Women Vs. Void: Solitary Women Weathering Radical Non-attachment
“Loneliness comes to you by default,” Motoyuki Shibata, Japanese essayist and translator, proclaimed in response to Japan being dubbed “The Ministry of Loneliness” during a talk in Makassar International Writers Festival (MIWF) 2021. Lonely protagonists seem to pique the interest of today’s readers. While not a new concept—as protagonists whisking along the perilous waters of the isolated mind have since long been near and dear—perhaps the debilitating side effect of the pandemic has swept many under its protective numbness more so than ever.
Above all, contemporary Japanese literary works are being sought out for their loner of a protagonist. Their narrators typically dwell in lukewarm existences where nothing evolves, unravels, derives, or destructs; mooning about their solitary perambulations is a loneliness that looms ever so imminent. When one pries into the literary loneliness itself, however, they would surely be rattled by how this pervasive air of loneliness existing by default is oftentimes gendered.
The first recorded use of the word “loneliness” dates back to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the theatre’s most well-known solitary who marked the radical change of the role of solitary speaker, previously deemed a defamatory position reserved for the Vice character.¹ Loneliness evidently spawned out of the word “alone,” presumably alluding to the prince’s proclivity for soliloquies and solitude, yet was allied not to Hamlet, but the silent Ophelia.
The soliloquy icon himself is not as solitary as some editors might have construed. Many believe him to address his soliloquies directly to other characters despite no convincing grounds; others, by dint of stage direction or lack thereof, contend that Ophelia has no direction to leave the stage in any of the texts. A literary dispute is therefore scarcely needed as, if they were to remain true to the original, Hamlet indeed performs for Ophelia, be it directly to or in her presence unbeknownst to him. In his solitude, Hamlet speaks aloud and demands an audience, whereas Ophelia faithfully remains laced with silence in the background. Perhaps these two disjointed halves theatrically superimposed was why Shakespeare reserved no hesitance for a new word to describe the unreadable air of the latter’s isolation, who, even in her final moments—is wordless and alone.
Preceding “loneliness” was “oneliness.” Ostensibly much like “solitude,” “oneliness” is seen as innocuous, neither undesirable nor gauche. By ushering in an unwonted mien to isolation that shies away from Hamlet’s that is vocal and masculine (solitude) towards its othering that is voiceless and feminine ascribed to his female characters (loneliness), Shakespeare ultimately wafted in nuances to the word that are much less desirable. This pattern of gendered isolation has been reproduced in many other literary works thereafter, rife with women hovering as though behind the feathery turnings of white veils; faint afterthoughts crippled from breaching the papery skin of the writer’s descriptive prowess.
Say, adrift in the peculiar charm of tightly-hewn and evocatively rendered narratives, Haruki Murakami—undoubtedly today’s most popular experimental Japanese writer to have been translated to English—lapsed into this stale through line underlying nearly the entirety of his oeuvre. Murakami conceives a looking glass dense and bristle with magical realism in his novels; seemingly with an unremitting yen for twenty-ish withdrawn male protagonists assailed by an almost neurotic fascination for trains. They cruise through mortal coils in a flânerie fashion, spiraling down the rabbit holes of existential ravings and emerging into the “Other Side,” i.e., the inner self lodged in his characters, accessed through wells, underground libraries, and eerie cedar forests.
These a-dime-a-dozen male characters either brood pensively or agonize over a female character who is either suicidal, delusional, or whose very existential fact is vague. The stock character women wading in and out like a fever dream exist as an expendable part of the story and are sloughed off once their purpose, that is in the service of the male lead through sexual demands or self-sacrifice, is fulfilled. Perhaps the elusive prose resplendent in hermetic symbols divert from attention Yumiyoshi in Dance Dance Dance, the narrator’s lover in Killing Commendatore, and the identical twins of Pinball who are bounded along to make coffee for and appease the narrator’s carnal whims as he is dwarfed by first-world ennui.
To the Murakami protagonist, sex proffers the double role of compensation for the tenuous world and a trigger for a metamorphosis, catapulting him into the metaphysical realm much like ours but stretched all awry into wild dimensions—bridled by critics as naibu (the interior), gaiteki genjitsu (external reality), naiteku genjitsu (internal reality), achiragawa (over there), and sundry terminologies of that fashion. In Murakami’s own words: she takes you by the hand and leads you off somewhere. They just cannot seem to wean off the magic pixie dream girls, eh? The meditative, introspective nature as the narrators wrangle their thoughts feels like a trance to read, though hardly lends any revelatory sense of catharsis. Whatever is supposedly underneath the glittering surface of the text is oft bogged down in these heavy-handed musings.
