Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why (8 page)

Meanwhile, in the literary world, people are asking a different set of questions. No one’s ever met this “Currer Bell” guy. No one has any evidence that he exists. It’s a pen name, clearly, but whose? Whoever it is, he’s not very sneaky: There’s an “Acton Bell” and an “Ellis Bell” being foisted on the public, and they could not more obviously be the same person. (In fact, they were Anne and Emily Brontë, respectively.) Fingers start pointing to William Makepeace Thackeray, the
Vanity Fair
author, whose wife—it’s well known—went crazy, tried to drown herself, and had to be shut up somewhere in Paris, a few years back. He’s been praising
Jane Eyre
to the skies, told an editor he had to miss a deadline because he couldn’t stop reading it.
Obviously, this is Thackeray, trying to sneak out an account of his own marriage by using a fake name.

Other people have an even wilder theory. They think “Currer Bell” might actually be a woman: Thackeray’s mistress, some governess he took up with after the wife fell apart. Maybe Thackeray taught her to write. Maybe Thackeray
taught her to write a book about what it’s like to have an affair with Thackeray. Some people dismiss this out of hand, as being patently ridiculous—no woman could have written
Jane Eyre
; there’s sex, there’s violence, there are curse words, for goodness sakes’—but the suspicion, once planted, keeps growing. It would explain everything: the fake name, the dirty content, the general air of secrecy.
Jane Eyre
is obviously the work of a fallen woman, the dissolute and corrupted mistress of some married man.

When Ellen asks her about her connection to the
Jane Eyre
scandal, Charlotte Brontë denies everything: “Whoever has said it—if any one has, which I doubt—is no friend of mine. Though twenty books were ascribed to me, I should own none.” To her publisher, she writes panicked letters about the desperate importance of making sure that her cover isn’t blown, that she is always and only referred to by her pen name. If anyone gets a whiff of who she is, she says, “I should deem it a misfortune—a very great one.”

Oh, and one other thing: Prior to
Jane Eyre
, Currer Bell had been shopping a different novel, one which was rejected by every publishing house that saw it. The title of that first book was
The Professor
.

Do you know what I would do, Monsieur?

•

As I say: There’s something perversely liberating in this story. Or in reading the Heger letters themselves: long,
rambling, increasingly sloppy and hyperbolic and out-of-control. You can read the same descent into tearful begging and desperation in Mary Wollstonecraft’s letters to Gilbert Imlay.

In both cases, these women are desperate—but not in any trivial or stereotypical way. We spend so much time pathologizing “overemotional” women that we scarcely ever ask what those women are emotional about. Here, it’s clear: Both women are, in different ways, in fear for their lives. In Wollstonecraft’s case, there is the physical threat of living inside a bloody and anarchic war, and the difficulty of providing a decent life for her daughter as a social outcast; in Brontë’s case, there is the psychological danger of being buried alive, of the demands of daily feminine life slowly eroding her intellect until there is nothing left. Both women are drowning, and they hold onto the men in their lives with the desperate, superhuman grip of a shipwreck survivor clinging to the side of a lifeboat. It doesn’t look pretty. But then, survival in a desperate situation never does.

And even if it doesn’t: Who cares? Ugly as these relationships may have been, human relationships, or the need to be loved, can look (and feel) a whole lot worse than this.

There are relationships that are, yes, crazy: co-dependent, or abusive, or just plain toxic. But the cult of the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend does very little to keep these relationships from happening, let alone to educate people about how they work.

Think of all the times high-profile rape or abuse cases are framed as the acts of “vindictive” women, looking for revenge or a financial pay-off from the men who’ve dumped them; think of the Julian Assange rape case, during which Naomi Wolf accused the two women who’d pressed charges of using the
“dating police” to punish Assange for not becoming their boyfriend. Think about Anita Hill, reporting that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her, and the infamous line of questioning pursued by Senator Howell Heflin:
“Are you a scorned woman?” he asked. And: “Do you have a martyr complex?”
Meanwhile, lawyer John Doggett testified that Hill was delusional, afflicted by “erotomania”; his evidence was a possibly fabricated story about how she had once accused him of “leading her on” after he canceled a date.

