QUESTIONING THE PROMISE OF SELF-HELP: A READING OF WOMEN WHO LOVE TOO MUCH
Feminist Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, ps 177-192, 1993.
CYNTHIA D. SCHRAGER
The
"recovery' section of my local bookstore, sporting best-selling women's
self-help titles like Smart Women/Foolish
Choices, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them, and the very
popular Women Who Love Too Much, occupies the shelves
directly above the "women" section, where one goes to find such
feminist classics as The Second Sex, The Madwoman in the Attic and This Sex Which Is Not One. If this marketing juxtaposition seems
jarring, it nevertheless has the virtue of foregrounding a certain relationship
between women, self-help, and feminism that I want to explore further. It suggests not only the extent to which the
audience for self-help is a female one but also the dramatic way in which this
self-consciously popular genre has gained the privileged position in addressing
'women's issues' in the textual marketplace, offering "solutions" to
women's problems that often borrow from the discourse of feminism even as they
work against feminism's fundamental tenets.
In
the last decade, following in the wake of second-wave feminism, self-help books
for women have become a multi-billion dollar publishing phenomenon. They offer, as a New York Times press clipping in a promotional packet from
Harper/San Francisco put it, a program of 'recovery through reading" in an
era when other kinds of literacy are on the decline. A photo in the same press packet of best-selling
author Melodie Beattie (Co-dependent No
More and Beyond Co-dependency), sitting
on the houseboat she purchased with the royalties from her books, evokes the
kind of self-help success narrative that has been a part
of the American cultural imagination at least since Benjamin Franklin penned
his autobiography.[1]'
Of
course, American culture has a long and healthy masculine self-help narrative
tradition, rooted in the Protestant theme of individual self-improvement and
its many secular variations that have been so frequently associated with the
national character. From Ben Franklin's
eighteenth-century program for fame through frugality, to Horatio Alger's tales
of rags to respectability in the nineteenth-century streets of New York, to
Dale Carnegie's program for winning friends and influencing people in our own
century, these success narratives have characteristically addressed men in the
public sphere.[2] But a cursory glance at the self-help section of any
bookstore today reveals a preponderance of titles for women: The Cinderella Complex, Smart Women/Foolish
Choices, Men Are Just Desserts, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them,
Why Men Stray and My Men Stay, Men Who Can't Love, and Women Who Love Too Much are just a few of the titles that take up
the issue of gender in a "post-feminist" world. These books address what has come to be a
recognisable cultural icon, represented everywhere from 'Cathy' to 'Thirty
something.' Economically independent, professionally successful, and
desperately in need of a man, this 'contemporary woman' is what might be called
the tragic heroine of feminism.
Self-help books promise to empower her to make healthier relationship
choices at a time when, by all accounts, satisfying intimate relationships
between the sexes are increasingly imperilled.[3]
In
order to question the promise of a book like Robin Norwood's Women Who Love Too Much, which I take
here as a representative text, I want to detour by way of another therapeutic
discourse, one which also purports to know what women want and which has
already been thoroughly demonised by a generation of feminist critics-Freud's
well-known case study of hysteria, Dora (originally published as 'Fragment of
an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria").[4] At least at first glance, these two works appear to
occupy polarised ends of the spectrum of therapeutic discourses. For many feminist critics, Freud's
self-admitted failure to complete his analysis of Dora's case has come to
represent the failure of classical psychoanalysis to interpret female
experience, to answer Freud's own now-famous question: "What do women
want?" In contrast, Women Who Love
Too Much belongs to a distinctly different therapeutic genre, one whose
very name - "self-help" - proposes an escape from the gender-inflected
inequities embedded in Freud's doctor patient relationship with Dora. Whereas, in Freud's discourse, the male
analyst stands in privileged relation to the female "text," self-help
books like Norwood's apparently eliminate the hierarchical division between
analyst/analysand, critic/text, by making the tools of interpretation available
to the female lay reader and inviting her to engage in self-therapy. By correctly diagnosing her illness and
following a prescribed program, the reader of Women Who Love Too Much can self-author her own narrative of addiction and
recovery.[5] Whereas Freud addressed a specialised audience of
male colleagues, relegating Dora to the position of subject (or, if you like,
object) of medical scrutiny, Norwood addresses a community of women, a
"we' to which she herself professes to belong. By her own claim, her insight into her
material comes from "having been a woman who loved too much most of my
life."[6] Her writing is authorised not by her medical or
professional training but by her stated membership in the very group about
which she writes. This democratic and
non hierarchical nature of the self-help rhetoric is codified in the tenth and
final step of the Women Who Love Too Much
recovery program: 'Share with others what you have experienced and learned'
(p. 222). Central then to the project of
self-help is a model of authority which is decentralised, passed laterally from
woman to woman. The fact that Norwood
suggests that sharing "may mean helping to educate the medical and
counseling professions about the appropriate treatment approach for yourself
and women like you" highlights just how different a conception of the
relation to knowledge is implied by the self-help model (p. 260).