In a 2004 ‘Art of Fiction’ interview, Murakami confessed to picturing women as objects tussled with as the male recedes into himself:
“If the sex is good … your injury will be healed, your imagination will be invigorated … In that sense, in my stories, women are mediums—harbingers of the coming world. That’s why they always come to my protagonist; he doesn’t go to them.”
The commodification of female bodies—bred by institutions, relationships, sex roles, male control of the law and theology, and societal “scientific” prescriptions by male health professionals coinciding the role women need to play for industrial capitalism and reflecting male needs, male fantasies, male interests—paddled across male entitlement over physical, emotional, and sexual access to women stealthily into our subconscious. Our bodies are consumed, branded with arbitrary values and functions. It is not much of a surprise, then, that books like those of Murakami are peppered with “casual misogyny” (euphemism for sexualized children and rape fantasies).
The same sensibility for the arrangement of words that has garnered critical attention conjured up the 36-year-old narrator who converses at length with 13-year-old Mariye about her breasts, tired repetitions of Aomame’s “small breasts,” and the tasteless contemplation on the horrible tidings of her loved ones’ passings: “Aomame mourned the deaths of these two friends deeply … she mourned their lovely breasts—breasts that had vanished without a trace.” Amidst the obsession of breasts redolent of anime culture, one might wonder with all judgment suspended, for one hailed as the incumbent master of loneliness—how does Murakami write lonely women? Well, he does not.
Although he jells characters enmeshed in isolation, the women are denied its melodramatic pleasures of Socratic reveries; they must establish strength and independence to ameliorate their fate as, pertaining to the gendered isolation, ones who mull in silence emerge dead. Look no further than the depressive, silently recuperating Naoko in Norwegian Wood subjected to the role of a “perfect flesh”² of a passage to the “Other Side” whose death is later on soundlessly conveyed in a letter, contrasted to the vocal and independent Midori whom the narrator seeks sanctum in once he is roused from the twists and turns of the achiragawa. This pattern of men soliloquizing their solitary woes while the women die an offscreen death of Ophelia is scrawled out of the binary thought of masculine writing, coined by the French thinker Hélène Cixous.
“Woman exists in man’s world on his terms. She is either the other of man, or she is unthought.”
Titillating Derrida’s concept of différance, Cixous casted repudiation of masculine writing stemming from traditionalism’s segmented reality which couples concepts and terms in pairs of polar opposites, wherein one is privileged over the other. Cixous posited the dyad man-woman to have prompted the dichotomies. While men are traditionally associated with all that is active, cultural, light, high, or generally positive; women must suffice in being passive, natural, dark, low, or generally negative. “Man is the self; woman is the other. Thus, woman exists in man’s world on his terms. She is either the other of man, or she is unthought.”³ Salwa Bakr, prominent Egyptian author and critic, calls to mind the white male domination that lurks at the foundation of the literary world as the nub behind this, “In most cases, women continue to write from a man’s point of view on the world, because the foundational literary references are those written by men.”
The portrayals of female bodies in media propagate distorted notions of love pandering to femininity, the dutiful daughter of patriarchy. Femininity which is imposed, managed, organized, propagandized, and maintained by force encompasses values representing what patriarchy has made of women—veiled as biologically predetermined social, psychological, and behavioral traits inherent in them. Sex/gender essentialism has educated women, no less than by romantic literature or by pornography, to perceive relationships as not that of reciprocity but the sacrifice of the woman through maternal solace, non-judgmental nurturing, and enduring compassion—the very root of the stock female loneliness.
Under the capitalist heteropatriarchy, women must content themselves with unpaid domestic labor at home and underpaid labor at work. The separation of the spheres of production and reproduction rendered female sexuality tamed and domesticated into an essential part to the reproduction of an abundant workforce and male satisfaction. Female solitude, for the reason that it resists the patriarchal model of “womanhood,” is deemed radical.
Since the nineteenth century, nonetheless, the literary world has swindled in an indestructible wave of female pioneers. Traversing eerie Medieval castles, unnerving verdant landscapes, and atmospheric settings of the Gothic, they defy the male-dominated society and dissolve traditional power dynamics by plying the supernatural as the vehicle. They were indubitably beset by the same scrutiny and prejudice, their natural flair for social critique downplayed, and scathing repartee categorized as “masculine.” Pointedly scorning at this defanging by patriarchal powers, present-day literary it-girls have also undertaken the task of the modern and liberated New Woman. Without giving a whit, these women claim their right to solitude, scarcely ever settling into silence. Oh, and do they have much to say.