All of this falls under the heading of what lawyers call the “nuts and sluts” defense. When women report men’s sexual misconduct, the standard tactic of a defense attorney is to discredit those women by painting them as either sexually promiscuous, afflicted by an excess of desire, or “unstable” and vindictive, driven to hurt men because they can’t control their own emotions. Sexual overabundance or emotional overabundance: Either one renders you less than a victim in the eyes of a jury.

When we live in a climate of distrusting women’s voices, of viewing women as primarily obliged to service the relationship demands of men, their pain—pain that goes beyond
hurt feelings or loneliness, pain that comes from actual abuse—is always suspect. We can blame them for not being good, not making their male partners happy. We can say, not that abuse has made them act angrily or strangely, but that they were abused because they were angry or strange. And this is true even when the abuse in question is incontrovertible and well documented.

Not only do we make trainwrecks out of abuse victims, abuse has added to the ignominy of many of the most famous cases. Think of Whitney Houston, found bloodied at the site of a domestic-violence call. Think of Amy Winehouse, seen running into the street and pleading for help from passing cars, with a bruise in the shape of a man’s hand on her throat.

Winehouse was open about the fact that she would die for Blake Fielder-Civil, the husband who introduced her to crack and heroin, and from whom she fled on the night in question. (
When questioned, she covered for him, claiming that she was misbehaving and he “saved her life.”) At one point, a reporter who’d wandered into her house at 4:00 a.m. recorded Winehouse telling a friend that, if she’d ever really been in love,
“you’d be dead because you weren’t together.” Fielder-Civil was in prison for charges related to an armed robbery by that time, and Winehouse was in fact a few years away from death. But that didn’t stop anyone from turning her shout-outs to “my Blake, incarcerated” into a running joke.

Similarly, when Rihanna was beaten by her then-boyfriend
Chris Brown in 2009, the fact of the abuse, and its severity, were factually established—photos of her bloodied face were leaked to the press. But, almost overnight, urban legends about what Rihanna had done to “provoke” Brown sprang up on the Internet. She had given him an STD! She had thrown his car keys through a window!
A “Rihanna Deserved It” T-shirt was sold on CafePress.
And in one survey of two hundred teenagers, 46 percent blamed Rihanna for the assault. The line of logic speaks for itself. Here’s a sample, from
Yahoo! Answers
:

Im a women myself and I never want to get beat by a man, but I know if I ever do he’s going to be beating me for a good damn reason … suppose Rihanna was just going crazy and was hitting him, Im sure he could have shaked her or something but still, I know as a women sometimes we can get a little crazy with emotion
[.]

Yet, when Rihanna reconciled with Brown—
“I decided it was more important for me to be happy … even if it’s a mistake, it’s my mistake,” she said at the time—she was hated for that, too, with an onslaught of blog posts labeling her a “bad role model” and a traitor to women everywhere.
“Gone [are] the days where women and everyone around the globe praised her for leaving the destructive and violent relationship [she] had been in with Brown,” celebrity blog
Tell Tales
claimed, ignoring the fact that “everyone
around the globe” absolutely had not done that. “Today, Rihanna is letting down her fans and friends by accepting the R&B artist back in her life.”
HollywoodLife
accused her of
“telling young people everywhere that domestic abuse is healthy” and sending a “toxic message”; they quoted a self-help author who claimed that “She’s setting a terrible example because we know there is a high amount of abuse in teenage and adolescent relationships. They are going to follow her lead.”

Yes, dating Chris Brown was a bad idea. But this is strikingly unfair. Rihanna was called crazy for leaving Chris Brown, and called crazy for staying with him; there was no way out of the condemnation, no matter which route she took, and the actual abusive man in question was let off the hook for his choices in both scenarios. Rather than Chris Brown having a responsibility not to abuse women, it was always Rihanna’s responsibility not to
be
abused—and, no matter what she did, she was always blamed for any abuse that did or could happen.