Thus,
Freud's and Norwood's discourses appear to represent two very different
epistemologies and two correspondingly different positionings of the
female subject. Freud attempted to
constitute psychoanalysis as a privileged scientific discourse and to make its
interpretive tools available to a newly consolidated medical elite; the women's
self-help book of the 1980s emerged out of feminist critiques of the medical
establishment and such feminist self-help classics as Our Bodies, Ourselves. [7] Our Bodies,
Ourselves operates, at least in theory, on a grassroots
political model that promises to reclaim power from institutions to people
through the dissemination of knowledge.
Does women's self-help, in its "post feminist" mode, similarly
empower women? I will argue that, far
from representing an alternative to traditional psychotherapeutic discourses
that are structured around women's disempowerment, the goal of the contemporary
women's self-help narrative, exemplified by Women
Who Love Too Much, is to produce a female subject better suited to inhabiting
a gender-asymmetrical society than to challenging its political and social
basis. I want to turn first, however, to
a text whose strategies of containment are by now quite familiar, as a way of
signalling the continuity of contemporary women's self-help literature with
other patriarchal therapeutic discourses and practices.
Feminist
criticism has made us attentive to the constellation of social and cultural
factors that produced the hysterical role as a virtual parody of femininity in
the late nineteenth century. As Carroll
Smith-Rosenberg has argued, hysteria emerged out of the inherently
contradictory demands placed on Victorian bourgeois women. On the one hand, the
role of "true woman" required a woman to be "emotional,
dependent and gentle"; in contrast, the role of 'ideal mother' required
her to be 'strong, self-reliant, protective, an efficient caretaker in relation
to children and home.'[8] The extreme disjunction between these two roles led
the hysteric to seek relief in a socially acceptable sick role through which
she could escape her role as self-sacrificing mother while still exerting
enormous influence on the family. At
once passive and aggressive, dependent and rebellious, self-punishing and angry,
the hysteric embodied the numerous contradictions of nineteenth-century
femininity.
If,
for feminist criticism, the hysteric has become a crucial trope for the
disempowered medicalized female subject, then Dora's case has certainly become
the metonymic narrative of that disempowerment.
Dora's protofeminist consciousness of herself as "an object for
barter" in a rather sordid domestic tale has made her an attractive, if
tragic, heroine in contemporary feminist scripts of her story. Freud's willingness to exculpate Dora's
father and Herr K. for their use of Dora and to affix blame on various women -
Dora's mother, Frau K., Dora's governess, and Dora herself -has been noted by
numerous critics, as has his notorious presumption that Dora's hysteria emerged
out of her repressed heterosexual desire for Herr K. Regarding the pivotal
scene by the lake in which the fourteen-year-old Dora rebuffed Herr K.'s
advances, Freud infamously writes: "I should without question consider a
person hysterical in whom an occasion for sexual excitement elicited feelings
that were preponderantly or exclusively unpleasurable; and I should do so
whether or no the person were capable of producing somatic symptoms."[9]
In a
provocative discussion of this passage, Nancy Armstrong reads Freud's treatment
of this scene of seduction as overturning the tradition of domestic fiction
that begins with Richardson:
"Freud . . . questions the form of authority that
depends chiefly on resisting seduction.
Only insofar as she could say "no" did Pamela possess any
power of self-definition. But in a
communication situation where strategies of reversal rule meaning, her "no" actually means "yes," and signs
of disgust therefore disguise pleasure."
