The Satirical Theater of the Female
Body:
The Role of Women in Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers,
Dead Babies, and Money: A Suicide Note
©1995, 1996 by Robert Martinez II
[Editor's note: Robert Martinez II, a graduate of the College of William &
Mary, completed this essay for his senior year independent study research project in the
English Department. He started reading Amis in college, and began to take a special
interest in Amis's treatment of sexuality and feminism. He plans to continue this topic of
study in the future. Robert can be reached at rlm_3@hotmail.com.]
Introduction
One of the main thematic concerns running through the fiction of
Martin Amis is a satirical preoccupation with human sexuality in the late twentieth
century. Many of his novels often present a wide spectrum of debauched and lecherous male
characters, ranging from cretinized brawling oafs to stylish degenerates who assault the
reader with their explicit sexual behaviors. The shocking and bleak nature of sexuality in
Amis’s novels represents his cynical yet comic view of how predominantly male
narcissistic attitudes and behavior have transformed sex into an arena of self-mastery
rather than a transcendence of the self through intimacy and communication. His fiction,
as James Diedrick has written in Understanding Martin Amis, largely illustrates a
brutal "anatomy of male misogyny" (Diedrick 49).
In The Rachel Papers (1973), Dead Babies (1975), and Money:
A Suicide Note (1984), Amis explores the sexual and social worlds of adolescence, the
drug culture of the 1970s, and the obscene greed of the 1980s. In each of these novels,
however, his concentration on corrupt male sexual actions raises questions about the
treatment of women. Even though one of Amis’s artistic intentions is to catalogue and
criticize male misogyny, these texts are still largely patriarchal in their satirical
designs: they often characterize women as sexual objects whose abuse accentuates the
violent and sometimes comic degeneracy of his male characters.
James Diedrick has acknowledged the possible antifeminist nature of
Amis’s fiction, referring in particular to Amis’s first three novels, The
Rachel Papers, Dead Babies, and Success: "Finally, while they often
brilliantly render male misogyny, it is not always clear where satirized sexism ends and
authorial antifeminism begins. Amis himself has called his first three novels ‘not
antifeminist but prefeminist,’ which is one way of describing a failure to extend
full imaginative sympathy to his women characters" (20). I want to suggest, however,
that an antifeminist sentiment is not confined to Amis’s early fiction. In the three
texts under analysis here, Amis seems to use his female characters and the female body as
textual landscapes and symbolic mirrors to render the violently Dionysian activity and the
comically pathetic antics of his male characters. The absence of consciousness in
Amis’s female characters becomes a necessary textual vacancy that his male
misogynists inhabit in order to establish his postlapsarian view of modern sexuality. In The
Rachel Papers, Dead Babies, and Money, women ultimately function as
narrative devices that stage and give voice to patriarchal behavior and Amis’s larger
artistic concerns for the Novel.