The strange thing is, relationships like hers don’t go against the script about the woman who only exists to be related to, who disappears the moment a man isn’t interested: They’re a literal and faithful read. The romantic trope of the woman who only cares about her boyfriend and the horror-movie trope of the woman who only cares about her ex-boyfriend are more or less the same woman; she becomes wonderful or terrible depending on how the man in
question feels about her. But that same script doesn’t give a woman any excuses for walking away. She’s supposed to stay until he’s done with her and die (or at least commit to invisibility) when he leaves. And it turns out that, when she does just that, she’s also turned into a punch line.

Simply because we’ve been taught to value men’s voices over and above women’s, our natural response to a woman’s claims of violence is to see her as delusional (she can’t perceive the real story) or unstable (she can’t handle the real story) or just plain frightening (she knows the real story, but she’s out to get him). Which means that a tremendous number of female stories—perhaps the most urgent and enlightening ones, the stories we most need to hear—have been shut down or silenced. Or it means that women have silenced themselves, believing that if they ever truly admitted what they were going through, they would sound crazy.

She did come out eventually, Charlotte. She let people know that she was a woman. She even let people know which woman she was; attended parties (Thackeray hosted a few), became a part of the literary scene. She waited until her sisters Anne and Emily had died, and eventually wrote a preface, letting people know their names, and how much she had loved them, and the conditions of their lives.

“We did not like to declare ourselves women, because—without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing
and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine’—we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice,” wrote the woman who’d once been told that literature could never be a woman’s profession. “We had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise.”

It was then, nearly ten years into her career, that Charlotte Brontë published her final novel,
Villette
. It was the account of a young woman named Lucy—not particularly pretty, not particularly wealthy, socially awkward—who is forced to make her way by teaching at a girls’ school in a French-speaking country much like Belgium. She hates it there. She’s lonely, isolated, so desperate that she goes into a Catholic church and makes confession, a sin in piety she cannot forgive herself. But, at this school, she meets a professor—a short, ugly, angry man; a man of power as to mind, but very choleric and irritable in temperament—and they fall in love. Notwithstanding the interference of the vile headmistress, an evil woman who wants the professor all to herself, he loves her back, wholeheartedly, and they are engaged to be wed. Nevertheless, they are separated, when he must go across the sea. And yet, Brontë writes, the separation of this young woman and her adored professor does have one consolation:

By every vessel he wrote; he wrote as he gave and he loved, in full-handed, full-hearted plenitude. He wrote because
he liked to write; he did not abridge, because he liked not to abridge. He sat down, he took pen and paper, because he loved Lucy and had much to say to her; because he was faithful and thoughtful, tender and true
.

Well: Constantin didn’t write. He didn’t seem to give or love much, either. He was neither faithful nor thoughtful, not tender and not true. And he brought Charlotte Brontë to her knees.

But when she finally gave up on the hope that he might write to her, something else began. Something far more important. We all know how
Jane Eyre
ends:
Reader, I married him
, etc. But what most people miss is the fact that the most important word of that sentence is not “married.” The real payoff comes far earlier. It feels so natural that most people miss it entirely. They don’t realize that it was the most impossible part of the sentence to imagine, or to achieve. So consider the triumph—the sheer, improbable triumph—in that one word. In the fact that, after everything that was torn up, tossed in the garbage, frozen out, laughed at, lectured against, she still got you. Look past him, married, look past
I
. Look to yourself:
Reader
.

3

MADNESS

When I was twelve years old, I concocted a plan to win over the cool kids at my school by having the coolest, funniest Halloween costume at their party. Other girls were going as witches, or kitty cats. Boys would be zombies—a little fake blood, it was easy. Not me. I wanted to get creative with my monster.