Readers peruse ruminations of the banality of existence wreathed in dread and disorientation as these difficult women mitigate the indefatigable absurdity of the modern world: from Otessa Moshfegh’s sardonically melancholic insomniac in My Year of Rest and Relaxation to the compulsive and devastating account that fuses together the glass shards reflecting familiar women in Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed. We are privy to the recesses of their heads as they weave in a tapestry of diurnal predicaments, and on the heels of these maniacally enthralling narratives, we are left raw and agitated.
From the same feather, Mieko Kawakami copiously enkindles criticisms towards social norms, baring its smoke and mirrors with such ferocity. Delved into the interior voice, Kawakami daringly ricochets between prolific use of magical realism and the blunt details of body politics, allowing it to transcend pure scenery underneath the deceptively simple writing. Kawakami makes clear through the drapes and pulls of fiction those mute sentiments women may lack the words to describe with.
The inclination to solitude corresponds to feminist objectives for female independence, advocating the cultivation of social avenues for women to thrive outside of relationships with men. As its echoes are rebounded across literature, some shoot disheartening sneers or take umbrage. It is as though the independent woman is infallible — someone whose distressed perseverance is heroic and whose affliction stirs insight, and any less than that is unacceptable. When feminists encourage women to be independent, in truth, it is not meant to deprive them of outside help ever—but for women to secure freedom in financial, domestic, academic, and professional domains so as not to be bought, enslaved, and controlled by men. Construing the independent woman as some sort of infrangible cyborg and limiting companionship to that of a sexual or romantic nature are precisely what delude people into envisioning singlehood as dreadfully lonely.
Throughout history, female characters, if portrayed as powerful, are portrayed in masculine terms: the indomitable, weapon-wielding heroines or the stoic, disaffected girlbosses. Sayaka Murata in Convenience Store Woman satirizes this reductive view by stripping her narrator devoid of desires that may fend her off the summit of “true independence.” Moored in the predictable rhythms of the workplace, Furukura is relentlessly pestered for her lack of a husband and children even though she has no want of them. She boils herself down into “a normal cog in society” whose every part exists for the convenience store:
“[Her] hand was important for giving customers their change and for wrapping their food orders. It felt disgustingly sticky from Shiraha’s sweat and I wanted to wash it as soon as I possibly could. It was discourteous to customers to leave it like this!”
Furukura’s qualms with settling into a “normal” mold of people is not only pronounced in the dismissal of her gender, but the refusal of being “human” altogether. Shiraha, the self-involved manchild she takes in just to deflect societal pressures, eventually cries out, “That’s grotesque. You’re not human!” to which Furukura retorts inwardly, “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!” In more than one way, Furukura seems like the pinnacle of the New Woman.
The choices for women seem to careen between the silence of loneliness, and resignation to a subservient role in exchange for economic security or out of fear of being shamed and lonely. Worse still, trading any filament of humanity for a labor function. Either way makes for a wet dream for the capitalist heteropatriachy, and what is outside of the conventional choices for women is unthought.
The idealization of heterosexual romance, beamed at women even from formative years in art, literature, the media, advertising, and wedding pageantry incessantly entails an iteration of a heteronormative couple that winds up together. This normative choice of domestic companionship with a man being considered as part of “womanhood” is manufactured through covert socializations and overt forces. The attacks on widows and spinsters run the gamut from mockery and devaluation to deliberate genocide of burning and torturing during the witch-huntings.⁴ The law, the pulpit, and the reorganization of the family have channeled predominately heterosexual women to value committed companionship only in the model of a traditional, cohabiting, heterosexual romance.
Still to this day, heterosexual romance is brandished as the bonafide antidote to female loneliness, and yet multiple studies have revealed unmarried and childless women to be the happiest subgroup in the population. Single and childless women are more likely to live longer than their married and child-rearing peers. On the contrary, middle-aged married women have an elevated risk of both mental and physical conditions. With traditional measures of success erring in heteronormativity (i.e. getting married and having babies) no longer correlating with neoteric notions of it, many shun off the soporific preaching of the nuclear family, perpetrated by compulsory heterosexuality as an institution by which women—of all sexualities—have been traditionally controlled.
Women in every culture and throughout history have ventured into the independent, non-heterosexual, woman-connected existence nevertheless. It was through the constraints and sanctions penalizing and obstructing female solidarity that women’s lives are permeated with male dominance. One byproduct of this is the word “gossip” which meant “women friends” in the olden days. Female communities have always been profoundly connected by collective identity and centered on the passings of wisdoms and acquired knowledge, from traditional remedies to the understanding of human behavior.⁵ Women had to be derisively pit against one another to exclude them from places where decisions are taken—to rob them of any morsel of social power. This distortion slithered through the centuries, weaponized as a derogatory remark to disparage female solidarity in the naturally tight-knit community and demobilize women from challenging the edifice of patriarchal powers.
