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
Part 3
Dead Babies
The use of women to foreground patriarchal activity becomes more complex and takes on greater social significance in Dead Babies, Amis’s second novel and a formal satire on the state of sexuality during the drug and sex culture of the 1970s. As inscribed in its title, Dead Babies is often considered Amis’s most egregious, repulsive, and offensive text—a book that has been called "not for the squeamish" (Diedrick 32), while being labelled by critic Neil Powell as more or less a failed satire due to its graphically brutal nature (Powell 44). It has also been labeled a misogynistic satire by critic Shanti Padhi: "Apart from being indecent, Amis’s satire can be callous especially regarding women" (39).
The problem with these criticisms—most notably Padhi’s—is that few reviewers, aside from James Diedrick, have attempted to discuss the form of satire Amis writes in Dead Babies. Dead Babies marks a progression in Amis’s writing; the novel takes the discussion of sexuality beyond the comic scatological world of adolescence presented in The Rachel Papers and presents countercultural sexual behavior as the disease weakening the humanist beliefs that hold society together. Within this wider socio-sexual concern, however—a concern that Amis develops further in London Fields—remains the question of the treatment of women. The problematic treatment of women ultimately lies in Amis’s use of the female body as a symbol for the sexual decay of this social environment. Thus, the problem with women in the novel is not necessarily their characterization as shamefully immature sexual youths (for the men in Dead Babies are equally as callous), but that they are used to structure Amis’s patriarchal narrative and to produce the satirical meaning he aims to achieve.
In order to qualify the attacks concerning the presentation of women and scabrousness in Dead Babies, however, Amis’s role as a satirist must be carefully considered. Satire is generally defined as "the literary art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation" (Abrams 187). Amis’s writing embodies these characteristics, and he has even been considered a postmodern Jonathan Swift. An interesting difference in Amis’s satire, though, is his self-conscious acknowledgment of the ambiguous state of morality in the late twentieth century. James Diedrick hints at this difference when he compares the two writers: "A voice of moral and religious certainty can be heard behind the masks of Swift’s personae; the critical tones that filter through Amis’s characters register contingent rather than definitive moral judgments" (15).
This lack of moral certainty seems to lie in Amis’s realization that the satirist does not possess a set idea of virtue against which to illuminate the vices of society. He clarifies this ambiguous stance by identifying relativism as the philosophical dilemma that complicates the consideration of contemporary morality. In a key passage in The Rachel Papers, Amis once again uses the double-voicing technique in Charles’s speech to discuss the relativism of contemporary moral values:
It occurs to me that the analogy can be taken further—moral issues, for example. The so-called new philosophy, "permissiveness" if you like, seen from the right perspective, is only a new puritanism, whereby you’re accused of being repressed or unenlightened if you happen to object to infidelity, promiscuity, and so on. You’re not allowed to mind anything any more, and so you end up denying your instincts again—moderate possessiveness, say, or moral scrupulousness—just as the puritans would have you deny the opposite instincts. (130-1)
Amis uses Charles Highway’s dinner speech to articulate the problem that arises when morality clashes with relativism. In contrast with the puritans, there are no firm codes or moral absolutes to define behavior in the modern world: Amis realizes that depending upon the historical context and point of view, morality shifts in meaning to encompass new behaviors and attitudes.
