Revisiting Books With Your Full Brain
Does how we read change with our brain development?
As a kid, when I wasn’t rotting my adolescent brain by memorizing the lyrics to the Sublime discography or slurping down boarding school YA novels (which I consumed like instruction manuals), I was doing my best Rory Gilmore impression by building a TBR pile well beyond my intellectual capacities. (That girl read Proust as a high school freshman?!)
I was poor as hell but also a good student and earnestly (desperately) believed that if I read enough Great Works of Literature, I would be rewarded by way of an escape route from the small, stressful life I was living. I was partially correct. But this also meant I spent time plowing through books I didn’t completely understand but believed I should have read. (Should have according to whom, I’m not sure; I didn’t even know how graduate school worked.)
This is background handwringing to get us to what I want to talk about today: books I’d like to eventually re-read with a fully-cooked brain. A brain that has, among other things, a prefrontal cortex and the general rewiring that comes from being a mother in her thirties.
The idea came from a bit of a bit that Zoe Marquedant and I have. And by bit, I mean we text each other about a book and the other one says, “I’d like to revisit that with a fully cooked brain.” So, not much of a bit, but certainly a prompt.
It’s sort of a pipe dream to revisit these (and others), especially as I’m already plotting out an Amazon order of fall reading that will certainly take me more than the fall to get through, but still. I think it’s a worthy exercise. What books did you read before you had a full brain, or even just the lived experience to understand the themes?
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
I read this book in college, in a special topics global literature class. That class was the shit, honestly. That professor was assigning us Edward Said and Zadie Smith and we were all idiotically trudging through it and — speaking for myself — feeling quite smart but also uncertain about what the takeaways were. I had not met the term “literary criticism” yet, so I also didn’t know you could feel more than “like/dislike” after reading. We were Boston college students and the book takes place in a fictional Boston suburb, and so it was easy for me to follow the experience of being a student in New England, but pretty much everything from the “adult” perspective went right over my head. Also, how higher ed actually functions was still pretty beyond my grasp. Nevermind the nuances of the term liberal.
No regrets having read it as basically still a kid — the exposure was mind-altering — but I think I’d get more out of it now than I did back then.
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
I read this in high school and wrote not one, but two, papers on it in college. I went around telling people I was a big fan of Russian literature while having no real idea of what that actually meant. (I held my breath through One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich shortly afterward and thought that I’d found a specialty.)
I blame my fundamentalist upbringing for my love affair with Crime and Punishment. My takeaway at the time: is it okay to kill someone who is fundamentally cancerous to their community? I’m still pretty sure that’s one of the novel’s central questions, but I’d like to read it as a deconstructed adult who is a bit more immune to religious guilt, or at least more aware of it.
Bread and Wine by Ignazio Silone
Definitely did not, at the age of 19, have a working definition of fascism. (It’s bad, right?) Here I am worrying that Trick Mirror is too much for my college freshmen, and yet this professor assigned this to first-semester first-years and, honestly, respect.
It follows an Italian revolutionary in hiding from fascist police. He pretends to be a priest and hides among the peasants, grappling with, among other things, the idea of revolution, itself. The story wasn’t hard to follow or anything, but a decade and a half of political maturity later, and being less generally hot-headed, I sense there may be more for me to discover here.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Is re-reading The Secret History an ethical decision or an aesthetic decision?
I read this book on my own in graduate school, on my Kindle, slowly. I had read The Goldfinch and did not, blessedly, know about the cult following Tartt and her debut already had among a certain subset of readers. That means I got to read The Secret History without superimposed outside opinions, which is great, but now that I’m on the other side of the classroom and I am not reading multiple books a week while writing a thesis, I actually wonder if I would simply enjoy this one more. Plus, I’ll wallow happily in just about any story that ruminates on class distinctions and semi-mystical magical realism. (I’m thinking about watching Saltburn again, so this tracks.)
This week in the classroom,
I assigned my nonfiction students to read E.B. White’s ‘Once More to the Lake.’ It’s one of those essays where you don’t exactly know the author’s angle until the very last line. That line gives me chills every damn time.
In other news, please enjoy the following essay from TV SUMMER: GIRLHOOD. It’s a dual piece of cultural and literary criticism by Aisha Zahira, who you may remember wrote a Cookie Mueller retrospective for us earlier this year. In this piece, she asks who girlhood is for, and who is consequently excluded. She uses Alison Rumfitt’s 2021 novel Tell Me I’m Worthless to open up these questions. Enjoy!
xoxo,
Monica
By Aisha Zahira
The internet has taken ‘girlhood’ and reworked a straightforward concept into an exclusionary trend, foregrounding a specific type of ‘girl’ with a fixed set of qualities. But ‘Girlhood’ in its current online iteration is misaligned with the general definition of girlhood (simply of the time when one is a girl and not yet older), with its white-focused depiction of innocence. In this way, it has satisfied the criteria to catapult it into a successful trend, paired with its evocation of a so-called collective experience, and as a space that can constitute its very own subculture. However, not everyone has accepted its manifesto. In fact, disillusionment with the popular representation of girlhood has long, historical roots.
