neutral, neither precisely one thing nor another, . . . something in-between, intermediate, an agent, a mediator, a means, not an end. . . . She mediates the deep abyss of the feminine, in an individual, subjective way, to those around her (Ulanov 208). As Chariss daughter says, Mums on another channel (49). The Mediums dominant archetype, according to Ulanov, is the Wise Woman, and the Mediums objective is to inspire others to become conscious of their own psychic contents and those of others (208). This is the function of Charis; she arouses the deeply submerged emotions of both Roz and Tony, and she is protective and nurturing, sensitive to the disarray of others lives. Child of an emotionally unstable and abusive mother and never-met father, Charis has developed her intuitive abilities at an early age in an attempt to gauge
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her mothers moods and rages. Her spiritual nature is also assisted into being by her grandmother, a woman with healing powers and an earthy sensibility. Unfortunately, however, when Chariss mother suffers a mental breakdown, Charis is sent to live with her Aunt Vi and Uncle Vern, a man who sexually abuses his niece. It is during this time period that Charis, in order to nullify the effects of Uncle Verns abuse, splits herself into Charis and Karenthe child-figure who carries their pain.11 Charis encounters Zenia in the first week of November in the first year of the seventies (222). Zenia shows up at a yoga class that Charis is teaching, exuding feigned illness and pain. Because Charis loves nothing better than collecting sick puppies, she is easily persuaded to adopt the supposedly cancer-riddled Zenia, cleansing her spiritually and physically. Charis fails to perceive Zenias refusal to succumb to the romanticized existence that Charis has carefully constructed, and even though Zenia warns Charis, Come on, youre not a baby. [Billy] loves your ass. . . . Its not your soul, its not you. . . . Ive watched him, hes a greedy shit, Charis refuses to listen (254). Blinded to Billys faultshe slaps and pinches Charis, cares nothing about her sexual pleasure, and freeloadsCharis wants the same thing that Billy does: for Billy to be happy (231). Charis is gullible; she wants to believe that she is keeping him as a prisoner of war: He is hers, to do with as she will (232). Yet Billy actually uses Charis as a way station, a temporary convenience (234). It is not until Zeniatelling Charis is not enough12proves what a louse Billy really is by sleeping with him and helping him sell-out his former partners/ terrorists that Charis perceives, somewhat, that Billy is not lost or wounded (236). Tellingly, Billy abandons Charis after he has learned that she is pregnant and after he has tried to kill the baby by kneeing Charis in the stomach. Charis initially loses to Zenia because she realizes she has no weapons, no weapons that will work against Zenia. All Charis has on her side is a wish to be good, and goodness is an absence, its the absence of evil; whereas Zenia has the real story (473). Charis is lacking the ability to act and react with logic and common sense. She also subconsciously distrusts her gifther spiritual abilities particularly after her encounter with Zenia. Roz has her chance with Zenia during the 1980s. Roz, fleshy and mature, is symbolically representative of the body. Sharing feelings of social alienation with Tony and Charis, she hides behind a facade of cheerful college camaraderie with her dorm mates. However, Roz feels shame and awkwardness, loathing her body and agonizing about her supposed ineptitude. Moreover, Roz lives in a state of perpetual presentness; unable to rely upon the past or contemplate the future, she survives by keenly attuning herself to the cues of the right now, exemplified by her uncanny ability to spot and exploit current trends.
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Child of a truly selfless womanso lacking in selfhood that she is nearly anonymouswho supports herself and her daughter by running a rooming house, and a crook of a father who was in wartime Europe during Rozs early childhood, Roz must hide her Jewish identity and change her name to Rosalind Greenwood as protection against anti-Semitism and attend a Catholic school. When her father returns and she resumes her long-forgotten heritage, Roz feels that her life had been cut in two. On the one side is Roz, and her mother, and the rooming house, and the nuns, and the other girls at school. . . . Thats the side where there are mostly women, women who have power, which means they have power over Roz, because even though God and Jesus are men its her mother and the nuns who have the last word. On the other side is her father, filling the kitchen with his bulk, his loud voice, his multi-layered smell; filling the house with it, filling up all the space in her mothers gaze so that Roz is pushed off to the edge, because her mother, who is so unbending, bends. She abdicates. (36768) Roz, like Tony and Charis, divides her self upon her fathers return, suppressing critical ingredients of that self. Roz is the Mother in both the Jungian interpretation as integral part of the Great Mother and as one of the four structural forms. She lives for others and supports others, championing growth not only in her maternal role but also in friendship, in charitable activities, and as the head of her company. Rozs twin daughters assume [that Roz will] cover for them, lie herself blue, hurl her body in front of the bullets, and theyre right, she will (395). Yet, Roz-as-mother has also projected that role in her relationship with her husband; she is anxiously overprotective and possessive of Mitch, who, as the other . . . has outgrown such support or never really needed it. This [overly solicitous] attitude communicates a lack of confidence in the others strength and independence and [interferes] with his development (Ulanov 198). Ulanov also states that the Mother will promote and protect for her husband all that has to do with his position in the worldhis persona, Jung calls it. She may ignore or suppress his other qualities or interests because she sees them as threats either to herself or her home. As a result, a man may come to feel that he is merely a household fixture, or at best a son, and he will try to compensate for this attack on his virility by spending a great deal of time in male company . . . or will involve himself in a love affair. (2012)
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Roz unknowingly treats Mitch as a possession, an accessory, and even a child. In essence, Roz feels as if she has bought and paid for Mitch with money from her fathers ill-gotten gains. She cannot conceive of any suggestion that Mitch has married her for any other reason (and she is probably right). Thus, enamored of her husbands looks and social standing but not trusting her own attributes, Roz only finds yet another reason to despise her self. Rozs existence as a nurturer is characterized in the masochistic emptiness she feels when she is not overtly needed. Thus, Roz relishes the times Mitch needs her to her to bail him out of his infidelities and she mourns her childrens growing independence. Roz is also extremely self-critical; she blames herself for Mitchs inability to behave like a husband. She also deeply criticizes her own successes as a businesswoman; she believes that a good woman should be selfless like her own mother: The Self should be scrubbed like a floor: on both knees, with a harsh wire brush, until nothing is left of it at all (333). Zenia arrives in the nick of time in Rozs life not only to save her faltering magazineZenia refocuses the fading feminist endeavor into a slick and lucrative periodicalbut also to save Roz from her marriage. Snatching Mitch, Zenia treats him in the same manner he has treated his extramarital lovers: she reels him in and then dumps him. As Bloom and Makowsky note, An eye for an eye, Zenia treats Mitch exactly as he has treated all the other women in his life, and worse (176). Zenia steals Mitchs soul, exacting, perhaps, revenge for Roz. It is only through Zenia that Roz is able to act, vicariously, in what she considers a selfish manner. Yet Roz is unable to separate what is selfish from what is selfassertive and self-protective. Like Ruth Patchett in Weldons The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Zenia is artificial, suggesting that she is self-fashioned rather than man-made. However, her name suggests that she is a compilation of discarded but necessary aspects of Tony, Charis, and Roz; thus, she is a particularly female creation (Aguiar; Enos).13 Zenias inherent knowledge of how to dispossess each of the protagonists is also indicative of her intimate connection with each. It seems probable, then, that Zenia is the tangible medley of all the qualities the women have suppressed in their psyches.14 Each woman has psychologically split in the pastTony, abandoned child, into Ynot, left-handed warrior; Karen, abused child, into Charis, spiritual healer; Rosalind Greenwood, Catholic schoolgirl, into Roz Grunwald, Jewish displaced person. And, similar to the tangible energy released from a split atom, Zenia may be the materialization of the womens divided selves. Emma Jung writes, If woman does not meet adequately the demand for consciousness or intellectual activity, the animus becomes autonomous and negative, and works destructively on the individual herself and in her relations to other people (6). Zenia just might be that embodied and autonomous animus. As Roz recognizes, Zenia possesses
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innate masculinized qualities: If she was a guy youd have to call her a prick. I mean, there is no female name for it, because bitch doesnt even begin to cover it (480). Emma Jung further explains that if the possibility of spiritual functioning is not taken up by the conscious mind, the psychic energy for it falls into the unconscious, and there activates the archetype of the animus. Possessed of energy that has flowed back into the unconscious, the anima figure becomes autonomous, so powerful, indeed, that it can overwhelm the conscious ego and thus finally dominate the whole personality. (6) Tony, Charis, and Roz have so forcibly removed this energy from their psyches that Zenia, perhaps, materializes from the resulting displacement. When Charis is a child living with her grandmother, she finds a broody hen sitting on twenty-three eggs; her grandmother tells her, The other hensve been dropping their own eggs on her. Saving themselves the bother. The lazy sluts (271). Likewise, Tony, Charis, and Roz have been dropping their own responsibilities on Zenia. As noted, Zenia performs a very necessary function for Tony, Charis, and Roz: Zenia menaces the carefully constructed shells that allow them to remain good girls: good because they avoid occasions for evil (Bloom and Makowsky 167). They allow Zenia the privilege of doing their dastardly deeds. Yet Zenia also forces the women to see the illusion of those carefully constructed shells; Zenia has a distinct tendency to break those shells. Moreover, described often as an oval, Zenia herself may be the shell that needs to be broken.15 Zenia is the Hetaira in every sense of the archetypal form. From a negative viewpoint, the Hetaira tends to tempt herself or a man away from collective responsibilities and from realistic adaptation (Ulanov 203). The Hetairas relation to the male [or female, in The Robber Brides inversions] stimulates and promotes his individual interests, his inclinations, and even his problems, and she may lead him to lose his sense of reality; she becomes a kind of Circe in a mans life, states Ulanov. The Hetaira, a label taken from the Greek for concubine, may be represented as seductress, harlot, or witch (204), and the maidenly softness of the Hetaira often alternates with willfulness and power drives. She may be the embodiment of aggression, which results in a severing of ties within herself and outside her in destructive ways (205). Yet Zenia is not, as Tony, Charis, and Roz believe, an evil entity; Bloom and Makowsky point out that Zenia is a good witch, disguised as a bad witch (167).16 Zenia, in Ulanovs definition of the Hetaira, awakens and arouses the individual, subjective psychic life in herself and others, conveying a sense of personal value quite apart from collective standards, a value that can stimulate and promote something close to total realization of personality (203). Each motherless woman initially accepts Zenia as a mother-surrogate figure.
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Ultimately, however, the three protagonists reject the feminine as represented in their abusive, elusive, and abandoning mothers; they fear the qualities that Zenia possesses in abundance. And, these qualities are not just dictated by animus. Judith Kegan Gardiner argues that contemporary women writers have developed a new set of sexlinked oppositions between male and female kinds of evil and the female evils often spring from current psychological anxieties about motherhood and daughter-hood. These writers dramatize a dual moral standard; in the public realm, victimized women blame male power, but their private villains are rejecting mothers and their moral heroes those who assume maternal responsibility. (74)17 Coral Ann Howells labels the mothers of Tony, Charis, and Roz as War Bride mothers, monsters with triple heads, and accuses them of being responsible for generating their daughters insecurities and escape fantasies (73). Yet, as Shannon Hengen counters, all three women find relief from thralldom to the men in their lives, and perhaps also from the concomitant negative views of other women . . . paradoxically by first embracing Zenia (279).18 Each woman has attached herself to a version of her father: West, Tonys husband, is as unsubstantial as her father, Griff, was; Billys abusiveness and sexual domineering is reminiscent of Uncle Vern; Mitchs philandering echoes the numerous affairs Rozs father engaged in. By invoking both sexes of parental figures, Atwood may be implying that these women have failed to mature, wallowing in parental blame for their own deficiencies. Zenia has initiallyafter her first encounters with the womenleft Tony, Charis, and Roz with lies to sustain them: West is vulnerable; Billy will come back; Roz is grieving over Mitchs suicide. She returns, unwillinglyas her anger in Toxique makes clearto vanquish these lies that the women so tenaciously cling to. Bloom and Makowsky note: [Zenia] knows the other characters better than they know themselves; she understands their customary soothing and clucking over one another in times of trouble makes them feel better about the disastrous status quo but doesnt solve their problems, because they fail to see that their attitudes are the problem, not Zenia or the men. Zenia becomes the agent of dramatic change, her scorched-earth, keepno-prisoners policy a much stronger remedy than palliatives of chicken soup and herbal tea. (171) Zenias return, then, may be viewed as beneficial, a final lesson for the women to learn.
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Roz recognizes that the Zenias of this world havent let themselves be moulded into male fantasies, theyve done it themselves (388). Zenia possesses the power her three victims lack, a power born of the elements commonly denigrated as belonging to the bitch.19 This power emanates from ostensibly unfeminine attributes: anger, indignation, resentment, aggression, ambition, self-centeredness, artifice, egotism. In fact, these are all the qualities that Tony, Charis, and Roz have striven to eradicate from their own psyches. Or maybe not. These rejected qualities are the ones that the three women, under the influence of patriarchal values, believe to be unfeminine and malignant. However, in examining each of their archetypal formsAmazon, Medium, and Mother, respectivelyTony, Charis, and Roz are the embodiments of the negative sides of these forms. Zenia, paradoxically, is then the embodiment of the rejected positive qualities. Within her, for example, Zenia harbors Tonys missing rage: when Tony tells Zenia of her mothers abandonment, Zenia asks, Werent you furious?. I would have been (168). Tony isnt sure what it would be like, to be enraged. Possibly too dangerous. Or else a relief. No rage at the time: only a cold panic, a desolation; and fear, because of what her father would do, or say: would she be blamed? (16869). Zenia, with her tenacity and directness, also contradicts Chariss lack of boundaries. Moreover, Rozs absent self-esteem has found sanctuary in Zenias arrogant self-assertion. Zenia returns to force each woman to reclaim those characteristics. Witness the final, anticlimactic confrontation as Roz, Tony, and Charis gather together their long dormant emotions and easily overpower their rival.20 Zenia has approached each of the women, and her blackmail threats of long ago have been revived. Each woman then confronts Zenia in her hotel room, and each is almost seduced again by Zenia. Yet, this time, Zenias machinations are boringly transparent. Predictably, Tony, Charis, and Roz then break free of Zenias evil spell, quickly and efficiently disposing her threats. Each finally recognizes her own power and thus Zenias inability to continue dominating her. Zenias subsequent death and the poetic discovery of her body in the fountain are an act of redundancy; having lost her power, Zenia has lost her life force. Equally redundant is her death; not only does she appear to have drowned, but it is discovered that the cause of her death is an overdose of heroin; and the autopsy reveals that Zenia was dying of ovarian cancer: death times three. The life force never truly belonged to Zenia anyway. It rightfully belongs to Tony, Charis, and Roz. Tony realizes that theres a part of her that has wanted to cheer Zenia on, even to encourage her. To make her into a saga. To participate in her daring, her contempt for almost everything, her rapacity and lawlessness (184). Charis contends that they were tempted, each one of them, but they didnt succumb. Succumbing would have been killing Zenia, either physically
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or spiritually (489). Symbolically, then, in not killing Zenia, Tony, Charis, and Roz have chosen to let the qualities of their selves that they have entrusted to Zenia live. Just prior to her defeat of Zenia, each of the protagonists dreams a particularly symbolic dream. In these dreams, the women find identity confusion and intimate knowledge of one anothers experiences. These dreams represent a critical integration, or, in a sense, individuation. Each woman not only reclaims that which she had originally rejected, but she also seeks and integrates the positive traits of her friends. Tony, for example, dreams of Chariss egg.21 Roz dreams of Chariss symbolic suitcasethe one in which she has stowed Karen. Most telling, however, each woman dreams of Zenia and her own greatest fear of Zenia. Tony sees West leaving with Zenia, but this Zenia has gills, a reference to Tonys nickname of Guppy. Charis dreams that she merges with Zenia, representing her own fear of re-merging with Karen. And Roz dreams that Zenia is not only like her father, but that he/she makes reference to her Catholic upbringing. These dreams reunite the fragments of each protagonists separated past, joining the split sides of each past. This integration is what ultimately enables each to confront Zenia and reclaim from Zenia that which belongs to her.
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Coda The Bitch Code

