in my #fleabagera: the modern-day unhinged woman

the madwoman in the attic has become our new favourite character

SPOILERS AHEAD: ‘normal people’ and ‘fleabag’

at the age of twenty-two, you could say that i have been in enough toxic internet spaces to be unphased at the staggering fourteen million views on the tiktok hashtag ‘#fleabagera’. mid-2010s tumblr was a cesspool of teenage angst, black and white photography, and eating disorder ‘support’ groups, fuelled by obsession with fictional characters that teenage girls saw on the screen and likened themselves to.

from seeing the ugly romanticisation of violet harmon and tate langdon in ‘american horror story’ circa 2011 to 2013, to the icon status held by mentally ill teen idol effy stonem on ‘skins’ in the early 2010s, i am well versed in tumblr posts depicting mental illness as some kind of ethereal disease dripping in lace and wearing black knee-high socks.

where one hundred years ago wider society would have shunned the woes of these women, today we now place them on pedestals; women who, in the face of their struggles, are still beautiful and desired, despite their ‘unhinged’-ness. black and white gifs playing on loop of a slow mascara tear with white italic font at the bottom spelling out some unironic phrase such as ‘please don’t leave me’ cut depression down into an easily digestible bite ready for audience consumption.

in more recent years, there has been a shift in how unstable women have been presented. rather than being seen as helpless victims whose storylines are built on male saviours, these women are now seen as relatable due to their own characters. effy stonem dreamily saying ‘sometimes i think i was born backwards’ whilst mid-drug overdose won’t cut it for the 2022 woman who hates her life, now we need something stronger to captivate us.

examples of these characters include fleabag, marianne from ‘normal people’, and rue from ‘euphoria’, all complex characters with struggles and secrets that we see ourselves in once a week. the focus on relatability has also shifted from being directed at insecure, unsure teenage girls to even more unsure young women – women who are in their #fleabagera.

in her online essay ‘standing on the shoulders of complex female characters’, rayne fisher-quann writes that ‘[…] the desire to editorialise our own experiences (to romanticise the unseen, to live for our biographies) has become an autonomic facet of womanhood as unavoidable as breathing’. we no longer live our lives for the moment, we live them for the instagram posts that our classmates will upload upon our untimely deaths, upon the photos of ourselves that may emerge fifty years in the future, who we were scrawled on the back in shitty cursive.

we are careful about who we are on paper; in the mirror; in online spaces, where any handsome stranger may stumble upon us. we desire to see ourselves on the screen in any depiction that we can in order to break down our personalities into any funny, tongue-in-cheek flirtatious chunks that we can for a few retweets. whether that means we present ourselves as being in a red lipstick, unkempt hair, phoebe bridgers-esque, fleabag era depression, or a bookish, sexual fantasy, outsider, ‘normal people’ marianne-type,

‘young women are conditioned to believe that their identities are defined almost entirely by their neuroses, these roundups of cultural trends and authors du jour often implicitly serve to chicly signal one’s mental illnesses to the public’ (fisher-quann).

we have gone from hiding our disgustingly decrepit femininity to sexualising it – placing ourselves on the outside and looking in as observers, seeing ourselves perform the role of ‘woman’ that we previously held as our full-time jobs. we make our depression sexy. unwashed, tangled hair becomes tousled; bed-worn, unbrushed teeth preserve last night’s wine-drunk kisses; dirty, sweaty bedsheets hold memories of hot bodies and intimacy.

the madwoman in the attic

what does it mean?

sandra gilbert and susan gubar produced the idea of the ‘madwoman in the attic’ in 1979, theorised after edward rochester’s first wife, bertha, in charlotte bronte’s 1847 novel ‘jane eyre’. after bertha’s marriage to edward, her mental health crumbles and she becomes unstable, deemed unfit for the high society surrounding the rochester title. her doting husband lovingly locks her away in the attic, alone, to pretend she no longer exists. how kind.

