Red Pepper » Mel Evans

Classic book: The Bell Jar

admin — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 10:00:32 +0000

I first read The Bell Jar aged 16, eyes glued to the page until 3am. Judging from the discussions around the 50th anniversary of its publication, and of Sylvia Plath’s death, I’m not the only one. The central character, Esther Greenwood, set a new standard in fictional heroines: honest, cutting, and disillusioned, with a dark, dry wit. Plath wanted to write high art and pop art at the same time, and the novel’s enduring, intergenerational appeal demonstrates her success.
Readers argue over how far to read the novel as autobiography. For those hungry for more from a profound writer who died so young, seeing the book as the ‘truth’ of Plath’s experience offers some kind of answer to her suicide. Others reject this as over-simplifying and urge allowing the character Greenwood to exist more freely as Plath’s careful creation. Either way, The Bell Jar provides a stark portrait of 1950s America’s options for young (white) women, and conveys the conditions that 1960s second wave feminism (mainly centred on the experience of white women) rose in response to.
Esther Greenwood is torn between modelling herself on Doreen the sexy slut or Betsy the wholesome virgin. She is disgusted by the lifestyles of affluent young women, as someone who had never been to a restaurant before spending the summer on a writer’s scholarship in New York – that in fact funnels the young women into secretarial work or marriage rather than nurturing their creative paths. Esther compares her own incarceration in a mental health clinic to the restrictions on young women like her in the outside world: ‘What was there about us, in Belsize [hospital], so different from the girls playing bridge and gossiping and studying in the college to which I would return? Those girls, too, sat under bell jars of a sort.’
Plath lays bare the connections between society’s norms and oppressions and her protagonist’s journey through suicidal depression. Esther repeats how it is various things around her that ‘made me sick’. Esther’s rejection of being told that ‘what a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from’ crystallises Plath’s critical analysis of 1950s US patriarchy as stifling, suffocating and indeed sickening. Esther instead notes that she ‘wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the coloured arrows from a 4th of July rocket’, but the barriers to her doing that are clearly internalised nonetheless.
I first came to read this book because it was on the A-Level curriculum, with a young teacher drawing out the finer points of feminist critique for the class. Plath lacked role models herself, but certainly raised expectations of female characters for other women readers. Amidst the 50th-anniversary debates some Plath fans fantasise over who would Sylvia be if she were a young woman today.
Some imagine her as a fervent blogger dissecting the world she sees post-radical feminism, post riot grrrl, post Prozac. Maybe links would be drawn to the impact of current cuts to Disability Living Allowance to people with mental health problems like Plath, who made little money as a writer while she was living. Or perhaps in 2013, after numerous backlashes against gains made by feminist movements, and women still suffering issues like the large pay gap and the 6 per cent conviction rate in rape cases, the outlook for women is simply another kind of depressing.
With the recent release of the anniversary edition has come a new cover and a new controversy over the meaning and purpose of the book. Faber & Faber’s original 1966 cover design, by Shirley Tucker, is a dizzying set of concentric circles, but the new edition is the reflection in a compact mirror of a woman powdering her face (see above for both). Fatema Ahmed in the London Review of Books rightly challenged this switch in focus: ‘The anniversary edition fits into the depressing trend for treating fiction by women as a genre, which no man could be expected to read and which women will only know is meant for them if they can see a woman on the cover.’ F&F contends that the ‘mass appeal’ design could bring in new readers – and it is selling fast.
Several editions of The Bell Jar have covers showing a young woman staring back at the reader. Well, read her, hear her, and share the book with others who might find solace or new understanding in this novel of a young woman’s battle with patriarchy, exquisitely described. I’ll leave it to readers of this review to act on widening the readership of such an important novel, significant to history, feminism, and the potential for political organising of understanding the roots of depression.
If I were to compare The Bell Jar to contemporary literature, perhaps The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie comes closest. In telling of the restricted situation Nigerian women find themselves in now, socially and politically, it is akin to Plath’s rendering of the predicament of white women in 1950s in the US. Plath is held in rightful renown and her story resonates today.

