Elizabeth Wurtzel
Doubleday
April 1, 1998
434 pages
Buy the paperback at bn.com
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Elizabeth Wurtzel's
Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women has absorbed more
critical venom than any book since, well, Elizabeth Wurtzel's
Prozac Nation. Even allowing for the fact that I am genetically
programmed to like what everyone else hates (and vice versa),
I've never understood Wurtzelphobia. What is it about this woman
that causes reviewers to react as if biting on tin foil? My guess
is that it's envy of her youth, her looks, her Harvard background,
and her disconcerting way of reminding people that a woman can
have all these advantages and still be as miserable as dog shit
in the rain. She is also not one to tone down her melodramatic
self-absorption, which is why critics slammed Prozac Nation
and I admired it. I like Wurtzel for the same reason that I like
Caroline Knapp (and her continuing adventures of Alice K. in
the Boston Phoenix) -- it takes guts to be this up-front
about how fucked-up you are.
While Bitch is dotted with autobiographical anecdotes
in support of one thesis or another, it's not nearly as solipsistic
as Wurtzel's freshman effort. Rather, it's a breezy and potato-chip-readable
survey of pop culture as it relates to demonized women. As a
much-maligned woman herself, Wurtzel must feel uniquely qualified
to muse on her fellow, well, bitches. Wurtzel doesn't use the
word in an empowering way, the way some women claim it for themselves;
she abstracts it, burrows around inside it, projects it onto
some of the most infamous females in recent (or ancient) history
and explains why the label never quite fits.
This isn't a man-bashing book, so male readers can relax. Indeed,
Wurtzel can be withering on the stupidity specific to women (which
often goes hand in hand with the stupidity specific to men, so
that one feeds off the other). Occasionally you'll hear a plaintive
refrain on the order of "We're smarter than this! After
decades of feminism, we're still fucking ourselves over?"
She writes viciously about Mary Jo Buttafuoco (while defending
Amy Fisher); she looks askance at Nicole Brown Simpson's family,
whose airheaded nonchalance, she suggests, may have helped tip
the jury in O.J.'s favor. Wurtzel bashes everyone -- the
cultural observer as misanthrope -- but the book is suffused
with compassion for most of her subjects, along with a fair amount
of envy. Wurtzel wants to be courageous enough to be bad and
assaultive, to really earn hatred instead of being the object
of hatred simply because of her gender.
Bitch is divided into five sections, of which the best
is far and away "There She Goes Again," Wurtzel's meditation
on literary psycho-bitches (Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath) and the
suicidal mindset in general. Having been there (almost) and done
that (or tried to), Wurtzel writes with chilling accuracy about
the most impossible women of all -- the ones who seemingly have
it all and piss it away, consciously floor it towards their own
destruction. Perhaps not coincidentally, such women tend to be
brilliant and creative -- the inevitable madness that arises
from being a female genius in a man's, man's, man's world?
Then again, male artists don't have such hot psychological track
records either -- and Kurt Cobain is dead while Courtney
Love hung in there. Wurtzel notes that male insanity
tends to be outer-directed (hello, Unabomber), while female mental
illness is generally inner-directed (self-mutilation, eating
disorders, etc.) -- even the things they do to hurt others also
hurt themselves. The section on Plath and Sexton is appropriately
the middle section, at the heart of Wurtzel's 434-page odyssey
through the public lives of difficult women and their private
demons. Everything else in the book seems to proceed from Plath
and Sexton, though Wurtzel goes all the way back to Biblical
bitches, too.
At its best, Bitch is a highly engaging and well-written
pop-culture binge on the level of Stephen King's Danse Macabre
(still my all-time favorite bathroom reading) and David Denby's
recent, shamefully overlooked Great Books. I've admired
Wurtzel's style ever since her pop-music-article days at the
New Yorker, and she'll flit from topic to topic, reversing
herself, trying to make herself clear ("What I'm trying
to get across is..." turns up again and again), and then
she'll knock off a beautiful sentence like "Suicide, like
death itself, is of necessity not a coherent construct to anyone
still living." That one has an elegant heft to it, as does
this observation about famous self-destructive women: "These
women, rich with interpretive possibility, become mental-health
pornography once dead."
Wurtzel's book isn't without flaw. I was surprised to read that
Stanley Kubrick directed One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,
and her chapter on Nicole Brown Simpson -- with its theories
about why women stay in abusive relationships (many women secretly
crave pain because they can't feel anything else, blah blah)
-- will strike many as stupid the way Camille Paglia's social
criticism strikes many as stupid. Still, even in its bumpy and
unconvincing moments this is a fascinating read. Among other
things, Wurtzel demands the right to fill a whole book with her
self-referencing, often questionable breakdowns of female behavior.
There she is on the cover, topless, her middle finger raised
and forming the "I" in BITCH. Wurtzel, self-absorbed
but not self-loving, may ironically define herself as a bitch,
but I don't. I hope she honors her demons just enough to remain
an interesting writer, but not enough to succumb to them and
follow the ghosts of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton into bad-girl
hell. |