The
result, according to Armstrong, is a critical shift in the discourse around
female subjectivity. By rewriting any
other-than-phallic desire as repression and denial, Freud converts the feminine
virtues of the entire domestic fiction tradition into a set of pathological
symptoms from which the female patient must be healed/liberated. Mr. B.s libertinism in Pamela is rewritten as
Freud's liberation, but both men clearly stand in the position of the
seducer. Nevertheless, as Armstrong
aptly notes, Dora refuses to be seduced: "She plays Pamela to the end,
leaving Freud without a successful conclusion to his case history."[10]
Smith-Rosenberg's
and Armstrong's discussions point to two aspects of the contemporary women's
self-help phenomenon that I want to develop further. First, I suggest that, like the figure of the
hysteric, the woman who loves too much must be understood in relation to the
project of constructing middle-class femininity undertaken by a tradition of
domestic discourse most frequently associated with the late-eighteenth and the
nineteenth centuries. At the same time,
however, Women Who Love Too Much participates in this
tradition in an emphatically post-Freudian moment, one that frames what had
previously been seen primarily as moral questions in terms of a thematics of
sickness and health that has come to characterize our century.[11]
In
many ways, Women Who Love Too Much appears
to be a radical break from the same restrictive, socially constructed feminine
roles that Smith-Rosenberg suggests the Victorian hysteric was seeking to
escape. Analysing a series of first- and
third-person narrations of women's stories, Norwood attempts to redefine the
traditional female sex role, suggesting a central paradox implicit in its
construction. The figure of the martyred
woman, usually associated with selflessness and nurturance, is shown, in fact,
to be dominated by the need to control.
Far from being a healthy role, it is a dangerously self-destructive
one. The problem with the woman who
loves too much, Norwood reveals, is that she needs to develop her own sense of
self rather than focusing on others.
Thus, on one level, the message of Women
Who Love Too Much seems liberated and liberating. That the injunction to be selfish (step nine
out of the ten steps to recovery) violates everything women have been taught to
be is implicit in Norwood's cautious presentation:
"Selfish here requires careful explanation. It probably conjures up an image of exactly
what you don't want to be: indifferent, cruel, thoughtless, self-centered. . .
. But remember, you are a woman with a history of loving too much. For you, becoming selfish is a necessary
exercise in letting go of martyrdom." (p. 256)
Norwood's
"history of loving too much" could well refer to the history of white
middle-class women in America for at least the last hundred-and-fifty years. Beginning with Barbara Welter's now classic
essay, 'The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,' scholarship on what has come to
be known as the cult of domesticity has flourished. Although critics disagree on the extent to
which the female role was a submissive one, they do agree that the
nineteenth-century white middle-class woman's role was defined relationally:
her value was a function of the extent to which she met others' needs.[12] By revealing this traditional female sex
role-nurturing, protective, selfless -as damaging and self-destructive, Norwood
suggests that the problem with women is that they have played this role too
well, ultimately to the detriment of themselves and those around them.
Yet
underneath this apparently radical challenge to the social construction of
femininity, Women Who Love Too Much bears a strong resemblance
to other genres of domestic fiction whose goal is to produce a happily
socialised female subject.[13] Like the seduction novel, Women Who Love Too Much uses the second-person pronoun to address a
female reader and to instruct her on how to avert the devastating results of a
liaison with "the wrong man." Moreover, like its eighteenth-century
counterpart, Women Who Love Too Much confronts
not so much a crisis in femininity as a crisis in heterosexual relations. In the opening chapter, Jill presents her
situation this way: 'I'm doing this - seeing a therapist, I mean - because I'm
really unhappy. It's
men of course. I mean,
me and men. I always
do something to drive them away" (p. 2). Similarly, Margo: "My life is like one
long, sort of crummy, novel....I've been married four times already, and I'm
only thirty-five" (p. 197). And, perhaps paradigmatically, Celeste:
"I've probably been with more than a hundred men in my fife, and I'll bet,
looking back, that every one of them was either too many years younger than I
or a con artist or dependent on drugs or alcohol or gay or crazy. A hundred impossible men! How did I find them all?" (p. 156). Like the hysteric, the woman who loves too
much disrupts exogamous exchange.
