Things I think about when I'm thinking about 'The Natural Way of Things' by Charlotte Wood #2

#1 of this series is here


It's all so damn relevant. The women in The Natural Way of Things could be real. They could be plucked out of the last month's newspapers, or the month before that, or before that.  There are always fresh crops of women available for public persecution.

In the very few weeks since I've read The Natural Way of Things multiple women have come forward about the predatory behaviour of a man prominent in the NZ music scene, numerous people are defending him, friends of Facebook friends write it would be interesting to hear the other side of the story. There's been an Auckland court case about inappropriate sports massages involving teenage girls, hotly denied by the coach involved; Monica Lewinsky is being derided as ugly; and a woman has won a decades long battle to see the Catholic priest that abused her sent to jail. The church knew and hadn't told.

Verla looks around the table then. Despite the shaven skulls, one by one the girls' faces clarify for an instant--and then merge, and Verla knows that she and they are in some dreadful way connected.

Boncer's words return. In the days to come she will learn what she is, what they all are. That they are the minister's-little-travel-trump and that Skype-slut and the yuck-ugly-dog from the cruise ship; they are pig-on-a-spit and big-red-box, moll-number-twelve and bogan-gold-digger-gangbang-slut. They are what happens when you don't keep your fucking fat slag's mouth shut.

...

Her room (not room: cell, dogbox) is at the end of the row. She can hear the girls in the adjoining boxes; next to her is Isobel Askell the airline girl, then Hetty the cardinal's girl with the burnt and ulcerating arm, then Yolanda Kovacs, then the rest: Maitlynd the school principal's 'head girl'; then big Barbs; and next that morose gamer girl Rhiannon, the one called Codebabe and the wanking mascot for every nasty gamer creep in the country. Then poor cruise-ship Lydia, then Leandra from the army, then last of all, the girl the whole country could despise: little Asian Joy from last season's PerforMAXX. Who got fat, then thin after everything happened, and who could barely speak a word now, let alone sing one. 

The particular prison Wood writes of is fiction, but the experience of women in society, taught to validate themselves and each other based on their ability to attract men, the indecency with which men treat them, and the quick cruelty of society in assessing women's willing or unwilling sexual engagement with men is not invented. There's nothing new here, Wood just wrote it down.

And in TNWOT, it's not just an anonymous public, or Facebook comments or men that hold the women in contempt. The women in the prison judge each other with little compassion. They're cruel and absorb uncritically the ideas that others hold of them.  I wonder if this is what Charlotte Wood meant when she said she did not intend to write a good feminist novel. The women are implicated, brave and brilliant in other respects, but they go with it, fanning quite pure hatred of each other. This feels brutal and real and true. Hetty, the cardinal's girl cops the worst of it.

What the cardinal had seen close up, Verla knows now, was Hetty’s wet red mouth, the coarse black eyebrows, potent with some ferocious carnality. He saw what Verla could see now, that Hetty was a little muscled dog that knew how to bite, and how to indiscriminately fuck. If she were a male the pink crayon of her dick would be always out.

People have thought this about Verla. She knows that; she read the comments at first. They’ve more or less said it to her face. But with Hetty it is true. The sour milk smell, the clotted mess of what Hetty is saying, the stink of her body all rise up in a curdled mist. Hetty is repulsive, a liar. Hetty can be blamed.

Read part 3 of this series