Dissociative feminism and reclaiming the term 'unhinged': From Lessing to Moshfegh
"Selfish, an egotist, polygamous, amoral, irresponsible, unbalanced, and utterly not a good member of society."
I wrote this essay for as a term paper for my Modernist and Contemporary Fiction module during my Masters. I think it deserves to be read by others even if it may not be my best work.
Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas - can't be yours alone. DORIS LESSING, The Golden Notebook.
I went home and went to sleep. Outside of the occasional irritation, I had no nightmares, no passions, no desires, no great pains. OTTESSA MOSHFEGH, My Year of Rest and Relaxation.
Introduction:
In a letter to her confidante and lover, Leonard Smith, Doris Lessing uses the term 'unhinged' (Lessing, 1946) to describe herself to justify her decisions and actions while questioning the need for such a justification. She also describes herself as ‘selfish, an egotist, polygamous, amoral, irresponsible, unbalanced, and utterly not a good member of society’ (Lessing, 1946). 'Unhinged' is often hurled at women who dare to show an emotion that steps outside the patriarchal society's prescribed bounds. Using it, she rejects any attempts to make herself palatable to the receiver of her letters and, decades later, readers she never wanted. She also refused to make the female characters in her magnum opus, The Golden Notebook (Lessing, 1962), likeable when she presents the 'free women' as raw, unpolished grey characters glorious in their moral ambiguity. She took questions about their identity in society and their struggles with mental health head-on in a decade when such conversations were frowned upon and penalised.
Sixty years later, this move has gained popularity because of a niche group with surprising influence on readers and the publishing industry. The credit for starting trends like 'Sad Girl Books', 'Unhinged Woman Books', and 'Hot Girl Reads' goes to creators on BookTok (videos about books on TikTok) and BookTube (videos about books on YouTube). These genres claim to address an aspect of the human experience reserved for women. These videos and posts, popularly known as 'being in your Fleabag era', named after Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s titular character in her show Fleabag, on social media platforms can garner anywhere from 50,000 to 400,000 views (Shunyata, 2022).
The torch-holders of this genre are authors like Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney, whose books; My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Moshfegh, 2019) and Beautiful World Where Are You (Rooney, 2021) are at the top of all the lists. However, these novels are criticised for glamorising female suffering and mental illness and actively encouraging dissociative feminism. This essay attempts to draw comparisons between the representations of unhinged women from Lessing to Moshfegh, countering the critics of this trend and the feminist implications.
Background:
The Golden Notebook was published in 1962, a time 'in which girls were lobotomised if they expressed an ounce of female suffering' (Barriga, 2022). The following year Sylvia Plath published The Bell Jar (Plath, 1963), the archetype of the 'Sad Girl Books' genre.. The emerging genre by its name, instigates a conversation about the gendered nature of mental health representation. However, this is not new. Most prominently in Western culture, madness (called hysteria, melancholy or depression) has been primarily considered a women's issue, regardless of the statistical evidence (Thelandersson, 2017). In the 19th century, medical professionals and sociologists attempted to draw links to the female reproductive system and biological-based gender roles.
Literature and popular culture reflected a similar representation beginning in the eighteenth century. There is a widespread belief that this state of affairs has changed due to the Women's Liberation Movement's work. According to popular discourse in the 21st century, society has managed to meet the most critical goals of feminism, and so it should be glorious to be a woman today. However, the overarching media narrative is that women are unhappy, and the blame lands at the doorstep of feminism (Faludi, 1992, p. 1-7).
The terminology may have changed, but the sentiment at the core of it remains the same: the onus of women's suffering lies in their fight for freedom and identity. Most novels written by men, pandering to the 'Male Gaze' (Mulvey, 1975) or rooted in traditional ideas about gender roles, represent women using the Madonna-Whore complex (Brownlee, 2020). A female character is either a figure of unflinching purity and respectability or one that fails to live up to these standards and is considered a contemptible whore who dares to show an iota of sexual desire. Then there is the third trope of the 'madwoman in the attic': think of Victorian novels like Jane Eyre (Brontë, 1847), Lady Audley's Secret (Braddon, 1862) and The Woman in White (Collins, 1860), which primarily mirrored Victorian anxieties about inconvenient women that rebelled against the masculine figures in their lives (Bachman, 2017).
