Why are the women of these writers disgusted with their bodies?

What do women call their bodies "garbage" in fiction?

For generations, anna Karenina and Emma Bovary have been arguably the best of the self-loathing heroines of literature.

For Anna, the guilt of abandoning her husband and children, combined with her jealous nature, forced her to ruin her love affair with Count Vronsky and commit suicide.

For Emma, she was dumped by a negative bachelor in an extramarital affair, unable to pay off the debt she owed due to her shopping addiction, and finally ended herself with a spoonful of arsenic.

Recently, Tolstoy and Flaubert's interpretation of women's self-harm has sparked a fierce controversy, thanks to the dedicated exploration by female novelists of the performance of female characters "adding resentment to their own bodies" (self-harm).

In two of Sally Rooney's novels, two protagonists in their 20s ask their lovers to beat them in bed.

Frances, a college student and aspiring poet in Conversations With Friends (2017), thoughtfully says that "I feel like a hurt person and unworthy of anything," and describes her body as "garbage."

In Normal People (2019), Marianne unravels her love affair with her sensitive classmates, at first having a rich man abuse her, and later, a perverted artist takes highly insulting pictures of her and does something horrible during their sexual relationship.

And all this is obviously because Marianne considers herself "a depraved and wrong bad person," "all her efforts are right, have the right point of view, say the right things... And that's just a cover for something deep inside her, her evil side."

Similarly, Edie, who calls herself an "office slut" in Raven Leilani's debut novel Luster (released in 2020), encourages her married lover to push her, beat her, and insert a samurai sword into her hand.

Meanwhile, in Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), the nameless young narrator abuses sleeping pills and sedatives in his body in an attempt to immerse himself in most of his sleep.

"What else do you want from life besides sleeping?" Her best friend asked her in her rare moment of consciousness. The narrator writes, "I chose to ignore her sarcasm, I wanted to be an artist, but I had no talent, I told her." Soon, she passed out again.

In Melissa Broad's novel Milk Feeding (2021), Rachel, an employee at a talent management firm in Los Angeles, goes from starving herself to binge-eating junk food. This transformation began when Rachel fell in love with a large frozen yogurt machine, and she began to release her fears, "like spinning to infinity, or it could be nothing, or shrinking into a small ball, or so big that I could only see fragments, so clumsy that I could never control such a huge void, only destruction, only death." 」

Finally, in Lena Andersson's 2016 Swedish novel Willful Disregard, Esther, a smart writer in her mid-30s, leaves her cohabiting boyfriend to pursue an arrogant, older artist who is not so much self-loathing as self-defeating. Although the artist made it clear that his interest was not here. The unanswered words that Esther wrote to him are likely to send a painful chill to readers who sacrifice their self-esteem in pursuit of love or longing.

But Anna and Emma can be seen as people oppressed in gender roles and their respective eras and circumstances, and why the latest group of self-loathing people emerges is unknown to us, who are blessed with social identity and sexual freedom, which is unimaginable to their ancestors. But they suffer from self-loathing and desperately harm themselves.

Of course, regardless of one's sociological data, the human condition is a daunting task. However, it's hard not to notice that these protagonists are young, intelligent, charming, and wealthy whites with the exception of Eddie. Readers are curious about what's going on, and they're forgivable.

Rooney attributes his motives to another self, from the destruction of "late capitalism" (Francis), to domestic violence, and being an idiot in high school (Marianne). Because none of these ideas are fully mature, or completely convincing. Broad believes Rachel's parents are the root cause of her eating disorders and frustrated self-esteem. When she starved herself to the point of menopause, her mother insisted: "Anorexia sufferers are much thinner than you, they look like victims of concentration camps and they have to be hospitalized." You're not anorexia."

In My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Moshfigg refuses to provide any explanation for the narrator's desire to spend his life in deep sleep. The reader can learn the details of her life, though not satisfied, but comfortable. But they are conveyed in a cold way, making the novel read more like an absurdist allegory about the "lost connection" between people in the modern world.

I wonder, in a broader sense, whether these books reflect a dissatisfaction with the current liberal left's clichés about "patriarchy." The hugely successful "Normal People" and "My Year of Rest and Relax" were both published at the height of the #MeToo movement. However, numerous news reports depict powerful men abusing their powers to compete for naïve and unsuspecting young women in employment, a far cry from the sexual worldview in these novels.

What's more, male characters don't always conform. Whether it is the married lover in "Chat History" or Marianne's sensitive boyfriend in "Normal People", despite the heroine's request, she is not willing to hurt the heroine. When Marianne's frightening artist lover admits that he has feelings for her, she leaves with obvious disgust.

Similarly, Moshfage's emotional detachment narrator seems indifferent to the experience of being "exploited" for sex. Regarding her ex-boyfriend, she said: "At one point he said he was scared of getting me too excited' because he didn't want to break my heart. So he made me very efficient and selfish, and when he was over, he would get dressed, check his pager, comb his hair, kiss my forehead and leave."

It is as if the protagonists in these novels choose the former when faced with the choice of whether to "become their greatest enemy" or "become a male victim". It's not hard to imagine that most female readers of these books might prefer this approach. First of all, this gesture makes these people almost off topic. "It turns out that a man might miss someone she's never met, except in her imagination," Anderson writes, writing that her hypersensitive heroine preemptively imposes on a man who neither knows her nor wants her.

That attitude also stands in stark contrast to Judith Rosner's 1975 best-selling novel Looking for Mr. Goodbar, another book about women's self-destruction.

The novel is roughly based on a real murder and tells the story of a teacher named Teresa who grew up in the Bronx. She suffered from polio and could only walk with a limp. Like the fictional characters of her contemporaries, Teresa considered herself unsound and therefore not only unworthy of love, but also unworthy of life: "How could they not believe that it would have been better if she had died the first time she fell ill instead of what she is now?"

When Teresa's self-esteem problems are entangled with the sexual revolution, it provides a reason for her fear of being tethered. However, her inattentive intentions in self-preservation gradually deviate, and she begins an extramarital affair with her married university professor. Teresa has since turned down a well-meaning lawyer who wants to marry her in favor of anonymous sex dating with an unfettered stranger she meets at a bar. We learn in the first few pages of the novel that one of these strangers is a real psychopath and beats her to death with a stick.

But even without the warning of her violent death, Teresa remains vulnerable and helpless in the company of men, something that today's fictional "self-loathing" does not have — perhaps because the latter seem to be experts in their own dysfunction and therefore able to control themselves even if they get out of control. Rosner describes Teresa as "dizzy," "scared," "restless," and "endangered," but unable to make sense of her tears. What has changed in those 45 years?

In Both "Feeding With Cow's Milk" and "My Year of Rest and Relaxation," "therapy" takes the form of an eccentric and unprofessional psychiatrist, while the narrator subtly overcomes them, a hilarious theme. The mainstreaming of "treatment" may be the deciding factor.

On the last few pages of In Search of Mr. Goodba, Teresa considers seeking professional help. In an unexpected plot point, before she could lie down on the couch, her life was over.

By Lucinda Rosenfeld

Compile: Anna

Proofreading: LIT.CAVE

Editorial board image: Online