Sometimes bein a bitch is the only thing a woman has to hold on to. Kathy Bates in Delores Claiborne
nnis Pratt writes, When a woman sets out to manipulate language, to create new myths out of old, to write an essay or to paint a painting, she transgresses fundamental social taboos in that very act. She further cautions, To use our drive for authenticity in order to shape feminine archetypes into fiction, to bring elements of our inner world into consciousness and give them shape in the social form of the novel, is an act of defiance with perilous consequences (Pratt et al. 11). By endowing the archetypes with fluidity and the capacity to evolve, the feminist archetypalist must ready herself for the inevitable charge of manipulation from those who seek to engage in literary scholarship with rigid and unchanging standards. However, to ignore the drive for authenticity in emerging feminine types depicted in fiction is to ignore the fullness and richness of subjectified women. Toni Morrison has written, The archetypes created by women about themselves are rare, and even those few that do exist may be the result of a female mind completely controlled by male type thinking (What 15). Certainly, in examining the Jungian archetypes and the sources Jung used for validation in his findings, Morrisons point of view is accurate. Even such women-centered mythical figures as Eve and Demeter, logic suggests, were created and propagated by men as the traditional writers of civilization. The characters passed down through legend and the oral tradition, even if they originated in female consciousness, reveal a deeply ingrained capitulation to patriarchal doctrine. Eve, subservient to Adam and held responsible for the fall, is given little in the way of female dimensions. Demeter partially accedes to the stipulations of Pluto, who has kidnapped and raped her daughter, Persephone, and she is forced to surrender to his demand that Persephone be returned to him for half of the year. Thus, while the myth of Demeter is indeed woman centered and provides a useful feminine model, Demeter as rep134
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resentative of autonomous and powerful woman is a less than successful model. These mythological figures reflect very little in the way of individuation, and, although they do validate the feminine in ways, they remain without dimension. The integration of the female self, according to such feminist archetypalists as Ann Bedford Ulanov, Annis Pratt, Joanna Russ, Bettina L. Knapp, Estella Lauter, and Carol Schreier Rupprecht, involves accepting and indeed championing all of her various selves: Mother, Hetaira, Amazon, and Medium, and all of the different aspects of each form: anima and animus, positive and negative. If [the female subject] responds to the archetypes underlying her nature, then she can respond to the deep motivations that the archetypes provide, which can only enrich her life, her relation to others, and her contributions to society (Ulanov 211). In addition, Michele Pessoni contends that feminist writers such as Toni Morrison, who articulates conditions of individuation in Sula, begin to explore the possibility of discovering divinity and meaning from within, of reconnecting to the feminine archetype buried deep within the human psyche in order to resurrect a way of seeing and feeling which offers the promise of healing and life to an ailing world. (439) Indeed, the resurrected bitch often finds her genesis in the true originating archetypal figurethe triple goddess, Maiden/Mother/Cronethe unified archetype that maintained within her the integration of positive and negative rather than splitting into separate entities. The individuated characters discussed in this volume demonstrate the necessity for women to reconnect with the severed portions of their psyches and to absorb the power of the maligned negative archetypes. Without this recognition, characters such as Tony, Charis, and Roz, and Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, and Pallas are initially doomed to a perpetual state of indecision and weakness. Yet, when each accepts responsibility for the whole self, each is rewarded with knowledge and power. Moreover, none of these characters sacrifices her positive and socially acceptable self; instead, each widens the parameters of self, redefining who she is. Of most importance, none of the revalued characters finds the necessity to either apologize for who she has become or regret the evolution she has undergone. None needs forgiveness for becoming the bitch. In fact, in most cases, the newly gained power of the bitch has beneficial consequences as these women find reserves within their selves allowing them to enrich their lives (physical and spiritual), ward off threatening encroachments, and appreciate their own previously submerged qualities. The trend of women depicting women as fully developed individuals, complete with flaws, seems to be deepening. As popular culture redefines the bitch, the
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works that celebrate her existence continue to gain prominence. The positive social implications of accepting the bitch include endowing women with the ideaa liberating notionthat femininity is not necessarily synonymous with weakness, capitulation, good manners, and subservience. Margaret Atwood asks a potent question: Were women to be condemned to virtue for life, slaves in the salt mines of goodness? How intolerable (Spotty Handed). Without ridding herself of a naive belief in the power of virtue (not that virtue in itself is the antithesis of power), and without recognizing the strength that comes from accepting the aspects of her self that do not conform to limiting patriarchal dictates, woman will indeed condemn herself to a perpetually impossible existence. As more and more literary works give the bitch credence, she becomes valuable in her own right, whether her power is nasty and selfishly manifested, whether her power is the justifiable rage and indignation of an ignored being, or whether her power is that of the misunderstood fairy godmother.
Notes
I
Works Cited
I
Index
Notes
Introduction: The Season of the Bitch
1. Jessica Benjamin contends that the three tasks of feminism are to redeem what has been devalued in womens domain, to conquer the territory that has been reserved to men, and to resolve and transcend the opposition between these spheres by reformulating the relationship between them (78). Annette Kolodny writes that defining feminist literary criticism involves exposing the sexual stereotyping of women in both our literature and our literary criticism (96). 2. Karen Elias-Button argues, It seems to oversimplify the reality of womens lives to say that they only share the existential condition of victimization by the patriarchy. Indeed, women are too discovering that it is becoming possible to define the feminine, beyond its relation to the Other (specifically, the male), in their own terms (357). Elias-Button refers the work of Carol Christ and Naomi Goldenberg, among others, who have undertaken this task. 3. See Rita Felskis Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change and Susan Gubars The Birth of the Artist as Heroine: (Re)Production, the Kunstlerroman Tradition, and the Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, The Representation of Women in Fiction, ed. Carolyn Heilbrun (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983) for discussions of this genre. 4. Celie does not lose her sense of community or spiritual center as she moves from dire poverty and deprivation to a more human way of life, Barbara Christian contends, perhaps because she comes to that improvement in her life through inner growth and through the support of her sisters (326). Rita Felski similarly notes, Celies increasing sense of purpose and identity is accompanied by identification with such strong female figures as Shug and Sofia and simultaneously entails an acceptance of black community (139). 5. In discussing the trend of sentimental literature written by women in the 1800s, Leslie Fieldler observes: In America, especially, the use of women as symbols of piety and purity led to an unfortunate series of mis-understandings. With no countertradition, cynical or idealizing, to challenge it, the sentimental view came to be accepted as quite literally true, was imposed upon actual women as a required role and responded to by men as if it were a fact of life rather than of fancy. (80)
139
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His observation may also hold true for feminist novels of the late twentieth century; the promotion of virtues in women, and the failure to note their less than virtuous tendencies, may have the undesirable effect of reducing womens realities. 6. Northrop Frye, for example, noted that women in literature could be divided into the lady of duty and the lady of pleasure (Anatomy 196). 7. See Edward Hanford Kellys A Bitch by Any Other Name Is Less Poetic for a complete analysis of the word bitch and its many meanings. 8. Annis Pratt et al. note, The term archetype derives from the Greek archi, a beginning or first instance, and typos, a stamp, and denotes the primordial form, the original, of a series of variations (3). 9. Feminists are not the first to question Jungian archetypal theory; others who have reevaluated and revised the concept of archetypes include Northrop Frye and Claude Levi-Strauss.
1. To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type