To compartmentalise women into these boxes is to ignore their complexities and reduce them to one-dimensional cardboard cutouts. Take the representation of Mrs Rochester in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre versus modernist author Jean Rhys' (1977) response to it in Wide Sargasso Sea, in which she imagines the life of Bertha Mason. Rhys gives us a three-dimensional character instead, revealing the horrifying reality behind a man's claim about a woman's insanity.
When women reject restrictive gender normative roles and portray female suffering and emotions, we get real characters. A step in this direction that several female authors have taken involves reclaiming terms like 'unhinged' and its predecessor 'hysterical', which are used to silence women and undermine their emotions. Lessing was one of the first authors to do this, more directly in her correspondence and indirectly in the characters in her novels and short stories, by removing the negative stigma associated with it. These representations are accurate to life. They mirror a human experience, uniquely female, that may be messy and misguided, but most importantly, are relatable because it disregards social expectations.
Modernism and 'The New Woman':
For several years, there has been a false stereotyping of femininity in society and literature that involved women being weak, submissive homemakers who are merely complementary to men. Since then, gender theorists and sociologists have rejected the claim that the basis of these stereotypes is in the biological differences between men and women. The most prominent work in this field has to be by gender theorist Judith Butler; according to them, gender is neither essential nor biological; it is entirely a performed set of traits giving rise to their Gender Performativity Theory. (Butler, 1997)
As early as 1911, Dora Marsden, in her article 'Bondwomen' (Marsden, 1911), also concluded that women's inferiority is a social construct. However, she argues that the blame for this partly lies with a section of women who instinctively see themselves as inferior. Ellen Glasgow agrees with Marsden and states that a woman's willingness to accept society's norms forms her identity (Glasgow, 1913). Post World War I, the status of women in society changed as they stepped into the workforce and, due to the sudden lack of men, started forging their identities. As a result, the 'new woman' emerged. With financial independence came agency, sexual liberation, intellectual freedom and the realisation that women can be equal to men. This new woman became a source of material for many authors, and modernist literature saw a significant change in the representation of female characters. While female authors adapted quickly to this change, male authors found it difficult to let go of the traditional view of femininity. Even though modernist authors like Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway found it challenging to break the well-established views of gender roles, they blurred the lines in their most notable works: The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald, 1925), The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner, 1957), and The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Hemingway, 1961), respectively (Wrenn, 2010). The new woman challenged the male-dominated frameworks in literature.
According to Susan Stanford Friedman, modernist literature did not emerge only from a particular period in time; it is the literature that comes as a response to a moment of immense upheaval and destabilisation of existing structures (Friedman, 2010).
In the 1960s, second-wave feminists believed that no essential differences existed between men and women; therefore, they demanded a rebellious and deconstructive viewpoint to the fight for equality. As a result, books featured female characters that rejected antiquated ideas about femininity, contradicted stereotypes, and forged identities independent of their families, all while experimenting with form and language. Despite the attempts of these authors, prevailing perspectives about women in literature and society have only changed gradually.
Feminism and Gender Wars in The Golden Notebook:
The Golden Notebook can be read as a feminist novel even though Lessing herself is critical of the movement and her intention was to write a novel about issues more significant than the sex war. According to Lessing, the novel's central theme is "'breakdown', that sometimes when people 'crack up' it is a way of self-healing" (Lessing, 2013). The Golden Notebook has an experimental structure. A conventional short novel titled 'Free Women' makes up its skeleton. It is divided into five sections, in turn, divided into four notebooks. Each section follows a different part of the character's life. She writes about the character's anxieties as a female socialist author in the black notebook. The red notebook contains evolving thoughts about her communist politics. The yellow notebook consists of the stories she creates from her personal experiences. Lastly, the blue notebook is her diary.
