Guest post by Virginia Konchan
Modern-day treatments of what Jeffrey Eugenides (in honor of Austen) termed the “marriage plot” include post-romantic polemics (Laura Kipnis’ 2004 Against Love), tried and true arguments for biological and gender essentialism, and a pantheon of queer and trans literature, alongside chick lit and a healthy representation of post-romantic, post-9/11 literature that obviates the question of coupling, to say nothing of marriage, all together (e.g. Wells Towers’ Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned). Hollywood continues to churn out variations on the theme, whether representative of market demand, or not, such as the 2013 British rom-com Austenland, directed by Jerusha Hess (an adaptation of Shannon Hale’s novel, based off Pride and Prejudice, about a British resort recreating the Austen era, to fuel the obsession that every single woman’s platonic double—in the person of Mr. Darcy, aloof yet smoldering with passion—awaits us just around the corner).
What has changed radically in the last 100 years is the labor conditions of women, the rites of accreditation and education in a post-industrial society, and, now, the official transition from a post-manufacturing to a service economy job market (for both men and women), in the US, as well as, governmentally, the transition from a welfare to a fully corporatized (i.e. privatized) state. With these changes, we’ve also seen a resurgence of Darwinian logic (every man and woman for him/herself; compete in the free market, or die) that structures all corporate enterprises and industries in global capitalism, with the exception of independently-owned businesses or careers (internally-funded or reliant on patrons, philanthropy, and trustees). A women who chooses to entreprenurialize (work independently, start their own business, or freelance) adjusts not only to the rollercoaster cash flow, as Whitney Johnson, who left Merrill Lynch to co-found Rose Park Advisors with Clay Christensen, in the Harvard Business Review Blog Network, points out, while the recent global downturn fuels the American DIY rhetoric of entrepreneurial activity, such ‘independence’ isn’t always volitional: layoffs abound, and, despite soft stats of “productivity gains,” job creation does not. “Approximately 43 million people, or roughly 35%-40% of the private workforce in the U.S., are currently doing some type of contingent work; this number is expected to grow to 65-70 million within the decade, well ahead of the 1% rate at which the labor force is growing,” Johnson notes, citing research from MBO Partners’ State of Independence in America report, about “independent” U.S. laborers (an individual working 15+ hours per week whether as a freelancer, contractor, or owner of a micro-business): “Stripping out the c. 25 million people who are working part-time and are potentially under-employed, MBO calculates there are currently about 17 million independents,” a statistic expected to increase to 23 million by 2017, based on a 6.3% per year growth rate, that could easily swell to over 30+ million in the next decade as large and small corporations, as well as the government, continue to employ contingent labor (roughly 40% of the workforce is defined currently as contingent labor, and that number is expected to rise).
Blue Jasmine, starring Cate Blanchett, is Woody Allen’s 44th feature film: his protagonist, a divorcee socialite whose ex-husband Hal, played by Alec Baldwin, after amassing millions the Bernie Madoff scandal, is caught, jailed, and commits suicide, differing radically (her options, labor situation, and social roles) from the female ingénue of Annie Hall, the irascible Diane Keaton.
In the movie, Jasmine neé Jeanette (she changes her name midway through her class ascension) struggles to accept her functional unemployment (she has virtually no job skills in a market where you can buy goods, but not survive, on credit) after her divorce, arriving on her working-class stepsister, Ginger’s, doorstep in the Mission District of San Francisco with an equipage of slightly-dented Louis Vuitton luggage, perfectly-coiffed hair, and a desire to begin again (but not before polishing off several stiff martinis with Grey Goose, and rejecting, clearly appalled, the romantic overtures of Ginger’s boyfriend Chili’s working-class friend). The conversation Jasmine has with Ginger (a grocery story clerk) about her legitimate prospects, post-Hal (whose racketeering phoniness render him as computer-like as the Hal of Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey) are nothing short of comedic (I was always good at design, she muses, and decides to take a day job as an assistant in a dental office to pay for online classes in interior decorating).
Her painfully accurate labor skills assessment, doesn’t stop her from catching the eye of a new money tycoon with coastal property. She meets this second alluring husband prospect, played by Peter Sarsgaard, at a party—impressed by her Chanel digs, he asks her out, and she proceeds to play the part of a successful businesswoman to a hilt, offering to design his new home (the following scene has them antiquing together, before looking at engagement rings). The prize, if we follow the moral logic of Blue Jasmine (the rhetoric of American democracy, and the American novel, since The Great Gatsby) goes not necessarily to the hardest worker (Calvinism), smartest thinker (meritocracy) or most monied sophisticate (philistine aristocracy), but the best con-man—or woman: the artful, or artless, swindler with a heart of gold.
