Caught on Tape: Female Self-Exposure and Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs

We're living in the age of the female artist. If the defining genre of the early twentieth century was the male Küntslerroman (think Joyce, think Proust), then the defining genre of the early twenty-first century is the female ntslerroman. We watch these women cavort onscreen: Lena Dunham's Hannah Horvath, Greta Gerwig's Frances Ha. We read their email exchanges in their "novels from life," the idiosyncratic label that Sheila Heti gives to her book. Taken together, these works give us models of female genius. "One good thing about being a woman is that we haven't too many examples yet of what a genius looks like," declares Sheila, the playwright-narrator of Heti's How Should a Person Be? (2012), adding "It could be me" (4). These are young women, quirky women, maybe a little bit manic, ambitious and flawed. They are also women deeply in love ... in love with other women. We're witnessing the dawning of a new genre, a marriage of the courtship plot and the portrait of the artist, a genre that puts the friendship between women in the foreground. "I'd never had a woman" (30), realizes Heti's Sheila, who's testing out a friendship with a painter named Margaux. "Women always have to confirm with each other, even after so many years: We are still all right. But in the exaggeration of their effusiveness, you know that things are not all right between them, and that they never will be. A woman can't find rest or take up home in the heart of another womannot permanently. It's just not a safe space to land" (31). Or, as Hannah puts it in the season finale of Girls: "A friendship between college girls is grander and more romantic than any romance."

It's not that men have stopped writing about their lives or that we've stopped reading about them: Benjamin Kunkel's Indecision (2006) is taught in university courses on the Bildungsroman, while Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) drew praise from none other than the New Yorker's James Wood. But semi-autobiographical stories about the lives of young, artistic women have generated more discussion in the media than almost any other narrative art in recent memory, 1 and the discussion seems to circle around a different set of questions, ones that have little to do with artistic craftsmanship. At times, the coverage seems to have more in common with celebrity gossip than cultural criticism: can a woman of a certain weight have sex? and if so, with whom? and if she does have sex, do we have to (want to?) watch?  2 For Hannah Tennant-Moore, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books , both Dunham's TV show and Heti's novel belong to a new genre, the female sex memoir, in which a woman "conveys her sex life almost exclusively through confessional details at which the reader is invited to gape. For Tennant-Moore, this strategy is less than fully satisfying: "The reader can visualize the sex easily enough, but has no sense of what the sex feels like or why it is fundamental to an author's sense of self." The genre leaves her unimpressed: "It's as if a whole host of women with no culinary knowledge started writing cookbooks just because they sometimes eat food." We might want to take issue, however, with Tennant-Moore's assumptionmade clear in her discussion of Hetithat it's the sex in How Should a Person Be?not the unique voice, the craft, the send-up of the art world, the careful depiction of female friendshipthat propelled the author to literary fame.

Tennant-Moore might nonetheless be onto something in spite of herself: these narratives explicitly thematize, even theorize, the costs and consequences of the kind of self-exposure that is demanded of the young female artist. Hannah, "the voice of her generation" (OK, maybe "a voice of a generation") is writing a memoir, but as her editor tells her, this draft is missing "the pudgy face slick with semen and sadness." Hannah offers to write about deflowering a teenager; her editor enthusiastically endorses this idea. The exchange comes close on the heels of one of Hannah's first paying freelance gigs, one that asks her to "expose all of [her] vulnerabilities to the entire Internet." (Hannah obliges by doing a bunch of cocaine and severing ties with two of her best friends before making out with her downstairs neighbor.) Heti, for her part, is no less fascinated by the sordid details that often accompany female celebrity. After a day of ogling celebrities in Miami, Sheila and Margaux pass an evening watching "an heiress give her boyfriend a hand job on [Sheila's] computer screen" (96).  Sheila feels "a kinship" with this heiress: "She was just another white girl going through life with her clothes off" (97). This kind of fame is uniquely female.  It's hard to imagine two straight male friends watching a tape of a male public figure's private life, much less writing about the experience. The scene of visual voyeurism recalls Laura Mulvey's description of the ways in which female actors are subject to the "male gaze," which, thanks to the intensely visual nature of twenty-first-century life, is more and more often the condition in which all women exist.  In this case, the voyeurs are women themselves, and as they scrutinize the stolen sex tape, they learn how to perform for male eyes; they are watching so they know how to be watched.