her mental illness has her described by jane as animalistic, like a wild and untameable creature – nothing like the dignified wife that society would picture with a character as rigid as edward rochester. gilbert and gubar write that ‘aggressiveness [is] ‘monstrous’ in women precisely because it is ‘unfeminine’ and therefore unsuited to a gentle life of ‘contemplative purity’’. bertha’s instability is depicted as shameful, unacceptable – and most of all, mannish.

women in media during the victorian era were supposed to be modest, closed-mouthed objects – submissive creatures to be sexually and societally owned. the trope turns this pathetic, lifeless woman on her head and fills her with rage – The Wife is no longer mousy, useless, innocent. she is loud, she is angry, she is sexy, and she is powerful. women aren’t angels anymore, they are human. mad women aren’t shut away as life lessons to scare us into submission, they are the main characters, and often they are our favourite ones.

in the article ‘the smartest women i know are all dissociating’, emmeline clein writes,

‘i’ve noticed a lot of brilliant women giving up on shouting and complaining, and instead taking on a darkly comic, deadpan tone when writing about feminism. this approach presents overtly horrifying facts about uniquely feminine struggles and delivers them flatly, dripping with sarcasm.’

we have been victim to frustration and emotional suffocation for long enough that we can turn that sickly-sweet pity from our peers into humour at our own expense, unfiltered ridicule through the lens of feminism.

clein writes about the concept of dissociative feminism, an experience that ‘simply refuses sustenance and lives sometimes within and sometimes outside the craggy body society adores, subsisting on men’s lustful gazes and other women’s jealous ones.’ we have these blips internally, processing how we feel before inking it down on the page – be that on paper, or on the web.

with the developments of social media, we can share our dissociative feminine lives with unlimited people across the world, littering our thoughts in our twitter drafts or anonymous tumblr accounts where no one can place words to woman. clein explains that ‘the rise of the internet […] does […] seem to have opened up a lot of new ways to practice dissociation’.

the ugly duckling

‘normal people’s marianne

the character of marianne sheridan in sally rooney’s 2018 novel ‘normal people’, and subsequent bbc television adaptation, is the perfect literary example of the sexualised ugly duckling; she is depressed, unattractive, gross, and delightfully sexual. our first introduction shows her exactly as her peers see her, in her messy school uniform, making teasing comments about her classmates.

everything that is marianne is mystified, carefully constructed to appear blasé and unaffected by the social hierarchy and her reputation, sometimes cruel and crude in how she speaks about people, even connell. she wears her face makeup-less, she licks yoghurt off her shirt in the school toilets in a disgusting display of uncaringness, and she speaks out brashly to the people who spite her, including her own teachers. we think of her as the ultimate social outcast.

but then we get the privilege of seeing inside her head, as the secret reader of her thoughts. marianne looks at herself in the mirror and sees herself as

‘lack[ing] definition’ and ‘express[ing] everything all at once, which is the same as expressing nothing’.

she thinks anxiously about what she will wear to the debs, and what people will think when she makes her anticipated joke appearance in a slinky black dress and makeup. she cries when connell tells her that he is in love with someone else, even though she has her own boyfriend, and she lets him keep their sexual relationship hidden because she loves him so much. on the surface, marianne is a typical ‘madwoman in the attic’; people label her as depressed, unstable, and everything that a beautiful woman shouldn’t be. her brutal classmates make a point that she doesn’t shave her legs, that she has buck teeth that peep out on the rare occasions that she smiles, and that she doesn’t seem to care about appearing refined or ‘cool’.

when we find marianne at university, she has undergone a transformation that women are all too familiar with in books and visual media; she has taken off her invisible glasses, applied some makeup, and now she’s hot. in the three months that connell doesn’t see her, marianne becomes attractive at the addition of a cigarette between her lips and a low-cut dress. she has her sexual awakening outside of her admittedly unhealthy experiences with connell and becomes an object of wide-spread attention and desire. she is no longer the ugly duckling, but instead a beautiful swan in an evening dress and full-face of makeup.

despite her outer shell changing its form, the inner-marianne stays the same. she takes the pain and hurt of the unhealthy relationships of her childhood and translates them into an idea that she needs pain inflicted on her during sex to fully become someone else’s. in his piece ‘normal people: the self-at-worst and the self-at-best’, alan eppel writes

