Sexual assault and rape have figured in many literary tragedies over the years.
Sexual assault and rape have figured in many literary tragedies over the years.
J ust when we thought things couldn’t get much worse for Harvey Weinstein, the news came of yet another lawsuit targeting the disgraced producer — this time for an alleged incident way back in 1994.
Weinstein already stands convicted on charges of criminal sexual act and rape and is unlikely to be a free man again, and there can be little doubt that more powerful figures will face ruin, disgrace, and imprisonment as the #MeToo juggernaut rolls onward.
But the stated aim of some proponents of #MeToo is greater in scope than the shaming and jailing of individuals who have abused their power and committed sexual harassment or assault.
In February, before the COVID-19 outbreak turned life everywhere upside down, the Weinstein scandal and trial received ample coverage in the glossy pages of The Hollywood Reporter. In the February 26 issue, one finds a piece by Kim Masters, entitled “What Happens After Weinstein Is What Matters.” Masters asserts the need to go way beyond individual criminal prosecutions and — you guessed it — change the culture that provided such fertile ground for misconduct.
“The looming question for Hollywood is whether the industry has the will . . . to deal with the sometimes subtle misogyny that keeps women, and people of color, from being fairly represented,” writes Masters, who goes on to decry “a culture in which men like Weinstein can thrive.”
If we don’t change the culture, then powerful men will go on thinking that it’s okay to act as Weinstein did, or will imagine that the legal and professional consequences are the only reason not to do so.
It’s a familiar assertion, and one that we are certain to hear more of in coming months as the Weinstein fiasco recedes in the rear-view mirror.
One of Joe Biden’s most notorious gaffes (and that’s really saying something) was his statement, on stage during the fifth Democratic-primary debate last November, that “we, in fact, have to fundamentally change the culture, the culture of how women are treated. . . . We have to change the culture, period, and keep punching at it, and punching at it, and punching at it . . . and make it clear, from the president on down, that we will not tolerate it, we will not tolerate this culture.”
If Biden takes office in January 2021 and has the presence of mind to do anything, he will surely follow through on this pledge, making widespread cultural change a national priority. We will see a good deal of “punching at it,” sanctioned at the highest levels of government.
Reasonable people can agree on the desirability of a relationship between men and women based on mutual respect and a corporate, social, and cultural environment where people reject and refrain from committing harassment and assault.
But what does this pat phrase, “change the culture,” really entail? Our Anglo-Saxon legal tradition provides punishment for specific unlawful actions. “Change the culture” is a nice mantra, but how exactly to go about doing this is a rather more involved question.
One does have to wonder what “punching at it” will mean when no one agrees on what corrupted “the culture” in the first place or where the punches, so to speak, should land.
Proponents of #MeToo can, if so inclined, point to certain books as having nefarious influence. Does that sound farfetched? In the U.K., the Advertising Standards Association has already gone so far as to ban ads that feature gender stereotypes, which are not always a simple thing to define or identify.
One cause of our problematic culture, in the eyes of some feminists, has always been literature that conveys outdated attitudes and depicts or even condones the viewing of women in a certain light. Case in point: the final, unfinished novel by one of the most revered writers in our canon. The writer is F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the novel is The Last Tycoon.
Given all the media frenzy around Weinstein, it’s baffling that people haven’t pointed out the parallels between Weinstein and Fitzgerald’s protagonist, a driven, demanding, visionary Hollywood producer named Monroe Stahr. (Stahr himself is based on legendary MGM head Irving Thalberg.)
Like Harvey Weinstein, Stahr has the instincts of a visionary producer and proves willing to take a gamble on motion pictures that aren’t a surefire success. At a studio meeting early in the novel, Stahr greenlights a film project with a South American setting in the face of others’ objections about budget issues and the story’s adaptability for the screen. (One can imagine a similar meeting involving Weinstein and other execs when it was time to make a decision about Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.) An even stronger parallel is that Stahr is a great aficionado of female beauty. In the course of a shoot involving the great real-life French star Claudette Colbert, Stahr is fussy about capturing her beauty on camera in just the right way.
One source of Stahr’s appreciation of beauty, it seems, is his sense of how fleeting it is. This becomes more than evident during his tryst with Kathleen Moore. In a famous passage, Fitzgerald writes: “He watched her move, intently, yet half afraid that her body would fail somewhere and break the spell. He had watched women in screen tests and seen their beauty vanish second by second, as if a lovely statue had begun to walk with the meager joints of a paper doll.”
