Maia Silber

This spring, Joan Didion became the new face of the French luxury brand Céline, and the fashion blogosphere dissolved into a lilac-scented pleasure cloud. Céline dressed Didion in black; maxi-skirt wearing girls from Tumblr domains far and wide re-blogged the writer’s LA packing list. Before the literary world could cry “commercialization,” the fashion world cried, “She worked at *Vogue*!”



Even outside of the oversized-clutch toting demographic, commentators praised the ads, lauding the fashion industry for its newfound respect for brains and beauty. The purveyors of all things hot-or-not had finally given smart women their scented seal of approval—what a victory for feminism. Never mind her National Book Award. Didion finally made it when they stamped her face on the back of a $1200 leather jacket.



With a spritz of eau-de-Didion, Phoebe Philo did to Didion what popular culture has done to women writers for years: She made her pretty. I first read Emily Dickinson in a blue picture book; on the cover the branches of a white-blossomed tree folded into the shape of a heart, a white dove nesting in its tip. “Pink, small and punctual” appeared on page two; “Wild Nights” was nowhere to be found. Children’s publishers sell fake gold lockets with *Wuthering Heights* and *Jane Eyre*. You’ll find Austen quoted in as many works of Tumblr-ism as criticism. Harvard calls its only undergraduate course centered entirely on the novelist “From Jane Austen to Chick-lit.”



Female writers still carry baggage, and not just the history-of-marginalization kind. They carry 2 skirts, 2 jerseys or leotards, 1 pullover sweater, stockings, face cream, and the rest. For marketing purposes, it helps to be pretty—or at least, to wear fashionable sunglasses, to write works whose titles might be written in cursive over curly-haired silhouettes on pink hardcovers. It helps to accessorize.



Austin Dickinson once recommended that his sister write more simply. “I’ll be as *simple* as you please, the *simplest* sort of simple,” she promised him in a letter. “I’ll be a little ninny—a little pussy catty, a little Red Riding Hood. I’ll wear a Bee in my Bonnet, and a Rose bud in my hair.” 46 years later, Lawrence Knowles featured a drawing of Dickinson alongside a selection of her poetry in *The Golden Treasure of American Songs and Lyrics*. The white-dressed poet lounges under a tree, a rose bud in her hair.



That image of Dickinson would persist—even as scholars restored her original manuscripts, wrote about her bisexuality, and attempted to compensate for the gender bias with which her works had been read for years. In 1976, just a few years before R.W. Franklin reprinted Dickinson’s original fasci- cles, PBS produced a television version of the play *The Belle of Amherst*. In the first scene, Julie Harris, white-dress clad, carried a cake on screen—made from Dickinson’s own recipe.



The next day, *The New York Times* printed an article titled “The Poet’s Black Cake,” alongside a portrait in which an aproned Dickinson, rendered as a tight-smiled housewife, holds out her Bundt. The piece concludes with a quote from Harris, who, asked what she’d say to Dickinson if she had the chance, replies: “I’d ask her to show me how she made her rye and Indian bread.” If the seventies had Tumblr, the quote would have been typed up in Edwardian script and re-blogged next to a picture of Miss Emily in the kitchen.



Lest you think it’s just the silly seventies, visit any bookstore to purchase titles like *A Brighter Garden* and *Emily*, each featuring some variation of the pastel watercolor flowerbed, the pretty white-dressed girl smiling over her roses. Never mind that Dickinson’s poems about death and sex breach typical garden party etiquette. We need only smooth out Emily’s punctuation, cut her erotic odes, and paint a few pink hearts in the margin. (*The Poetry for Young People* edition counts nineteen.)



We infantilize rather than analyze. After all, it’s easier to assess Austen’s contribution to rom-coms than to consciousness, less threatening to transcribe Didion’s packing list than her psychoanalytic profile, more polite to talk about Dickinson’s spring days than her wild nights. We make writers “women writers,” and then we make them girls.



Male poets can be marketed toward children, too. Poetry for Young People also sells a hardcover Robert Frost Collection. It opens with a three-page account of his life and includes commentary on each of his poems. The biographical information in the Dickinson edition contains only brief mentions of the poet’s childhood, telling us, “Emily was much like other girls.” Then, of course, come the hearts.



