![]() It also suggests that the adult shortcut to this happily regressed state is through violence and sexual coercion. Artemisia’s account contains the unchallenged idea that children do not want control. The word “child” strikes a curious note in a story about abnegation and arousal-if that is what it is (for a book that deals in the paradoxes of desire, very little is described below the waist). ![]() It is because I was released from control.” When he did so, she says, “I was again the child.” Artemisia, as well as being beautiful, Argentinian, and elegantly self-aware, is a psychotherapist who goes on to discuss, with her babysitter, “the rape fantasy”: “It was not because I was released from shame that I found relief in his violence. In a late-night conversation over a bottle of wine, Artemisia tells the babysitter of the moment of relief and excitement when her older husband reasserted his power over her by the “introduction of violence” to the sexual dynamic. The first is told by Artemisia, the wealthy mother of a classmate who brings the twenty-one-year-old narrator from New York City to Italy to watch her younger children while the family is on vacation. The book covers seventeen years of the narrator’s life and plays out through various conversations with or about women who are interested in being subjugated or hurt by men. “We were sex-positive, we probably wouldn’t have even called ourselves feminists.” She is also alert to the possibility that her needs are shaped by a newly toxic patriarchy: “The porn wars were over and porn had won and we were porn-positive,” she says of her student self. The other option was I was wrong.” She worries whether such a “wrong” desire (or a desire for wrongness) can be sanctioned by the self. It also leads to questions about consent that are so taboo they are almost beyond articulation: “Either the desires I had were possible desires or…or, this was the other option, I had been tricked. This might be an efficient enough thing to want in your life, except for the way it shifts, perhaps inevitably, into a need to be mistreated. ![]() Popkey’s unnamed narrator desires men who will tell her what to do. Her need to be dominated cannot be overcome. “It was as if every cell in my body began immediately trying to pull away.” Her narrator tries to date men who have “working definitions of the word feminism” themselves these are “lovely men, men with advanced degrees and wit to spare,” but when they try to kiss her, she recoils. For Popkey, society has been replaced by feminism as the system that tells you whom to love, though this switch from authority to the dismantling of authority does not solve the problem of desire. Why do women feel guilty when they cannot love the person they “should” love? (Of course they feel guilty! Is there another way to feel about all that?) The question Popkey asks is familiar from the nineteenth-century novel, where it is also a question about society: Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina abandon marriage for love, and both suffer disastrous consequences. The problem seems self-evident, but though there is much discussion about morality and desire in this book, it asks no radical question about why women in particular should feel beholden to people who like them, love them, or desire them. She does this despite the fact that he was “so kind and so supportive and emotionally generous and a good listener…everything a liberated woman is supposed to want.” Her remorse is partly political: How can a woman refuse all that for herself, when it is exactly what she wants for women in general? Her regret is also, in part, simply human-she does not love a man who loves her, and the pain he feels when she leaves him makes her feel badly about herself. Her nice, white life “was going to be suburban, it was going to be upper-middle-class,” but she throws all that into disarray when she decides to leave her husband, John, who loves her. The narrator of Miranda Popkey’s first novel, Topics of Conversation, is the daughter of an old Hollywood family, now in gentle decline. ![]() It might also be useful to ask if the latter are more often female. There is, perhaps, a game to be played with novels along these lines, dividing fictional characters into those who sin and those who are merely wrongheaded and sad. It was like accusing them of causing their own loneliness. ![]() They reached instead for the phrase “a failure to love,” a devastating switch that moved children from the pleasures of transgression (who doesn’t like a good sin?) to the wilderness of abandonment. Sometime in the 1980s Catholic primary school teachers in Ireland abandoned the concept of sin, considering it too harsh for the six-year-olds they were training for the confessional. ![]()
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