Writing in 2015, the team at Ebony Entertainment highlighted the struggles of Black, trans women in their exclusion from (white-centered) womanhood and feminism. “It’s very hard to miss how marginalized women are always examples of bad womanhood,” the editorial team wrote. “It’s even harder not to notice how White women consider themselves not just gatekeepers of feminism but of womanhood itself.” Widening definitions of womanhood and feminism to include the stories of Black women and women of color has been a long-fought battle, and has led to a wider embrace of intersectional feminism. In spite of this, representation of ‘girlhood’ has remained stagnant since its conception, including from its early boom in the 2010s to its recent resurgence online. This remains a prescient issue because, though the article was responding to a so-called universal ‘womanhood,’ it seems to have predicted the one-note image of ‘girlhood,’ too.
One novel that brings into question our understanding of ‘girlhood’ is Alison Rumfitt’s 2021 debut Tell Me I’m Worthless. The story follows a transgender woman named Alice attempting to find a space for herself in an England marred by transphobia. Embarking on a fraught journey, Alice attends parties and hangs out with friends, taking drugs and hallucinating her days away. What she’s trying to avoid but can’t seem to shake is English transphobia. Transphobia is presented as an arm of fascism, and both are infused into the main antagonist of the novel – Albion House, a place where Alice and her friends, Ila and Hannah, experience an extremely traumatic event that leaves one of them dead. This event is hinted at throughout the book, although it isn’t ultimately revealed in detail until the story’s end. As the story unfolds, Albion acts as a representation of a transphobic society. Houses are a staple character in the horror genre; here it serves as a mouthpiece for our worst thoughts. And it’s not all allegory – the house gets entire chapters devoted to its point of view. Its “haunting spilled out of its broken or boarded up windows, soaking into the fertile earth around it,” potentially infecting all of us.
Bringing the themes of this novel into conversation with the framework of ‘girlhood’ allows for interesting parallels. Fascism represented by Albion spread outward, including to Alice’s former best friend Ila. Fascism works as a cage hoping to limit Alice, not just attempting to hide her specific experience of ‘girlhood,’ but to erase it completely. Fascism seeks to confine Alice – can ‘girlhood’ offer a reprieve? Rumfitt’s writing can aid in expanding, questioning, and even frustrating ideas of who this term applies to and what it represents. Increasingly, her work shows it may not be a sufficient title. A case can be made then, that if we cannot extend the term, we must reject it.
Our default illustration of ‘girlhood’ is white and cisgender. There is a projected image of white women picnicking, circularly dancing wearing long, white dresses and flower crowns. It is assigned to girls sitting together in bedrooms, on trains, at parties, baking, making pastel pottery. In essence, there is an element of purity (with all its connotations) attached. Miriam Balanescu, in a recent review, sums it up: “pristinely manicured mien.”
There’s nothing inherently wrong with these experiences. Actually, they reveal an underlying desire for connection that infiltrates the surface of girlhood as an idea. Digging deeper into this online trend reveals further factions of ‘girlhood’ that we can choose from, such as the ‘clean girl’ look, or the ‘office siren,’ which provides representation for girls who wear burgundy instead of pink. But why has this particular aesthetic – of white girls sitting together clad conservatively – been utilized as the de facto face of girlhood?
One obvious inspiration for the aesthetic is our idea of childhood. Only as adults can we create a concept of ‘childhood,’ and it is only the concept that we remember. We can merely stand on the periphery of its memory, applying a misconception of innocence on to it. As the late Margeurite Duras, a French novelist and filmmaker, said of memory, “the child has learned it so deeply she no longer knows it.” In essence, memories are what we know but can’t repeat, and it is in this inability to recreate them that there is an incomplete ability to understand; we quickly forget there is no universal childhood, and certainly not all childhoods are innocent. The nostalgia for this period in our lives is due to it being the one time where, in retrospect, we cannot be blamed for our actions. As children still growing and learning about ourselves and the world, there is no requirement for us to take full responsibility, and it is this idea that lives on in the cis, white-focussed iteration of ‘girlhood.’
Groupifying white women as faces of girlhood in this way sets a dangerous precedent with specific historical influences. Tell Me I’m Worthless touches on these influences, highlighting the fascist rhetoric underpinning our assumptions of what a girl or a woman is. The novel illustrates how restrictive definitions and ideas of women only lead to distraction. As one chapter from the House’s perspective asks, “Do you decide one is a woman and one isn’t, so you can believe one of them but not the other? Do you take the side of the woman who is most like you?” This does a disservice to all women.