In the Preface, Lessing says, "But nobody so much as noticed this central theme, because the book was instantly belittled, by friendly reviewers as well as by hostile ones, as being about the sex war, or was claimed by women as a useful weapon in the sex war." (Lessing, 2013) However, this statement ignores that the subject of the novel - the relation between the individual and society - is highly relevant in the contemporary feminist movement. Women have been belittled and victimised because of their lack of social roles and isolation from the more significant political climate. The Women's Liberation Movement's attitude towards this idea is that if a woman is to emerge as an independent individual she must establish this relation to society without interference from men. However, Lessing does not stick to this idea consistently throughout the novel.
Lessing's angry response to those who held the novel as a weapon in the sex war was to say, "What they would really like me to say is "Ha sisters, I stand with you side by side in your struggle toward the golden dawn where all those beastly men are no more." Do they really want people to make oversimplified statements about men and women? " (Lessing, 1982, cited by McCrum, 2015) Nevertheless, while she says this, critics of Lessing's works have often pointed out that the men in her fiction are painted in the worst possible light and have a limited scope of redemption. Like its author's stance on feminism, the novel's message is complex and sometimes contradictory. However, it is easy to identify the characteristic that made the book a weapon in the hands of strident feminists: Lessing's main character, Anna Wulf.
Anna Wulf says, "I am interested only in stretching myself, in living as fully as I can." (Lessing, 1962, p. 64) According to Lessing, for a woman to live fully, she must also live freely. In Anna, Lessing gives us her conception of a 'free woman'. These women are 'living the kind of life women never lived before' (Lessing, 1962, p. 451). Her description gives rise to a conflict between the way of life she must create to fit her new belief that men and women are equal while battling the profound ideas of women's inferiority.
Anna insists that her identity be independent of the men with whom she has relationships. However, the way the women in The Golden Notebook look at their sexual relations with men is at variance with their outlook on every other aspect of their lives. An example of Lessing's negative portrayal of men is that all the male characters in The Golden Notebook are afraid of commitment. Where Lessing's feminist stand falters is that the women in the book accept this cruel behaviour as natural and inevitable without stopping to question it.
Anna is a single mother, yet she refuses to be identified by her motherhood. Her relationship with her daughter, Janet, is ambivalent, and she does not behave in a particular manner to avoid the title of ‘bad mother’. Anna's characterisation shines a light on the frustrations of a single mother juggling her personal needs with those of her child. Anna has agency over her thoughts and actions. And yet, she rationalises the behaviours of the men in her life, especially Michael's response to her maternal responsibilities, by saying, "If I were a man, I'd be the same." (Lessing, 1962, p. 266) The assertion suggests that Lessing believes that biology makes her respond the way she does to Janet, going against the feminist movement's rejection of biological-based gender roles.
As Lessing writes about Anna's relationships, she does not shy away from her sexuality. Lessing believes that women need and deserve sexual pleasure. While Lessing asks "for more physical objectification, rather than less" (Feigel, 2018), she also insists that men look beyond a woman's body and appreciate their minds. This depiction of sexual liberation was one of the significant reasons feminists believed that the novel was Lessing's public declaration of support for the Women's Liberation Movement. Lessing has received criticism for her focus on heterosexual sex and romance. She goes so far as to say that homosexual relationships threaten women's integrity (Libby, 1974).