Endlessly circulating from man to man, she signals a failure in
heterosexual relationships that poses a threat to the constitution of society
around the figure of the nuclear family.[14] The implicit project of the text, then, is to stem
this erosion of the bourgeois family. just as her eighteenth-century sisters
were threatened by the "rake,' the woman who loves too much is threatened
by a seemingly endless series of "inappropriate" men; too young, too
addicted, too gay, they all fall short on a yardstick of morality that the text
prescribes. Like Trudi, whom we meet
early on in Women Who Love Too Much, the
task of the woman who loves too much is to learn to simply be in the company of
men whom she considered nice, even if she also found them a little boring, 'in
other words, to recognise Mr. Right from Mr. Wrong (p. 38-39). Given this underlying project, it is not
surprising that, like a familiar Jane Austen novel, Women Who Love Too Much ends with marriage. In the final chapter, when we again meet
Trudi, engaged and learning to love the man who is "the best friend I've
ever had" (p. 264), we are reminded of Emma, who, after discarding a
series of suitors who turn out to be variously 'inappropriate'-in one case too inferior
socially, in another too 'rakish'- finally 'discovers' Knightley as an object
of desire. The "appropriateness" of Knightley depends, of course, on
a whole constellation of social factors, not the least of which is his
superiority to Emma in every way, both socially and intellectually, and this
dynamic finds an interesting corollary in Women
Who Love Too Much. Precisely what is
at stake in most if not all of the mini narratives that comprise Women Who Love Too Much is a reversal of
the traditional power relations between women and men. Women who love too
much, according to Norwood, classically pick men who are their inferiors. For example, Connie recalls that in her
relationship with Kenneth: 'I made virtually all the decisions concerning us as
a couple.... I felt strong and he felt free to lean on me' (pp. 144-45). Similarly, Pam: 'I had at least twenty IQ
points over him. And I needed that edge. It took all that and more to make me even
begin to believe I was his equal. . .' (p. 152). And Celeste: 'He was also twenty-seven and
still a virgin. Again, I was the
teacher, which made me feel strong and independent. And in control' (p. 158). In each of these cases, the power
differential is glossed variously as "sick," "controlling,"
"manipulative," "scheming," "dominating." Norwood
advises: "When her drive to control masquerades as 'being helpful' and
'giving encouragement,' what is ignored again is her own need for the
superiority and power implied in this kind of interaction' (p. 176). I would submit that what is ignored, in
Norwood's formulation, are the power differentials between women and men that
might historically account for these women's desire to feel in control, to
have, as it were, a handicap.[15]
In
its attempt to fashion a female subject who is independent, without being too
independent, Women Who Love Too Much belongs
to a genre of women's culture that Lauren Berlant has called the 'female
complaint." Berlant defines the complaint as a genre of self-containment
that 'allows the woman who wants to maintain her alignment with men to speak
oppositionally but without fear for her position in the heterosexual economy.'
For Berlant, the complaint is characterised by its resistance to masculine
privilege through an attempt to "demystify" female experience and its
simultaneous foreclosure of any fundamental challenge to the conditions which
induced its production. Thus, by
managing and controlling women's resistance, it acts as a "'safety valve'
for surplus female rage and desire."[16]
Certainly
in its relentless adherence to the traditional marriage plot of domestic
fiction, the impulse of Women Who Love
Too Much is to foreclose any possibility of breaking out of the
heterosexual economy. The text's
'refusal to see' anything other than heterosexuality as a relationship option
is perhaps most apparent in Margo's story.
After describing a series of unhappy relationships with men, Margo
relates her experience in sharing the home of another young mother this way:
"Susie, my roommate, coached me through natural
childbirth with my second daughter, Darla. It
sounds crazy, but that was one of the best times of my life. We were so poor, going to school, working,
taking care of our babies, buying clothes at thrift stores and food with food
stamps. But we were free in our own way.... Yet I was so
restless. I wanted a man. . . .'
Margo's tense face, still pretty though painfully
thin, looked at me pleadingly. Could I help her find and keep Mr. Wonderful?
This was the question written all over it, her reason for coming to therapy.