It’s important to dissect how fascist ideologies prop up white women in their narratives. In their article, Ebony Entertainment acknowledges the struggles white women work to overcome but, recognizes these struggles are systemically different from those of Black women and women of colour. They write, “While White women fight to reclaim the word ‘slut,’ I am fighting for the rights of my younger sisters to be recognized as girls and human. This doesn’t make my womanhood less valid. It is simply different…and harder.” It is acknowledging this ‘difference’ — of race, of class, of cis-/transness — that is the biggest hurdle of ‘girlhood’ in trying to represent the spectrum of experience.
But, why is this the case? Or perhaps the better question: what is achieved when women are confined to this monolithic representation? More importantly, what is lost? Because even in a misogynistic ideology such as fascism, women are an important tool. They are not important as workers, doctors, farmers etc., however – their worth is in their status as ‘women.’ Not women as human, but ‘women’ as mythologized beings with innate, biological instincts. Even with women entering the workforce, ‘real’ work for women in fascism is presented as domestic labour. In his 1933 pamphlet entitled ‘Fascism: 100 Questions & Answers, Oswald Mosely, the founder of the British Union of Fascists, states, “We certainly combat the decadence of the present system which views the position of wife and mother as inferior. On the contrary, we consider this to be one of the greatest of human and racial functions to be honoured and encouraged.” By conceptualising women in this way, fascism simplifies them, boxing them into a role under the guise of a liberated identity, turning something that should be wonderful (motherhood) on its head to serve fascism’s malignant purpose. In a similar way, ‘girlhood’ views itself as a fresh sphere of the internet reserved for women, though it comes with a caveat where whiteness is viewed as the default and trans women are not even considered. Conservative viewpoints and images are foregrounded under the banner of ‘classical.’ Like fascism, ‘girlhood’ also presents the myth of an archetypal ‘girl’ for all of us to compare ourselves to. It confines the white women who are already represented in these ideologies while ostracising those who are not.
Examining Tell Me I’m Worthless from this point of view makes one think of Muriel Sparks’ novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which follows a schoolteacher shaping the lives of a group of five of her students. The Brodie Set, as the five girls are referred to, are the poster group for the dangers of blind conformity — they all want to be the quintessential Brodie girl, giving up their unique interests and backgrounds to do so. In a similar way, House Albion in Rumfitt’s novel figures as a sort of Miss Brodie, punishing those like Alice who do not abide by its ideals, only accepting those that uplift it. The Brodie Set are encouraged by their teacher, who has an overt, fascist obsession with her group achieving perfection in their girlhood. She prioritises the aesthetic nature of the arts, mimicking the values of Hitler and Mussolini. The fetishisation of this aesthetic imposed on the young girls functions as a parallel for the systems and roles imbued in ‘girlhood’. If you don’t relate to the images presented to you, you clearly do not belong in the category. If your girlhood cannot be slotted neatly into this idea, your complexity works against you.
So what happens when someone tries to fit into this idea? One aspect of Tell Me I’m Worthless that rings close to home is Alice’s worries regarding how she presents. In a similar way to cisgender women, Alice frets about whether she aligns with the socially acceptable vision of a woman, and tries to achieve that “neat femininity” as Rumfitt describes, calling to mind the “perfectly manicured” representation Balanescu also notices. “My face almost looks okay. I’ve shaved,” Rumfitt writes. This observation is honest and pertinent and casts a wide net, prompting questions about performance, labels, and acceptance. Through an everyday experience like applying makeup, an understanding of what is expected of women forms, a certain type of performativity that not everyone can — or should have to — live up to. This is something that is an overwhelming part of ‘girlhood,’ the disallowance of anything or anyone that isn’t perfect. A pristine quality adheres to each image, each idea is curated, and only the neatly presented girls are let in. Alice worries about what her friends think of her looks, and even what she herself thinks, telling herself, “It’s alright if you don’t pass, a voice in me says.” It’s difficult to imagine the current conception of ‘girlhood’ creating a space for Alice’s experience.
Near the end of the novel, Alice tries to exorcise the House, attempting to overturn its fascistic influence. This is an important message — that fascism can be resisted. The House is, at first, weakened when contractors try to turn it into a collection of flats, meaning “it had been hurt during the attempts to convert it.” Ironically, this allows for “the possibility of someone trying [to defeat it]” to step in. Nevertheless, it is a view of an optimistic world in which Alice doesn’t have to fit into a neat category, and a future in which differences are accepted.
This is what ‘girlhood’ fails to achieve. Its proposed universality in attempting to understand a collective experience has only led to restriction and a boring sameness. The concept tries to be a base for women to draw parallels with each other’s experiences, but it fails to account for anything more diverse than what people are already aware of. Within its borders, there is no room for exploration. Its confining images mimic those utilised by fascism, and a deviation from the rigid, defined aesthetic means you aren’t part of the club. No doubt, there’s security in this shared belief system, but its white veneer overshadows the experiences of not only the women represented in its aesthetic but, even more so, those who are not.
Aisha Zahira is a writer living in Manchester.