The Creation of Anne Boleyn (42 page)

Who Let the Bitch Out?

What is it about Anne the temptress/predator? Why do we keep returning to her, even though serious scholars have challenged the stereotype? The “femme fatale” is a long-standing archetype in many cultures, of course, and Anne is only one of many: Eve, Delilah, Salome, Jezebel, the sirens, Medea, Cleopatra, Morgan le Fay, Vampira, the Dragon Lady, and all their various incarnations and evil sisters in mythology, novels, fin-de-siècle painting, film noir, and television soaps. There are many explanations—cultural, psychological, feminist, and misogynist—for her appeal. Camille Paglia, in
Sexual Personae,
follows Freud and Nietzsche and argues that the femme fatale is “one of the most mesmerizing of sexual personae,” who will always have a cultural presence because “Woman,” beginning first of all with the mother, represents the seductions, betrayals, and “uncontrollable nearness of nature,” “a malevolent moon that keeps breaking through our fog of hopeful sentiment.”
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Bram Dijkstra sees her less as a permanent fixture grounded in the facts of women’s biological role and more as a periodically erupting, misogynist icon, whose popularity waxes and wanes historically. He illustrates this in
Idols of Perversity
through the culture of fin-de-siècle Europe, arguing that a wave of literary, artistic, and scientific “fantasies of feminine evil” flooded that period, externalizing its misogyny and developing evolutionary racism. One of my Facebook page readers offered a more “Jungian” view: that Gregory’s Anne, like Scarlett O’Hara, acts out parts of the self that most of us are afraid to put into public scrutiny.

In the great autobiography that is my inner monologue, I am the heroine of my story sometimes, and an anti-heroine other times. We aren’t supposed to like Scarlett O’Hara, but we admire her and talk about her almost a century since she debuted in the public consciousness . . . She fascinates those who like her, who hate her, or those who admire but do not necessarily like her. I would argue that Anne Boleyn—the real one—and just like me and Scarlett O’Hara and you, was a complex human with good intentions mingled with bad. Philippa Gregory’s Anne has the disadvantage of being fictional, of having her thoughts and intentions broadcast by their author, whereas real people are able to conceal their intentions behind words and perspectives.
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Putting this comment into Jungian terms, wicked Anne belongs to the repressed “shadow” that is part of the storehouse of our collective unconscious. We all secretly identify with the behavior of those who dare to act out our more libidinous (sexual and aggressive) fantasies and impulses. And perhaps when they are punished, it psychologically wipes clean our own slates, exorcises our demons, makes us feel purified.

My own view is that while the femme fatale can’t be simply dismissed as a creation of Western sexism, the fact that she has flourished in certain specific cultural contexts rather than in others is striking. She may be part of some collective unconscious, but there are (historical) moments when she is fairly quiet, and others when the “bitch is loose.” The end of the twentieth and turn into the twenty-first century seems to be one of those—and since this is more and more a global culture, the dominion of the bitch is too. Postwar popular culture had its share of scheming vixens on
Dallas, Dynasty,
and the rest. But they played a supporting role to Mary Tyler Moore, Claire Huxtable, Murphy Brown,
Designing Women
, and other independent but likeable prime-time women—and they clearly were marked as “villainesses.” Nowadays, really, really mean girls, backstabbing “frenemies,” and defiantly materialistic sluts are not just dots on the landscape, but truly in the ascendancy. And unlike Alexis Carrington, they don’t even scheme in secret. They’re proud of their materialism and their aggression, which Bravo highlights in the self-defining snippets that open each of their
Real Housewives
shows. (“If it doesn’t make me money, I’m not interested in it.”
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“There may be younger housewives, but no one is hotter than me.”
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“I don’t try to keep up with the Joneses; I
am
the Joneses.”
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) Women crave power, hell yes! And they lust over designer shoes and handbags. And yes, they will beat one another up, verbally and physically—call one another whores, pull one another’s wigs off, overturn tables—given half the chance. Deal with it! The only difference between these characters’ behavior and the “selfish, boorish ways that once got men called ‘chauvinist pigs,’” Hampton Stevens writes in the
Washington Times,
is that “critics describe them with glowing words such as ‘assertive,’ ‘edgy,’ and, heaven help us, ‘sassy.’ However, what these women actually are, generally speaking, are utterly awful human beings: vain, selfish, shallow and controlling—a generation of ‘Mean Girls’ grown, not surprisingly, into mean women.”
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And consumed with relish—and often admiration—by viewers.

