Wrestling with the B-word: Lucy March's THAT TOUCH OF MAGIC

Bitch: Feminist Responses to Popular Culture

Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women

Smart women with feminist leanings have long been attempting to reclaim the derogatory term "bitch," suggesting that the qualities which it points to as worthy of insult are the very qualities that women should celebrate. As author Laura Wild argues,

To me, someone calling me a bitch means they think I'm aggressive, asserting my control, in charge, whatever, and they're probably threatened by that. I am those things, there's no reason why I shouldn't be, and the shock attached to the use of the phrase by whoever's saying it that suggests I shouldn't be those things is what annoys me most.

Such reclamation projects were on my mind as I read the second book in Lucy March's light comedic paranormal series about the small town of Nodaway Falls, That Touch of Magic. Its brash, foul-mouthed, rule-breaking protagonist, budding conjurer Stacy Easter, could well be termed a bitch in the positive, reclaimed sense. Her typical way of interacting with others is through snarky, barbed sarcasm: she greets the sight of her friend (and soon-to-be sister-in-law) Peach "It's Rosie the Riveter, the spank-me version." Peach simply replies, "Yay! She's being mean. She's okay" (26). Stacy wisecracks her way throughout the novel, not afraid to speak her mind, to take control of a bad situation, or to protest, loudly, when others treat her or her friends poorly.

The only thing (or person, rather) who leaves her tongue-tied is her ex-boyfriend, Leo North, who, ten years before, in a drunken, grief-stricken mistake, slept with another girl then left Stacy to study for the priesthood. Back in town for Peach's wedding to Stacy's brother, Leo, it turns out, did not end up taking on the collar. And it also turns out he's not just back in town for the wedding; his therapist recommended that he see Stacy once again, so he'd stop "thinking of you as ... well. Mine. He said you'd be different. He said those feelings would go away, and I'd be able to finally let it go and move on" (70). To Leo's chagrin, his therapist had it wrong: he's just as drawn to Stacy as he was ten years ago.

And Stacy knows her feelings for Leo are just as strong as they ever were. But tough Stacy isn't as ready to mend fences as Leo is: "I wanted to throw my arms around him, kiss him until neither of us could see straight. Bring him to my bed and keep him there forever. But that was weakness, and if loving Leo had made me anything, it wasn't weak" (72). Intriguingly, though, it turns out that Leo's transgression isn't the only thing standing in the way of a joyful Stacy-Leo reunion. Turns out that Stacy's embrace of reclaimed bitchiness is not as unambiguous as she makes it seem.

Stacy herself often deploys the b-word; it appears 16 times in the book, most often spoken by or thought by our protagonist. She uses it to describe her over-the-top narcissistic mother after Mrs. Easter insults Peach during the rehearsal dinner ("You have captured my son's heart, and he's a good man,, so there must be some great virtue in you.... It is my sincere hope that you will find your way back to Jesus, and repent of the poison you have injected into my good boy with your whorish ways"): "She's a hellbitch, Peach" (50-51; 56). When Mrs. Easter tries to return to the rehearsal dinner to spew more vitriol, Stacy uses the word again, threatening her mother with a pretend potion: "If I hear one word from anyone about you being a bitch to anyone, not just Peach... if I see one expression on your face that isn't kindness and delight, all I have to do is get a drop of this on your skin, a single drop, and your face will break out in wrinkles they can see from space" (62). In this sense, being a bitch is being selfish, being completely uncaring of the feelings of those around you.

Stacy also deploys the male form, "son of a bitch," when she wants to insult men who act in a similar, unfeeling way. Initially, when Leo first attempts to explain and apologize: "You slept with someone else, then left me to become a priest, you son of a bitch!" (68) and "You son of a bitch!... You left me" (69). And later in the story, when she discovers that Desmond Lamb, a fellow (male) conjurer has less than benign intentions towards her and the other women of Nodaway Falls, she uses it on four separate occasions to signal her contempt for his selfish, unfeeling attempts to use others for his own gain.