While Lessing's female friendships are also complicated and messy, the relationships her characters have with other women are the most important in their lives and she explores how these friendships can be a way to extend their being. However, in the end, Lessing's female friendships are always defined by their relations with men. As Anna repeatedly mentions, "our real loyalties are always to men, and not to women." (Lessing, 1962, p. 52)
What makes Anna more unlikeable is that she voices opinions and conducts herself in ways that women are often too scared to because of societal expectations and the fear of being termed 'bad women'. Anna constantly makes decisions that make the reader uncomfortable but what makes her genuinely relatable is that these are decisions that she is uncomfortable with, too. According to Roxane Gay, "Likeability is a very elaborate lie, a code of conduct dictating the proper way to be. The question [of likeability] suggests that characters should not be a reflection of us, but of our better selves." (Gay, 2014) Lessing reclaims this narrative in her work. While writing about Lessing's fictional characters, Judith Kegan Gardiner says, "Lessing sometimes encourages us to empathise with her characters, sometimes incites our antagonism against them" (Gardiner, 1989). However, she never forces them to fit into the restrictive label of likeable.
Despite this contrary messaging about feminism, what is most important is that Lessing's women are real, not mythical creatures or paragons of virtue one must put on a pedestal. They are flawed in the same way that her female readers are, making them simultaneously despicable and relatable. Lessing's most potent feminist message is that women must look beyond the need to be pleasant, accept the messiness, and live as free women.
Representation of Unhinged Women in My Year of Rest and Relaxation:
In an interview with Entertainment magazine, while talking about the lack of moral imperative or judgement in her novel, Lapvona (Moshfegh, 2022), Ottessa Moshfegh, easily one of the most sensational contemporary authors, says, "I don't like literature that moralises anything." (Greenblatt, 2022) Moshfegh stands by this philosophy while writing her characters, especially the female ones. Her characters never abide strictly by a moral compass, and her stories do not end on a preachy note meant to give the reader a lesson, even though sometimes her works read like fables.
Not only is Moshfegh's bibliography similar to that of Lessing, with a line-up of short stories and experimental novels, but decades apart, both authors also do not make the reading experience accessible by making their characters pleasant. Moshfegh's characters can be unsettling and may even induce feelings of revulsion. Readers are used to seeing female characters, specifically the central characters of novels, as compassionate beings who behave well. When authors like Moshfegh give us characters, who reject societal norms, we find the experience of reading about them jarring. Moshfegh writes characters repulsed by themselves and repulsive to the readers. In her novel Eileen (Moshfegh, 2015), the titular character constantly studies her 'horse-like face' and 'grotesque figure' in the mirror. She obsessively takes laxatives and then has 'oceanic shits'; she covers her genitalia in layers of cloth and then 'scrabbles to find what is underneath it all' (Moshfegh, 2015). Moshfegh's angry response to critics who call Eileen a disgusting character was, "They wanted me to somehow explain to them how I had the audacity to write a disgusting female character . . ." (Tolentino, 2018)
The repulsion in My Year of Rest and Relaxation is veiled, arguably thinly. The unnamed central character is thin, blonde, beautiful, wealthy, sophisticated and privileged, yet her actions repulse the readers because of Moshfegh's unrelenting crudeness. "Being pretty only kept me trapped in a world that valued looks above all else," (Moshfegh, 2019, p. 28) says the main character. Moshfegh does not believe in sugarcoating any aspect of the female experience, which brings to mind Lessing's description of menstrual blood and childbirth.
Reviewers have criticised Moshfegh for supposedly condoning destructive behaviour. But one must remember that when authors depict such characters in their works they do not intend them to be inspirations. Their destructive behaviours and coping mechanisms are not role models. Fiction holds a mirror up to not only the positive things in society but also the negative. Only such representations depict that women are not entirely black or white, they reside somewhere in the grey area, and their personalities are multifaceted depending on their life experiences. Readers and reviewers alike have always made this allowance for male characters in fiction. An unlikeable man is billed as an antihero, but an unlikeable woman is lambasted for her transgressions (Gay, 2014).
In My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the unnamed main character embarks on a year of hibernation-like sleep induced by a cocktail of drugs and the fictional drug, Infermiterol, prescribed by her eccentric therapist. She does this to dull the pain and deal with the trauma of losing her parents. Moshfegh gives us a character that is imprudent, yet we cannot stop reading about her while she goes about this experiment. The novel is set in hopeful, pre-9/11 New York but had it been published at that time or any other cultural era; it probably would not have received the cult-like fame it has. "But it's a dream that's all too relatable in these post-pandemic times, where lockdown, a waning will to work and gnawing existential angst have become familiar parts of the collective consciousness." (Chalklen, 2022) In the post-COVID era when there is increasing exhaustion with the hyper capitalistic girl boss trend, it is not surprising that increasingly women understand the motivations of the unhinged character.