1. For example, in his discussion of the animus, Jung states: In intellectual women the animus encourages a critical disputatiousness and would-be highbrowism, which, however, consists essentially in harping on some irrelevant weak point and nonsensically making it the main one. Or a perfectly lucid discussion gets tangled up in the most maddening way through the introduction of a quite different and if possible perverse point of view. Without knowing it, such women are solely intent upon exasperating the man and are, in consequence, the more completely at the mercy of the animus. Unfortunately I am always right, one of these creatures once confessed to me. (Aspects 97) 2. Jung writes, There is no consciousness without discrimination of opposites. . . . Nothing can exist without its opposite; the two were one in the beginning and will be one again in the end (Aspects 125). Lauter and Rupprecht recognize Jungs rigid opposition: For example, [Jung] posited that Eros, or the principle of relatedness, was not only associated with females but was dominant in the female psyche; conversely, the analytic principle, or Logos, was dominant in males. Despite all our efforts toward individuation, he said, Eros would remain weaker in most males and Logos weaker in most females. Thus he set arbitrary limits on the development of both sexes and reinforced the stereotypes of man as thinker and woman as nurturer. By associating men with thought, the cultural category with the higher value in the twentieth century in most Western societies, he helped to perpetuate the inequality of women. (6) Ann Bedford Ulanov agrees that the feminine has been most neglected in psychoanalytic literature as it is usually treated as a tangent of the masculine and confined to its literal sexuality, which is then seen as deficient because it lacks the masculine sexual organs. But, Ulanov asserts, Jung, in contrast, explores the feminine as a
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distinct category of being. She adds, Though Jung is often contradictory and abstruse about an already abstruse subject, he has initiated a new and fundamentally important point of view: a study of the symbolic meaning of the feminine and its role psychic functioning (13). 3. Cynthia A. Davis states that this criticism, archetypal and mythic, seems to posit a fixity of pattern and image incompatible with a feminist understanding of gender and power relations (109). 4. The collective unconscious rests on a deeper level, which does not derive from personal experience . . . but is inborn, Jung relates. I have chosen the term collective because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal . . . and thus constitutes a common psychic substrate . . . present in every one of us (Archetypes 34). 5. Jung describes the animaan elfin beingas the Soul: With her cunning play of illusions the soul lures into life the inertness of matter that does not want to live. She makes us believe incredible things, that life may be lived. She is full of snares and traps, in order that man should fall, should reach the earth, entangle himself there, and stay caught, so that life should be lived; as Eve in the garden of Eden could not rest content until she had convinced Adam of the goodness of the forbidden apple. (Archetypes 2627) 6. Pratt et al. note that the animus is an archetype of much less value than the anima, according to Jung; while the anima provides the male with love, mystery, and the completion of his individuality, . . . the animus only makes a woman opinionated, masculine, and shrill (7). 7. Jung states, Since the anima is an archetype that is found in men, it is reasonable to suppose that an equivalent archetype must be present in women; for just as man is compensated by a feminine element, so woman is compensated by a masculine one (Aspects 179). 8. Jung explains, This is the motif of the dual mother, an archetype to be found in many variants in the field of mythology and comparative religion and forming the basis of numerous reprsentations collectives ( Archetypes 45). 9. Karen Horney states, Men have never tired of fashioning expressions for the violent force by which man feels himself drawn to the woman, and side by side with his longing, the dread that through her he might die and be undone (134). Horney articulates his dread: Always, everywhere, the man strives to rid himself of his dread of women by objectifying it. It is not, he says, that I dread her: it is that she herself is malignant, capable of any crime, a beast of prey, a vampire, a witch, insatiable in her desires. She is the very personification of what is evil. (135) 10. Displaying lack of insight, Jung further adds: No matter how friendly or obliging a womans Eros may be, no logic on earth can shake her if she is ridden by the animus. Often the man has the feelingand he is not altogether wrongthat only seduction
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or a beating or a rape would have the necessary power of persuasion. (Aspects 172) It is such unfortunate statements as these that incur the feminists understandable reluctance to use Jungs theories to promote understanding of women. 11. Frye notes that he has tended to resist association with Jung. He writes that Jung, being a psychologist, he is concerned with existential archetypes, not imaginative ones (Forming 35). 12. Jung notes, On the negative side the mother archetype may connote anything secret, hidden, dark: the abyss, the world of the dead, anything that devours, seduces, and poisons, that is terrifying and inescapable like fate (Archetypes 83). Erich Neumann describes the Terrible Mother as follows: The symbolism of the Terrible Mother draws its images predominantly from the inside; that is to say, the negative elementary character of the Feminine expresses itself in fantastic and chimerical images that do not originate in the outside world. The reason for this is that the Terrible Female is a symbol for the unconscious. And the dark side of the Terrible Mother takes the form of monsters, whether in Egypt, or India, Mexico or Etruria, Bali or Rome. In the myths and tales of all peoples, ages, and countriesand even in the nightmares of our own nightswitches and vampires, ghouls spectres, assail us, all terrifyingly alike. The dark half of the black-and-white cosmic egg representing the Archetypal Feminine engenders terrible figures that manifest the black, abysmal side of life and the human psyche. Just as world, life, nature, and soul have been experienced as generative and nourishing, protecting and warming Femininity, so their opposites are also perceived in the image of the Feminine; death and destruction, danger and distress, hunger and nakedness, appear as helplessness in the presence of the Dark and Terrible Mother. (14849) 13. Wehr notes, Like all archetypal images, Jungs concept of animus has both a negative and positive pole. In his various discussions of animus, those of the negative animus, or the animus-possessed, woman predominate (119). Wehr continues: Jungs term of animus-possessed woman is analogous to Freuds labeling of certain women as castrating. It serves the same purpose, which is to keep women subdued, feminine, and disempowered except through whatever indirect channels for empowerment they can find in being feminine (120). In contrast, a woman who is positively affected by her animus displays a capacity to focus on, evaluate, and discern her own reactions, her unconscious rationality, her power aspirations, her opinions, her argumentativeness, her aggression, her capacities to differentiate, her expectations of how one ought to be and what one should do. As well as her potential for relationship to creative meaning, clarity, self-expression, and the spiritual contents of her life. (Ulanov 41)
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14. I would like to state that I do agree with F. L. Radford and R. R. Wilson that there are few [pure] examples in literature of either Jungs or Freuds influence (317). Literature may be legitimately interpreted through a variety of different critical lens, and my reading of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, and indeed all of the following literary analyses, constitutes only one of the many possible readings. 15. See Bruce E. Wallis, Christ in the Cuckoos Nest: or, the Gospel According to Ken Kesey, A Casebook on Ken Keseys One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, ed. George J. Searles (Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1992); and Stephen L. Tanner, Ken Kesey (Boston: Twayne, 1983). 16. Significantly, two of Billys most problematic sounds are B, the consonant that begins his own name, and M, the consonant that begins the word mother, the crux of his psychological problems. 17. Freudian psychology states that masochism is a primarily feminine trait. 18. This use of terms is significant. McMurphy does not suggest that Nurse Ratched needs a lover or even that she needs to get laid. He uses a phrase that indicates he believes that she needs to be overpowered and, in essence, raped. 19. The Chief admits, We couldnt stop him because we were the ones making him do it. It wasnt the nurse that was forcing him, it was our need (267). Leslie Horst also agrees that male sexuality in the novel is a performance: It is oriented solely toward the males pleasure; the females enjoyment is not, for her own sake, but is the reflection of an accomplishment of the man. In a true sense, women are sexual objects (17). 20. Barry Leeds contends that Nurse Ratcheds breasts are the ironic reminders of the sexuality she has renounced (20). 21. Madelon E. Heatherington claims, Big Nurse gets nothing like the artfully distinctive treatment which Kesey affords the male characters. Hers is basically a onedimensional evil, for her power is largely derivative, not something she has earned or can exercise on her own (651). 22. Likewise, Roberta K. Rigsby, contending that the primary concern feminist critics have in regard to Jungian archetypal theory is that the criticism tends to suggest an essentialist agenda by relying on predetermined identity, refutes this criticism by asserting that feminists have been able to move beyond the Jungian assumption that archetypes are eternal and unchanging (181). 23. See Annis Pratt et al., Archetypal Patterns in Womens Fiction. Pratt, a feminist archetypal theorist, engaged in a close reading of over three hundred novels written by women for the purpose of developing accurate archetypes as rendered through the consciousness of women writers. 24. See Ann Bedford Ulanov, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and Christian Theology. 25. Cynthia Davis recognizes the received versions of myth are the structures the writer has to work with; to step completely out of ones culture is impossible. The woman writer can add the human dimension by identifying with the mythic female in a way that men cannot; thus the resurrections of myths that
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center on women, like Demeter and Helen, or that stress womens closeness to nature. (117) 26. Richard D. Maxwell notes, Big Nurse, in order to keep the men on her ward submissive to her rules and regulations, has to subdue their masculinity (139). 27. Ulanov bases her observations on the work of Toni Wolff (Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche), the Jungian analysand, theorist, and mistress of Jung; she originally labeled the types. 28. Eva does explain that she has burned Plum because he was dead to the world already, addicted to heroin. She also states that she killed her son to save herself; he wanted to crawl back into her womb. 29. Jung believes that in the daughter a mother-complex either unduly stimulates or else inhibits the feminine instinct, and that in the son it injures the masculine instinct through an unnatural sexualization ( Aspects 114). 30. Leslie Fieldler asserts that Daisy is a bitch, the abusing woman, symbol of Imperialist rather than a colonial America and a Dark Destroyer (31213). However, Judith Fetterly argues that in being seized as an incarnation of [Gatsbys] dream, Daisy is annihilated as a separate person and is solopsized into Gatsby, becoming an extension of him (98). According to Fetterly, it is not Daisy who is the bitch, but America (73). 31. Cixouss essay urges women to write, an act that will also be marked by womans seizing the occasion to speak, hence her shattering entry into history, which has always been based on her suppression (246). 32. Wehr notes, patriarchal society values feminine indefiniteness. Feminine definiteness, combined with the power of the anima, indeed appears to threaten (108).
2. The Male Perspective