Yet despite her contempt for those who do not feel for others, tough, brash, rule-breaking Stacy is really worried that it is not her mother, or any of the unfeeling men in her life, but Stacy herself who is the true bitch. And that a bitch, even of the reclaimed variety, is not someone whom anyone can love. She attempts, mid-book, to apologize to Leo for their breakup:

     "It's... me.... I'm ugly.... Not physically, okay. I know I'm pretty physically. But inside, where it matters. I'm an ugly person."
     He huffed in the darkness. "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."
     "You should have left.... You saw me for what I really was.... Oh, come on. You saw me. When I was screaming at you, when I was throwing things at you... I saw the look on your face.... I scared you.... When I get angry, I get ugly. I know that. And once someone has seen that... I mean, how can I expect them to want to be around me?" (180-81)

Stacy has internalized the cultural message (and her mother's message, too) that her emotions—in particular, her anger—are bad, hateful, making her worthy only of being shunned. Over the course of the novel, then, Stacy will have to go beyond a surface reclamation of "bitch," digging deeper into both the sexual and emotional connotations of the earlier derogatory usage before she can rest easy in the reclaimed, celebratory sense of the word.

According to the OED, the word "bitch" stems from the Old English bicce, or female dog. But by the sixteenth century, the word was just as commonly used as an insult aimed primarily at women, in particular at "lewd or sensuous" women, women whose sexuality was seen as threatening because uncontrolled. Today, its connotations include both this earlier sense, as well as a more general sense of a "malicious or treacherous woman"; when applied to an object, it also indicates something "outstandingly difficult or unpleasant."

Significantly, it is during Stacy's sexual reunion with Leo that she is finally able to channel the magical power which Desmond inadvertently granted her. And only after Leo challenges her, mid-sex, to reject the assumptions that derogatory bitch-hood projects ("I'm not ugly. I'm not vicious.) and embrace instead the strength inherent in reclaimed bitch-hood ("I'm powerful") can she take control of that magic. Viewing both her emotions (especially her anger) and her power as equally worthy of celebrating, Stacy comes to reject the construction of bitch that argues that a powerful woman can only be powerful if she lacks sensitivity to others.

Only after fully embracing reclaimed bitchiness can Stacy counter the unfeeling Desmond when he lofts the b-insult (in its earlier sense) in her direction during their final showdown. And only by forcing Desmond to reconnect with his own detached emotions, rather than shunning the power of her own feelings, can Stacy ultimately prevent Desmond from harming the people she loves.


Do you think "bitch" as a word is worth reclaiming? Are there other romance novels which use the word in a feminist, rather than a derogatory, way?


Photo credits:
I'm Not a Bitch: Life Inspiration Quotes
Leymah Gbowee: Working Women in Aid and Development blog

Lucy March

That Touch of Magic

St. Martin's, 2014

It don't breakeven... Gayle Forman's WHERE SHE WENT

 RNFF Book Review





After spending six+ hours in a car with a fourteen-year-old this past weekend, I have first-hand evidence that the songs on just about every pop music station are almost always about falling in love. Running a close second, however, are songs about falling out of it. While Neil Sedaka famously crooned that breaking up is hard to do, apparently singing about the end of a relationship is not nearly so tough.

Unlike pop music, popular romance fiction rarely focuses on the breakup, at least a final, absolute breakup between two lovers who truly care for one another. Instead, romance offers the trope of the separated lovers, their relationship broken apart (usually through no fault of their own) sometime in the past, before the action of the novel begins. During the course of the typical separated lovers story, the hero and heroine recognize the signs they misread, or discover the evil figures who tricked them apart (cruel parents, jealous siblings, rival lovers), and mend the breaks that have kept them apart, making them miserable for months (or more often, years).

Young Adult romance* rarely features the separated lovers trope; given the typical age of its protagonists and their relative lack of romantic experience compared to their adult romance brethren, such a finding is not that surprising. To discover a YA romance that dances on the edge between breakup and separated lovers is rare in itself, but to find one that also tells its story from the point of view of the male in the relationship seems well worth looking at from a feminist perspective. Especially when the writing in the book is as good as it is in Gayle Forman's Where She Went.


Back in high school, Adam Wilde and Mia Hall were known as "Groovy and the Geek." Adam wrote songs and played guitar in an emo-core punk band, while Mia devoted herself to classical cello. The story of how two such disparate teens came together, as well as the horrific accident that broke apart Mia's family, is told in Forman's previous novel, If I Stay. Where She Went begins three years later, long after Mia, who moved to New York City to study at Julliard, gradually stopped returning Adam's texts and phone calls. The action of the novel, told in the immediacy of the present tense, unfolds over a single night and day; Adam recounts the events that led up to this day via memories interpolated between the current action.

