Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (25 page)

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

female subjectivity emerges as fluid, unstable and contingent precisely because it is represented in aesthetic and narrative forms that say it is. In the liminal spaces of the series – its themes of death, its playing with conventions, introducing a character like Claire in the process of becoming – might we see the television discourse preparing for another kind of subjectivity, another discourse?

© the authors

134

eleven

Desperately seeking

ERIN

Brenda: writing the self

MacLEOD

in
Six Feet Under

‘There’s so much I don’t know about you,’ Nate Fisher tells his girlfriend, Brenda Chenowith (‘An Open Book’, 1:5). Responding to him, Brenda replies that she is ‘an open book’. But is her narrative so easy to read? Both feminism and postmodernism, argues Lidia Curti (1998), share the need to search for new storytelling methods – to constantly challenge accepted narratives that shape men and women’s lives.
Six Feet Under
’s Brenda Chenowith also desires narrative forms to tell her tales. Having had a book written about her as a child protégé with an IQ of 185 –
Charlotte Light and
Dark,
authored by Gareth Feinberg Ph.D. – she attempts to counter the static, printed version of her ‘self’ with the creation of additional narratives. From her childhood immersion in the fictional world of another book –
Nathaniel and Isabel
– to seemingly endless self-

(re)creation and the writing of her
own
novel, Brenda moves from telling one story to the next, from one version of her ‘self’ to another.

Brenda, as both storyteller and subject of a story, occupies a multifaceted position. Giving her account is not a simple project, negotiating her role and her subject position is no easy task. In order to understand Brenda, or for that matter, any other woman’s process when putting pen to paper, the very act of writing demands re-evaluation and reworking. If, as Sandra Gilbert notes in the aptly titled ‘Literary Paternity’ (1979), the writer ‘fathers’ a text, what are 135

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

women doing when they tell their stories? Since Brenda has been narrativised in a psychological study, she reacts against patriarchal description as well as the male ownership of her story. Brenda consistently identifies and then violates borders, she disturbs boundaries; she struggles, as this chapter will argue, to develop specific frameworks for challenging patriarchal borders and gendered boundaries. Her project to contest grand (often patriarchal) narratives is, at the same time, both postmodernist and feminist.

Charlotte
and Dora

It is not difficult to understand why Brenda does not jump at telling people about her starring role in the cult bestseller
Charlotte Light
and Dark
. In her attempt to justify to Nate why she has never mentioned the book, Brenda explains that ‘people always change towards me after they read [
Charlotte
] … And now you’re gonna read that book and think that you know me. Well, you know what? You don’t’ (‘An Open Book’, 1:5). Frustrated with the fact that those who read
Charlotte
see it as a complete account of who she is, Brenda rejects the validity of this grand narrative. Recognising Jean-François Lyotard’s assertion that ‘people are only that which actualizes the narratives … by recounting them … listening to them … and recounting themselves through them’ (1997: 23), I argue that Brenda develops strategies to resist an easy definition of herself. She insists instead on separation from
Charlotte
, asserting that the book fixes a sense of who she is that belonged first to the doctor and now the reading public – but never her.

Claire Fisher, Nate’s younger sister, on seeing the book in Brenda’s home, launches into how much she loves it. She is completely bowled over when Brenda’s brother, Billy, reveals that Brenda ‘[is]

Charlotte’ (‘An Open Book’, 1:5) (and echoes this enthusiasm in season two at Brenda and Nate’s engagement dinner). Brenda sarcastically interrupts Claire’s reverie: ‘Don’t tell me. The book spoke to you. Like it was written specifically for you … lonely little girls desperate for something to emulate. Because, apparently, they’re not original enough to come up with anything on their own’ (‘The Room’, 1:6). Despite her snarkiness and her desire to think of herself as an ‘original’, she misunderstands Claire’s interest. Later 136

DESP ERATELY SEEKING BRENDA

Claire describes
Charlotte
as ‘this book about this girl who’s being analysed, and she’s, like, way smarter than the people who are analysing her, and so she’s constantly fucking with them’ (‘In Place of Anger’, 2:6). It is no small coincidence that Claire, another girl involved in the act of testing, retesting, forming and reforming her own identity, can understand what the young Brenda is doing here.

Claire’s insightful comment belies the fact that Brenda knows only too well the consequence of resisting. While Claire may understand the process, Brenda must live with the consequences – namely, that the reading of her identity from the published account is entirely beyond her control.

Much like Sigmund Freud’s famous hysteric, Dora, the young Brenda resists the treatment which is eventually turned into
Charlotte
Light and Dark
. Unlike Dora though, Brenda was unable to halt the analysis. Handed over at the age of six to ‘strangers, experts, a bunch of academic fucks who scrutinise[d] everything’ (‘An Open Book’, 1:5) (not to mention her psychiatrist parents, Margaret and Bernard Chenowith), we learn through flashbacks of her resistance: she refused to speak, and often resorted to barking and growling. Rather than a period of exploration and possibility, Brenda’s childhood became a time of endless analysis, infinite prescription and constant surveillance.

Just as Freud promotes analysis as key to identifying Dora’s

‘problem’, regardless of her objections, the title
Charlotte Light and
Dark
demonstrates a similar self-confidence in making known hidden

‘truths’ about the abnormally precocious young Brenda. Of course
Charlotte Light and Dark
cannot hope to paint a complete picture of its very reluctant subject: even Freud admitted that Dora’s pre-mature end to therapy ‘obliged’ him ‘to resort to framing conjectures and filling in deficiencies’ (1997: 76) as he worked towards narrating an ‘intelligible, consistent, and unbroken case history’ (11). But the title of Feinberg’s study purports to present Brenda from light to dark, black and white, beginning to end. Both texts dealing with Dora and ‘Charlotte’ respectively close down female interpretation of events and subjectivity. No matter how much she barked at the doctor and made her resistance known,
Charlotte Light and Dark
is still proclaimed by her psychiatrist to provide a full account, a complete insight into her personality and identity. Even Margaret explains to Nate that he should look no further if he wants 137

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

to understand Brenda: ‘It’s all in the book,’ she coos (‘An Open Book’, 1:5).

