The Bitch Is Back

The Bitch Is Back

by Sarah Appleton Aguiar

I have spent some time staring at the cover of Sarah Appleton Aguiar’s The Bitch Is Back. The word ‘bitch’ is fracturing in white over a dull background of maroon and black, four times the size of any other word. Are the blocky cubes at its edges vestiges of quotation marks, or a knowing pointer to Elton John for the pop-savvy reader? Are they gestures to irony? Are they?

Sarah Appleton Aguiar has written a book proclaiming the return of "that vital woman, empowered with anger, wit, ruthless survival instincts – the bitch" into the pages of contemporary fiction. The slim volume seems aimed at a readership somewhere between English Literature (of which Aguiar is assistant professor), and Women’s Studies – and aims, through discussion of a medley of literary texts, to analyse the problem that the bitch has posed for feminists, and for feminist novelists in particular. After all, as Margaret Atwood was asking in 1994 "is it not, today – well, somehow unfeminist – to depict a woman behaving badly?".

Aguiar’s argument is that the ‘second wave’ of feminist writers were so keen to present female characters who provided rich and edifying role models that they shied away from the potent stock figure of the wicked woman. "Alas, what happened to the village gossips, calculating gold diggers, merciless backstabbers, sinful sirens, evil stepmothers, deadly daughters, twisted hags, bags, and crones?" And, beyond the realm of fairy-tale, where were the Gertrudes and Gonerils, the Scarlett O’Haras and Miss Havershams, in the earnest successes of female writers of the sixties and seventies? Her criticism of these writers is that they tended to portray "scores of virtuous victims of oppression"; and that the characters they created were, frankly, rather dull. After all, as many readers of Jane Austen have observed, it is Lizzie Bennet’s flaws that make her lovable as well as complex. Mary Crawford would make a far more entertaining dinner companion than worthy little Fanny Price – and to the extent that we are asked to pretend otherwise, Mansfield Park is the most ‘difficult’ of Austen’s novels.

Analysis of more than a hundred literary texts leads Aguiar to the conclusion that the ‘bitch’ is far from being merely a product of a distorting male imagination. Many of the most terrifying female characters in literature have been dreamed up by women – from the "sadistic and torturous" Miss Minchin in Frances Burnett’s children’s classic, A Little Princess, to the "enormously malignant" Rebecca in Du Maurier’s eponymous novel. Does this prove that female authors have subscribed to oppressive or patriarchal paradigms about the way in which women are supposed to behave? Aguiar prefers to believe that "the bitch’s ubiquitous presence in all – not just male-written literature – attests to her lasting endurance": this character, she suggests, is a key Jungian archetype ("the woman dominated by animus"), and not a figure who can be so lightly written out of literary history. Her study ends with a celebration of the ‘return of the bitch’ in the work of contemporary feminist writers, focusing closely on two recent novels – Toni Morrison’s Paradise, and Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.

The distinction between the practice of ‘second wave’ and contemporary feminist writers frames this book, and seems to me both interesting and plausible. The final section, ‘Syzygy’ provides detailed analysis of two books that Aguiar sees as symptomatic of recent practice – Toni Morrison’s Paradise and Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride – both books where "the bitch is found to have vital existence". Aguiar is clearly well-acquainted with Margaret Atwood’s fiction and her critical pronouncements; the latter, in fact, become a key motif threading through the book. And, it strikes me, Aguiar’s reading of The Robber Bride, is interesting precisely to the extent that her approach coincides with, or derives from, Atwood’s own. So, there is a logic behind discussing the four female characters as representative of "the four structural forms of female archetypes: Amazon, Mother, Medium, and Hetaira" because Atwood is herself a writer working within this tradition of Jungian typology. To the reader of Margaret Atwood who is unversed in Jung, Aguiar may be a useful guide – particularly to the reader who is interested in questions of intentionality.

The reader who wants literary criticism or evaluation of The Robber Bride, however, would be better advised to look elsewhere. Aguiar’s approach to reading characters, deftly achieved though it may be, falls far short of providing a thorough reading of texts. We might consider, as an example, a sentence that comes at the end of Aguiar’s discussion of The Robber Bride: "Yet, this time, Zenia’s machinations are boringly transparent". The word ‘boringly’, if intended as literary criticism, would usually be inflected in the writer’s direction – suggesting that the novel’s ending was dully or mechanistically achieved; that Atwood had not managed to make Zenia a continually engaging character. Aguiar, however, is always more interested in questions of morality than technique: her criticism is directed not at Atwood as writer, but Zenia as character – as someone who has failed, all along, to truly possess the female "life force".