An avatar of the classic Hollywood fall from grace, Jasmine may be shallow, as accused by Ginger’s boyfriend, but she also represents a character trying to literally survive, soul intact, by her only means (wit, looks, and wiles). In this, she joins a long legacy of women protagonists, in fiction and film, from Moll Flanders to Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, who become self-reliant only when forced (often through tragedy or loss) and develop character only as a result of learning how to avail themselves (by birth, hook, or crook) of the means of self-cultivation. Jasmine’s life and choices, seen within the Western (and Hollywood) oeuvres of female heroines, from David Lynch’s doppelgangers, to besties escaping, by driving their car off a cliff, abusive spouses—or for Madame Bovary, the ennui of what Jonathan Franzen calls “married person’s (i.e. false) consciousness”—Thelma and Louise—reflects the fact that in today’s contemporary novel, as well as pop culture, our “heroines” have more choices, but they are still often scripted, between has and has nots, or, rather, the woman that has, or does, it all (the 2011 feature film I Don’t Know How She Does It, starring Sarah Jessica Parker), and the woman who bares her struggles publically, usually receiving social grace upon delivering the now-ubiquitous message that celebrities (and royals) are people too.
Whether broadcasting happy-go-lucky debauchery (Chelsea Handler) sexscapades (Paris Hilton), shameless gold-digging (Anna Nicole Simpson), infidelity (Elizabeth Hurley, Sandra Bullock), domestic violence (Rhianna, Halle Berry), addiction (Lindsay Lohan) or the everyday travails common to all women (childbearing, weight gain, divorces, and illness, in the public eye): the more human the portrayal of celebrity (Kate Middleton taking her time—two weeks—as reported in the media, to return to a size O, post-George), the more praise from the public.
Never has the privatization movement sweeping the country been more relevant as an extended metaphor, to domestic security—not for our homeland, but for women. Women receiving federal aid for supporting a child are cut off if living with or married to a man in the States, penalizing a working class woman’s desire to raise a child with the child’s father or other male figure, and making a two-family income, albeit with one income from Uncle Sam, an impossibility: just as, when women marry in many Islamic cultures, they sign off whatever meager state rights to protection they had, even if their husband harms, rapes, or enslaves them (husbands are allowed to beat their wives and children as long as they don’t leave any physical marks, an Islamic court in the United Arab Emirates ruled in 2010), women in a precarious labor situation not married to an employed man, in a privatized state, survive off either her parents, or the state.
The stress of financial survival, in late capitalism, trumps life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, in a shrinking labor (and marriage) market. In the former, journalist and cultural critics have noted, in the last several years, a new glass ceiling erected—entry-level and service industry jobs (adjunct professorships, advertising, sales) and the educational opportunities to obtain those positions abound. Women aren’t being hired for executive positions in a variety of fields, with obvious exceptions (New Zealand, Grenada, Barbados, and Andorra all have or have had female heads of state), and despite efforts of democratic governments to encourage large companies to recruit more senior women, only four out of the 87 chief executives appointed by FTSE 100 companies in the past two years were female, as a representative statistic, in the UK. The Count by VIDA, documentaries such as Miss Representation, and other reports on the dearth of authorial and executive parity between men and women in the U.S. workplace underscore the facts: but while the “new glass ceiling” for women may indeed be prevailing, media-driven misogyny, and a restructuring of service economy jobs, even in senior positions, or internalized and externalized locked doors to design, IT, and engineering fields, the fact remains that, as Gail Becker said in the Huffington Post, “firsts” set a precedent that can then be modeled for other women, as relationship and cultural standards (equality and freedom from abuse, violence, and intimidation), codified laws, and hiring authorities. “Frankly, I look forward to the end of that necessary prepositional clause — a time when we don’t need to define someone by the barrier they broke. But until that day, my commas are standing by, ready to remember those who helped tear away barriers for me.”
The question of what women want may have been contemporized in the Victorian era by Freud, but in the “marriage plot” of fictional narratives, the question of what women want (beyond survival), is not only still being played out, but is also the recurrent theme of literary fiction-cum-life, from in the trope of Pygmalion or Narcissus, wherein a man seeks a woman he can form either to his image, or as an extension of his ego, in master-muse couplings (Svengali and Trilby, George Balanchine and Tanaquil Le Clercq, Coco Chanel and Étienne Balsan, Zelda Fitzgerald and F. Scott, Frieda Kahlo and Diego Rivera) to a pop culture flick like Bride Wars or the cultic sensation (book-turned-movie) Eat, Pray, Love.