1. Fieldler traces the Dark Lady of the novel as far back as Richardsons Clarissa, Scotts Ivanhoe, and Shakespeares Sonnets. 2. Erich Neumann suggests that the evil female as representative of a males projected anima serves a positive function for the male: Even when the anima is seemingly negative and intends, for example, to poison the male consciousness, to endanger it by intoxication, and so oneven then a positive reversal is possible, for the anima figure is always subject to defeat. When Circe, the enchantress who turns men into beasts, meets the superior figure of Odysseus, she does not kill herself like the Sphinx, whose riddle Oedipus has solved, but instead invites him to share her bed. (35) 3. The god Hermes warns Odysseus that he must have sexual relations with Circe in order to free his men but that when she has you stripped, she may rob you of your courage and manhood (163). Circe, thus, is considered to be a castrator, similar to Delilah.
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4. Catherine S. Quick notes that Jezebel is according to tradition, the ultimate figure of feminine evil, one considered so evil by patriarchal standards that her name in most dictionaries is synonymous with wicked woman (44). It is also interesting to note that, although a jezebel is considered to be a sexually treacherous woman of loose virtue, the biblical story of Jezebel makes no reference to her sexual appetites, revealing only that she used cosmetics. 5. A 1998 review of Toward the End of Time notes that Updike is truly, truly awful about women, and he exults in it (Hamilton 46). The main character of this novel is a bore about his penis, which is really the protagonistif not quite the heroof this book, as (arguably) of most of Updikes work (46). In this postnuclear war novel, protagonist Ben Turnbull realistically fantasizes about shooting his aging wife, Gloria (who wanted Ben to kill a deer who was munching at her gardens) and moves a hooker into the house. 6. Romig asserts that [Miss Havisham] wants to be revenged and is willing to wait, continuing her role as victim, until a suitable avenger (Estella) can be shaped. And she wants to make sure that she does not forget, does not heal, for then the enormity of the crime against her would be lessened; her hurt would become merely human rather than enormous and mythic is proportion. (19) 7. In this aspect, Estellas choice of Bentley Drummle makes perfect sense; Estella, under Miss Havishams tutelage, has chosen the virtual reincarnation of Compeyson, the jilting bridegroom. The weak, adoring suitors that Estella discards would not be suitable substitutes for the magnificent revenge nor would Pip suffice due to his inability to cause genuine pain. Only a real bastard like Drummle will do. Estella, however, due to her inexperience with the power of the patriarchy and males in general, is ill-equipped to handle Drummles abusive behavior. 8. Carol Siegel convincingly argues that Estella has many attributes one would expect to find in a prostitute-dominatrix (6). 9. Pip believes that Miss Havisham is the fairy godmother who had changed him, an impression she supports upon his visit to her prior to his leaving for London. The scene takes place as one of her relatives, Sarah Pocket, is in the room. The reader might wonder whether she would have contradicted Pip if Sarah were not present. 10. Richard Witt disagrees, stating those symbolic interpretations of the fire must be resisted. He provides evidence that womens fashions and their flammability were responsible for several deaths annually. 11. Steve Carter asserts that Caddy in The Sound and the Fury is infected by the grip of her animus, a condition that results in her sexual promiscuity (134). Similarly, Judith Sutpens strong identification with her father also promotes animus possession and licentious behavior. 12. William T. Stafford, in The Enigma of Serena Merle, labels Serena the first great bad heroine of the James canon (117). 13. Fetterly relates the male impulse to read The Bostonians as melodramatic: The rescue of Verena from perversion, exploitation, imprisonment, deaththe
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snow-white maiden saved from the clutches of the wicked witch by the handsome prince (110). 14. Serena is, of course, an American. 15. The actual quote is launch his boat (476). 16. Georges father, Tom Willard, accuses his son of acting like a gawky girl (44). 17. Fieldler labels Brett Ashley the bitch-goddess and the Lilith of the 20s; he states, The Spaniards know her immediately as a terrible goddess, the avatar of an ancient archetype (319). 18. Earl R. Wasserman equates Wonderboy with Excalibur, both talismans of male potency (441). 19. Iris tells Roy, You are really the first (176). Moreover, Iris is the first woman to have given herself to Roy sexually without ulterior motivation. Wasserman relates, Roys failure is his self-centered inability to turn to her and sacrifice the Memo too vividly recorded on his spirit (454). 20. Patricia Meyer Spacks observes that female sexuality seems to mean danger rather than power; male sexuality is power (200). 21. Louis Owens recognizes that the implied author [narrator] conceives of Cathy as predetermined to evil, inherently depraved (254). Barbara Heavilin also asserts that Cathy has chosen to follow a life of perversion, one that breeds corruption, torture, and murder (94). And if she has indeed chosen this path as a very young girl, Cathy must possess some innate knowledge that most children are not born with. 22. John H. Timmerman does not associate Cathy with the archetype of Eve; rather, he argues that Cathy is symbolically identified with Satan, a masculine figure, which corresponds with the Jungian contention that the bitch is animus possessed. 23. Mimi Gladstein writes, Much of Cathys character certainly suggests a venting of [Steinbecks] hostility toward neurotic, manipulative, conscienceless women. (32). 24. Joanna Russ rightly observes, The hero whose success in business alienates him from his family is not at all in the position of the heroine who loses her femininity by competing with menhe is not desexed, but she is (What Can 8).
3. Women Reading and Women Writing the Bitch

1. I would like to stress that the following discussion analyzes some of the traditional works of girls fiction and does not deal with the numerous excellent examples of fiction, especially those written in the last half of the twentieth century, that promote selfhood, self-esteem, and pride for female readersnovels by Madeline LEngle, Judy Blume, Beverly Cleary, among many, many others. 2. Joyce Carol Oates argues that the fairy tale, as a literary/cultural genre, has traditionally been associated with women (In Olden 98). As Nancy A. Walker recognizes: Fairy tales are thus in some senses womens stories: not only were women their traditional transmitters, but the best known of them narrate the fates of womenSnow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella. And even though some of these heroines end
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up marrying princes, we must not forget what they endure on the way to those endings: being fed poisoned apples, sleeping for a hundred years, being locked in towers, wearing rags and scrubbing floors. (Witch Weldon 910) Beverly Lyon Clark also agrees: Most of those who write, edit, buy, and critique childrens literatureat least in this centuryare women (171). 3. Jung notes that these women are a manifestation of the grandmother: As mother of the mother, she is greater than the latter; she is in truth the . . . Great Mother. As the distance between conscious and unconscious increases, the grandmothers more exalted rank transforms her into a Great Mother, and it frequently happens that the opposites contained in this image split apart. We then get a good fairy and a wicked fairy, or a benevolent goddess and one who is malevolent and dangerous. (Archetypes 102) 4. Mary Lennox, heroine of The Secret Garden, is labeled disagreeable from the very beginning of the novel (1). Keyser exonerates her behavior as a child who treats others hatefully and is hated in return because children, having never known love, they feel hatred for themselves (Quite Contrary 3). During the last third of the novel, however, Mary virtually disappears from the novel and loses her appeal. In fact, the glorious transformation of Colins that she has been instrumental in bringing about culminates without an acknowledgement from Colins father as to her part. Burnett seems to be educating her youthful female readers to find rewards in unsung humility. 5. And, incidentally, as Miss Amelia seems to serve no real purpose in the school, Miss Minchin must be charitable in the sense that she is supporting her sister, an idea not immediately noticeable in the outline of Miss Minchins character. 6. Even Mr. Barrow, the no-nonsense solicitor, recognizes that Miss Minchin is a businesswomen and shrewd (99). 7. Susan Ostrov Weisser asserts: The Bitch figure, a staple of Harlequin novels as well as other popular romances, is not only wonderfully terrible, the woman the reader loves to hate; she is also terrible because she is wonderful, in the ways that the heroines of these novels most decidedly are not. (269) The Harlequin bitch, for example, dastardly and immoral as she is, is a welcome relief from the predictably insipid heroine. 8. See Rosemary Rogers, Sweet Savage Love (New York: Avon, 1974) as an example. 9. It should be noted, however, that Scarlett herself is amazingly innocent in regard to her own sexuality. The infamous staircase scene, as Rhett hauls his protesting wife up the stairs to the bedroomand her pleased nature in the morningsuggests that Scarlett has never before experienced sexual pleasure. 10. It is significant that Ednas two children are both sons and thus fledgling members of the patriarchy, a fact that might help to explain why she abandons them.
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11. Szabo and Jones also recognize that the last few pages of Guests novel leave room for Beths redemption; in fact, the final scene is about the possibility of her returna return that is dependent upon Conrads newfound ability to read her cryptic gestures of affection (60). 12. See, for example, Barbara Johnson, Is Female to Male as Ground Is to Figure? Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Richard Feldstein and Judith Roof (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989). 13. Margaret B. McDowell further notes: While her women usually prevail, often by sheer endurance [Lily Bart is an exception], Wharton does not idealize them. Destructive women in her fiction gain power because they manipulate to their advantage the hypocrisy and pretence which characterized, in large part, the relations between the sexes in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century American literature. (528) 14. Blake Nevius categorizes Undine as the most egocentric and dehumanized female in American fiction; he accuses her of being rootless, vain, and crudely opportunistic (148), and Edmund Wilson declares that Undine is the prototype in fiction of the gold-digger, of the international cocktail bitch (202). Elizabeth Ammons states, In fact, Undine does seem a modern Circe: cruel, destructive, misandrous (327). 15. See Thorstein Veblen, A Theory of the Leisure Class for a detailed analysis of the terms conspicuous consumption and leisure class. 16. Fleenor recognizes that Gilman does not suggest a subculture of women working together; Gilman was working against her own cultures definition of women, and her primary antagonists were women (231). 17. Nina Auerbach explains that the fallen woman becomes the abased figurehead of a fallen culture. . . . She seems to enlightened minds a pitiable monster, created by the neuroses of a culture that because it feared female sexuality and aggression enshrined a respectably sadistic cautionary tale punishing them both. (157) Contemporary feminist writers, in avoiding portrayals of this character, seem to also be avoiding the pejorative nature of her tale as well. And when they do write about her, Auerbach notes, they are eager to demythicize her, constructing her as a victim and survivor (158). 18. Atwood is referring specifically to Canadian literature; however, her recognition is valid for any number of national literatures.
4. Revising Literary History