Athenian nights

admin — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 10:00:53 +0000

Hot off the press – well, if it had been printed – comes this sharply recorded reportage from Athens. It’s only available as an ebook, which is why we can read it sooner after it was written. So if you didn’t feel equipped to head over to Greece but want a flavour of the action fresh from the scene, here’s your opportunity. And if you’ve been following news from the mainstream media, here’s the under‑story you knew you were missing.
Discordia is a witty, fast-paced whip round Athens, summer 2012, wonderfully visualised by Molly Crabapple with striking, dreamy illustrations (as you can see here), and superbly narrated by Laurie Penny with her crisp, incisive delivery. Having taken as inspiration Hunter S Thompson and Ralph Steadman’s 1970s writer-illustrator collaboration, Penny and Crabapple follow the established form with interviews at parties in the dawn hours and insights into their friendship, while at the same time turning it on its head to comment on the reception of their work as women, and the requisite additional ‘swagger’ they find they need to get the job done.
The playing out of the past four years of Greek struggle is told in part through deaths. In 2008, the police murder of 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos sparked the initial uprisings. In April this year, 77-year-old Dmitris Christoulas’s suicide tells of the shift from visceral anger to total despair. He shot himself in one of the most central Athens public spaces, Syntagma Square, leaving this note: ‘The government has annihilated all traces for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone paid for with no help from the state . . . I believe that young people with no future will one day take up arms and hang the traitors of this country at Syntagma Square, just like the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945.’
The ebook permits an appealing brightness to the images that would be costly in print, and the writing manages to combine all the freshness of blogging with the space for narrative threads that a book allows. From anti-racism demonstrations, to the empty offices of the national left newspaper, to nihilistic parties, Discordia makes connections to the Occupy movement, the Arab uprisings and the English riots of 2011. It warns of the rise of neo-fascism amidst withdrawal of almost any social provision. Smart, sweaty, and humorous, this is a trip to Athens well worth making – and you can get there fast online.
The two illustrations on this page are by Molly Crabapple and are taken from the book.

The M word

admin — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 14:00:39 +0000

Alison Bechdel’s cartoon strip, now a collected works, Dykes To Watch Out For, established her as a cult hero. It went on to win the cartoonist international acclaim for her laugh-out-loud, mesmerising soap-opera comic following the lives, loves and political struggles of an endearing team of North American lesbians. Begun in a pre-L Word era, it set out in uncharted territory, imagining that: ‘By drawing the everyday lives of women like me, I hoped to make lesbians more visible . . . if only people could see us, how could they help but love us?!’
Are You My Mother? explores theories of the ‘mother-daughter’ gulf by considering the writer’s own childhood. Bechdel brings in theory on the effects of the initial stages of the mother-child relationship, ultimately reaching an understanding that embraces her own experience. The book follows Fun Home as a second memoir that seeks to understand Bechdel’s family and thereby herself.
Bechdel examines the work of Virginia Woolf and the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott to shed theoretical and narrative light on care and dependence. She provides the reader with a handy map of her life in girlfriends and therapists – invaluable reference points – as she draws together a web of dreams and experience to make careful conclusions about how she understands her mother and their ways of relating to each other.
The book left me refreshed by the journey Bechdel takes the reader on through her life and others. She mixes sharp humour and an enamouring reflective process to create cartoons that convey nuanced relationships, all in a concise and stunningly beautiful monochrome and blood-red graphic novel.
Not for the faint-hearted, Are You My Mother? is a long, cross-continent road trip in soul-searching. But it isn’t navel-gazing: each page contains a funny, delightful detail in character observation, and as a whole, perhaps more so than Bechdel’s other ‘cult faves’, this work has the potential to resonate with a wider audience.