(p. 200, my emphasis)
Just
at the point where Margo's relationship with a woman begins to sound like her
only healthy marriage, the impossibility of that happiness, and the sense of
freedom it apparently conferred, is registered in the phrase "it sounds
crazy.' Immediately, we are thrust back into the marriage plot (finding and
keeping Mr. Wonderful) which we learn, through Norwood's subsequent analysis of
Margo's story, involves looking for satisfaction in yourself rather than
endlessly searching for the "magic man who will make [you] happy" (p.
219). The possibility of a lesbian
relationship is foreclosed - remains, in fact, culturally unintelligible within
what Judith Butler has called "the heterosexual matrix" that governs
both Margo's self-constructing narrative and Norwood's interpretive
intervention.[17] The goal of the narrative becomes the production of a
female subject who is 'just
independent enough.' Like Austin's Emma who must, in the course of that novel,
be gently disabused of her wish not to marry, the woman who loves too much must
be taught not to need men, but never not to need men.
If the cultural project of Women Who Love Too Much may be understood as continuous with that of a
tradition of domesticity established, among other laces, in eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century fiction, the text's use of the disease model as an
explanatory construct for the behaviors it attempts to police also
distinguishes it from that tradition.
What in a previous century n-tight have been formulated as a question of
arbitrating proper middle-class feminine behavior is here represented as a
matter of fife and death, demanding all the attention and respect our century
affords issues in the medical domain. In
a chapter appropriately titled "Dying for Love," Norwood appropriates
the already familiar contemporary discourse of addiction and recovery, using
Margo's case history to argue that loving too much is a progressive disease
with a specific symptomatology, diagnosis, and treatment.
"I want to make a case for applying the disease
concept to the pattern of loving too much.
This is a tall order, and if you balk at accepting this proposal, I hope
you will at least see the strong analogy between a disease such as alcoholism,
which is addiction to a substance, and that which occurs in women who love too
much, addicted as they are to the men in their lives. I am thoroughly convinced that what afflicts
women who love too much is not like a
disease; it is a disease process, requiring a specific diagnosis and a specific
treatment." (p. 208)
Without treatment, Norwood warns, "loving too
much can kill you" (p. 218).[18]
Norwood's
insistence on the disease model deploys a series of paradoxes with regard to
the question of agency. By treating loving
too much as an addictive disease over which the individual has no control, Women Who Love Too Much accords the
women it addresses both the helplessness and the absolution from moral
responsibility that we normally associate with illness. The acceptance of one's helplessness over
one's disease then becomes the precondition for "self-help," a
paradox which will be familiar to anyone conversant with the language of the
twelve-step recovery programs. But I wish
to point to a further (and to me more insidious) paradox embedded in this
particular version of self-help. By
insisting that the woman who loves too much is afflicted with a disease
process, Norwood's book addresses a 'victim" who is paradoxically rendered
responsible for a set of problems that are, if anything, "symptoms"
of larger social and political ills.
Although any number of factors - child sexual abuse, alcohol and
substance abuse, domestic violence, to name just a few - are present in the various
clinical narratives, the specificity of those social issues and, more
importantly, their social, cultural and economic contexts are lost in Norwood's
analysis. In demarcating the individual
biological subject as the site of responsibility for the problems she purports
to address, Norwood reduces each narrative to a variation on that familiar
American tale of individual triumph over adversity. Like the protagonist in a conversion
narrative, or its secular spin-offs, the heroines of the mini-narratives of Women Who Love Too Much must follow the
path schematised in the chart entitled "The Progression of 'Loving Too
Much' and Recovery" alone (p. 213).
Any appeal to the political roots of their problems, and hence any
possibility of real social change, is foreclosed.
This
bracketing of the political is made explicit in the following advice Norwood
gives to women forming support groups:
"Stick to the topic at hand. Virtually any topic a leader wants to
introduce is fine except anything having to do with religion, politics, or
outside issues such as current events, celebrities, any causes, treatment
programs, or therapeutic modalities.
There is no room for debate or devisiveness [sic] in a support
group." (p. 281)
The fantasy that this advice promotes is the
possibility of a self or group of selves functioning in isolation from any
social or political context. The book's
utopian vision of an ever-widening circle of self-help groups is more likely to
produce a class of women better prepared to adjust to existing social
structures than to direct their collective energies toward any kind of
challenge to those structures.