In the now, Adam's a troubled, alienated rock star, having risen to fame on the strength of the songs he wrote after Mia dumped him (lyrics from that album—Collateral Damage—serve as epigraphs for the book's even-numbered chapters). Both on the verge of leaving for a 3-month tour of Europe and on the verge of a personal breakdown, Adam attempts  to lessen the anxiety caused by the grind of the spotlight, unresolved grief, and an overly inquisitive reporter by walking the streets of the city alone. But instead of finding the solace he seeks, Adam comes across a poster advertising that evening's performance at Carnegie Hall: YOUNG CONCERT SERIES PRESENTS MIA HALL. Deciding to violate "the three-year restraining order she basically put out on me," Adam buys a rush ticket, telling himself he'll be content to hear Mia even if he can't see her (54).

Zankel Hall, at Carnegie Hall

But such is the fame of Shooting Star and its lead songwriter that even the crew at Carnegie Hall recognizes Adam. Instead of signing the expected autographs, though, he finds himself being invited backstage. To see Mia, the girl who told him she loved him more than life itself before she stepped on the plane to New York three years ago. To Mia, the girl who never came back.


Mia, on the verge of departing for her own concert tour to Japan, invites Adam to accompany her on a farewell tour of NYC. But will it also a final farewell to Adam, providing closure to their unofficial breakup, a closure Mia never gave him? During the night and day that follows, Adam and Mia dance painfully along the edge of revelation, the weight of what isn't said far more meaningful than the awkward commonplaces that are all either can initially bring themselves to offer. Later, as Mia gradually begins to tell Adam about her life since leaving him, and her feelings about the accident and her lost family, Adam cannot stop himself from reading each statement as a potential rejection. But finally he allows an unscripted emotion to escape, discovering the courage, or perhaps the anger, to ask Mia why she left.

Forman doesn't offer the typical romance excuses of a misunderstanding, or interfering friends or parents; instead, Mia's heartbreaking answers point to the pain even those we love, and who love us, can cause. Even when (perhaps especially when) they are trying their hardest to help:


     "All I wanted was for you to be okay. All I wanted was to help you. I would've done anything."
     She drops her chin to her chest. "Yes, I know. You wanted to rescue me."
     "Damn, Mia. You say that like it's a bad thing."
     She looks up at me. The sympathy is still in her eyes, but there's something else now, too: a fierceness; it slices up my anger and reconstitutes it as dread.
     "You were so busy trying to be my savior that you left me all alone," she says. "I know you were trying to help, but it just felt, at the time, like you were pushing me away, keeping things from me for my own good and making me more of a victim." (184)

Unwilling to continue to play the victim, Mia makes the (feminist) choice to reject self-sacrifice, even if it means sacrificing her relationship with the man she loves:

"You wrote, 'She says I have to pick: choose you, or choose me. She's the last one standing.' I don't know. When I heard 'Roulette' I just thought you did understand. That you were angry, but you knew. I had to choose me."
     "That's your excuse for dropping me without a word? There's cowardly, Mia. And then there's cruel! Is that who you've become?"
    "Maybe it was who I needed to be for a while." (186-87)

Forman's novel contains many other understated feminist moments. One of my favorites is Adam's dismay at the realization that he's allowed himself to degenerate from being a "Man" to being a mere "Guy": 

     One day she'd told me that they'd decided that my gender was divvied into two neat piles: Men and Guys. Basically, all the saints of the world: Men. The jerks, the players, the wet T-shirt contest aficionados? They were Guys. Back then I was a Man....
     She's right. I am a Guy now. And I can peg the precise night I turned into one. (144-45)

Others include his recognition of what playing music really means, and especially the decision he makes about the direction his career will take once's his finally made his peace with Mia. Needless to say, this is not a book that makes a heroine give up what she loves doing in order to be with her man.

On which side of the breakup/separated lovers divide does Adam and Mia's story ultimately end? That Forman manages to keep readers unsure even up until the final chapters is not only a testament to her skills as a writer, but also to her ability to re-create a unique, and feminist, romance by experimenting at the boundaries of existing genre tropes.
 

 Gayle Forman, Where She Went. New York: Dutton, 2011.







*Unlike the RWA, which, through its recent change in their RITA award qualifications, has narrowed its definition of "romance" for the YA audience, I take a broader view in this blog, considering literary YA fiction as well as that packaged specifically as "romance."
  

Photo/Illustration credits:
• Cello ribbons & bows: Luana Krause 
• Zankel Hall: Robert Silman Associates
• Les Paul Junior Guitar: Top Guitars

Next time on RNFF: The origins of the phrase "pornography for women"