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 4
Money
The social world of Amis’s fiction, and the role women play in it, is expanded in his fifth novel, Money: A Suicide Note. In the novel, Amis associates sexual debasement with late capitalism. To express this, Amis returns to the first-person narrative style used in The Rachel Papers in order to perform a heavy comic satire on the sexual degeneracy of a materialistic Everyman, John Self: "I’m called John Self. But who isn’t?" (Amis 97).
The story of Money can be seen as a contemporary play on The Pardoner’s Tale (one of the texts on Self’s bookshelf). John Self, like Chaucer’s Pardoner, is a character consumed by his own cupidity, gluttonously satisfying all his selfish desires while being utterly blind to his own spiritual emptiness. Within this caricature of Self’s high-paced consumerism, Amis continues to examine modern sexuality by satirizing Self’s main vices—money and pornography. But as with the sexual satires performed in The Rachel Papers and Dead Babies, Amis limits his satirist’s lens to a focus on male behavior. In contrast, Amis claims that Money differs from his earlier novels: "I consider Money my feminist book. The hero does start to see the light, and being the kind of person he is, he fails to move into the light" (Morrison 101).
Despite the reformation that Self almost undergoes through the efforts of Martina Twain, his journey through the novel is still largely constructed with the sexual manipulation of women. Thus, it is difficult to consider Money as a feminist text precisely because of this sexually subjugated role women possess: while Amis consistently illuminates the misogyny present in John Self’s sexuality (and of his other male characters), his novel rarely deals with or attempts to articulate the consciousness of women. One of Amis’s obvious goals is to examine the capitalistic victimization of women and attack Self’s treatment of women; but while performing this satire on materialistic and sexual greed, Amis continues to use the female body as a narrative prop to stage male corruption. In Money, women ultimately function as symbolic mirrors that reflect and give voice to Self’s internal degeneracy.
In a superficial consideration of Self’s sexual behavior in the novel, Amis openly criticizes his protagonist’s views of women. This branch of the novel’s various satirical focuses seems to elude critic Laura Doan, who states that Amis’s women characters are "mere playthings for male sexual gratification" (Doan 70). Indeed, Doan bluntly writes: "In Amis’s novel, women’s relationship to money must be mediated through men in the form of sexual favors. His resulting equation is thus: women + money = object" (70). Doan's argument is too simplistic, and is therefore unconvincing. Amis is quite aware of these conditions and satirizes their existence. For example, Amis speaks through his protagonist to acknowledge the patriarchal dynamics underlying the use of money: "She [Selina] has always said that men use money to dominate women. I have always agreed. That’s why I’ve never wanted to give her any" (88). This passage represents Amis’s use of "double-voicing," a technique noted by James Diedrick: "Amis satirizes Self by ‘doubling’ Self’s voice with his own throughout the novel, composing an artful counterpoint that resonates with implications beyond the range of his narrator’s hearing" (77).
Through this technique, Amis is able to critique the gender politics underlying the economic power system: Self, unlike the reader, is deaf to the presence of Amis’s voice, which creates a sense of irony in Self’s statement that deprecates his capitalistic sexism. Because Doan limits her analysis to Self’s character, she fails to distinguish the beliefs of John Self from the intentions of Amis. One of her main contentions is that "Amis’s text does not transgress the established boundaries of the patriarchal order to break away from the dominant power systems..." (Doan 76). Even though Amis does not attempt to envision a utopic or dystopic transformation of the "power systems," he does not necessarily reify the patriarchal "gender system," as Doan claims; for his satirical portrait of John Self serves as a criticism of that very system.
Amis characterizes John Self as an embodiment of the capitalistic systems of England and America in the late twentieth century, and uses this status to further expose Self’s internal emptiness: "Martina had given me a how-to kit for the twentieth century. And yet that was what I was giving her too—in person...She was learning quite a bit about her planet’s travel through time. She had osmoted some with this limp fatso, his mind in freefall and turnaround, a rag-and-bone man, hollow, stuffed, made out of junk, junk" (308). For Amis, Self seems to be a late-twentieth-century rendition of T.S. Eliot’s "Hollow Men"—an individual whose devotion to mass consumerism, materialism and pornography has shackled him in sexual, spiritual and intellectual poverty.