In
its deployment of a thematics of health and disease that pathologises women,
rather than examining the oppressive nature of the intersections between gender
and power that help to produce their "condition," Women Who Love Too Much recalls Freud's
treatment of hysteria. Like the hysteric
before her, the figure of the woman who loves too much has become a kind of
archetypal female, a pervasive cultural stereotype that functions as a locus
for a variety of displaced blame, anger, and resentment. As in Dora, the pathologisation of women
becomes a means of avoiding a larger social crisis in gender arrangements, and
the production of a "healthy" female subject becomes a means of
maintaining female complicity in precisely those gender arrangements which most
oppress her.[19]
But
unlike traditional psychoanalysis where the pathologisation of women takes
place within a hierarchical physician-patient relationship, self-help
therapeutic discourse produces its female subject through the private act of
reading and depends upon the willingness of the reading subject herself to join
the interpretive community the book offers membership in. The importance of "good reading' is thus
crucial, as is made clear in the preface:
"But if you are a woman who loves too much, I
feel it only fair to caution you that this is not going to be an easy book to
read. Indeed, if the definition fits and
you nevertheless breeze through this book unstirred and unaffected, or you find
yourself bored or angry, or unable to concentrate on the material presented
here, or only able to think about how much it would help someone else, I
suggest that you try reading the book again at a later time. We all need to deny what is too painful or
too threatening to accept. Denial is a
natural means of self-protection, operating automatically and unbidden. Perhaps at a later reading you will be able
to face your own experiences and deeper feelings." (p.
xvi)
Freud's concept of resistance, whereby Dora's disgust
could be re-written as pleasure, is here appropriated and re deployed as a
means of regulating the act of reader-response.
The critical act itself is rendered suspect, because any negative
reaction to the text is deflected back on to the reader as evidence of her own
shortcomings. There is no such thing,
then, as a 'bad text,' only a 'bad reader.' In contrast the 'good reader,' the
one who doesn't resist or deny the text, is, through the private act of
reading, inducted into a community of women who share her narrative of sickness
and recovery.
In
constructing for the American cultural imagination an archetypal narrative of
female experience as disease, Women Who
Love Too Much functions as a kind of smoke screen for a variety of pressing
social problems, effectively ensuring that those problems are themselves never
directly confronted. Paradoxically, by
refusing to address the specific historical legacy of the gender-asymmetrical
distribution of power and assignment of roles in our culture, the text avoids
precisely what is at the root of the current crisis in heterosexual relations
that it is nevertheless attempting to heal.
By focusing our attention on the 'sick,' controlling,' 'manipulative,'
'dependent,' 'obsessive,' 'weak,' 'dominating,' 'bitchy,' 'nagging' women who
people its pages, Women Who Love Too Much
distracts us from reformulating their 'disease' as a symptom of larger
social and political ills.
During
more than a decade of Reagan-Bush politics, it is not surprising that
contemporary women's self-help books have managed to appropriate many of
feminism's principles and practices for quite different ends. Seventies' consciousness-raising groups
became eighties' self-help groups; the analysis of the personal as political
became simply an analysis of the personal; and the apparent critique of the
cult of domesticity, which self-help borrowed from feminism, has fallen short
of dismantling the monogamous heterosexual couple, not only as the normative
model for connectedness and intimacy but also as the basis for all social
relations. As women are facing a wider
range of culturally sanctioned choices about how to live their lives without
the accompanying institutional supports and options which would make those
choices easier, self-help books like Women
Who Love Too Much function to discipline women in certain fundamental
values, including the notion that monogamous heterosexual love (corrected to a
"post feminist" mode) is at the basis of self-fulfilment.
Have
feminist critics ceded the field? In her
book Talking Back, bell hooks has
suggested that the market for self-help books like Women Who Love Too Much has been created by feminism's failure to
provide models for meeting the longing for personal transformation that its
successes have awakened in women. hooks redefines this longing for
"self-recovery" as the process by which dominated or exploited
individuals gain a 'critical consciousness' of their oppression and begin the
process of 'remaking and reconstituting themselves so that [they] can be
radical."[20] Her definition depathologises and politicises
"self-recovery," making it the necessary basis for a radical politics
that doesn't simply identify structures of oppression but also works to change
them.[21]
Certainly
in the last decade, some academic feminist critics have been more concerned
with deconstructing than with reconstructing the self: the very term
"self-recovery' calls up precisely that notion of a reified identity that
precedes its discursive construction that many recent feminist debates have
sought to destabilise. And yet, if
feminist criticism is going to have a transformational impact on women's lives,
it must begin to be attentive to the remarkable appeal of narratives of
self-recovery in contemporary popular culture. hooks's
definition reminds us that the process of becoming a subject - a process of self-making - is crucial to political activism.