And you’ll find no Robert Frost paper dolls. No Fitzgerald novels sold with lockets. No black-bearded silhouettes of Hemingway against any colored background. Male writers don’t need the add-ons. Their work, popular culture tells us, needs no accessories to sell.



Sometimes, the accessories don’t need the women writers. Etsy.com sells a collection of *Pride and Prejudice* purses: hardcovers with pages removed, lined with pink cloth, featuring beaded handles. Nine by six inches, the reviews promise, roomy enough for your lipstick and perfume. (Does one who totes an Austen purse spritz herself with Didion, or do novels and nonfiction clash?). Not quite wide enough for a book.



The Ce?line campaign might be one small step forward for the fashion industry, but it’s a giant slap in Didion’s sunglassed-face. Didion, who spoke sardonically in a 1977 *Paris Review* interview about the “fragility of Joan Didion myth,” has always been hyperaware of the attention given to her physical appearance in popular culture. Then, she claimed that she dealt with stereotypes about women writers by “just tending my own garden.” Today, the 80-year-old icon who consented to Ce?line’s campaign seems to have retired to the rosebeds. When the *New York Times* asked the face behind the glasses why she thought the campaign made such a sensation, she only said, “I don’t have any clue.”



Like the owner of hollowed-out Austen novels, the Ce?line consumer (though she might consider her brand more tasteful) has no need for the writer’s prose. Under the guise of a “literary aesthetic,” she claims the female writer without her work, without her complications, without her strangeness. Didion, leather-jacket edition: the simplest sort of simple.



A feminist victory? I’ll believe it when Calvin Klein features Norman Mailer in a denim campaign. I’ll believe it when I see those $1200 jeans, Mailer’s face grinning on the left ass cheek. 

Ruby Rae Spiegel’s Dry Land takes place almost entirely in an empty locker-room. Two high school athletes named Amy and Ester straddle and stand on its benches, spread and sprawl on its floor, leaving Gatorade bottles and Hostess wrappers in their wake. They discuss menstruation and athlete’s foot, imagining their blood leaking out of their swimsuits and their skin flaking on the floor. When Amy takes a pill to induce labor, Ester asks her what she will do with the “thing,” and Amy, panicking, suggests that she puts it in a locker.



The abortion is sudden and bloody on the locker-room floor. On opening night at the Boston Center for the Arts, one woman left the theater, hand over mouth. Her companions remained seated but welcomed the excuse to look away from the stage.



Theatre-goers expect the abortion, though. The program has two pages devoted to placing “abortion in context.” The play’s most jarring scene comes a few minutes later, when a janitor pushes an industrial mop down the theater’s left-hand aisle. On stage, he picks up crumpled newspapers and wipes down the set. He scrubs the brown stain in the middle of the floor, until it becomes watery and red, and then disappears.



In the wake of the staged abortion, the janitor denies the audience emotional reprieve. Watching him feels like closing your eyes after looking at the sun, and seeing a yellow sphere burn behind your lids. On the clean, empty stage, the girl’s twisted body remains as afterimage.



The bodies we are forced to imagine stay with us longer than the ones displayed on stage. Early in the play, Ester asks Amy whether she’s ever wondered what her organs taste like—steak, maybe. Another character remembers that after they kissed at a party, Amy asked him to tell the other guests that he came on her face. When the hostess asked her to leave, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Amy and Ester reconstruct their bodies with words, inhabiting empty spaces.



This insistence on female presence comes to Boston at a crucial moment. Last spring, Harvard University conducted a survey that found that one in three graduating seniors had experienced sexual assault while enrolled. President Drew Faust released those results just a week before the opening of Dry Land, calling for an emergency assembly in Harvard’s Science Center. Strangely, though, as students and administrators reckoned with those results, female bodies rarely entered the conversation.



If, after  Dry Land, the female body burned as afterimage, then after the assembly, it faded into white space. David B. Laibson, an Economics professor and member of Harvard’s Task Force on Sexual Assault, delivered a 45-minute PowerPoint presentation. By its conclusion, the central fact of assault had been buried under percentage points, breakdowns and breakouts. In that narrow lecture hall, where students sat on hard metal seats, and clean vacuumed aisles, one could no more see flesh and blood than an elephant squatting on the stage.