The claim that the female characters are playthings for male sexual gratification in Money is actually put to satirical use by Amis. Amis takes this condition, as embodied by Self, and articulates the effects that male sexism has on women. For example, Self is forced to occupy a woman’s mindset when he is accosted by a group of homosexuals outside Fielding’s rehearsal studio: "But as I walked across the jarred and cratered road and sensed the usual quickenings of irony and aggression I also sensed something further—I sensed that my weight, my mass, my meat was being appraised, registered, scaled, not with lust, no, but with a carnal speculation I had never felt before. Christ, is this how you chicks feel?" (182). In this passage, Self finds himself in a situation where the tables have turned: he is now placed in the role of the sex object who is objectified by the viewer, which allows Amis the opportunity to question the morality of Self’s (and men’s) attitudes toward women. In fact, Amis analyzes the problem of Self’s pornography addiction to comment harshly on the sexual myths men hold of women:
Here’s a little-known fact: the girls in the pornographic magazines aren’t like the girls in the pornographic magazines either. That’s the thing about pornography, that’s the thing about men—they’re always giving you the wrong ideas about women. No girls are like the girls in the men’s magazines, not even Selina, not even the girls in the men’s magazines...It transpires that everyone has their human shape, their human form. But try telling pornography that. Try telling men. (219-20; original emphasis)
Thus, Amis criticizes the situation of women existing as sex objects for male sexual gratification. The only way in which he reifies the contemporary gender system is in order to ridicule its mythical portrayal of women that leads men like John Self to practice sexual misogyny.
The problem of female characterization in Money is not so much that the women are "sexual playthings" for Amis’s male characters (for this is what Amis satirizes), but that his very form of satire constantly relies on sexually manipulated images of women in order to exist. If we follow Amis’s Nabokovian desire to reject concern for the character to see what the writer’s purpose is, it seems that once again we are presented with a specifically patriarchal satire that depends on the sexual subjugation of women to comment on male behavior. Even though Amis has his moments—very brief moments—of occupying female consciousness under the pressure of Self’s patriarchal world, his sexual satire on Self is partially made possible by women serving as mirrors to reflect Self’s lack of moral character.
The obvious factor that must be stressed about John Self is that he is corrupted by pornography, and it is through his eyes that we see the world. One of the four dominant voices that resonates inside of Self’s head is indeed pornography: "Second is the voice of pornography. This often sounds like the rap of a demented DJ: the way she moves has got to be good news, can’t get loose till I feel the juice—suck and spread, bitch, yeah bounce for me baby...And so on" (104; original emphasis). Thus, if Self’s mind is cluttered with the decay of pornography, it soon becomes evident that the various representations of women in Amis’s text must function as reflections of this corrupted consciousness.
The discussion of pornography in the novel exists primarily as the connection between Self’s psyche and his external world: "Issuing from my head, can pornography now shape the clouds and hold all sway in the middle air?...Come on, if that is what it looked like then that is what it looked like. I am probably not alone in supposing that I am shaped by how I see things. And that cloud up there certainly looked like a pussy to me" (231; my emphasis). The outside world, based on Self’s words, becomes an extension of the pornographic noise in his head: his surroundings and the people around him are, at times, transformed into looking-glasses that bear the images of his sexually corrupt thoughts.
Similar to Charles Highway’s parodic "hokey-pokey" sexual behavior with Rachel Noyes, women in Money are thus presented as sexually pliable objects in order to articulate the callous sexuality of John Self: "In my experience, the thing about girls is—you never know. No, you never do. Even if you actually catch them, redhanded—bent triple upside down in mid-air over the headboard, say, and brushing their teeth with your best friend’s dick—you never know. She’ll deny it, indignantly. She’ll believe it, too. She’ll hold the dick there, like a mike, and tell you that it isn’t so" (20). Amis here apparently abandons his concern for female consciousness by literally twisting the female body into impossible contortions to convey a comic view of Self’s ignorant and misogynistic distrust of women.
This same elastic presentation of women recurs when Amis satirizes the commodified sexual relationship between Self and Selina Street: "The day before last, however, I decided to open a joint bank account...An hour and a half later she turned to me, with one leg still hooked over the headboard, and said, ‘Do it, anywhere, anything.’ Things had unquestionably improved, what with all this new dignity and self-respect about the place" (85). As the last sentence indicates, the point of the satire here is to represent how self-esteem, sexuality and human relationships are reduced to monetary transactions; but the manipulation of the female body becomes a favorite image to communicate the corruption that shapes John Self’s mentality.
This use of the female body to comment on male identity has been brilliantly articulated by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own. In her essay, Woolf ruminates on the supposed question of male supremacy and female inferiority, and discovers that the two issues are bound by the patriarchal need for confidence and identity: "Without self-confidence we are babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself...Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch who has to conquer, who has to rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself" (Woolf 35). Woolf’s psychological analysis of the patriarch’s identity formation is based upon the idea that the subjugated Other—most often women—provides the male with the sense of power he needs to feel himself important.