We can embrace this definition and still be attentive to the lessons of
recent feminist debates on the social construction of the subject. Self-recovery should be understood here not
as a nostalgic return to the stable normative subject of early feminism, nor as
an uncritical re-embracing of individualist politics, but as an ongoing process
of self-making that is socially
constituted, that straddles multiple axes of difference in a culture organised
hierarchically according to those axes, and that serves as a basis for
challenging those hierarchies through political action.
As
long as feminism continues its deep suspicion of self-recovery as a project, it
will continue to abdicate its authority in this area to other forms of
discourse that are self-consciously popular and apolitical and that are
simultaneously complicit with conservative dominant-culture values. And as long as we continue to five in a
society that oppresses and abuses women in a variety of material ways, women -
in and outside the academy, feminist and otherwise-will continue to struggle
with recovering a sense of self-empowerment.
It's time we reclaimed self-help as an area of legitimate feminist
analysis.
NOTES
I would like to thank D.A. Miller, whose insights into
self-help literature initially inspired this inquiry, and Lauren Berlant, whose
comments on an earlier version of this essay were especially valuable in
guiding its subsequent direction. Thanks
also to Bruce Burgett and Judy Berman for many helpful conversations.
[1]
Edwin McDowell, In a Land of Addictions, Shelves Full
of Solace,' New York Times, 21 June 1989; J.D. Reed, 'Melody Beattie Helps Anguished
Readers Kick the Dependency Habit,' People
Weekly, 7 Aug. 1989.
[2] John G. Cawelti
traces this masculine self-help narrative tradition in Apostles of the
Self-Made Man (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1965).
[3] 1 want to distinguish at this point in my discussion between self-help literature and self-help social movements. The contemporary women's self-help books that I explore in this essay frequently borrow from the discourse of the twelve-step recovery movement pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous, but I do not pretend to decide here which, if any, of my claims can be generalised to the twelve-step recovery and related self-help movements. Although there are surely many similarities, the obvious differences require that they be treated as two distinct phenomena.
[4] In recent years,
there has been an extraordinary amount of criticism on Dora from a feminist
perspective. See especially, Helene
Cixous and Catherine Clement, The Newly
Born Woman, trans.
Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Diacritics 13 (Spring 1983), a special
issue on Dora; and the collection of articles entitled In Dora's Case: Freud-Hysteria,-Feminism, eds. Charles Bernheimer and
Claire Kahane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
[5] For samples of
these self-authored narratives, see Robin Norwood's sequel, Letters from Women Who Love Too Much (New
York: Pocket Books, 1988).
[6]
Robin Norwood, Women
Who Love Too Much (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), xvi. Subsequent references to this edition are
noted parenthetically in the text.
[7] For feminist
critiques of the medical establishment, see, for example, Barbara Ehrenreich
and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (Garden
City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1978); and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in
Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985), esp. pt. 3. I offer the Boston
Women's Health Collective's Our Bodies, Ourselves (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971) as an
alternative self-help model with the following caveat: as an example of the
praxis of 1970s' feminism, it shares with early feminist theoretical discourse
a tendency to construct a normative woman as its subject. The New
Our Bodies, Ourselves (1984) attempts to provide a corrective to the
original text by being more attentive to differences among women.
[8] Smith-Rosenberg, 199.
[9] Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, ed. Philip Rieff (New
York:
Macmillan, 1963), 50, 44.
[10] Nancy Armstrong,
Desire and Domestic Fiction,. A Political
History of the Novel (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 232-33, 237. Madelon
Sprengnether also treats Freud's case history as an "attempted seduction
via interpretation" which ultimately fails (see "Enforcing Oedipus:
Freud and Dora," in In Dora's Case, 254-75,
261).
