Walker Evans, Truck & Sign, 1930
“I said that a fallen woman should be forgiven, but I did not say that I could forgive her. I can’t.”
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
In a book review for The New Yorker, Elif Batuman lamented, “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s when characters living out some fantasy (adulterous or promiscuous women, for example) are subjected by the author to horrible punishments, intended to show that nobody gets away with it.” From Flaubert’s Madame Bovary to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, male writers have cemented the trope of the fallen woman as tragic figure. Early feminist novelists have also contributed to this canon of irreputable ladies, including Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, and Colette.
I confess that I am a little bit obsessed with this sub-genre, which I affectionately refer to as “slut lit.” Cataloguing stories about pleasure-seeking women can be traced back to my years as a twenty-something simultaneously attempting to date and find steady work. From my reading, I was reminded that being single and financially independent was a type of freedom not afforded to the majority of women in history. The inevitably tragic outcomes of heroines like Lily Bart and Edna Pontellier, either outcasted or trapped by the institution of marriage, have as much to do with romance as they do money and legal rights. And women who transgress, or have been perceived to do so, are indeed often subject to punishment in both literature and life.
For so long, marriage defined the behavior of women. It was the only way “to have a sex life that was socially sanctioned,” according to author Rebecca Traister in an interview with feminist writer Jessica Valenti. Traister argues in her new book, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, that the rules are being rewritten. The demise of the old model — what she refers to as the binary of “single life vs married life” — means infinite possibilities for women:
It may lead them to happiness, unhappiness, partnership, solitude, may lead them to sex, celibacy and messes of all these things intertwined with each other: women who have promiscuous sex lives, women who have lives who are not having sex for years or at all, women who are in monogamous relationships, women who get married early, late, women who divorce, women who marry other women, women who have children before marriage, women who have children and wind up raising them with friends.
We see women writers reclaiming the “slut” — from a cheating wife exiled for following her heart to an aging courtesan who dies penniless — female characters whose limited choices ultimately lead to their demise. She is recast as a girl coming of age, as a queer woman, as a woman of color discovering herself; not just a cautionary tale but as someone hot-blooded and real.
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From Light on Dark Corners: A complete sexual science and guide to purity by B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols (1895).
I said that she had acted like a saint, but that since I was living in this real world I had really wanted just a mother. I reminded her that my whole upbringing had been devoted to preventing me from becoming a slut; I then gave a brief description of my personal life, offering each detail as evidence that my upbringing had been a failure and that, in fact, life as a slut was quite enjoyable, thank you very much.
— Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy
Kincaid’s portrait of a budding artist focuses on a young woman who leaves her home in the West Indies to become an au pair for a wealthy white family in an American city. Lucy’s immigrant perspective offers sharp observations not only about class and cultural differences but also what it means to be a woman. Mariah, the wife and mother of the family Lucy works for, represents a respectable yet suffocating kind of femininity, echoed in Lucy’s upbringing. Her burgeoning sexuality eventually compels her to break from her mother’s hypocrisy, and to seize her independence.
1930’s Teen Delinquents, Estonia.
It goes on in the disreputable quarter of Cholon, every evening. Every morning the little slut goes to have her body caressed by a filthy Chinese millionaire. And she goes to the French high school, too, with the little white girls, the athletic little white girls who learn to crawl in the pool at the Sporting Club. One day they’ll be told not to speak to the daughter of the teacher in Sadec any more.
— Marguerite Duras, The Lover
Duras waited quite late in her life to publish the autobiographical novel set in 1920s colonial Vietnam about a 15-year-old French girl’s sexual awakening with a rich, older Chinese man. While we would identify their relationship as rape now, Duras’ narrator leaves us with a conflicting vagueness when it comes to the character’s true feelings regarding the affair. At times passionless, and other times erotic, the writing creates a fogged window into the psyche of this girl-woman coming to grips with her sense of power and voice.
From Todd Haynes’ film, Carol (2015), based on the novel The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith.
At seventeen her mind was still like Madame Tussaud’s Exhibition, with Love, represented by kings and queens in velvet, on the upper floors, and Sex, like the Chamber of Horrors, tucked away underground. Usually she could forget about the basement in rapturous contemplation of the stately tableaux above.
— Mary Renault, The Friendly Young Ladies
Published in 1944, Renault’s comedy of errors with a lesbian/bisexual twist leaves much of the identity politics unspoken. Early on, we’re given few clues about 17-year-old Elsie’s older sister Leo, a writer, who has run away from home. Says their father: “We already have one daughter outside the pale of decent society. If a second finds her way into the demi-monde, believe me, it won’t astonish me.” When Elsie, too, runs away, she finds Leo sharing a houseboat with another young lady, Helen, and they welcome her into their bohemian lifestyle. Beneath all the flirting and missed connections, as men come and go, lies a story about women rebelling against societal expectation. In real life, Renault and her lifelong romantic partner Julie Mullard, a nurse (a possible model for the character of Helen), also had bixsexual relationships with men.