Aguiar’s desire to read characters rather than texts is the problem that haunts this book; at least from the standpoint of literary criticism. I find it hard to see how anyone could expect to be able to treat a hundred and thirty texts within as many pages (and among these, King Lear, Madame Bovary, Heart of Darkness ...) and find something of interest to say about any of them. Hard even to see how anyone could intimately know this number of canonical works. The two central chapters (‘The Male Perspective’ and ‘Women Reading and Writing the Bitch’) offer us a lightning tour through literary history by positing a typology of female character types – from ‘the femme fatale’, via ‘the domineering shrew’ to ‘the devouring mother’. Texts are introduced in one or two sentences; invoked in support of a particular point; and then abandoned in the pursuit of system-building and classification. Inevitably, factual mistakes occur, as when Aguiar refers throughout to ‘Lady’ Caroline Bingley, in Pride and Prejudice. More frequently, complex texts are reduced to crude formulas – "In Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, for example, Serena Merle, is condemned far more in the novel than is the self-serving, villainous Gilbert Osmond". Frequently the writing is ugly: "the self-desexed Miss Havisham uses her seemingly elemental knowledge of the masculine in her overtly developed animus to expertly train Estella as an apprentice who will manipulate Pip...". Can you bear me to continue?
To judge The Bitch Is Back by the standards of traditional literary criticism – with its aims of reflectiveness, ‘close reading’, and generosity to the text – is in some ways unhelpful. The problem is perhaps more with presentation than content: the book has been dressed up, with a few rhetorical flourishes, as literary criticism, when all its impulses lie elsewhere. In this respect, the first full chapter (‘To Arche the Type or Not to Arche the Type’) seems the most honest: Aguiar is here explicitly setting up her intellectual project, which is "feminist revision of Jungian archetypal theory". As a contribution to a closed dialogue conducted among feminist Jungians The Bitch Is Back becomes immediately a more respectable and understandable piece of work – although not one with a very broad appeal.

To a reader outside this tradition, however, Aguiar’s methodology is awkward in the extreme. In support of her project, Aguiar quotes Bettina Knapp on the value of an archetypal criticism "which takes the literary work out of its individual and conventional context and relates it to humankind in general". It does not seem to occur to her that many readers – not only committed historicists – might think this a Bad Idea; that to this common reader it makes little sense to discuss Jean Rhys by saying "In Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette/ Bertha has a chance to tell her own story", as if Charlotte Bronte’s invention, Bertha, had some independent and permanent existence beyond the pages of Jane Eyre. A reader who is not a Jungian is, after all, unlikely to believe that the characters in a novel, any more than its descriptions of the weather, or average length of sentences have any ‘reality’; any ability to be separated from the rest of the text. This need not, I think, mean that Jungian criticism is uninteresting to anyone who is not a full-blown subscriber: but one might wish that, if she does want to engage with a broader discipline, Aguiar were more theoretically self-conscious, more aware that her own beliefs are – if not quite cranky – at least unusual among modern critics. Annis Pratt (to whom Aguiar refers a good deal), and who may be considered pretty much the godmother of this type of criticism was, in 1981, much more theoretically ruminative and explanatory – "I want to reiterate the pragmatic basis of my approach...A dogmatic insistence upon preordained, invariable sets of archetypal patterns would distort literary analysis...".

Aguiar would have strengthened her overarching argument, which makes a fine distinction between ‘second wave’ feminist writers and contemporary practice, if she had been willing to plump for the pragmatism of close reading, rather than hazy schematization. In a world where readers and writers emerge from ever more disparate theoretical backgrounds, it is surely this broad commitment to close and careful reading that keeps ‘Eng. Lit.’ as a valuable umbrella term. And I suspect that the odd pair of quotation marks - a dollop of light-heartedness, a soupcon of irony - would have made this polemical book a little less "stone cold sober as a matter of fact".

by Hannah Sullivan

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