[11] Armstrong's
account of this shift in Desire and
Domestic Fiction stresses the relative power and autonomy enjoyed by the
middle-class woman prior to this moment of reigning in. I view the domestic fiction tradition
somewhat less optimistically, stressing its role in disciplining middle-class
women into gender arrangements that were limiting and oppressive.
[12] Barbara Welter,
"The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-60," American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966): 151-74. For further discussion of the cult of
domesticity, see, for example, Ann Douglas, The
Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977); Mary P. Ryan, The Empire of the Mother (New York:
Haworth Press, 1982); Kathryn Kish Sklar,
Catherine Beecher (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973). For a reconsideration of the
nineteenth-century construction of femininity in view of the politics of race,
see Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
[13] As Nancy
Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction suggests,
the contemporary women's self-help book has a history in the form of
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British conduct books and domestic novels
for middle-class women that predates the medicalisation of the discourse on
sexuality. For a discussion of that
history in America, see Ryan; and Richard H. Brodhead, "Sparing the Rod:
Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America," Representations 21 (Winter 1988): 67-92. Although tracing such a lineage is beyond the
scope of this paper, I suggest that the gender arrangements promoted by
contemporary women's self-help books are continuous with precisely those middle-class
family formations whose emergence Armstrong, Ryan, and Brodhead document. But whereas these earlier discourses were
progressive, shaping the new middle-class family as a supposedly democratic
alternative to the earlier patriarchal family model, contemporary women's
self-help literature emerges as a reactionary response to the
"breakdown" of this "traditional' family. In lieu of creating new institutional
supports in a society undergoing rapid demographic changes, self-help books
suggest that the solutions to the intensely dislocating effects of these
changes lie in the promotion of the "right" individual choices and a
return to the nuclear family.
[14] In The Newly Born Woman, Clement notes that
"Freud's young hysterics are looking everywhere for an ideal man, are
unsuccessful at reconstituting the family, are failures at exogamous exchange'
(p. 45). The question of whether the
hysteric's disruptiveness of the family is ultimately conservative or revolutionary
remains open in the dialogue between Cixous and Clement.
[15] A corresponding
impulse to equalise the distribution of power in the relation between the sexes
can be seen in a text like Jane Eyre, in
which Jane marries her former employer, Edward Rochester, only after he has
been severely crippled in a fire.
[17]
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion
of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 151n. 6.
[18]
"Loving too much" is a popularisation of the
concept of "co-dependency," a term originally deriving from
family-systems approaches to drug and alcohol addiction which see the (usually
female) spouse of the addicted individual as a participant in the addiction. But there are growing signs of dismay with
women's self-help literature oil self-recovery and addiction. See, for example, Marianne Walters, "The
Co-dependent Cinderella Who Loves Too Much . . . Fights Back," Family Therapy Networker (July/August
1990): 53-57. Walters decries self-help
books' tendency to pathologise traits normally associated with the feminine and
calls for a therapeutic approach that is socially contextualised. My purpose here is not to discredit either
"co-dependency" or "addiction" models but to explore the
implications of their popularisation and over application.
[19] A book like
Steven Carter and Julia Sokol's Men Who
Can't Love (New York: Berkeley Books, 1987) reverses the title of Women Who Love Too Much, but not its
politics. Despite the title's gesture
toward pathologising men, the subtitle - "How to Recognise a
Commitment-Phobic Man before He Breaks Your Heart" - makes clear that the
focus of the book remains women.
[20] bell hooks, Talking Back (Boston: South End Press, 1989), 28-34, 32.
[21] An example of a
"cross-over" text, which both markets itself as self-help and is
deeply informed by feminist analysis, is Susie Orbach's Fat Is a Feminist Issue: A Self-Help Guide for Compulsive Eaters (New
York: Berkeley Books, 1978). Although it
has recently been reissued, the book predates the wave of love-as-addiction
self-help books that began flooding the market in the 1980s. Although the book's focus is not
relationships, the prevalence of what Orbach calls "lose weight and
get/hold your man" diet plans reveals the deep affiliation between the
marketing of commercial weight-loss plans and the institutionalisation of
heterosexual monogamy. In contrast,
Orbach's version of self help places personal responsibility for weight loss in
the context of political analysis, viewing compulsive eating as a symptom of
women's social inequality and specific roles in this culture.