For Amis, as Martin Dodsworth has noted, "moral positions are made difficult by a sense of relative values which chimes with the concerns of advanced thought in this period, as represented by writers like Jacques Derrida or Paul de Man" (Dodsworth 337). It is thus that the oddly named "Appleseed Rectory" in Dead Babies makes sense: the name ironically locates a postlapsarian sentiment within the bounds of a religious institution. The purpose of this juxtaposition is to define the "new puritanism," as represented by the characters in Dead Babies:
Are we presenting characters and scenes that are somehow fanciful, tendentious, supererogatory? Not at all. Quite the contrary. The reverse is the case. By the standards that here obtain Giles and Keith could be dismissed as pathetically introverted, Quentin and Andy as complacent and somewhat fastidious, and Celia and Diana as sadly, even quaintly, inhibited. The household, indeed, considers itself a fortress for the old pieties, a stout anachronism, a bastion of the values it seems to us so notably to lack. (Amis 16-17)
The shocking actions that are found inside of Appleseed Rectory are not to be necessarily seen as deviant; rather, due to the relativistic nature of moral values in postmodernity, Amis ironically redefines the "old pieties" as the contemporary behavior of the Appleseeders: the rectory is a bastion of the pieties of permissiveness, a castle that guards the new morality of infidelity and promiscuity. Thus, there is no established code of morality, just a difference in opinion between the narrator and reader, and the Appleseeders. By examining this relativistic view of morality, Amis is able to perform a satire that will graphically expose and indirectly judge the "moral codes" of Appleseed Rectory.
Furthermore, Amis’s third-person narrative tone seems specifically to place the reader within this relativistic dilemma concerning morality by making the reader aware of her or his role in determining the judgments on the behavior of the Appleseeders. It is a postmodern move on Amis’s part, drawing the reader into complicity in the construction of a work of fiction. This narrative technique also fulfills some of Amis’s satirical effects: the narrator and reader become separated from the Appleseeders, allowing Amis to display the cruelty and violence he identifies with the philosophy of permissiveness while placing the reader and narrator at a safe distance from Appleseed Rectory in order to laugh at and raise scorn for its inhabitants.
This satirical distance that Amis employs in Dead Babies most clearly resembles the indirect form of satire, "in which the objects of the satire are characters who make themselves and their opinions ridiculous or obnoxious by what they think, say, and do, and are sometimes made even more ridiculous by the author’s comments and narrative style" (Abrams 188). Similar to Amis’s mockery of Charles Highway’s mediated sexuality, the narrative style of Dead Babies serves to ridicule the sexual behavior of the Appleseeders, as in this scene between Andy Adorno and Roxeanne Smith:
He turned around and sneered sexily at Roxeanne, whose hair lay undisturbed by the warm wind. Our excellent Adorno was wondering whether to slap her about a bit first, or rip her T-dress off, or kick her legs out from underneath her—something casual like that—but suddenly Roxeanne skipped backward and in one double-armed action had pulled off her nightdress and was naked. (101)
Amis again seemingly includes the reader in the creation of Andy’s behavior, but does so to deprecate his actions: "Our excellent Adorno" is a clear example of ironic understatement, which effectively separates the reader from the presentation of Andy’s thoughts, illuminating and therefore satirizing his misogyny. The narrator’s use of language is also a mockery of Andy Adorno: "casual" is a word spoken often by Andy to refer to his breezy acceptance of violence or heavy drug usage. The use of the word here, however, parodies his thought, signifying that this "casual" attitude and behavior is really nothing more than the horribly desensitized mentality that is at the root of Andy’s moral bankruptcy.
Amis’s satirical portrait of Andy’s behavior extends to a graphic analysis of Marvell’s penchant for debased sexuality. Marvell represents the absolute moral nadir of the novel—a character who uses the liberal philosophy of permissiveness to rationalize the destruction of spiritual bonds with the use of drugs:
Look—fuck—we’re agreed that life is a rat’s ass and that it’s no fun being yourself all the time. So why not do with your brain what you do with your body? Fuck all this dead babies about love, understanding, compassion—use drugs to kind of...cushion the consciousness, guide it, protect it, stimulate it . . . We have chemical authority over the psyche—so let’s use it, and have a good time. (44; original emphasis)
Marvell’s ideology is patently ludicrous: his apparent liberal philosophy is laced with Amis’s cynicism—a cynicism that interprets the hedonistic use of drugs as a destructive manipulation of the body and human relationships. Not only does Marvell’s ideology serve as an ironic comment on his moral corruption, but Amis also uses his character graphically to expose the consequences of Marvell’s liberal attitudes toward sexuality, and thus to incite disgust and contempt in the reader:
Marvell snorted a nostrilful of blood onto the grass, wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and laughed drunkenly.