In recent discourse about literature, critics have argued that the term 'unhinged' should not be used for despicable characters in the same way that it is used for characters struggling with their mental health. In her essay, Vera Kurian, author of Never Saw Me Coming (Kurian, 2021a), says, "... we should take a moment and reflect on who is calling any particular woman unhinged. How does any woman manage to stay hinged in a world where she is frequently dismissed, underestimated and attacked?" (Kurian, 2021b) To put both these types of female characters under the same umbrella term runs the risk of furthering the negative stigma surrounding women's breakdowns. However, the term, and by extension, the genre, has moved beyond being just a descriptor for mental state. It is now synonymous with women who rebel against gender normative roles.
Therefore, Amy Dunne from Gone Girl (Flynn, 2012) is unhinged not only because she decides to frame her cheating husband for her murder but also because she ridicules the 'Cool Girl' trope and criticises men's objectification of women. Irina, the main character of Boy Parts (Clark, 2020), is not unhinged because she takes unethical photos of young boys but also because she flips the assumption that women cannot be abominable. Similarly, Beautiful World Where Are You (Rooney, 2021) does not feature on all the 'Unhinged Woman' lists because one of its central characters, Alice Kelleher, seeks isolation in the wake of a nervous breakdown. Instead, it is because the female characters in this book look at the world and relationships from an unabashedly feminine perspective without living a gender-normative life. Lastly, in Milk Fed (Broder, 2021), the main character, Rachel, is not unhinged because she has an eating disorder but because the book represents lesbian relationships and the complex relationship that can exist between mothers and daughters.
"I'd wake up to find voice messages on my cell phone from salons or spas confirming appointments I'd booked in my sleep." (Moshfegh, 2019, p. 9) says the unnamed central character of Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation. When the main character blacks out, she rejects the world, including society's expectations of her as a woman in the early 2000s. However, asleep and unconscious, she finds herself adhering to the exact expectations as if they are ingrained into her mind. Moshfegh's representation references the Jungian idea of the collective unconscious. Jung believed that the unconscious mind was inherited from the past collective experiences of humanity rather than through personal experiences, expressed through universal archetypes (Jung, 1947, cited by McLeod, 2018). Moshfegh attempts to point out that we live in a society where it is practically impossible for women to completely withdraw from feminine traits because the patriarchy and gender binary are too deeply rooted. Moshfegh's central character shops for lingerie online while unconscious, even though she finds comfort in the soft cotton of men's pyjamas. She finds that her subconscious self is a conformist who still wants to grotesquely parade herself as a sexual object in front of men.
Like Lessing's Anna and Molly, the central character of My Year of Rest and Relaxation also has a strained relationship with her friend Reva. "I was both relieved and irritated when Reva showed up, the way you'd feel if someone interrupted you in the middle of suicide" (Moshfegh, 2019, p. 12), the central character says. Moshfegh describes Reva as someone who strives to fit into the label of sophisticated woman, almost going too far to meet this goal and yet she is not a likeable character. By contrasting the two characters and their outlooks towards the world's expectations, Moshfegh argues that there is no winning for women. While some readers might find the main character's decisions ridiculous because she rejects these expectations, they find Reva ridiculous for adhering to them. So Moshfegh's argument is, at its core, the same as Lessing's; to live freely and happily, women cannot keep striving for society's approval.
