Spoilers ahead!
The stories we read are not just informed by real life, but rather they provide a blueprint for understanding ourselves and the human condition. Perhaps then, it's telling that recently, our most resonant female characters are similar to Fleabag and the narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation: checked-out, self-destructive, nihilistic, and strangely perceptive in their ability to spot the absurdities of modern-day life.
Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation evokes elements of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, an 1892 short story about an upper-class woman who is alienated after failing to joyfully assume the duties of marriage and motherhood. Luckily, her physician husband knows just the cure: a treatment of rest and isolation. “So I take phosphates or phosphites, whatever it is,” the narrator writes in a secret journal, “...and I am absolutely forbidden to work again until I am well.” Not dissimilarly, My Year of Rest and Relaxation follows a privileged young woman—seemingly with the whole world at her feet—in her journey to drown out the world by sleeping her year away, induced by sleeping medications prescribed by a kooky psychiatrist. While for Gilman’s narrator, isolation is enforced by her husband, and for the twenty-something unnamed narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, it is self-inflicted, the backdrop of a repressive culture and a superficial approach to well-being and self-help remains constant.
Set in New York City in the 18-month stretch leading up to the 9/11 attack, My Year of Rest and Relaxation explores a culture riddled with contradiction—a culture of striving imbued with a sense of heady optimism that seems to infect everyone but the narrator. It’s a culture that Moshfegh seems to suggest is largely perpetuated by lean-in or mainstream feminism (recall T-shirts emblazoned with slogans such as “WOMEN TAKE UP SPACE.”) It’s a brand of feminism that outlines the hazy goal of ‘self-empowerment,’ suggesting that by cultivating a ruthless professional demeanour (and the perfect body), a woman can “demand opportunities” and become increasingly successful and visible. Yet, by now we've come to understand that the greatest failure of this ideology is the definition of ‘empowerment’ as the result of individual action rather than requiring systemic change. It’s the co-optation of feminism by capitalistic ideals to create something diluted, palatable, and market-friendly.
It’s when we experience this mass disillusionment with mainstream feminism that Mosfegh’s characters who refuse to lean in seem like the true revolutionaries. Mosfegh, who identifies as apolitical and readily turns down the label of feminist, might not have intended her narrator to be interpreted as an icon, but for many readers, she has become an unlikely hero. Where Reva—the narrator’s best friend and a sort of foil character emblematic of the follies of lean in culture—is partial to corny self-help books and workshops, dishes out advice that reads like it has been plagiarised out of a bad TV script, and routinely assumes absurd diets to contort her body to fit the beauty standard (“prune juice and baking soda,” or “a gallon of salt water a day”), the narrator simply dissociates and checks-out—very literally putting herself to sleep.
It’s only in the lull, the nothingness, the absolution of sleep that the narrator experiences transcendent freedom. “Oh sleep,” she pines, “Nothing could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom.” In another chapter, the narrator marvels, “And yet I was aware of the nothingness. I was awake in my sleep somehow. I felt good. I felt happy.” The irony that Moshfegh seems to suggest is that the narrator, in the depths of her medicated sleep, is more attuned to reality than characters like Reva, chained to trite, suffocating performances of smiling and leaning in, naively trusting that progress is just behind the corner.
It’s like this scene from Boy Parts, Eliza Clark’s debut novel that has garnered similar descriptions that liken it to contemporary American Psycho with a female protagonist that rivals Bateman in his vileness. The narrator, Irina, and her friend Flo enter a sex shop, which Flo stammeringly claims to be a feminist space. Irina views her friend’s nonchalance as performative and artificial. She scoffs, “Basic feminist internet discourse has made her think she’s sex-positive.” As an implied challenge, Irina beckons to an increasingly provocative and ludicrous list of objects: a wall of pornographic DVDs, “a mannequin with enormous plastic breasts and a cheap wig.” “What about that stuff, Flo;” Irina asks, “is that feminist?”
It’s in this scene that the limitations of mainstream feminism reveal themselves—an ideology that promises transgressive, radical action but delivers flimsy messaging that lends itself best to commodification. In the essay, Things Are Getting a Little Out of Hand Writer Nina Renta Aron recalls her experiences with feminism as a teenager in the 1990s when she was part of a movement of young women who made zines about their experiences navigating complex topics that accompanied female identity: peer pressure, beauty ideals, sexual assault, abortion, eating disorders. Their writing was unfiltered, messy, and honest. However, it was an authenticity that would be short-lived. “Our rebellion was swiftly co-opted,” Aron writes, “It hardly stood a chance against the machinery of capitalism, which absorbed even our aesthetic…which became motifs of the era of Girl Power that followed.”
It’s in the face of this exhaustive battle of tug and war where the odds are so obviously stacked against us, that it feels reflexive to recoil and draw back. Think Audrey Wollen’s Sad Girl Theory, where she contends that “instead of trying to paint a gloss of positivity over girlhood, instead of forcing optimism and self-love down our throats, sticking a Band-aid on this gaping wound,” women should not be ashamed of their discontent; rather, Wollen suggests that expressing sadness or nihilism is a powerful tool of resistance and protest. The obvious hole in this argument is the fact that expressing this deeply nihilistic worldview, to throw up our hands and declare I’m done, is a uniquely privileged perspective. It's her privilege that affords the narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation an entire year of escapism from reality; it’s also privilege that brings readers to label the narrator and her prolonged escapism as relatable when really, it's anything but. In the narrator’s rare ventures out of her apartment, where she reads snippets of the daily news, she observes the recent developments with a cool detachment. After all, the narrator is far too insulated by her wealth, status, and whiteness to be directly affected.
We need to acknowledge that however tantalising and aestheticized dissociative feminism is, there is nothing radical about this ideology. It’s destructive, disengaged, self-involved, and ultimately exclusionary towards women of colour and other marginalised communities who are and have historically been the vanguard of political activism and the ones who continue to demand change.
But if there’s anything that the narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation believes in, it has to be art. (“I wanted to be an artist,” she tells Reva in a rare moment of longing) When the narrator emerges from her hibernation, she finds herself at the Met, perusing through paintings of fruit and pondering the meaning of life, creation, and art. She concludes that there is nothing that she despises more than creating art to assuage one’s fears of death. Real art, the narrator believes, is to hold a mirror up to reality, a reality that she believes to be unsalvageable, something perpetually ugly and grey. But maybe it’s exactly this worldview that leads to a flattening of the narrator’s view of those around her and herself. In an abrupt turn within the final chapter, the narrator watches a figure she believes to be her friend Reva fall from the Twin Towers during the September 11 terrorist attack. In the image of her friend plummeting to her death, the narrator sees only art. (“I am overcome with awe…not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I’ll never see her again, but because she is beautiful.”) Reva, who the narrator described as “plebeian, straightlaced, and conformist” in life becomes beautiful only in death, the “ultimate dissociation.” This conclusion, that life and beauty cannot co-exist, is both at once grim and laughably unfounded; it's a worldview that we are better off without, in both our day-to-day lives and in our feminism.
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