From Ang Lee’s film, Lust, Caution (2007), based on the short story by Eileen Chang.
Madame Liang twisted around, propping her elbow on Weilong’s pillow. “For a woman, there’s nothing more important than her reputation,” she said in a low voice. “When I use the word ‘reputation,’ I mean something a bit different from a dusty old scholar’s idea. These days, people who are even a little bit modern don’t care that much about chastity. When a young lady goes out and mixes at banquets and parties, there’s bound to be a certain amount of gossip. That kind of talk, the more it spreads, the more it stirs up interest, the more it increases your prestige. It certainly won’t harm your future. The one thing that must be avoided at all costs is this: to love someone who doesn’t love you, or who loves you and drops you. A woman’s bones can’t withstand a fall like that!”
— Eileen Chang, “Aloeswood Incense,” Love in a Fallen City
Chang’s collection of short stories, first published in 1944 under the original title Romances, follows characters as they navigate arranged marriages, marriages of convenience, divorce, and war. “Aloeswood Incense” opens with the Shanghai-born Weilong, a young college student, as she’s taken under the wing of her aunt, a concubine to a Cantonese business tycoon, who has been set up with a house of her own in Hong Kong. With an expensive new wardrobe at her disposal, Weilong acclimates to Madame Liang’s lifestyle of partying, and consequently becomes acquainted with the cadre of men that orbit the household. At one point, she even finds herself competing with her aunt, whose prowess and wit are worthy of Jane Austen’s scheming Lady Susan. The larger lesson, necessary for their survival as women, that Madame Liang imparts on her niece is one of pragmatism, which comes back to money, of course.
From An Education (2009), directed by Lone Scherfig, based on a memoir of the same name by British journalist Lynn Barber.
I went to the window and looked out at the September evening. Though still hot with the vanished sun, the dusk, with its suggestion of autumn and nights drawing in, sent shivers of excitement up and down my spine. I thought of sex and sin; of my body and all the men in the world who would never sleep with it. I felt a vague, melancholy sensation running through me, not at all unpleasant.
— Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado
A far cry from the dewy-eyed love interests depicted in Fitzgerald’s and Hemingway’s take of American expats in France, Dundy’s Sally Jay Gorce is both fearless and funny. She does not demure when acknowledging her own sexual appetite, and in that regard she embodies an emancipated woman. Unlike many of her female predecessors who find themselves entangled in messy affairs that fail to pan out, Sally is allowed to make mistakes and move on with her life — and that in itself is a narrative worth celebrating.
“We Should All Be Feminists,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, TEDx Talks (2013).
He was the first man to see her naked. It made her sick with shame. It made her sick with desire.
— Monica Ali, Brick Lane
In many respects, Ali’s protagonist Nazneen shares a lot in common with traditional adulteresses from literature whose stories begin with an arranged marriage at a young age to an older man. Having traded a Bangladeshi village for a Bangladeshi community in east London, Nazneen confronts the challenges of her role as a new wife and as an immigrant in a new homeland. It is only upon meeting a young radical named Karim some years later that she acknowledges her discontent. The affair becomes the catalyst that awakens not only her sexuality but also her sense of autonomy.
Ad created by Theresa Wlokka and her students at the Miami Ad School in Hamburg, Germany, for Swiss gender equality organization Terre Des Femmes.
Zan giggled. Mo Li answered with dignity, “No, I’m exploring what it means to be American.”
Zan and I looked at each other.
Then Mo Li said, “My Korean friend says that the most important thing we need to do to get in is to dress really slutty.”
— Jean Kwok, Mambo in Chinatown
It’s not a clandestine romance with another person that stirs Charlie’s passion but rather one with dance, specifically ballroom dancing. Kwok’s novel centers around Charlie Wong, who has spent the majority of her life confined to New York’s Chinatown. At the age of 22, she still lives at home with her widowed father, a noodle maker, helping to take care of her younger sister while working as a dishwasher. Highlighting the cultural expectations and familial pressures that have shaped Charlie, Kwok brings an interesting spin to her Cinderella-like transformation after she takes a new job as a receptionist at an uptown studio. In a scene where she and her childhood friends are planning to visit an outer-borough Asian nightclub, Charlie calls Mo Li “shallow” for wanting to go. Here, Kwok pokes fun at the different standards of femininity as Mo Li equates her mission to go clubbing in order to meet men — which necessitates dressing less conservatively — with “American”-ness.
Courtesy of a nocturnal nerd, Tumblr.
I couldn’t stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.
—Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
The motif of purity comes up again and again for Esther Greenwood who arrives in New York wide-eyed, aspiring to become a writer. The internship Esther lands is with the publication Ladies’ Day, perhaps ironically named given that the young women in Plath’s novel appear to be constantly questioning and redefining what it means to be a so-called lady. Esther’s new friends in the city, Doreen and Betsy, represent two distinct modes of womanhood: one unapologetically sexual, the other pious. It is this tightrope in between that Esther struggles to navigate, alongside a greater psychological battle with her sanity.