Classic book: Woman on the Edge of Time – A utopia of resistance

admin — Wed, 02 May 2012 14:57:17 +0000

A journey through resistance and revolution, Woman on the Edge of Time expresses the personal in the political by exploring the body as a site of resistance. Like many of Marge Piercy’s page‑turning works of fiction, her well-crafted narrative is led by affectionately observed and likeably flawed characters. Piercy gives space in her work to women’s experiences and relationships, often, as in this novel, to queer women and women of colour.
Woman on the Edge of Time depicts parallel stories: 1970s New York, where incidents will fate a potentially utopic or dystopic future, and the year 2137.
Piercy’s utopia elaborates on contemporary political and scientific experiments in horizontal living/organising and computer technology. No one bears children and male‑bodied people produce milk. Pronouns are non‑gendered and every child has three co-mothers until they turn 13 and pick their own name, off in the forest.
Everyone’s in functional polyamorous relationships. Each has a room of their own, creating a rhizomatic network of closely related individuals, with no nuclear or hierarchical relationships, intimate or familial. We meet a young teenager playing a harp to a room of sleeping babies. For the big party, everyone gets dressed up in fabulous Gaga-esque biodegradable outfits. Neighbouring communities consider their respective needs and debate until consensus on how to live with each other and the land. It’s delightfully politically idyllic.
Is this the utopia I would go for? Well, in many ways no. Utopic visions are only useful insofar as they shed critical light on the present and open imaginative space around alternative futures. They will always have limitations, and Piercy’s future utopia of Mattapoissett has its flaws.
The utopia is brought to us via the dreams and hallucinations of Consuelo Ramos, incarcerated in a New York hospital mental health ward. Connie is tough and hurting, imprisoned when she needs to be supported, abandoned to a place potentially more life-threatening than the one she inhabited before. Piercy does not create a utopic vision as a polemic, but as a counterpoint in constant dialogue with the experience of individuals marginalised in a capitalist society. She does not use this utopia to tantalise or drug the reader but rather as a tool to critique social crises of the present. Her science fiction delights in technological potential while also questioning medicine turned technically tyrannical.
Connie is a Hispanic woman, poor and sidelined. She retains a deep warmth and care for her unreliable niece, and nurtures the strength in the women around her on the psych ward. Here we meet resistance to oppression in their sheer resilience to physical violence. Connie and her ward-mates fight against the doctors’ abusive scientific experiments as the people of utopic Mattapoisett hold off the encroachment of the corporations’ attack at the frontiers of their enclosure.
Connie’s initial reaction to Piercy’s utopia as depicted in Mattapoisett lets loose the potential disgust in the reader for this seemingly new-age hippy commune, which in fact shows itself to be a highly organised, technologically developed community that Connie grows to trust, embrace and be nurtured by.
Connie’s passage to Mattapoisett is enabled by time travel sans fancy gadgets, on the arms of genderqueer Luciente, who wears trousers that re-size according to when the wearer gains or loses a few pounds. Where Luciente comes from, people are referred to as per and ze rather than her/him and s/he. Initially Connie reads Luciente as a gay man, and is shocked to find per to be what Connie would consider female-bodied. Piercy’s writing in 1979 might seem trite now after 30 years of trans-activism that has both evolved and disrupted understandings and expressions of gendered bodies, yet her writing is part of that journey.
In this future, racisms of the past (for 2137) are healed into a Benetton-esque blur of under-explored ethnic references. As far as I can see, racisms that oppress to this day stemming from colonialism and slavery will not disappear into casual celebration of cultural differences, but will require a continued critique and struggle against white supremacy, and I would have liked to see some depiction of this process. That the war with the corporations is being fought on the one hand, while white supremacy is somehow fully dismantled on the other, betrays a lack of analysis of the intersection of capitalism and racism.
Nonetheless, the journey with Connie and her ward‑mates empathetically shows the brilliant resilience of a group of women labelled ‘mad’ and facing persecution. Marge Piercy’s writing is to me like a long-awaited afternoon drinking tea with a close friend. Her characters, narratives and sensitive reflections on both intimate relationships and political organising engulf me in a sympathetic critical understanding. She is the most lent-out author on my shelf. With Piercy, do not expect a tidy neat denouement – life rarely offers an easily resolved ending, and neither does she.