In the twenty-first century, the female artist seems not so different from the female celebrity: both are famous for exposing parts of themselves to the public gaze. In Heti's prologuea prologue that might be unparalleled in its wit, wisdom, and weirdnessSheila aligns the two identities as she takes her first shot at answering the novel's titular question: "How should a person be? I sometimes wonder about it, and I can't help answering like this: a celebrity" (2). She and Margaux "do whatever we can to make the other one feel famous" (2), which includes painting portraits and recording conversations - in short, making art out of each others' lives. We learn that this is a dangerous bargain: after Sheila exposes too much of Margaux, it seems, for a moment, that the friendship will not recover. If one is exposing oneself, however, then that's a different question entirely. All of the critics commenting on Heti's and Dunham's self-disclosing stories may be playing right into the artists' hands.

But what will happen to these young artists when they grow up? This is the point of departure for Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs (2013), a novel that updates this nascent genre and offers us a portrait of the female artist manquée and furieuse. "How angry am I?" asks the protagonist, the erstwhile sculptor Nora Eldridge, replying "You don't want to know" (3). But over the course of the novelin fact, on the novel's very first pageshe proceeds to tell us:

I'm a good girl, I'm a nice girl, I'm a straight-A, strait-laced, good daughter, good career girl, and I never stole anybody's boyfriend and I never ran out on a girlfriend, and I put up with my parents' shit and my brother's shit, and I'm not a girl anyhow, I'm over forty fucking years old, and I'm good at my job and I'm great with kids and I held my mother's hand when she died, after four years of holding her hand while she was dying, and I speak to my father every day on the telephoneevery day, mind you, and what kind of weather do you have on your side of the river, because here it's pretty gray and a bit muggy too? It was supposed to say "Great Artist" on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say "such a good teacher/daughter/friend" instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL. (3)

So begins a profanity-laced prologue, a prologue that seems designed to shock, even if the somewhat familiar plot and setting that follow prove much less shocking. It's a self-consciously epic opening, one that recalls the rage of Achilles as well as the brooding protagonists of certain classic novels, men to whom Nora compares herself: "No Ralph Ellison basement full of lightbulbs for us; no Dostoyevskian metaphorical subterra" (6). Forty-two years of life are compressed into a single paragraph, one in which each obstacle to artistic achievement is separated by a single comma, and which culminates in an expression of unfiltered rage. Nora is angry, angry but not crazy"Angry, yes; crazy, no" (5)and is on a break from her job teaching at a private elementary school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She'll either return to her job or "set the world on fire" (5) - she hasn't yet decided.

The novel will revisit each of the above obstacles in turn: the dying mother who had an ambivalent relationship with her own ambition, the lingering father who is perfectly content with his lack of ambition. To hear Nora tell it, her daughterly duties stymied her artistic production. Being a "good girl" means being "a decent human being [...] and a valuable member of society" (15), two qualities, in this account, that are antithetical to creativity. Women, Nora thinks, find it especially hard "to say 'Fuck off' to the lot of it," whereas "Men have generations of practice at this. Men have figured out how to spawn children and leave them to others to raise, how to placate their mothers with a mere phone call from afar, how to insist, as calmly as if insisting that the sun is in the sky, as if any other possibility were madness, that their work, of all things, is what mustand must firstbe done. [...] You need to see everything elseeveryone elseas expendable, as less than yourself" (15).

If these sentiments call to mind a certain kind of second-wave feminism, or, more specifically, a strain of 1980s feminist literary criticism, that is because Messud seems to be deliberately calling upon that political and intellectual tradition. (Not that these problems have been put behind us: as a certain widely-circulated article published in the year prior to the novel's publication demonstrates, this discussion is very much alive today.) Nora explicitly cites this brand of feminist politics: "How did all that revolutionary talk of the seventies land us in a place where being female means playing dumb and looking good?" she asks (4). From the reference to the "madwomen in the attic" (6) in the novel's first chapter (Messud, or rather Nora, knows her Gilbert and Gubar, not to mention her Barthes and Butler) to the title of Nora's diorama series, "A Room of One's Own?" (63), Messud returns again and again to that pathbreaking strain of literary history, one that recovers the success of women writers and wonders what they would have produced with more resources and fewer obstacles. It's worth noting, as Alison Lurie does in the New York Review of Books, that the visual art in the novel tends towards the literary: Nora recreates the rooms of female writers, projects that she, after Eliot, calls "the fragments I have shored against my ruin" (36). It is the literary world, not the art world, with which Nora is in dialogue, and it is more a shouting match than a conversation. In this respect, Messud's effort to historicize her heroine's struggles is one of the novel's most important contributions. Though this essay began by describing the new, or at least renewed, interest in the lives of creative women, Messud is right to remind us that there is a long history here, that maybe not much has changed, or at least that not enough has changed, since Virginia Woolf first killed the angel in the house.