1. See also Susannah Radstone, Remembering Medea: The Uses of Nostalgia, Critical Quarterly 35.3: 5463. 2. Dayle B. Delancey contends that Sethe views infanticide as the child-salvation that is the only option worth considering (16).
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3. It is interesting to note that in The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar contend that Wuthering Heights itself is a revision of a male text: John Miltons Paradise Lost (191). 4. Thormahlen apparently disregards the quarrel that springs up between Catherine and Isabella when Isabella falls in love with Heathcliff: You are a dog in the manger, Cathy, Isabella cries, and desire no one to be loved but yourself! (89). 5. Thormahlen goes on to contend that Catherine is congenitally insane, a position that Hoffmans novel rejects. 6. It should be noted that because the narrative of Wuthering Heights is filtered through the consciousness of two different individualsNelly Dean and Lockwood the depiction of Catherine as rendered is suspect. Nelly Dean has admitted to not liking Catherine, and Lockwood possesses a genuine streak of cruelty as evidenced by his reactions in his dreams. Lockwood crushes a preacher to atoms (29) in his first dream and rubs a childs hands on broken glass during his second dream (30). 7. Catherine, a few minutes later, also admits her love for Heathcliff because hes more myself than I am (72). 8. Schapiro further contends that Heathcliff is indeed Catherines self, but specifically a projection of her enraged, bad, instinctual self that she cannot fully accept or acknowledge, just as Catherine is a projection of Heathcliff s idealized good self that he cannot bear to lose (48). 9. Alfred Harbage, as an example, in his introduction to King Lear, allows Goneril and Regan no excuses for their actions, contending that to see a causal relationship between what [Lear] does to Goneril and Regan and what they do to him, or to interpret their aggression as normal revolt against parental domination, is simply to be perverse (1061). 10. Hoover refers to several critics, including Paul A. Jorgensen (Lears SelfDiscovery), Robert B. Heilman (This Great Stage), John F. Danby ( Shakespeares Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear), Maynard Mack (King Lear in Our Time), Marilyn French (Shakespeares Division of Experience), H. S. Wilson (On the Design of Shakespearean Tragedy), and Bridget Gellert Lyons (The Subplot as Simplification in King Lear ). 11. Carol Osborne relates that Cordelia feels alienated in her home environment because she is not as gifted as her two [older] sisters are (102). 12. Cordelias sexuality is confusing. For instance, breasts fascinate Cordelia, and fill her with scorn (97). Moreover, Cordelia seems to lack traditionally feminine talents such as knitting (107). Atwood is perhaps insinuating that Cordelia, as the third and last daughter, is a disappointment to her father; he may have been hoping for a son. Cordelia may, unconsciously, be attempting to please him by acting like a male. 13. It is interesting to note that Perdita, Miranda, and Cordelia are all names of motherless Shakespearean daughters. 14. Elaine, when she rejects Cordelia, sees that Cordelias behavior is an impersonation, of someone much older (205). 15. The disgust expressed in [King Lear] toward women is more strident and articulate, and far less reasonable, than the disgust expressed in Othello and Hamlet
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states Oates (Is This). Atwood, in evoking Shakespeare, accentuates the devastating consequences of that disgust upon an innocently bewildered daughter. 16. Brooke Allen states, Delia has played the child all her life (31). 17. Rita Felski defines this genre as follows: While retaining distinctive structural features of the genre, the feminist Bildungsroman differs in important ways from its literary predecessors. For instance it has often been pointed out that the traditional male Bildungsroman is an essentially conservative genre; the heros passionately held, if often nave, ideals are gradually worn away through encounters with the sobering forces of reality, and the conclusion signals an integration into society which necessitates a more or less resigned acceptance of the existing social order. The feminist text, however, reveals a rather different trajectory; the journey into society does not signify a surrender of ideals and a recognition of limitations, but rather constitutes the precondition for oppositional activity and engagement. . . . The move from the sphere of the family into society, from the private into the public world, is a potentially far more liberating process than is the case for the male Bildungsroman protagonist, who possesses from the start a more confident sense of self which the heroine has had to struggle painfully toward. (137) 18. As Susan K. Kissel recognizes, Forming new relationships with strangers has created a sense of [Delias] own self-worth and enabled her to renew past family relationships in more positive, effective ways (84). 19. Lears final wish for himself and Cordelia is the selfish desire that he might be locked in a cell for the rest of his life with his daughter while each continually professes love to the other. Even after all of his trials, he has still not recognized his daughters autonomy nor does he ever understand Cordelias initial reluctance to flatter her father. 20. Oates argues that in purely psychological terms, Lear is the incomplete personality, the immature adult; likewise, Larry Cooks demanding reliance upon his daughters shows not only a regal disdain for their preferences and familial responsibilities, but also a childish incapability for caring for himself (Is This). 21. Carden notes, As object rather than subject in the economy of Daddys authority, [Ginny] is not to answer, interpret, or construct meaning, but rather to passively receive his speech. (188). I would add that the way Ginny is supposed to listen to her father is exactly how she was supposed to accept his sexual abuse. 22. Ironically, it is Caroline who first suggests that Larry not be allowed to drive. 23. Lears curse begs Nature to Suspend thy purpose if thou didst intend To make this creature fruitful. Into her womb convey sterility, Dry up her organs of increase, And from her derogate body never spring A babe to honor her. (1.4.26772)
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24. Both womens maladies are more than likely the result of toxicity of the farms well water, the consequence of their fathers use of dangerous chemicals. These same chemicals may also have been the cause of the death of Roses and Ginnys mother, a fact that further serves to underscore Larrys misplaced priorities.
5. The Art of Becoming a Bitch