"Heard about the Body Bar in Santa Barbara? No? Hell of a fuckin’ place. The waiters and waitresses are nude, natch—and you get fucked there for the cover charge. But you hear the gimmicks? You can have cunt cubes in your drinks. I mean it. And not just flavored with cunt. Real juice in the cubes. They got...yeah, they got tit soda, cock cocktails, pit popsicles...Oh yeah, and ice cream that tastes of ass. Hell of a place."
Marvell snorted a nostrilful of blood onto the grass. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He laughed drunkenly. (154-5)
The details of Marvell’s description of the club teem with scabrous and pornographic energy. However, the passage reveals a moment where Amis is not necessarily complicitous in the portrayal of nastiness he so carefully describes. Amis distances himself and the reader from Marvell by bracketing the passage with a purposefully vile characterization of Marvell’s bodily gestures, replacing his use of commas in the first portrait with periods in the second, to state more emphatically the corruption of Marvell’s beliefs. Furthermore, the chapter in which this scene occurs, "Hell of a place," bears ironic relevance: it is a fitting title for a chapter describing Marvell’s club, for the club is a hell of sexual degeneration for Amis. The graphic intensity of the scene would also fulfill the requirements of Menippean satire, as defined by James Diedrick:
Bodily fluids of all kinds flow copiously in Dead Babies, but they are not purgative. They express the varieties of personal and social disease produced by everything from parental neglect to the aestheticization of violence. In Menippean satire, as Bakhtin writes, ‘the idea...has no fear of the underworld or of the filth of life,’ and Amis, providing proof, rubs the reader’s face in it. (36)
Thus, the explicit treatment of sexuality and presentation of misogynistic behavior are not simply "callous" characteristics of Amis’s satire; rather, they are central textual elements needed to construct and ridicule the brutalized world that Amis sees before him. Indeed, in a comparison of the graphic matter in the novels of Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, Martin Dodsworth states: "The violence and nastiness of their books are what they see and an expression of what they feel about what they see" (337).
However, the novelistic construction and expression of the nastiness of Amis’s pessimistic vision of society becomes especially problematic once we turn back to the treatment of women in the novel. Despite the experimentation in satire that Amis performs in Dead Babies, women seem to be clearly used to foreground various acts of satirized violence and comic male behavior. James Diedrick provides a path to this argument when discussing the form of Menippean satire in Dead Babies: "The worst tendencies of the present are exaggerated and projected into a postseventies future that has become a theater of cruelty, with the body as its stage" (36). A more accurate description of the novel’s treatment of violence, though, can be envisioned by realizing that the woman’s body acts as the stage for this theater of abuse.
This point is demonstrated in one of the satirized dialogues that Amis refers to as "Those conversations," when Andy Adorno discusses the aestheticization of violence: "Violence is innate, so it’s sort of felt selfhood, realized livingness, it’s expressing life in its full creative force—it’s sort of creative to do it" (143; my emphasis). Andy’s philosophy is made ridiculous by the reader’s and narrator’s awareness that this "full creative force" of violence is the very agent that destroys the creative energies of life. It seems, though, that in order to develop fully this satirical comment the female body is staged as the site for Andy to demonstrate his morally corrupt philosophy.
After he sexually abuses Lucy Littlejohn ("Lucy was then required to perform fellatio on Andy, who from time to time offered to knock her fucking head off whether she swallowed it or not..." [29]), Andy explains his behavior to Quentin, revealing the fulfillment of his destructive ideology: "No, man, it’s creative...—radical rape, for her own fuckin’ good" (29; my emphasis). James Diedrick argues that in this scene Amis has Andy mimic the misogyny characteristic of Norman Mailer, and therefore concludes that "In this passage parody drives a wedge between Andy’s thoughts and those of the author and reader" (16). But the form of satire that Amis constructs here is blatantly patriarchal: the parody of Mailer and the demonstration of Andy’s ironic "creative" behavior provides commentary only on the actions of men (as well as offering an artistic challenge to Mailer), leaving Lucy’s body as the silent stage where images of male cruelty can be reproduced and ridiculed.