The discussion moved from female bodies to gendered spaces. Midway through the presentation, Laibson noted that 14% of reported assaults took place in “single-sex social organizations that are not fraternities or sororities”  That statistic framed much of campus discussion in following weeks. In her e-mail to the student body, Faust proposed four areas of further investigation, including “the locations where [sexual assaults] occur.” Chair of the Sexual Assault Task Force Stephan D. Hyman echoed that sentiment, asking the College to interrogate “the relationship between social spaces and sexual assault.” Though most administrators first responded to the survey with moral outrage, they quickly turned to narrow analysis. Because that analysis focused more on the where of sexual assault rather than the how and why, it lended itself to logistical calculation rather than human understanding.



Students, too, focused their analyses on the logistics of assault rather than the fact of it. Some sought to combat Harvard’s problem by absenting themselves from problematic spaces. A student and a professor published their resignations from exclusive Final Clubs. Several students publicly refused to “punch” those organizations . Others demanded that Harvard restructure those spaces. A Crimson editorial demanded an investigation of the Clubs and one student wrote in to suggest that “the Women’s Center occupy the Porcellian building.” Such arguments implied we can eliminate the sexual assault the way a surgeon eliminates cancer: localize, then remove.



On one level, this approach makes sense. But fighting sexual assault exclusively by fighting Final Clubs offers only a simplified solution to a more complex—and more human—problem.  It’s easy to spot the women slipping behind hired bouncers, tightly wrapped torsos angled sideways. It’s harder to see the flesh and blood under those tight dresses. So, we look at the architecture.



When we fail to consider the presence of female bodies in all spaces, we risk excusing ourselves from dealing with them. Administrators have sidestepped criticism with with vague nods to “inclusivity” and donations to House social budgets. Meanwhile, laying the guilt on certain spaces pardons those who don’t occupy those spaces. It’s the old fallacy of rape—only strong, powerful men could commit such a crime—mapped onto Harvard’s social scene. When one man confesses to the guilt of Final Clubs, those not in Final Clubs can absolve themselves of sin. One resignation letter ended with a plea for Harvard to “rise from the ashes of assault into a new awakening.” If we awaken only to the problem of spaces, and not to the problem of human nature, we might as well just stay asleep.



Fortunately, Harvard women have begun to reinsert their bodies into the campus discussion. Two survivors published bylined narratives of their assaults in the Crimson. The point of such articles is clear: to match names, individual identities, to numbers. If administrators and students respect these narratives, they must not only acknowledge female presence, but see beyond victimhood. The survey defines penetration as “when one person puts a penis, fingers, or object inside someone else’s vagina or anus.” Man as actor, woman as acted upon. One Crimson op-ed noted that “one of every six women who received a diploma last May was raped.” In between the tragedy of rape and the triumph of commencement, those bodies live and breathe in every space on campus. We must meet them in every state, in every place.



Perhaps that what makes Dry Land truly radical. The bodies it forces us to imagine suffer, but they also just exist. Ester sits on Amy’s stomach, and then tickles her, making her laugh until she pees. Amy presses the soles of her feet against Ester’s butt, and shouts “I’m fondling you!” Ester does not take off her swimsuit for a week as a superstitious measure before swimming for a college recruiter. She develops a full-body rash, and triumphs. The play ends as Amy watches Ester’s recruitment video, silent in front of the elegant swimmer on screen. Ester is not beautiful in the way that the girls in the magazines left in the locker-room are. She is beautiful in grossness rather than perfection, in the privacy of the moment rather than in the public gaze.



If Dry Land fills empty spaces, it also imbues moments of pain with triumph. After the abortion, after the clean-up, Amy and Ester practice delivering a presentation about the Florida wetlands. They describe swamps and green ferns that gave men gangrene and malaria and stymied agriculture. Now, the swamps and green ferns are paved over but still present, heavy and throbbing under strip-malls and freeways. They are a reminder of past injury, but also the secret of progress. As Amy and Ester exchange notecards on the now-clean floor, their voices grow louder. They are strengthened by the phantom stains of blood.