But of course, some things have changed, and The Woman Upstairs is at its most interesting when it grapples with ways of being a woman that fit uneasily within set cultural scripts. In Messud's novel, as in Girls and How Should a Person Be?, scripts seem most elusive when women try to relate to other women. The book's title, "the woman upstairs," a moniker repeated throughout the novel, serves as one way for Nora to ally herself with other women. It becomes a kind of call to arms, an expression of solidarity"we Women Upstairs!" (165)as Nora imagines a sprawling sisterhood of "furies [...] Numerous in our twenties and thirties, we're positively legion in our fortes and fifties" (3-5). It's this universalist vision that might explain, in part, the affinity Nora feels with Sirena Shahid, the mother of one of Nora's new students and a successful installation artist. The Shahid family has come from Paris to Cambridge for a year, following the philosopher-patriarch, Skandar, who has a fellowship at Harvard. Nora is seduced first by the boy, Reza, with whom she locks eyes in a Whole Foods (a quintessentially Cantabrigian seduction scene) and then by Reza's mother, to whom she feels a strange and immediate attraction. When the two meet for coffee and Sirena confesses that she makes art, Nora admits the same, thrilled by the connection: "this! Of course! we shared" (33). Never mind that Sirena is Italian, fluent in French, and marked again and again with a kind of "foreignness" (30) by Nora's narration, whereas Nora is a self-described provincial WASP about whom "there was nothing foreign" (30). And never mind that Sirena is an emphatically "real" (23, 33) artist, whereas Nora hasn't entered a studio in years. The women share their projects: Sirena builds "installations [...] lush gardens and jungles made out of household items and refuse: elaborately carved soap primroses, splayed lilies and tulips fashioned out of dyed dishrags and starch, silvery vines of painted and varnished clothesline and foil, precisely and impeccably made" (35). She has begun making videos of these installations; "the story of the videos was precisely this revelation that the beautiful world was fake, was made of garbage" (35). Nora, for her part, also makes installations of a sort, "Joseph Cornell-scaled dioramas" (36). The two bond over the compulsion to create: "It's what keeps me from being crazy" says Sirena, to which Nora responds, "I'm the same. I need to do it, or I go mad" (35). Even early in the novel, the threat of madness, lurking just offstage, has an ominous and inevitable tone. Indeed, the novel is dominated by these moments of foreshadowing, and we wait for the betrayal at which Nora hints repeatedly.

In the meantime, the two women establish a friendship of sorts, sharing tea and pastries in their jointly rented Somerville studio. Sirena works on her new installation, Wonderland, while Nora begins a series of dioramas depicting the rooms of female artists: Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Alice Neel, and, somewhat incongruently, Andy Warhol's muse Edie Sedgwick. Edie is the strangest choice but also the most "essential" (64), both to Nora and to the novel itself. Though not an artist by trade, Edie made art out of her life: "She existed only in the public gaze [...] if when I was sixteen and on my way to college, you'd asked me whether I wanted to be Georgia O'Keeffe or Edie Sedgwick, I would definitely have hesitated. And I might have said Sedgwick" (63-4). Sedgwick is a woman exposed on reels of film, a kind of exposure that fascinates Nora so much that one late night in the studio, she dresses up as Edie, takes Polaroids of herself, and ends up masturbating in Sirena's half-built Wonderland. "When, as a woman, you make yourself the work of art, and when you are then what everyone looks at," Nora explains, "then whatever else, you aren't alone" (145). Here is the essential difference between Edie and Emily, between the female artists of the present and those of the past. Whereas Woolf and her ilk retreated into rooms of their own (when they could find them), seeking freedom from social obligations and domestic responsibility, the contemporary female artist abandons privacy and willfully exposes herself to the eyes of others. It is the intensely public nature of this performance that defines the way these women make art.