Compare this cultural moment to the late 1980s, when Glenn Close’s character in
Fatal Attraction
aroused a storm of indignation and controversy over a depiction of an unstrung, bunny-boiling adulteress. When
Fatal Attraction
was released, we were still pre–Dinesh D’Souza, Camille Paglia, and Christina Hoff Sommers; Allan Bloom’s
The Closing of the American Mind
had only just been published. “Politically correct” had not yet become a handy ubiquitous put-down of feminists and other critics of sexism, racism, and ethnocentrism. And while preview audiences demanded to see the bunny boiler killed off by the betrayed wife (an original ending, which had Alex commit suicide to the strains of
Madame Butterfly
, didn’t wash and was replaced), the new ending (along with the portrayal of Alex as a murderous sociopath) was seen by many reviewers as an indictment and vicious punishment of the single career woman. Today, jaded by the slew of copycat female sociopaths that followed the success of the film (
Single White Female; The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,
etc.) and knowing that the culture is not very welcoming of “old-fashioned” feminism, movie and television reviewers are unlikely to beef about sexist imagery or ideology. It isn’t cool.

Who let the bitch out? Clearly, she is being warmly welcomed by an unhinged consumer culture that gratifies all tastes, no matter how sleazy or degrading, so long as the product sells. But just what tastes are being gratified, and what is being sold? Susan Herbst, in
Rude Democracy,
says, in speaking about the escalation of vicious attacks among politicians and from news commentators, that “conflict sells and excites in a way that calm political dialogue never will.”
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In the case of the outrageous behavior of reality-show contestants, this might be even more simply summed up as “It’s hard to turn your eyes away from a train wreck.” But arguably, reality-show contestants also hold a fun-house mirror up to viewers, acting out tendencies that our culture encourages in all of us—competitiveness, materialism, self-indulgence—but in an over-the-top way so we can feel superior. When Scott Dunlop created
The Real Housewives of Orange County
(the first in the Bravo series, which was meant to be a one-season feature), his intention was for it to be “a satirical look at life in affluent gated communities.”
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(
Desperate Housewives,
too, was originally marketed as a satire; it didn’t sell until rebilled as a prime-time soap opera.) But Bravo discovered that viewers didn’t see satire. They saw actual people leading enviably successful lives, whose behavior they could dissect and dis around the water cooler at work or talk about in blogs online.

Chillingly, the behavior of the housewives may not even seem all that awful to many viewers. In an increasingly mean culture, it may read as all the more “real.” Our polarized political discourse, by the time
The Real Housewives of Orange County
aired in 2006, had already degenerated into name-calling. And the Internet had teased the bitch out in the rest of us, enabling “users to lash out at individuals without forethought.”
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Laura Stepp, in the
Huffington Post,
makes an apt comparison. “Tweets, blog posts and comments on Facebook are like the wicked notes girls used to pass in high school.”
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It’s no accident that the housewives all have their own blogs, in which they stoke one another’s fires between episodes. These sorts of blogs, David Denby points out in
Snark,
encourage nastiness to “metastasize as a pop writing form: A snarky insult, embedded in a story or post, quickly gets traffic; it gets linked to other blogs; and soon it has spread like a sneezy cold through the vast kindergarten of the Web.”
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Let’s not forget, though, that
Housewives
and
Bachelor
viewers are overwhelmingly women. And unlike
Dallas
and
Dynasty,
whose prime-time villainesses were made up, these shows reinforce the worst stereotypes about real women. So why do women, apparently, adore these shows? Have we been brainwashed to take delight in the demeaning and demonizing of our hard-won power? Susan Douglas, in “Where Have You Gone, Roseanne Barr?” (the
Shriver Report
), says:

The chief culprit is the use of an arch irony—the deployment of the knowing wink that it’s all a joke, that we’re not to take this too seriously. Because women have made plenty of progress because of feminism, and now that full equality is allegedly complete, it’s OK, even amusing, to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women. After all, TV shows such as “Are You Hot?” or magazines like
Maxim
can’t possibly undermine women’s equality at this late date, right?
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I would go further than this. It’s not just that sexist stereotypes are seen as “okay” but that they aren’t even seen as sexist anymore but rather as proof of women’s triumph over sexism in a culture that is viewed as “beyond feminism.” In this culture, our sexuality is seen as a potent form of power. Bitchery shows that we aren’t simpering, whining weaklings, that we’ve “come a long way” from our subservient ancestors. The “just do it” mentality has released all brakes on competitiveness; the harder we fight, the more we demonstrate that we have the right stuff. Unlike their mothers, the bubby-flaunting femmes of reality television aren’t afraid to “go for it.” They won’t allow anyone to make them feel ashamed of their ambitions or their aggressions. And they refuse to be stifled. “I’ve finally found my voice!” says one housewife, in the snippets that introduce the show. “I’m my own person,” says another. They announce themselves with feminist tropes. But they don’t need feminism. They already have power; just look at the size of those boobs and bank accounts. Both are usually the result of their husbands’ (or ex-husbands’) high-paying jobs, but puh-lease, don’t give me that tiresome libber crap. Get a life, Gloria Steinman (or whatever her name is).

The “heroines” of reality television are, in a sense, the inevitable flowering, in popular culture form, of the protest against “victim feminism” that Naomi Wolf, Camille Paglia, and Katie Roiphe inaugurated in the early 1990s. “Victim feminism,” as Wolf described it in her book
Fire with Fire,
“casts women as sexually pure and mystically nurturing, and stresses the evil done to these ‘good’ women as a way to petition for their rights.”
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It has turned “suffering into a virtue, anonymity into a status symbol, and marginalization into a mark of the highest faith.”
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It is also “obsolete” because “the psychology and the conditions of women’s lives have both been transformed enough so that it is no longer possible to pretend that the impulses to dominate, aggress, or sexually exploit others are ‘male’ urges alone.”
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Katie Roiphe
(The Morning After)
translated this into a critique of feminist ideas about date rape, arguing that in many cases, charges of rape were a “victim-feminist” excuse for a woman’s own bad behavior “the night before.”
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Camille Paglia went even further, charging all second-wave feminism with “paranoia” about male oppression and declaring that women, in fact, are “the dominant sex.”
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It may seem like a huge leap to go from rejecting “victim feminism” to behaving like a housewife from hell. But ideas that are ripe for development move fast from conception to materialization in a consumer culture, and as they find their audience, they gather steam. A door is opened, taboos are lifted, something sounds a resonant note with buyers, and within short order, much more is permitted—even celebrated—than would have been dreamed of five years before. Popular culture, with its expert nose for profitable icons and images, skipped quickly from “power feminism” and its proponents to
Sex and the City
and
Ally McBeal,
which tested—and demonstrated—that old-fashioned feminism, with its horror of sexual “objectification,” was dead. Get out your short skirts, and show off those legs (shaved, of course)! Then came the
Mean Girls
books, a whole slew of them, dedicated to demonstrating that girls were just as aggressive as boys, only more underhanded.
Desperate Housewives
discovered that women plotting against other women would not sell as satire; we wanted our schemers straight up—and, ultimately, with the opportunities provided by reality television, “real.” And then, inevitably, came the self-help books celebrating the “inner bitch,” such as Sherry Argov’s
Why Men Love Bitches,
which argues that “releasing your inner bitch” can help you land the right male.
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