Utne Reader claims to have captured “unfiltered snapshot of human desire” in images and videos of shemales in prom dresses, Twilight slash Edward and Jacob, black meat on white street, wives caught cheating on cam, best romance novels with alpha heroes, Kendra Wilkinson sex tape, spanking stories, free gay video tube, Jake Gyllenhaal without shirt, and girls gone wild orgies, in their latest feature, “21st Century Sex” (“In 1991,” the editors report, “the year the World Wide Web went online, there were fewer than 90 different adult magazines published in America. Just six years later, there were about 900 pornography sites on the web. Today, there are 2.5 million adult websites. It’s hard to imagine a more revolutionary development in the history of human sexuality. With a visit to an adult video site like PornHub, you can see more naked bodies in a single minute than the most promiscuous Victorian would have seen in an entire lifetime.”) However statistically “accurate,” all the authors of this spread convey is, as they say, a snapshot or image, not a theory, or embodied experience of mutual vulnerabilities, compelling truths, or even a fulfilled ideal.
For gay, straight, transgendered, single, and married women, the wide-ranging choices that now exist as careers, relative to, after the factory jobs were repossessed by returned soldiers, 50s post-war domesticity (or secretarial work), and, prior to that, spinsterhood or domestic “security” (as a recent female New Yorker cartoon character put it to her husband in bed: “I prefer the illusion of safety to the appearance of privacy”), provide options beyond the binary of marriage-cum-financial survival and self-fulfillment through career (Harlequin romance plots aside).
This leaves all subjects of neoliberalism, particularly women, in a precarious position, or, simply forced again to choose between a career in a helping profession, or, if lucky (possessing liquid capital or loan accreditation), entrepreneurial activity. As Jasmine discovered before it was too late, the labor market and the marriage market are not meritocracies, and even the top 1% are subject to market trends (and human fickleness): women not independently wealthy must labor to survive, like men, either in a career or in a form of domestic or sexual service, to a husband, or children, or both. What’s needed now is not just rooms, but salaries of our own, in careers that don’t bottom out upon our advancement within them, and marriages that don’t bottom out when the human commodity (the wife) reaches her shelf life in consumer capitalism (i.e. mature age). “Should Sancho Panza, Oroonoko, Moll Flanders, Frankenstein’s monster, Queenqueg, Tom, Lily Bart, Josef K.., Lolita, and Om, in A Fine Balance, really have no say in their own fates?” asks Jane Smiley in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, broadening the question of whether women are entitled to or even societally able to pursue their own teleological, self-designed, ends without bearing the stamp of manufacture from a family, husband, or employer.
To say women must either have a career and self-actualize, or be conscripted into marriage, and produced (either in Hollywood, literary publishing, or by a husband, father figure, or male boss), is not meant to be an embittered perspective, but realism. The irony of state capitalism wherein the state is the corporation is the forced choice, for women as well as companies, between privatization (domestic privatization, through marriage) and state-sponsorship (for women, through welfare, parental dependence, or employment). Second-wave feminism gave women the educational and career opportunities to choose between marriage and work (and between kids and no kids, abortion and carrying an unplanned pregnancy to term): the aporias of post-feminism today (academic/Marxist/psychoanalytic/cyber) are largely a result of a surplus of opportunities for education (buying a degree on loans) but fewer and fewer for salaried jobs with benefits that would allow one to live out one’s actual dreams and desires without indebtedness to a family, husband, or loan shark. The awakenings that arise upon this realization are delayed when many cultural analysts are working in what Cathy Wagner calls the “sharecropper estate” of the wage-labor academy themselves, and through smoke-and-mirrors wars (i.e. forced invasions of the Middle East) that detract our country’s ability to create new jobs, restructure corrupt institutions, and reroute systems of taxation and allocation of government funds.
Only when women realize there is no master signifier, or narrative (including that of a soul mate or perfect career, let alone, in this market, a wage-earning job) that can override our most basic human need: to learn to do, ourselves, what we need to not just survive, but live fulfilling lives without relying (unconsciously, through projected fantasies) on magical thinking about a husband- or state-protectorate to save us from the admittedly volatile free market (disaster-capitalism as our economic “reality” in lieu of the viable alternatives, or at least practice of conscious-capitalism, women and men are in the process of creating today).
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Virginia Konchan’s poems have appeared in Best New Poets, The Believer, The New Yorker, and The New Republic, her criticism in Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, Quarterly Conversation, Barzakh Magazine, and Boston Review, and her fiction in StoryQuarterly and Joyland, among other places. The recipient of grants and fellowships to Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, Ox-Bow, and Vermont Studio Center, Virginia is co-founder of Matter, a journal of poetry and political commentary. Currently, she is pursuing her PhD in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
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