Stahr later tells Kathleen, “I don’t want to lose you now.” That line must be doubly offensive to feminists, suggesting as it does that Stahr considers himself in some sense to possess Kathleen and that he doesn’t want to lose the image before him, in this moment, of her young, ravishing self. Fitzgerald has committed the unpardonable sin of making this amorous producer complex and believable — morally flawed but driven by an understandable need to cherish and hold onto what is elusive and temporal. It’s not exactly a portrayal that holds up well in the age of Weinstein and #MeToo.
The Last Tycoon is just one example. One wonders how the works of Henry Miller would fare amid efforts to change the culture by rooting out any unprogressive influences. There are passages in Miller’s work where the author exalts the seductive, voluptuous feminine qualities and even faults women for not displaying those traits. And don’t even get feminists started on D. H. Lawrence.
You may say these are rather extreme instances. But are they? In the eyes of some feminists, all kinds of books may be culpable, very much including works that dare to try to convey the complexity and ambiguity of the current situation.
James Lasdun, an extraordinary British poet, novelist, short-story writer, and memoirist who lives and teaches in New York, has acknowledged this complexity in a remarkable novella published in the U.S. last year, entitled Afternoon of a Faun. The narrator of this expertly told story grapples with conflicting loyalties and suffers a building sense of dread as he gets sucked into the drama of a case of sexual harassment originating way back in the 1970s.
One friend of the narrator is Marco Rosedale, a hotshot documentarian and fellow British expat living in New York. Another friend is Julia Gault, who steps forward out of the mists of the men’s pasts with claims that Marco’s conduct toward her in the course of a drunken encounter decades ago crossed the line into rape. A newspaper editor announces plans to publish her account and reaches out to Marco to ask for his response to the allegations. Denying that any nonconsensual sex took place, Marco desperately explores his own options and confides to the narrator his intent to commit suicide if this thing derails his career and besmirches his name, as it looks likely to do. Given the seriousness of what is brewing, his threat sounds pretty convincing. Julia, we soon find out, has some mental-health problems of her own.
The possible outcomes of the scenario are highly unpleasant to contemplate: Either a scandal will ruin Marco’s name and possibly drive him to make good on his threat, or the “heroes” of the story (it’s clear that there are no actual heroes) will find a way to thwart a woman whose psychological state is precarious enough as it is and who may well have a valid grievance against Marco.
Lasdun piles on the layers of ambiguity here. There is no guidebook we can pull out with clear, simple answers to the questions raised. Is Marco a rapist? Can the narrator in good conscience go on being friends with him with these charges hanging in the air? But there are questions for Julia too, including the familiar one: Why didn’t she come forward sooner? Does she have less than pure reasons for waiting until now, when Marco has significantly more assets than he did as a young man?
Moreover, should there be a statute of limitations for crimes, even terrible ones, that happened decades ago? Should we hope to see the career Marco has painstakingly built over decades now come to an end because of one stupid drunken encounter decades ago? If Julia’s account comes to light and people believe it, will the outcome for Marco be proportionate to the alleged offense? Will any of us really feel that it’s justice if Marco makes good on his threat of suicide as his world comes down in flames around him?
Lasdun does not provide pat answers, because there are none to provide. [Spoiler alert: If you don’t want to know the novella’s grand design, skip this paragraph.] Near the end of the novella, one of the narrator’s two friends — I won’t say which one — commits suicide, and the final scene takes place in the living room of the other, where people are watching Donald Trump debate Hillary Clinton as the November election looms. Lasdun infuses this scene with an ineffable sadness. More than that, he prods the reader to ponder the impossibility of a good outcome to the nettlesome scenario. If it had been the other character instead who committed suicide — the one now hosting the guests watching the debate — we have to wonder whether we’d feel any better.
Whatever conclusions one reaches — if it is possible to reach any in such a minefield of ambiguities — there can be no doubt that it was courageous of Lasdun to write Afternoon of a Faun and to publish it in a #MeToo moment where thoughtfulness is anathema to some.
Going beyond works dealing explicitly with sexual misconduct, one has to wonder about the fate of stories and novels that carry even the whiff of “antiquated” attitudes about gender.
Even works written by women could be fair game for today’s more extreme feminists. Take a book such as Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, whose titular character becomes so obsessed with not letting a female employee with whom he’s in love depart — with holding onto, or possessing, her — that he turns to extreme and drastic actions. Arguably, Frome has come to view the young woman as something very much like his personal property. Wharton presents Frome as a complex person, not simply a villain. What message might an alpha-male reader today draw from Ethan Frome?
Some feminists no doubt have the answer. If you want to change the culture, burn the book. It’s the only way.