Nora, once invisible and alone "with her cats and her pots of tea and her Sex and the City reruns and her goddamn Garnet Hill catalog" (68), has now reentered the social world and established some new intimacies within it. She's invited into the Shahid family, first as Reza's teacher, then as Sirena's collaborator, then as Reza's babysitter, and finally as Skandar's confidante. He tells her the history of his region, as well as his personal history, when he walks her home at the end of her babysitting shift. When Nora's friend Didi offers one way of understanding this love quadrangle"So you're in love with Sirena, and you want to fuck her husband and steal her child. Have I got it right?"Nora replies, "Not one bit" (94). Of course, this doesn't stop Nora from fucking Sirena's husband, a moment that we've been waiting for since Nora started taking her circuitous walks home with Skandar, and perhaps even earlier than that. It's an encounter in the studio that is sexual but not quite sex, described obliquely: "I never let him inside me in that way, not as everyone would assume, but what we did together and our union, if I can call it that, was nonetheless absolute" though "There are other ways of reading the signs; 'We didn't even sleep together' would be one" (215). As in How Should A Person Be?, sex is The Woman Upstairs is a red herring, something that captures our attention until we realize that, in these stories, erotic energy is primarily directed elsewhere.

And indeed it has to be: to borrow Sharon Marcus's phrase, the drama of the novel exists "between women," though the attraction between them is not quite erotic, not quite romantic. "I know what you're thinking," Nora intuits, "You're thinking that I was in love with herwhich I wasbut in a romantic waywhich I was not" (68). Nevertheless, Nora insists that sharing work amounts to "an intimacy greater than any nakedness" (126). When she begins to mistake her affection for Sirena as a sign of unrealized lesbian desire, her queer friends, swallowing giggles, convince her otherwise. It's hard to name the kind of love a woman might feel for another woman. But this is, in essence, the central project of all of the works examined in this essay, a project that some accomplish better than others. Nora's inarticulateness in these moments reflects the imprecise rendering of the friendship that's at the heart of Messud's novel. Whereas the angry emails exchanged between Sheila and Margaux in How Should a Person Be? and the faux-happy phone call between Hannah and Marnie in Girls are absolutely heartbreaking, the scenes between Nora and Sirena always seem a little bit forced, a little bit false.

Unsurprisingly, the unconvincing friendship does not last. By the end of The Woman Upstairs, the bond between Sirena and Nora has been ruptured and possibly even transformed into something that strengthens the Shahid marriage, something "between them" (251). The crushing betrayal the novel alludes to throughout is not the brief adulterous encounter we expected, but another kind of violation, this one perpetrated by Sirena. As in earlier scenes in the studio, Nora is once again naked and exposed, performing for the camera, but in this last instance, the exposure takes place without her consent. Sirena has plundered not Nora's imagination but her history, her body, herself. This betrayal is similar to the one in How Should a Person Be?, but in The Woman Upstairs, we get the perspective of the violated rather than the violator. We are left to wonder what motivated Sirena: vengeance? carelessness? Or is it simply that an artist must be, in Nora's words, "a ruthless person" (127)? For a novel that drops so many hints, the ending is wonderfully unexpected, delivered like a punch to the gut. It is, in my view, the best part of the novel, a move that shows the careful design of the narrative, and one that suggests that moments that seem like failures, such as the unconsummated affair, are really narrative feints. This final turn is like something out of Patricia Highsmith, or like the ending of Ian McEwan's Atonement (2001). It's an ending that changes everything.

The comparison to Atonement may be especially apt. Both Atonement and The Woman Upstairs (not to mention How Should a Person Be?) ask how you might make art out of your life and, crucially, whom you have to do hurt in order to do so. This is a timeless (and sexless) problem, perhaps. I'm reminded of how Elizabeth Bishop chided Robert Lowell for including letters from his former wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, in his collection The Dolphin.  "I'm sure my point is only too plain," she wrote to Lowell. "Lizzie [Hardwick] is not dead, etc.--but there is a 'mixture of fact & fiction' [in the book], and you have changed [Hardwick's] letters. That is 'infinite mischief,' I think. . .One can use one's life as material--one does anyway--but these letters--aren't you violating a trust? IF you were given permission--IF you hadn't changed them. . .etc. But art just isn't worth that much."

Just how much is art worth? In The Woman Upstairs, it's worth a friendship and more; in Nora's words, it's worth "sacrificing everything" (252). And so Nora exposes Sirena in turn, writing down the story of their friendship and its demise. She has finally made art out of her own life, and now "there's no telling what [she] might do" (253). She may set the world on fire.

Maggie Doherty is a PhD candidate in English at Harvard University. Her current research project examines the effects of state patronage on American literary production from the waning decades of the Cold War to the turn of the twenty-first century.

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  1. #1 See, for instance, these pieces from New York magazine and Jezebel. []
  2. #2 The episode in which Hannah has a brief affair with a handsome, older doctor generated intense and controversial commentary. For a representative sample of the skeptical viewer's perspective, see Slate's take. []