Despite Brenda’s resistance to the
Charlotte
narrative, she still desires to identify an alternative one – a counter-narrative to the one written without her consent. She is somehow convinced that other people
know
who they are – people like her ex-boyfriend, Trevor (Tuc Watkins), and his wife, Dawn (Judith Hoag): ‘I was watching Trevor and Dawn tonight, thinking they’re just so, so, so complete,’ she laments to Nate after the couple have left (‘Out, Out, Brief Candle’, 2:2). ‘Like they have something that I will never have. Ever. Either I wasn’t born with it, or it was beaten out of me.

Or maybe, maybe, I made myself into a self-fulfilling prophecy … I don’t know. I spent my childhood performing for clinicians, the rest of my life taking care of my train wreck of a brother, and I have no idea who I am.’ Her diatribe leads her to conclude that if circumstances had been different – no
Charlotte
, no train wreck of a brother – she might have had a chance to figure out who she is.

Her revelation further suggests that, to her mind, completeness relates to normative social roles along with an intimate connected-ness to a male other. It is as if she requires someone else to make her whole. Brenda imagines that Trevor and Dawn are complete as a result of their relationship (something she does not feel with Nate, as she confesses her frustration to him). Brenda’s self-fulfilling prophecy relies on believing not only that the ‘self’ can be defined as having a beginning and an end, but also that identity is shaped by socio-culturally constructed roles: wife, mother and lover. Despite her disaffection with traditional feminine roles, and her rejection of a coherent master narrative written for her, she cannot quite escape the promise of completeness that traditional models offer women.

Ironically, even though she refuses to accept such ideals, she nonetheless remains drawn to the notion that they may provide a sense of coherence for her. Tailoring versions of the social feminine self to suit – she asks Nate to marry her, for example – allows her to explore possible alternatives. But ultimately her search for new identities is confused by her desire to find her total ‘self’, not only as an individual but also in relation to someone else.

‘My whole life seems like a dream,’ Brenda says. ‘It’s like somebody else’s life. If my life were a movie, I’d either get up or walk out.’ (‘In the Game’, 2:1). Here Brenda expresses a disconnection 138

DESP ERATELY SEEKING BRENDA

from her own life, a sense that she is watching rather than participating. Using movies as a counterpoint allows her to indicate how she needs her life to be exciting, something with a story that keeps her interested but also provides a coherent cause and effect narrative. Unfortunately her life does not have a comfortable beginning, middle and end. Additionally, as a character on a television series, she quite literally must deal with an open-ended narrative.

What better way to keep things interesting than to affect constant change while attempting to retain control? Resisting the analysis that gave birth to
Charlotte
now manifests itself as a desire to continuously take on new and different identities. Her wish to push the doctors away and prevent them from being able to diagnose her life transforms into a compulsive need to recreate herself in order to thwart others from doing the same to her. Appropriating identities and constructing alternative life stories for herself reveals how adept the adult Brenda is at masquerade. Let us not forget that when we first meet Brenda she is having anonymous sex with Nate in a broom closet at the airport. ‘Are you ever going to tell me your name? asks Nate. ‘Probably not,’ responds Brenda (‘Pilot’, 1:1). If not for the fateful demise of Nathaniel Fisher, Sr, Brenda would never have had to move beyond the role of alluring siren who enjoys sexually pleasuring strangers. When forced to give her name to Nate’s mother she without hesitation adds that she met Nate in a cooking class – creating identity comes naturally. In a later episode she assumes the guise of speech therapist Candice Bavard while waiting for Nate at a restaurant (‘The Plan’, 2:3); in Las Vegas she becomes Jasmine Brecker (‘The Trip’, 1:11). Her concocted plan that she and Nate go shopping for a funeral to help him recognise his talents as a funeral director turns into a frightening experience for him (‘Life’s Too Short’, 1:9). Emerging from the washroom transformed into a woman dying of cancer proves more than a little unnerving for Nate, and he storms out. ‘That’s like that shit you pulled on those doctors,’ he later exclaims. Nate is in part shocked by Brenda’s ability to transform herself so convincingly and completely into someone else. He may not understand who she really is (‘there’s so much I don’t know about you’) but then neither does Brenda really know who she is behind the masquerades she performs so well.

What is the ‘shit’ she pulled on the doctors? Playing roles proved a desperate and eventually failed attempt to thwart classification and 139

READING
SIX FEET UNDER

pathologisation. But performing ‘Charlotte’ also meant Brenda somehow lost herself along the way. Playing with identities further results in a failure for her to be honest, especially with those she supposedly loves. Nate wants her to trust him with her ‘self’ – ‘We obviously have an intense sexual connection,’ he says. ‘And, yes, I would like for there to be something more than that. But that can’t ever happen until you trust me, which, apparently, you don’t’ (‘An Open Book,’ 1:5). He wants to get to know Brenda, but she is too preoccupied with watching how she creates herself – a behaviour learnt through years of psychotherapy, which in turn makes it difficult for her to let go of the control she has over self-representation and self-reinvention.

Brenda is simply too aware of the mechanisms involved in creating a persona. When Dawn explains that she read
Charlotte
in grad school as an example of a ‘classic borderline personality’, Brenda confesses that she ‘actually went to the library, looked up the symptoms and started behaving just like that to fuck with them’