1. Deborah McDowell notes, The narrative insistently blurs and confuses . . . binary oppositions. It glories in paradox and ambiguity (80). 2. Diane Gillespie and Missy Dern Kubitscheck note that the quality of life in the community improves when Sula becomes the embodiment of a threatening evil and individuals unite to defend themselves (85). 3. Helene thinks of Nel as more comfort and purpose than she had ever hoped to find in this life. She rose grandly to the occasion of motherhoodgrateful, deep down in her heart, that the child had not inherited the great beauty that was hers (18). 4. Carolyn M. Jones notes that with nothing to depend on, not even herself, Sula patterns her life on being unsupported and unconventional (62). 5. The narrator states that Sula had no center, no speck around which to grow . . . no ego (119). 6. Ruth has deliberately stifled her own motherly inclinations; in fact, late in the novel she tells another pregnant woman, If I were you I would sell the unborn baby, in advance for a large sum to adoptive parents (207). 7. In Energy and Brashness and Fay Weldons Tricksters, Julie Nash argues that Ruth is a manifestation of the traditional trickster character, which thereby endows her with the power of shape shifting. 8. Mary is greedy, or so Ruth tells us. Mary Fisher has built her tower around her, and cemented the stone with bank notes, and lined the walls with stolen love (87). 9. Elisabeth Bronfen adds, Yet what radically irritates us [the readers], is that [Fay Weldons] heroines gain power by confirming to excess the cultural formations that were shown to turn them prematurely into inert and meaningless beings (73). 10. Ruth becomes a discourse of absence, contends Susan Jaret McKinstry. As her body shrinks in every dimensionheight, jaw, teeth, limbs, and allher story seems to represent the symptoms of femaleness itself. Her presence becomes absence absence of self, of physical identity (110). 11. As an adult, Elaine will reiterate: Sisterhood is a difficult concept for me, I tell myself, because I never had a sister. Brotherhood is not (160). 12. Elaine recognizes that daytime is ruled by mothers. But fathers come out at night. Darkness brings home the fathers, with their real, unspeakable power (175). 13. See also Martha Sharpe, Margaret Atwood and Julia Kristeva: Space-Time, the Dissident Woman Artist, and the Pursuit of Female Solidarity in Cats Eye. 14. Judith McCombs relates Mrs. Smeath to the terrible, devouring Teeth Mother, the Kali Ma Archetype ensconced in her ogresss lair kitchen, brewing up hags potions with red and knuckly hands, and bearing a concealed, witchs eye (17). 15. Later, Elaine says, We are like twins in old fables, each of whom has been given half a key (434).
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16. What do you have to say for yourself ? Cordelia used to ask. Nothing, I would say. It was a word I came to connect with myself, as if I was nothing (43). 17. When nine-year-old Elaine is lying under the bridge, she sees that the bridge is different-looking; it seems higher above me, more solid, as if the railings have disappeared or been filled in. And its glowing, there are pools of light along it, greenishyellow, not like any light Ive ever seen before (200). Elaine is, in fact, describing the reconstructed concrete bridge that the older Elaine returns to. In addition, the opening lines of the novel state, Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once, reinforcing the notion that Elaine will indeed exist in two times at once (3).
6. Syzygy
1. Auerbach reasons, The very rigidity of the categories of victim and queen, domestic angel and demonic outcast, old maid and fallen woman, concentrates itself into a myth of transfiguration that glorified the women it seemed to suppress (9). 2. Pratt et al. write, Archetypes are fluid and dynamic, empowering womens personalities to grow and develop (135). In contesting the traditionally perceived rigidity of the archetypes, feminist archetypal theorists contend that the archetypes may be revised and widened. 3. This disallowing assumes such mythic proportions in the oral history of Ruby that each year the schoolchildren reenact the Christian Nativity as the story of the disallowing of the Ruby families into the lighter-skinned black community of Fairly. The novel states that the original citizens horror of whites was convulsive but abstract. They saved the clarity of their hatred for the men who had insulted them in ways too confounding for language: first by excluding them, then by offering them staples to exist in that very exclusion (189). The irony lies, of course, in Rubys evolution into the very same exclusionary attitude. 4. None of the 8-rocks has died in Ruby, as Pat Best notes; only K. D.s mother and her own mother, Delia, women of impure blood, have died natural deaths within the town limits. In fact, a paradoxically positive sign that Ruby will be redeemed occurs when Jeff and Sweetie Fleetwoods youngest baby, Save-Marie, dies. 5. Jung, of course, attests that the animus is always a contrasexual figure, while the shadow is the same-sexed figure (Aspects 167). Yet, I argue that Zenia should be equated with the animus rather than with the shadow, and my contention is supported by the idea that, in The Robber Bride, all of the major figures are female, a notion, as stated in my texts following paragraph, that is supported by the twins reading of fairy tales in the novel. 6. Pratt et al. contend that many feminist writers seem to be enacting the various aspects of the triple goddess, who was virgin, maternal figure, and old woman at one and the same time (172). For a discussion of Atwoods use of this figure, see Sandra Djaw, Back to the Primal: The Apprenticeship of Margaret Atwood, Various Atwoods: Essays on the Later Poems, Short Fiction, and Novels, ed. Lorraine M. York (Ontario, Can.: House of Anasi, 1995).
153
7. Perrakis notes, Tony uses her left-handed writing to reveal her inner world (156). 8. Some of the following analysis of the characters of Tony, Roz and Charis originally appeared in my Good Girls and Evil Twins: Constructing Zenia in Margaret Atwoods The Robber Bride. 9. That Tony does not have childrenunlike Charis and Rozmay be viewed as another piece of testimony to her maidenlike status. 10. When, as a college student, Tony contemplates sexual intimacy, she thinks that the thought of going to bed with anyone at all is terrifying. What if they rolled over on her by mistake, and she got squashed? Also, the thought of giving another person that much power over her makes her flinch (196). 11. After the third time Karen knows she is trapped. All she can do is split in two; all she can do is turn into Charis, and float out of her body and watch Karen, left behind with no words, flailing and sobbing (291). 12. Zenia also reads Chariss cards and spells out exactly what is going to happen, including Billys financial gain from selling out his fellow revolutionaries. Charis evades the implications of Zenias fortune-telling. 13. Jennifer Enos has discovered that splitting [Zenias name] into three parts, Z, EN, and IA, one can see how Atwood created the whole Zenia from parts of Roz, Charis, and Tony. The z comes from the last part of Rozs name, the en from the last part of Charis original name Karen, and the ia from the last part of Tonys real name Antonia. (14) 14. In an interview, Atwood explained that Zenia tailor-makes herself to fit her victims . . . personalities so that she comes up with the perfect con job for each (Seaman 899). 15. Interestingly, after Charis gives birth to her daughter, she vows to be the best person she can be, and praises her oval God (316, my italics). 16. Roz, for example, muses that she needs a wise woman, some gnarly old crone who would step out from behind a tree, who would give advice, not recognizing that she has found this wise woman in Zenia (431). 17. Gardiner is specifically referring to Marge Piercys Woman on the Edge of Time, Doris Lessings The Memoirs of a Survivor, Margaret Drabbles The Ice Age, and Joan Didions A Book of Common Prayer; however, her assessment holds equally true for a vast number of books. 18. See also Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis, Atwoods The Robber Bride: The Vampire as Intersubjective Catalyst; and Lynn Z. Bloom and Veronica Makowsky, Zenias Paradoxes. 19. Bloom and Makowsky comment: Zenia is so important to Tony, Charis, and Roz because she represents power to them (172). 20. For example, when Zenia claims that it was Billy who had killed Chariss chickens: Inside Charis, something breaks. Rage takes her over. She wants to squeeze Zenia, squeeze her and squeeze her by the neck until Chariss life, her
154
Note to Page 133
own life that she has imagined, all of the good things about her life that Zenia has drunk, come welling out like water from a sponge. The violence of her own reaction dismays her but shes lost control. She feels her body filled and surrounded with a white-hot light; wings of flame shoot out from her. (473) Atwoods imagery does not suggest that Chariss rage is destructive; the white-hot light carries the connotation of purifying, and wings of flame similarly connotes redemption and the freedom of flight. 21. Charis had retrieved an egg from her henhouse one morning and slipped it into her overalls breast pocket. The egg was broken when Billy dragged her down to have sex: Thats what Billy was like, at the time. He was always after her then. Billys sometimes-brutal sexuality is uncomfortably comparable to Karens molestation by her Uncle Vern. In both cases, Charis/Karen merely detached herself . . . until he finished and it was safe to re-enter her body (22930).
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Index
Acrasia (in The Faerie Queen), 38 Age of Innocence, The (Wharton), 73 Albee, Edward: Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 36 Alcott, Louisa May: Little Women, 60 Alice Manfred (in Jazz), 78, 120 Alison (in The Wife of Baths Tale), 5, 36 Allison, Dorothy: Bastard out of Carolina, 7172 Amazon archetype: 27, 2930; definition of negative side of, 30 American Dream, An (Mailer), 55 Andersen, Hans Christian, 5960 Anderson, Sherwood: Winesburg, Ohio, 4748 Andrews, V. C., 61 anima, 7, 13, 16, 2324; as confused with woman, 17, 141n. 6; definition of, 16, 141nn. 5, 7; as a projection, 144n. 2 animus, 7, 13, 16, 2324, 152n. 5; and the bitch, 7, 18, 27; definitions of, 1617, 140n. 1, 141n. 7, 142n. 13; in The Robber Bride, 12233 animus possession, 14142n. 10, 142n. 13 Anna Barton (in Damage), 7677 Anna Karenina, 43 Annie Wilkes (in Misery), 4243 Antigone, 5556 Antoinette (in Wide Sargasso Sea). See Bertha Rochester Aphrodite, 29 archetypal theory: feminist, 8, 14, 2324, 26, 143nn. 22, 23; and feminists, 14, 143n. 22; Jungian, 6, 78, 9, 1318, 134; negative images in, 9, 22, 141n. 3
archetypes: and binary opposition, 17, 33, 14041n. 2; Erich Neumanns definition of, 15; Jungian definition of, 6 7, 1415, 81; Northrup Frye and, 17, 140n. 9, 142n. 11; restoration of, 114; revising of, 11, 8097, 11415, 134, 152n. 2; women-created, 134; word derivation of, 140n. 8 Atwood, Margaret, 1, 66, 77, 81, 122, 136, 148n. 18; Cats Eye, 11, 88, 9091, 98, 99, 10713, 151nn. 1215, 152nn. 16, 17; Circe/Mud Poems, 81; The Handmaids Tale, 80; The Robber Bride, 11, 3031, 115, 12233, 153nn. 716, 18, 19, 15354n. 20, 154n. 21 Austen, Jane, 66; Pride and Prejudice, 72, 75 Awakening, The (Chopin), 10, 6768, 73 Baby Suggs (in Beloved ), 120 Barbara Coles (in One off the Short List), 30 Basic Instinct (film), 2 Bastard out of Carolina (Allison), 7172 Beast in the Jungle, The (James), 29 Beatrice (in The Divine Comedy), 30 Beatrice (in Rappucinis Daughter), 31 Becky Sharpe (in Vanity Fair), 43 Belle Watling (in Gone with the Wind ), 75 Beloved (Morrison), 72, 8283, 120 Bertha Dorset (in The House of Mirth), 75 Bertha Rochester (in Jane Eyre), 10, 8384 Beth Jarrett (in Ordinary People), 6871, 148n. 11 Bible, the, 35
167
168
Index Charis (in The Robber Bride), 11, 12223, 124, 12627, 128, 12930, 131, 132 33, 135, 153nn. 8, 1113, 15, 19, 153 54n. 20, 154n. 21 Charlotte Stant (in The Golden Bowl ), 44 Chopin, Kate: The Awakening, 10, 6768, 73 Circe, 29, 35, 38, 43, 81, 144n. 3 Circe/Mud Poems (Atwood), 81 Cleopatra, 5556 Clytemnestra, 35 Coetzee, J. M.: Foe, 81 collective unconscious, 141n. 4 Color Purple, The (Walker), 3, 75, 139n. 4 Conroy, Pat: The Prince of Tides, 4850 Consolata Sosa (in Paradise), 119, 120, 121 Cordelia (in Cats Eye), 11, 88, 9091, 98, 99, 10713, 149nn. 10, 11, 14, 152n. 16 Cordelia (in King Lear), 11, 88, 89, 90, 92, 9394, 97, 150n. 19 Crane, Stephen: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, 43 Custom of the Country, The (Wharton), 10, 7375, 148n. 14 Daisy Faye Buchanan (in The Great Gatsby), 5, 3132, 144n. 30; similarity to Catherine Earnshaw, 85 Damage (Hart), 7677 Dame Van Winkle (in Rip Van Winkle), 5, 36 Day of the Locust, The (West), 43 Deborah Rojack (in An American Dream), 55 Delia Grinstead (in Ladder of Years), 91 92, 150nn. 16, 18 Delilah, 2, 35, 43, 144n. 3 Demeter, 27, 13435, 144n. 25 Dickens, Charles, 10; Great Expectations, 36, 3942, 145nn. 610; Oliver Twist, 43 Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, The (Wells), 72 Diving into the Wreck (Rich), 81 Dorcas (in Jazz), 78
bildungsroman: female, 2, 92, 150n. 17 Billie Delia (in Paradise), 11920 bitch: archetype, 27; castrating, 5056; definitions of, 45, 6, 7, 3233, 3435, 98, 13536; in female-authored literature, 57; in the Gothic romance novel, 6264; Great American, 36; in the Harlequin romance novel, 62; literary history of, 5, 34; the making of, 11, 98 113; power of, 135, 136; rhetorical connotations of, 5, 89. See also animus Bitch (Brooks), 8 Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women (Wurtzel), 8 Bostonians, The (James), 44 Bradstreet, Anne, 81 Brave New World (Huxley), 28 Breathing Lessons (Tyler), 3 Brett Ashley (in The Sun Also Rises), 29, 50, 146n. 17 Bront, Charlotte: Jane Eyre, 10, 6667 Bront, Emily: Wuthering Heights, 1011, 8488 Burnett, Frances Hodgson: A Little Princess, 6061; The Secret Garden, 60, 147n. 4 Byatt, A. S., 81 Caddy Compson (in The Sound and the Fury), 5556, 145n. 11 Caroline (in A Thousand Acres), 9495, 97, 150n. 22 Carol Kennicott (in Main Street), 43 Carolyn Polhemus (in Presumed Innocent), 46, 63, 98 Carrie Meeber (in Sister Carrie), 29 Carter, Angela, 81 Catherine Earnshaw (in Wuthering Heights), 1011, 8488, 149nn. 48 Cathy Ames Trask (in East of Eden), 52 54, 76, 98, 146nn. 2123 Cats Eye (Atwood), 11, 88, 9091, 98, 99, 10713, 14950n. 15, 151nn. 1215, 152nn. 16, 17 Celestine Nansellock (in Mistress of Mellyn), 63 Celie (in The Color Purple), 3, 75, 139n. 4