‘growing up in an abusive environment, her personality development is constricted. she internalises the persecutory object which in turn is linked to submissive needs to be dominated.’

eppel continues, ‘in relationships with other men, marianne discovers an inner need for masochistic sexual intercourse’; when she explores this conversation with connell in the café, she says that it was her idea to try this dynamic with her boyfriend – even the parts that she doesn’t enjoy, because she is sacrificing her own enjoyment for the gratification of her partner. frankly, it is miserable and all too familiar for many women who have had parallel experiences. in the sexual relationships that we see marianne have, she is always giving herself over completely to the one that she loves. with jamie, she becomes his sadistic victim. with connell, she becomes his emotional doormat – when connell realises this, he becomes sickened at the lack of self-worth that marianne awards herself in order to be kept, to be loved, to be liked.

when young women categorise themselves as ‘a marianne’, they are channelling the women who came before them – the ones who religiously watched ‘sex and the city’ and placed themselves in the box of the main character they thought themselves to be most like. ‘a carrie’ was fashionable, charming, and flirtatious; ‘a miranda’ was intelligent, driven, and cynical; ‘a samantha’ was confident, sexual, and brash; ‘a charlotte’ was sweet, traditional, and emotional.

‘a marianne’ is a woman who shelters her deeply softer side inside a brash, harsh, and often jarring shell. she hides her romantic, painfully loving nature under a façade of appearing cold, ‘aloof, indifferent, and self-reliant’, according to eppel. in short, ‘a marianne’ is unhappy, and she is satisfied in this unhappiness, because she thinks that it is all that she deserves. but even with this in mind – she is loved.

connell seeks her out repeatedly throughout their lives, showing her that she can be desired despite all the flaws that she sees in herself. it is really no wonder that the lonely young women who picked up rooney’s novel to read on the train home (including myself here, no disrespect) saw themselves in the sad, scornful, and desperate marianne that we grow to love.

a sultry depression

our affiliation with phoebe waller-bridge’s ‘fleabag’

fleabag is the reflection that we like to keep locked in the mirror. she is the anti-quiet girl. the drunk cry in the club toilets. the way you stare at the floor on an early morning bus. the twist in your stomach when you laugh at a man’s joke that wasn’t actually funny. the way you poke your finger through the hole in the pocket of your oldest coat. all these reasons are why we love fleabag. she is the woman that we secretly all are.

she allows herself to be vulnerable to her audience. breaking the fourth wall and speaking her throwaway thoughts, she makes a mockery out of them, and herself. she places her struggles under a spotlight for us to point our fingers towards and laugh full-belly laughs at - all while she stands there, unblinking at the camera as if she can hear us at home thinking ‘omg that is so me’.

fleabag is able to see herself from the outside and criticise everything that is portraying herself to be. the first season opens with her going through the play that women act in the lead-up to sex,

‘you know that feeling when a guy you like sends you a text at 2 o’clock on a tuesday night and asks if he can ‘come and find you’ and you accidentally make it out like you’ve just got in yourself, so you have to get out of bed, drink half a bottle of wine, get in the shower, shave everything, put on some agent provocateur business, suspender belt, and wait by the door until the buzzer goes… and then you open the door to him like you’d almost forgotten he was coming over.’

she openly cringes at womanhood, at the expectations that we have placed on us from the moment that we buy our first box of tampons and start wearing £9 training bras from new look; we must desire to stay thin but never speak about it, we must enjoy sex but not enjoy it too much – not in the way that men enjoy sex –, and we must casually wear uncomfortable underwear under our work clothes on the off chance that we catch someone’s eye on the train home and get invited out ‘for drinks’. fleabag acknowledges that everything she does is under the guise of proper womanhood, the act of femininity without really caring about it.

one of the first glimpses of this attitude is when she awkwardly flirts with a man on the bus, a man she affectionately internally nicknames ‘bus rodent’ in ode to his ‘really’ tiny mouth and ‘very large front teeth’. in-between uncomfortably flirting with him, she interjects with withering looks toward the camera and short comments such as ‘i hate myself’, before returning to their back-and-forth of weird, early morning sexual tension and discomfort on her part. we get ‘the ick’ about this man in the same way as our protagonist – but despite her obvious inward disinterest, she plays along with his flirtations. this is something that we frequently see from fleabag throughout the series.