What makes the unnamed, unhinged main character of My Year of Rest and Relaxation relatable is not the fact that she decides to sleep away an entire year of her life because that is something she can do because she is a white woman of unavoidable privilege, but due to her rejection of societal expectations. She is so overwhelmed and repulsed by her shallowness that she thinks it will be easier to fall into 'the infinite nothingness’ (Moshfegh, 2019, p. 31) of sleep. "I thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me." (Moshfegh, 2019, p. 19)
Dissociative Feminism in Popular Culture:
"We know that she performs her pain as if it were a form of art, something outside herself that can be controlled, and yet chooses to revel in it regardless." (Garland, 2022) Emma Garland says this about the women who prescribe to the trend of 'being in your Fleabag era', but her words could be about both the unnamed main character in My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook. This phenomenon of withdrawing within oneself and women revelling in the tragic mess of their lives instead of blaming society's failures for their problems was termed 'dissociative feminism' by Emmeline Clein (Clein, 2019). Moshfegh's main character dissociates when she refuses to confront the issues in her life causing her distress and instead decides to block everything off by sleeping. In a more indirect way, Anna is also dissociating when she talks to Molly about the friction between her desire to be a 'free woman' and the internalised patriarchy holding her back.
Dissociative feminism directly responded to late-stage capitalism's girl-boss feminism as women realised that success was not guaranteed to everyone who worked hard for it because of certain structural inequities that act as disadvantages to specific sections of society. Exhausted with the need to be perfect and functioning under the fear of being called a bad feminist if they put a toe out of line, young girls turned to the idea of dissociation.
In popular culture, the most prominent example of dissociative feminism is in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s acclaimed series, Fleabag. The titular character, played by Waller-Bridge herself, uses dark humour as a defence mechanism against the grief of losing her mother and best friend. She narrates her tragic life experiences with self-deprecating humour and a smirk. At the most climactic moments of her life, she dissociates from the moment to break the fourth wall and talk to the viewers. It is a cinematic portrayal of the mind-body separation of dissociation that young women today use as a defence mechanism. It is only in the show's second season that Fleabag starts dealing with her problems better, and her budding love for an unattainable Catholic Priest stops her from dissociating as he catches her out. The main character realises that true healing can come only through a human connection at the end of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Fleabag comes to a similar conclusion.
Lessing and Moshfegh’s characters are economically and socially privileged, which is visible in their disregard for societal expectations. In the same way that allowances were made for unlikeable men in literature until recently, this brand of nihilistic feminism is an allowance made for privileged women that will not be extended to those without the same privileges. Despite this, readers cannot wholly overlook these narratives since they would fall into the trap they wish to avoid. Fiction cannot be held responsible for finding solutions to all societal evils; thus, it would be counterproductive to succumb to the accusations that these genres are detrimental to the movement.
Conclusion:
To review, Doris Lessing is arguably the pioneer of a style of writing female characters that is now sixty years later becoming popular with authors like Ottessa Moshfegh. By reclaiming terms initially used to silence women, they are handing over the power to women by allowing them to reject the societal frameworks that have victimised them. The genre, now at the peak of its popularity, also brings forward accounts of mental illness and breakdown where the agency is with the women, which is revolutionary after centuries of men controlling the narrative.
A reflection of this mindset is visible in today’s popular culture with an increasing number of female characters whose mental instability and misguided decisions are represented unabashedly. At the same time, they are no longer expected to conform to society’s rigid ideas about femininity. There is an increasing acceptance of morally ambiguous female characters which allows there to be a more three-dimensional representation of women. Criticism of the style of writing may be well-intended but fails to acknowledge the fact that fiction authors do not have a responsibility to make their characters role models for their readers. Female characters should be given the same liberty to be misguided that male characters get. Additionally, while dissociative feminism is undeniably a product of privilege, these stories should not be suppressed due to it.
While this feminist move has opened up avenues for stories that were previously not heard, there is a long way forward. Readers and the publishing industry must be open to such subversive stories from different strata of society, including voices with significantly lesser privileges. The celebration of unlikeable characters relieves female characters from the pressure of being perfect. In the same way, other groups, for instance, people of different races, castes and classes, also deserve representation that does not compartmentalise them in moral binaries.
Watch this video for an interesting take on the topic.