The literary witches ultimately emerge raucous and triumphant for they have zipped past gendered isolation, neither conforming to the corset, acquiescing into the quandaries of loneliness, nor magically transforming according to the outrageously ignorant myth of Having It All—much less backsliding into melancholic male fantasy self-inserts. Take Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen, for one, whose narrator wrestles with bouts of loss and memories; its fluid and radiant prose imbued with subtle resonance and relatability.
“Again and again I will suffer; again and again I will get back on my feet. I won’t let my spirit be destroyed.”
Grappling with the treacherous terrains of “womanhood,” Mikage gauges what pressures to dispose of and which to adopt, balancing independence and stability. The narratives bore assuredly at the hard realities of dissipating relations to others, by demise or falling-outs, and the discernible spasms of grief wrought across by it. Coming vis-à-vis with the ephemerality of life, she does not mask herself with undaunted courage nor deftly whittle down her throes. Instead, she reclines with peace that though emaciated by the ripples, though capitulating again and again to anguish, she forges forward. C’est la vie.
Audaciously waltzing into the void, “Hurricane Clarice” has readers floored by the propulsive shock waves of thoughts that roam and bewitch. Throughout her whole body of work, the Lispector narrator’s inimitable stream-of-consciousness cascades into the solitude of their minds, their motley musings budding eminently at the hedges of the quotidian. Bearing semblance to the vocal and melancholic soliloquies of Hamlet, they are engrossed in their own rambles; the whole book is deluged with splinters of their thoughts. Readers will find themselves surprised at the poetry with which the narrator sifts through the everyday, whipping domestic tasks into an exercise of existentialism in the enigmatically worded prose—one of which is from the narrator of The Passion According to G.H. who erupts into an epiphany even from an act as absurd as scrutinizing a cockroach:
“The roach with the white matter was looking at me. I don’t know if it was seeing me, I don’t know what a roach sees. But we were looking at each other, and also I don’t know what a woman sees. But if its eyes weren’t seeing me, its existence was existing me—in the primary world I had entered, beings exist others as a way of seeing one another. And in that world I was coming to know, there are several ways that mean seeing: one a looking at the other without seeing him, one possessing the other, one eating the other, one just being in a place and the other being there too: all that also means seeing. The roach wasn’t seeing me directly, it was with me. The roach wasn’t seeing me with its eyes but with its body.”
A fresh breeze amidst the unexamined heterocentrism plaguing the solitary New Woman, Carmen Maria Machado’s viscerally powerful Her Body and Other Parties operates in the realm of metaphorical leanings. With the words she culled through the choicest art, even a modicum of closure to the plot renders us a hollowed out husk. In this subtle, precise, and subversive potpourri, the autobiographically-driven “The Resident” is riddled with satirical elements of the Victorian gothic literature. The sapphic narrator collides onto thorny relationships in an artists’ residence therein she must stomach unsolicited criticism about her solitariness and predilections from her peers, as mysterious happenings muddle her sense of reality.
“It is my right to reside in my own mind.”
Machado’s electric capturing of dreamlike lyricism leaves readers perpetually on the verge of somatic buzz, but it is not diffident of itself in its direct criticism to misogyny by diffusing this selection of short stories with biting twists to well-known tales. Deploying meditative conceits, Machado playfully nudges at this unreasonable yet common fear of being alone. “Do you ever worry that you’re the madwoman in the attic?” one character who has been persistently harassing the narrator teases.
Some turnings of the pages later, the narrator exacts her retribution, “It is my right to reside in my own mind. It is my right.” and declares her reclaiming of solitude, “It is my right to be unsociable and it is my right to be unpleasant to be around. Do you ever listen to yourself? This is crazy, that is crazy, everything is crazy to you. By whose measure? Well, it is my right to be crazy, as you love to say so much. I have no shame. I have felt many things in my life, but shame is not among them … You may think that I have an obligation to you but I assure you that us being thrown together in this arbitrary arrangement does not cohesion make. I have never had less of an obligation to anyone in my life, you aggressively ordinary woman.”
¹ Vice character: an allegoric representation of one of the Seven Vices or a more general portrayal of evil as tempter of man, often rendering the audience complicit by revealing its evil plans through soliloquies or monologues. The Vice later on developed into the villain in Renaissance theatre.
² Haruki Murakami, Norwegian wood (New York: Vintage, 2012), p. 159.
³ Rosemarie Tong, Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2018), p. 187.
⁴ Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” in Blood, Bread, and Poetry (New York: WW Norton & Company, 1994).
⁵ Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-hunting, and Women (Oakland, Calif.: PM Press, 2018), p. 41.