she is a deeply complex woman; cocooned in a layer of self-hate and reliance on outside approval, again and again we see her fall at the feet of men that we can see simply do not deserve her. fleabag studies the art of constructing seductive depression, and she excels in a way that no woman on television has done quite before; she is wrought with grief and self-loathing that she dresses in red lipstick and designer clothing before dirtying with copious cigarettes and excessive drinking in dark corners.

by gilbert and gubar’s standards, fleabag fits perfectly in the box of the ‘madwoman in the attic’, the unhinged woman so scandalous that she dares not interact with society – but that is just the thing, isn’t it? us women at home with crumbs in our beds and phoebe bridgers on repeat look at fleabag and cry when she is left at the bus stop by the hot priest because we see a vulnerability in her that we envy, but has fleabag even learnt that vulnerability herself yet?

when we meet her, she is grieving her best friend’s recent death. boo recklessly dies after discovering her boyfriend has slept with someone else; we don’t get to meet her, but the series is dusted with flashback scenes of her and fleabag that show us that they were so close they may as well have been one joint soul. there is an unspoken build-up throughout the series that is resolved at the end of the first series, when we discover that fleabag has been hiding her deepest shame from even herself – that she was the one that slept with boo’s boyfriend. it’s unexpected, and we almost feel betrayed when we learn the truth.

in ‘fleabag and self-reflexivity: breaking-the-fourth-wall of a woman’s inner world’, luis rocha antunes writes

‘breaking-the-fourth-wall in ‘fleabag’ is not a mere comical device but an entire diegetic layer that shapes the viewer’s perception of the character and their engagement with the story’.

fleabag hides her intense sadness, guilt, and loneliness under a falsely charming and open persona that is knocked down in ruins once we discover that the woman we have grown to love over the course of five episodes is not at all who we thought she was.

‘omg she is just like me’

in conclusion…

another week passes by where we’ve gotten out of bed at a shitty hour and felt that crushing weight under our eyes or felt sluggish as we pull on clothes in an unheated bedroom. we get home from whatever environment we have undoubtedly dissociated ourselves in for an undistinctive number of hours, and we turn the television on.

there’s a woman on the screen who looks beautiful as she cries, as she crumples on top of her bedsheets in a ball the same way that you did just last week (although her bedsheets probably aren’t from ikea, let’s face it). we might repress it and tell ourselves that we don’t, but we all like to see fictionalised versions of what we think we are like reflected back at us. it makes us feel validated that our stories are worth showing other people – we are special enough to have some version of who we are be on television or in film.

references:

clein, emmeline, ‘the smartest women i know are all dissociating’ (20 november 2019) from ‘buzzfeed news’ [online] available at <[ https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emmelineclein/dissociation-feminism-women-fleabag-twitter]> (accessed 26th february 2022)

eppel, alan, ‘normal people: the self-at-worst and the self-at-best’, volume 8 #5 (5 july 2020), from ‘journal of psychiatry reform’

fisher-quann, rayne, ‘standing on the shoulders of complex female characters’ (6 february 2022) from ‘internet princess’ [online] available at <[https://internetprincess.substack.com/p/standing-on-the-shoulders-of-complex?utm_source=url]> (accessed 26th february 2022)

‘fleabag’, bbc, 21 july 2016, online video recording, bbc iplayer, <[ https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p040trv9/fleabag-series-1-episode-1]> (accessed 26th february 2022)

gilbert, s., gubar, s., ‘the madwoman in the attic: the woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination’ (1979) (yale university press; 2nd edition, 2000)

rocha antunes, luis, ‘fleabag and self-reflexivity: breaking-the-fourth-wall of a woman’s inner world’ (2 february 2020), from ‘tropos magazine: communication, society and culture’

rooney, sally, ‘normal people’ (2018) (london: faber & faber ltd.)