This theory of identity formation is related to Amis’s construction of Self’s character through a process of inversion: instead of boasting or inflating Self’s identity, Amis seems to subjugate women in his novel to show Self’s lack of confidence and his fragmented identity. An example of this inverted, symbiotic relationship between the female Other and the male self occurs when Self and Fielding Goodney audition women for their film:
I watched through my pornographic sheen. And the girls submitted to it, to the pornography. Professional city-dwellers, they were experienced in the twentieth century. They didn’t dance, they didn’t tease—they didn’t strip, not really. They took most of their clothes off and gave you a lesson in their personal anatomy. One of them simply lifted her skirt, lay on the floor, and had a handjob. She was the best. (185)
In this scene, women function as an absolute reflection of John Self: Self is the handjob specialist throughout the entire novel, a characteristic that becomes one of Amis’s favorite satirical targets. In light of this fact, the sexual objectification of women here becomes a textual technique that captures Self’s internal bankruptcy. This mirroring effect has been discussed by Woolf thus: "Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size" (35). The woman in this scene, then, is merely a personification of the sexually debased male self—an object that emanates from Self, through his "pornographic sheen," to reflect his lack of moral strength and therefore reduce his size.
Using women to reflect male degeneracy is given ultimate expression when Self confronts his stepmother, Vron. Self has returned to Barry Self’s pub, the Shakespeare, in order to get his money from his supposed father, when he finds himself trapped in a seduction scene with Vron. The details of the scene cast Vron as a pornographic spectacle that mirrors Self’s pornography-saturated psyche: "With empurpled fingertips she smoothed her breasts as if casting them with an ointment of spectral costliness...I stumbled forward a pace or two but it was hard because hard core makes the air so thick. Hard core make the air as hard as concrete or steel" (340).
Vron, like many of the other women found in Amis’s fiction, exists as a sexual prop to stage Self’s final moment of sexual debasement. Amis himself acknowledges this patriarchal structure in ridiculing Self: "There are certainly one or two pornographic scenes in Money, and they’re there for the effect they have on the narrator: he has no resistance to pornography, or to any other bad thing...The crucial pornographic scene is when he is seduced, as it were, by his then stepmother, Vron. That’s his nadir in the book: everything has collapsed, so why not do the worst thing?" (Haffenden 21-22)
Considering that this scene is meant to comment on Self’s jaded sexuality, it is quite significant, then, where this moment of Self’s nadir occurs: "She turned over. Her neck strained to keep erect. There was another mirror: Vron could see what I could see. A woman on all fours, a set of fingers gripping the silver band, and tugging. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Do it there, John.’ " (340; my emphasis).
Vron is the critical detail of this scene—the image that foregrounds Self’s ultimate pornographic experience. Since Vron functions as the key image, she bears special relevance to Woolf’s discussion of the power present in the woman-as-spectacle metaphor: "The looking-glass vision is of supreme importance because it charges the vitality; it stimulates the nervous system" (36). Vron is an inversion of the looking-glass principle: she drains Self of any vitality, of any hope for redemption. Remembering that Self is shaped by how he sees things, then, it is rather symbolic that this room contains mirrors: for if we follow Amis’s intentions in writing this scene, it seems apparent that Vron is just another mirror, capturing and reflecting the debased Self at half his "natural size."
Thus, The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies, and Money: A Suicide Note, can be seen as social and sexual satires that use women as vessels to articulate a vision of modern sexuality polluted by male misogyny. In his preoccupation with satirizing this state of sexuality, Amis finally seems to neglect the consciousness of women in these novels. The primary concerns of The Rachel Papers focus on the mediated sexuality of Charles Highway and the Oedipal designs of his narrative. The characterization of Rachel and other women only gain relevance through their bodies becoming literary landscapes that illustrate and amplify Charles’s abuses of sexuality and the resolution of the tension present in the relationship with his father.
The women of Dead Babies and Money function in a similar manner, with the manipulation of the female body serving as a spectacle that reflects the moral emptiness of men and their often demented psychological natures. Women are ultimately silent props in these three narratives, then, since their existence provides Amis with the opportunity to develop the consciences of his male characters and his own novelistic interests in the uses of comedy to lubricate the violence that he sees in the world. While it may be misleading to state that Martin Amis is a misogynist, it can be safely concluded that he portrays his women characters, as presented in these three novels, in the role of the Other that shades in and produces the ambiance for the male self.
