Slut Lit & Dismantling “The Fallen Woman”
In a book review for The New Yorker, Elif Batuman lamented, “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s when characters living out some fantasy (adulterous or promiscuous women, for example) are subjected by the author to horrible punishments, intended to show that nobody gets away with it.” From Flaubert’s Madame Bovary to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, male writers have cemented the trope of the fallen woman as tragic figure. Early feminist novelists have also contributed to this canon of irreputable ladies, including Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, and Colette.
I confess that I am a little bit obsessed with this sub-genre, which I affectionately refer to as @slutlit. Cataloguing stories about pleasure-seeking women can be traced back to my years as a twenty-something simultaneously attempting to date and find steady work. From my reading, I was reminded that being single and financially independent was a type of freedom not afforded to the majority of women in history. The inevitably tragic outcomes of heroines like Lily Bart and Edna Pontellier, either outcasted or trapped by the institution of marriage, have as much to do with romance as they do money and legal rights. And women who transgress, or have been perceived to do so, are indeed often subject to punishment in both literature and life.
For so long, marriage defined the behavior of women. It was the only way “to have a sex life that was socially sanctioned,” according to author Rebecca Traister in an interview with feminist writer Jessica Valenti. Traister argues in her new book, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, that the rules are being rewritten. The demise of the old model — what she refers to as the binary of “single life vs married life” — means infinite possibilities for women:
It may lead them to happiness, unhappiness, partnership, solitude, may lead them to sex, celibacy and messes of all these things intertwined with each other: women who have promiscuous sex lives, women who have lives who are not having sex for years or at all, women who are in monogamous relationships, women who get married early, late, women who divorce, women who marry other women, women who have children before marriage, women who have children and wind up raising them with friends.
We see women writers reclaiming the “slut” — from a cheating wife exiled for following her heart to an aging courtesan who dies penniless — female characters whose limited choices ultimately lead to their demise. She is recast as a girl coming of age, as a queer woman, as a woman of color discovering herself; not just a cautionary tale but as someone hot-blooded and real.
Read: An Enumerate by Mimi Wong