Index Drabble, Margaret: The Radiant Way, 3; The Witch of Exmoor, 31 Dreiser, Theodore: Sister Carrie, 29 Duchess of Malfi, the, 5556 Duessa (in The Faerie Queene), 38 du Maurier, Daphne: Rebecca, 63 East of Eden (Steinbeck), 5254, 76, 81 Edna Pontellier (in The Awakening), 10, 67 68, 71, 73, 147n. 10 Elaine Risely (in Cats Eye), 11, 9091, 98, 99, 10713, 151n. 11, 12, 15, 152n. 17 Elizabeth Willard (in Winesburg, Ohio), 4748 Ellen Olenska (in The Age of Innocence), 73 Emily Grierson (in A Rose for Emily), 30 Emma Bovary (in Madame Bovary), 5 Erdrich, Louise: Love Medicine, 72, 76 Esquivel, Laura: Like Water for Chocolate, 11, 88, 9394 Estella (in Great Expectations ), 39 41, 145nn. 68 Eva Peace (in Sula), 27, 100, 101, 102, 103, 144n. 28 Eve, 27, 35, 120, 134; Cathy Ames Trask as, 5354, 146n. 22; poetic revisions of, 81 fairy tales, 10, 5860, 146147n. 2; poetic revisions of, 81 Fatal Attraction (film), 2 Faulkner, William: Absalom! Absalom!, 5, 145n. 11; A Rose for Emily, 30; Sanctuary, 43; The Sound and the Fury, 47, 145n. 11 Faye Greener (in The Day of the Locust), 43 Fear of Flying (Jong), 3 feminist literary criticism: tasks of, 139n. 1 femme fatale archetype, 4346 Final Payments (Gordon), 23 Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Beautiful and the Damned, 36; The Great Gatsby, 5, 31 32, 144n. 30 Flagg, Fannie: Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Caf, 3
169
Flame and the Flower, The (Woodwiss), 64 Foe (Coetzee), 81 Freud, Sigmund, 14, 143n. 14 Frieda Haxby Palmer (in The Witch of Exmoor), 31 Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Caf (Flagg), 3 Gertrude (in Hamlet), 47 Gigi (in Paradise), 11, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 135 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 148n. 16; The Yellow Wallpaper, 10, 71, 75 Ginny (in A Thousand Acres), 89, 9497, 150n. 21, 151n. 24 Gloria (in The Beautiful and the Damned ), 36 Golden Bowl, The (James), 44 Goneril (in King Lear), 11, 8990, 92, 93, 94, 9596, 149n. 9 Gone with the Wind (Mitchell), 6566, 75 Good Country People (OConnor), 72 73 Gordon, Mary: Final Payments, 23 Gothic romance novel, 10, 6264 Grace Smeath (in Cats Eye), 1089, 110 Grass Is Singing, The (Lessing), 72 Great Expectations (Dickens), 36, 3942, 145nn. 610 Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 5, 3132, 144n. 30 Grimm, Brothers, 5859 Guest, Judith: Ordinary People, 10, 6871, 148n. 11 Handmaids Tale, The (Atwood), 80 Hannah Peace (in Sula), 100 Harlequin romance novel, 6162, 65, 147n. 7 Harriet Bird (in The Natural ), 51, 52 Hart, Josephine: Damage, 7677 Hawkes, John: Second Skin, 81 Hawthorne, Nathaniel: The Blithedale Romance, 5; Rappucinis Daughter, 31; The Scarlet Letter, 43, 80 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle): Helen, 81
170
Index Joy/Hulga (in Good Country People), 7273 Joy Luck Club, The (Tan), 75, 83 Judith (biblical), 35 Judith Sutpen (in Absalom! Absalom!), 5, 145n. 11 June Morrissey (in Love Medicine), 72, 76 Jung, Carl Gustav, 5. See also anima; animus; animus possession; archetypal theory; archetypes; collective unconscious; individuation; projections Karen (in The Robber Bride). See Charis Kate Croy (in The Wings of the Dove), 5, 20, 44 Katharina (in The Taming of the Shrew), 36 Kesey, Ken: One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, 9, 1826, 143nn. 14, 15 King, Stephen: Misery, 4243 King Lear (Shakespeare), 11, 8897, 149nn. 9, 10, 14950n. 15, 150nn. 19, 20, 15051n. 23 Kingston, Maxine Hong: The Woman Warrior, 3 Ladder of Years (Tyler), 11, 88, 9192 Lady Capulet (in Romeo and Juliet), 47 Lady Caroline Bingley (in Pride and Prejudice), 72 Lady Chatterley, 29 Lady Chatterleys Lover (Lawrence), 43 Lady MacBeth, 1, 5, 36 Lawrence, D. H.: Lady Chatterleys Lover, 43; The Rocking Horse Winner, 47 Lee, Harper: To Kill a Mockingbird, 75 Lessing, Doris: The Grass Is Singing, 72; One off the Short List, 30 Lewis, Sinclair: Main Street, 43 Life and Loves of a She-Devil, The (Weldon), 11, 98, 99, 1047, 129, 151nn. 610 Like Water for Chocolate (Esquivel), 11, 88, 9394 Lila Wingo (in The Prince of Tides), 4850 Lilith, 102 Lily Bart (in The House of Mirth), 73, 148n. 13 Little Altars Everywhere (Wells), 72
Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 38 Heathcliff (in Wuthering Heights), 10, 84 88, 149nn. 4, 7, 8 Hebert, Anne, 81 Hedda Gabler, 47 Helen (H. D.), 81 Helene Wright (in Sula), 100, 151n. 3 Helen Garp (in The World According to Garp), 48 Hemingway, Ernest: The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, 36; The Sun Also Rises, 29, 50 Here on Earth (Hoffman), 10, 8488 Hester Prynne (in The Scarlet Letter), 43, 80 Hetaira archetype, 27, 29, 75, 130; the Whore as negative archetype, 29, 148n. 17; Zenia as, 130 Hoffman, Alice, 10; Here on Earth, 10, 84 88; Practical Magic, 77 Holt, Victoria: Mistress of Mellyn, 63 House of Mirth, The (Wharton), 73, 75 Ida Farange (in What Maisie Knew), 47 individuation, 17, 23, 115; feminist definition of, 11516, 135 integration of the female self, 133, 135 Iris Lemon (in The Natural ), 5152, 146n. 19 Irving, John: The World According to Garp, 48 Irving, Washington: Rip Van Winkle, 36 Isabel Archer (in The Portrait of a Lady), 43 46 James, Henry, 10; The Beast in the Jungle, 29; The Bostonians, 44, 14546n. 13; The Golden Bowl, 44; The Portrait of a Lady, 4346, 145n. 12; What Maisie Knew, 47; The Wings of the Dove, 5, 20, 44 Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bront), 10, 6667 Janet Angstrom (in Updike), 48 Jazz (Morrison), 10, 7879, 120, 121 Jennie (in The Yellow Wallpaper), 75 Jezebel, 1, 35, 38, 145n. 4 Jong, Erica: Fear of Flying, 3 Joyce, James: Ulysses, 81
Index Little Princess, A (Burnett), 6061 Lolita (in Lolita), 52 Louisa Wells (in The Flame and the Flower), 64 Love Medicine (Erdrich), 72, 76 Lydia Bennett (in Pride and Prejudice), 75 Lysistrata, 5556 Mabs (in Puffball ), 7778 Madame Bovary, 5, 43 Maggie (in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ), 5 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Crane), 43 Mailer, Norman, 10; An American Dream, 55 Main Street (Lewis), 43 Malamud, Bernard: The Natural, 5052 Mama Day (Naylor), 77 Mama Elena (in Like Water for Chocolate), 93 March Murray (in Here on Earth), 8488 Margot Macomber (in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber), 36 Marshall, Paule: Praisesong for the Widow, 3, 80 Martha (in Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? ), 36 Mary Fisher (in The Life and Loves of a SheDevil ), 98, 99, 1047, 151n. 8 Mary Lennox (in The Secret Garden), 60, 147n. 4 Mary Magdelene, 29 Mary Turner (in The Grass Is Singing), 72, 73 Maugham, Somerset: Of Human Bondage, 43 Mavis (in Paradise), 11, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 135 May Bartram (in The Beast in the Jungle), 29 Mayella Ewell (in To Kill a Mockingbird ), 75 McTeague (Norris), 3638 Medea, 1, 27, 35, 47, 72, 8283, 148n. 1 Medium archetype, 27, 3031; the Witch as negative archetype, 3031 Medusa, 79, 82 Memo (in The Natural ), 51, 52 Mildred Rogers (in Of Human Bondage), 43 Miranda (in Mama Day), 77
171
Misery (King), 4243 Miss Havisham (in Great Expectations), 39 42, 145nn. 6, 7, 9, 10 Miss Minchin (in A Little Princess), 6061, 147nn. 5, 6 Mistress of Mellyn (Holt), 63 Mitchell, Margaret: Gone with the Wind, 6566, 75 Moll Flanders, 43 Morgana le Fay, 38 Morrison, Toni, 134, Beloved, 72, 8283, 112; Jazz, 10, 7879; Paradise, 11, 115, 11621; Sula, 11, 27, 75, 98, 99104, 151nn. 2, 3; Tar Baby, 121 mother archetype, 26, 2728; terrible mother as negative archetype, 27, 141n. 8; 142n. 12 mother-complex, 28, 144n. 29 Mrs. Compson (in The Sound and the Fury), 47 Mrs. Joe (in Great Expectations), 36 Mrs. Reed (in Jane Eyre), 6667, 71, 75 Mrs. Smeath (in Cats Eye), 10910, 111; as Terrible Mother, 151n. 14 myth, 35, 14344n. 25; of feminine evil, 114; in Sula, 99 Nana (in Nana), 43 Nancy (in Oliver Twist), 43 Natural, The (Malamud), 5052 Naylor, Gloria: Mama Day, 77 Nel Wright (in Sula), 11, 98, 99104, 151n. 3 Norris, Frank, 10; McTeague, 3638 Nurse Ratched (in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest), 9, 1822, 2326, 46, 143nn. 14, 18, 20, 21, 144n. 26; and animus, 18; as mother, 1921, 26 OConnor, Flannery: Good Country People, 7273 Offred (in The Handmaids Tale), 80 Of Human Bondage (Maugham), 43 Olive Chancellor (in The Bostonians), 44 Oliver Twist (Dickens), 43 One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest (Kesey), 18 22, 143n. 14
172
Index She-Devil ), 11, 98, 99, 1047, 129, 151nn. 610 Sanctuary (Faulkner), 43 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), 43, 80 Scarlett OHara, 1, 6566, 72, 147n. 9 Second Skin (Hawkes), 81 second-wave feminism, 1, 2 Secret Garden, The (Burnett), 60, 147n. 4 Seneca (in Paradise), 11, 116, 11819, 120, 121, 135 sentimental literature, 13940n. 5 Serena Merle (in The Portrait of a Lady), 43 46, 145n. 12, 146n. 14 Sethe Garner (in Beloved ), 72, 8283, 148n. 2 Sexton, Anne, 81 shadow: Jungian archetype, 15; Zenia as, 152n. 5 Shakespeare, William, 10, 81, 149n. 13; King Lear, 11, 8897, 14950n. 15, 150nn. 19, 20, 15051n. 23; The Taming of the Shrew, 36; The Tempest, 81 Shanita (in The Robber Bride), 3031 She Who Must Be Obeyed (Haggard), 39 Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, The (Hemingway), 36 shrew archetype, 3638 Shug Avery (in The Color Purple), 3, 75 Sister Carrie (Dreiser), 29 Smiley, Jane: A Thousand Acres, 11, 8889, 9497 Sound and the Fury, The (Faulkner), 47, 145n. 11 Steel, Danielle, 61 Steinbeck, John, 10; East of Eden, 5254, 76, 81, 98, 146nn. 2123 Stoker, Bram, 43 Sula (Morrison), 11, 27, 75, 98, 99104, 151nn. 25 Sula Peace (in Sula), 11, 75, 98, 99104, 151nn. 2, 4, 5 Tan, Amy: The Joy Luck Club, 75, 83 Tar Baby (Morrison), 121
One off the Short List (Lessing), 30 Ordinary People (Guest), 10, 6871 Ostriker, Alicia, 81 Pallas (in Paradise), 11, 116, 119, 120, 121, 135 Pandora, 35 Paradise (Morrison), 11, 115, 11621, 152nn. 3, 4 Portrait of a Lady, The (James) 4346, 145n. 12 Practical Magic (Hoffman), 77 Praisesong for the Widow (Marshall), 3, 80 Presumed Innocent (Turow), 46, 63 Pride and Prejudice (Austen), 72, 75 Prince of Tides, The (Conroy), 4850 projections, 7, 16, 35, 122; of anima, 144n. 2 Psycho (film), 48 Puffball (Weldon), 7778 Radiant Way, The (Drabble), 3 Rappucinis Daughter (Hawthorne), 31 Rebecca (du Maurier), 63 Rebecca de Winter (in Rebecca), 63 Regan (in King Lear), 8990, 92, 93, 94, 149n. 9 Rhys, Jean: Wide Sargasso Sea, 10, 8384 Rich, Adrienne, 80; Diving into the Wreck, 81 Robber Bride, The (Atwood), 11, 115, 122 33, 152n. 5, 153nn. 716, 18, 19, 153 54n. 20, 154n. 21 Robber Bridegroom, The (Brothers Grimm), 122 Rocking Horse Winner, The (Lawrence), 47 Rogers, Rosemary, 64, 147n. 8 Rose (in A Thousand Acres), 9497, 151n. 24 Rose for Emily, A (Faulkner), 30 Roz (in The Robber Bride), 11, 12223, 124, 12729, 130, 131, 13233, 135, 153nn. 8, 13, 16, 19 Ruby (in Mama Day), 77 Ruth Patchett (in The Life and Loves of a
Index Temple Drake (in Sanctuary), 29, 43 Tess of the DUrbervilles, 43 Thackeray, William: Vanity Fair, 43 Thousand Acres, A (Smiley), 11, 8889, 94 97, 150nn. 2022, 151n. 24 Throw Momma from the Train (film), 48 Tita (in Like Water for Chocolate), 93 To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee), 75 Tony (in The Robber Bride), 11, 12226, 127, 128, 12930, 131, 13233, 135, 153nn. 710, 13, 19 Trina Sieppe McTeague (in McTeague), 36 38 triple goddess figure, 6, 12223; Atwoods use of, 152n. 6 Turow, Scott: Presumed Innocent, 46, 63 Tyler, Anne: Breathing Lessons, 3; Ladder of Years, 11, 88, 9192 Ulysses (Joyce), 81 Undine Spragg (in The Custom of the Country), 10, 7375, 148n. 14 Updike, John, 48, 145n. 5; A Month of Sundays, 81; Rogers Version, 81; S., 81; Toward the End of Time, 145n. 5; The Witches of Eastwick, 39 Vanity Fair (Thackeray), 43 Veblen, Thorstein, 148n. 15 Violet Trace (in Jazz), 78 Walker, Alice: The Color Purple, 3, 75, 139n. 4 weird sisters (in MacBeth), 38 Weldon, Fay: The Life and Loves of a SheDevil, 11, 98, 99, 1047, 129, 151n. 610; Puffball, 7778 Wells, Rebecca: The Divine Secrets of the YaYa Sisterhood, 72; Little Altars Everywhere, 72
173
West, Nathaniel: The Day of the Locust, 43 Wharton, Edith: The Age of Innocence, 73, 148n. 13; The Custom of the Country, 10, 7375, 148n. 14; The House of Mirth, 73, 75 What Maisie Knew (James), 47 Wheres Poppa? (film), 48 whore. See Hetaira archetype Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Albee), 36 Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys), 10, 3031, 83 84 Wild (in Jazz), 7879 Winesburg, Ohio (Anderson), 4748 Wings of the Dove, The (James), 5, 20, 44 witch archetype, 3843, 7779; Annie Wilkes as, 4243; Miss Havisham as, 3942 Witches of Eastwick, The (Updike), 39 Witch of Exmoor, The (Drabble), 31 Woman Warrior, The (Kingston), 3 women: male dread of, 141n. 9 Woodwiss, Kathleen, 64; The Flame and the Flower, 64 World According to Garp, The (Irving), 48 Wurtzel, Elizabeth: Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, 8 Wuthering Heights (Emily Bront), 1011, 8488, 149n. 3 Yellow Wallpaper, The (Gilman), 10, 71, 73 Ying-ying (in The Joy Luck Club), 83 Zenia (in The Robber Bride), 11, 122, 123 25, 126, 127, 12933, 153nn. 1214, 16, 18, 19, 15354n. 20; as shadow, 152n. 5 Zenobia (in The Blithedale Romance), 5 Zola, Emile: Nana, 43
Sarah Appleton Aguiar attended Rhode Island College and the University
of Rhode Island and received her doctorate from the University of Connecticut. An assistant professor at Murray State University, she teaches womens literature and contemporary literature. Her publications include several articles on feminist theory and literature, and she is the coeditor, with Mica Howe, of the forthcoming anthology He Said, She Says: An RSVP to the Male Text.