The female body, however, is not limited to the reproduction of satirized images of male violence. As in all of Amis’s works, comedy becomes a central element in structuring his satires on sexual behavior and attitudes. Even though Amis’s use of humor is often employed to confront repression, violence and other painful realities of modern life, women seem to have a subjugated textual role in this process. Amis’s intention, indeed, is to use laughter as a buffer for moments of egregious actions; and it is precisely the role of humor that Amis identifies as the main concern of his fiction: "If you start off with the premise of me being a comic writer, you are taking an interesting line because there are clearly things in my novels that shouldn’t really be in comic novels...But I think that comedy never works when all it is, is comedy" (Morrison 97).
Amis often creates characters of exaggerated dimensions to achieve his comic intentions, perhaps most notably in Dead Babies where the narrator provides the following response to the repulsive Keith Whitehead’s query concerning all the comic misfortunes that befall him: "Well, we’re sorry about it, Keith, of course, but we’re afraid that you simply had to be that way. Nothing personal, please understand—merely in order to serve the designs of this particular fiction" (146-7). Here, Amis is borrowing the philosophy advocated by one of the writers who has influenced him the most, Vladimir Nabokov: "Nabokov used to say that what the reader shouldn’t do is identify with the character. What the reader should do is identify with the writer. You try and see what the writer is up to, what the writer is arranging and what the writer’s point is. Identify with the art, not the people" (Morrison 98; original emphasis).
But even if concern for the character is abandoned and authorial intention is investigated, it still seems apparent that female abuse becomes an artistic function used to create moments of novelistic humor. Immediately after Andy violently forces fellatio on Lucy (this time following the Appleseeders’ visit to the Psychologic Revue), the comically disgusting image of Keith Whitehead enters the scene: "Down the kitchen passage Keith Whitehead fried on his hot mattress. He was burping terribly every few seconds. They were the very worst sort of burps to which he was subject, like hardboiled eggs imploding at the back of his throat. ‘Mouth farts’ was what Keith had once called them" (99). Perhaps this juxtaposition defines one aspect of Amis’s use of humor—to ease the reader’s confrontation with the shocking brutality of sexual aggression. It seems more likely, though, that Amis’s interest lies in the comic dimensions of Keith Whitehead’s character.
In response to readers’ sympathetic concerns for Keith, Amis has said: "I wrote about Keith with a sort of horrible Dickensian glee, and it never occurred to me that his unloveableness could awaken love" (Haffenden 12). Thus, the cartoon-style and grotesque Dickensian features of Keith can be seen as the real concern of Amis in this scene. The violence enacted on Lucy’s body, then, remains as a backdrop to emphasize Keith’s follies rather than to articulate the atrocities committed against women. Indeed, Andy’s attack on Lucy creates a setting for her trauma to give space to Keith’s comically rendered attempt to seduce her: "Keith could scarcely keep his little red eyes open. It was 5:30, and he had long relinquished any intention of—you had to laugh—‘making a pass’ at the white-haired girl in the bed over which he leaned" (103).
As the scene ends, Lucy has been basically forgotten; her presence is necessary only in serving to construct "the designs" needed to portray the pathetic antics of Keith’s frustrated lust: "He put the light out and walked toward the door. On the way he stubbed his toe viciously on the metal-based coffee table, but he was half in tears anyway, tears of tiredness and contrition and self-disgust, and didn’t bother to register the pain" (103). The process of supplanting Lucy’s pain with Keith’s has come full circle: a scene that began with Keith finding Lucy in tears from sexual violence ends in a detailed caricature of his sexual frustration and tears.