Fueling an oily future

emma — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 18:26:27 +0000

BP launched their 2012 Olympics sponsorship advertising campaign in July 2011, just over one year after the 87-day oil spill catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. The re-seduction of public opinion began in televisions, high streets and roadsides across the country. Since the Deepwater Horizon tragedy the BP clean-up has taken place in two dimensions: the seabed, fragile coastal ecology, habitats and livelihoods of the Gulf; and that of its shamed image, justly sullied by a catastrophe caused by its own negligent, cost-cutting behaviour. The opportunity to be seen as a good corporate citizen through its sponsorship of the Olympics is magnificent timing from BP’s perspective.

This sponsorship support is not provided as a form of philanthropy, but as an integral part of engineering the social and political circumstances that will best ensure the long-term security of their investments in oil and gas projects. Approached as an engineering challenge, the corporation tends to see all opposition to its activities as solvable with the appropriate time, capital and techniques.
The construction of an offshore platform is one of the most expensive projects on earth in the 21st century. It can only offer a high return on capital if oil production if maintained over two or three decades. The maintainence of this production is usually threatened by social and political shifts in the countries of extraction. Any such threat to production – or the perception that that threat might exist – can immediately undermine the profitability of a corporation. BP’s share value was almost halved by the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, not because of the potential costs of the oil spill clean up, but because investors were concerned that the company’s future prospects in the US were being undermined by the collapse of support in Washington DC and in the US media.
To guard against any such threat to the company’s value, BP works constantly to engineer its ‘social license to operate’. This is a term widely used in business and government circles and usually applies to the process of engendering support for a company’s activities in the communities who live close to their factories, oil wells and pipelines. However it can shed light on how corporations construct public support far from the places of extraction or manufacture – for example how BP builds support in London and the UK.
In the summer of 2010, a large swathe of the British political establishment called on the White House to ‘stop bashing BP’ – support that assisted the company in persuading President Obama to say on TV: “BP is a strong and viable company and it is in all our interests that it stays that way”. To construct and maintain this support, BP focuses on building a positive image in the eyes of politicians, diplomats, civil servants, journalists, academics, NGO’s and cultural commentators. These groups are known as the ‘special publics’ or ‘clients’ in the public relations industry. Building a supportive attitude within the ‘special publics’ can be done through direct engagement and dialogue, through advertising, and through financial support – funding academic posts at universities, creating programmes in schools, sponsoring culture such as Tate or the British Museum, and financing sports such as the 2012 Olympics.
The BP Olympics advertising includes images of a runner on a pristine beach, calling to mind the Louisiana coastline which remains oil-soaked to this day. The choice of imagery here seems a bit of an oversight by the PR agencies Ogilvy and Landor. The campaign seeks to dress BP in green, making references to BP’s use of biofuels for the Games. Yet only 40 out of 5000 vehicles will use this source that campaign groups argue is unsustainable because it necessitates large scale planting of monoculture crops that wipe out biodiversity, deplete soil and exacerbate world hunger.
The success of the campaign rests not on these details however. Via global media attention the BP brand is associated with the hype, passion and fervent feel-good factors of the biggest international athletics event. This lends the company a guise of social acceptability that enables harmful oil and gas projects the world over. As such, BP extracts what it needs to continue profiting on its investments – a social licence to operate.

For more on BP sponsorship, follow @PlatformLondon on Twitter for their upcoming arts publication ‘Not if but when: Culture Beyond Oil’ and the ‘Tate a Tate’ audio tour.