The Bitch Is Back Wicked Women in Literature

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BITCH

Is Back Wicked Women in Literature

Sarah Appleton Aguiar

The Bitch Is Back

The Bitch Is Back

Sarah Appleton Aguiar

Southern Illinois University Press Carbondale and Edwardsville

The Bitch Is Back

The Season of the Bitch

Introduction The Season of the Bitch

The Season of the Bitch

The Season of the Bitch

The Archetypal Bitch

The Season of the Bitch

The Millennium Bitch

The Season of the Bitch

The Season of the Bitch

To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type

1 To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type

To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type

To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type

To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type

To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type

To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type

To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type

To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type

To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type

To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type

What Is a Woman to Do?

To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type

To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type

To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type

To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type

To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type

The Face(t)s of the Bitch

To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type

To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type

To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type

To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type

To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type

The Damned Bitch

To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type

The Male Perspective

2 The Male Perspective

The Male Perspective

The Male Perspective

The Domineering Shrew

The Male Perspective

The Male Perspective

The Male Perspective

The Male Perspective

The Male Perspective

The Male Perspective

The Male Perspective

The Femme Fatale

The Male Perspective

The Male Perspective

The Male Perspective

The Male Perspective

The Devouring Mother

The Male Perspective

The Male Perspective

The Male Perspective