Very early in the first year of Talk about books, I wrote about the first chapter in Jillian Keenan’s memoir, Sex with Shakespeare (2016) in which she advanced an unfamiliar argument as to how we should read A Midsummer Night’s Dream and in particular what we are to make of the character of Helena in that play. According to Keenan, Helena is kinky: she is not a pathetic weakling, but is determined to make sure Demetrius understands what she desires. I found Keenan’s argument persuasive in general, while disputing her reading of one line in particular: “And even for that do I love you the more”.

More than three years later, I wrote about Mary Gaitskill’s second collection of short stories, Because They Wanted To (1997) which features many characters who have desires that will never be satisfied. Some of those desires, notably those of Erin in the long final story, “The Wrong Thing”, involve being seriously hurt or humiliated. Several of the stories suggest that the gratification of desires may come at a cost that is either too high or not capable of being paid. As a result, I found myself wondering if I hadn’t been too sanguine about the likely outcome for Helena and Demetrius in A Midsummer Knight’s Dream. Perhaps a match between a committed masochist (or submissive — it’s not clear which Helena actually is) and a budding sadist (or dominator) isn’t necessarily the ideal union after all? Could it be that sadists are very often bad, dangerous, malevolent people, however accommodating they might seem to a masochist’s needs?

This is not the picture that Keenan presents. She suggests that Demetrius rejects Helena because he is disturbed by the recognition of his own desires.

Coming to terms with the details of our sexual identities is hard for everyone … This process is often even more difficult for sadists. I can’t imagine how scary and confusing it must feel to realize, in the early stages of sexual development, that you long to “hurt” the people you desire. Many sadists have told me that, at first, their fantasies terrified them. And in the early stages of awareness, it doesn’t necessarily help when sadists and masochists first meet. It’s overwhelming. We feed into each other, and the realization that our fantasies could become realities is the scariest thing of all. (pp. 17–18)

When I was writing about A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I accepted this view more or less uncritically. It wasn’t until I read Gaitskill’s stories that it struck me that, though Keenan is probably right about those sadists she has spoken to, there must surely be some sadists who just get off on inflicting pain without ever finding the prospect at all disturbing. How is a masochist supposed to know which kind of sadist s|he has got?

I originally read Keenan’s book as an ebook borrowed from the library. When I came to write about it some months later, I relied on an abridged version of the first chapter published in Slate online magazine. That suited my purposes very well, as the first chapter deals with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was the subject of my post. It meant, though, that my recollection of the rest of the book was vague. I have since acquired a paperback edition and reread it twice (most recently last weekend, to prepare for this post). I decided that I should take another look at Keenan’s book in the light of some of Gaitskill’s stories. This time, however, I’d use Gaitskill’s first collection, Bad Behavior (1988). And I’d also take the opportunity to consider Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018), particularly with regard to Marianne’s submissiveness, which I haven’t been quite sure what to make of in previous readings.

I’ve written before about Rooney’s first and third novels (and hope to write about Intermezzo before too long) but I haven’t till now had anything to say about Normal People apart from a few paragraphs in the post about Conversations with Friends. No doubt my reticence has had something to do with the submissiveness, which I’ve found disturbing (as I’m sure the reader is meant to).

On first reading of Sex with Shakespeare, my aim was to learn more about Shakespeare’s plays (and, to be sure, the treatment of sex in those plays) than about Jillian Keenan’s life. And there’s plenty about the plays that’s of interest, but the book is described as “A Memoir”, something I may not have noticed when I read the ebook. (Recently, I’ve begun to wonder if writers of literary biography wouldn’t much rather be writing literary criticism, but have been firmly told by their publishers that they can sell the former but not the latter, so they smuggle in as much criticism as they can get away with.)

Keenan describes herself as a masochist and “in rare cases, even a submissive” (Sex with Shakespeare, p. 10). The difference is that a masochist gets gratification or satisfaction from having pain inflicted on him or her whereas a submissive obtains them by being subjected to the will or control of another. As Keenan makes clear, the two don’t necessarily go together, though it’s easy to confuse them. Keenan herself was confused to start with:

The scraps of information that I’d found on the internet suggested that I was “submissive,” but that word didn’t seem right. I never acted or even felt submissive. I had spent the entire span of my sexual maturity fantasizing about this kind of relationship, but now that I had it, I was holding back … I argued, complained, bargained, negotiated, and did everything a submissive wasn’t “supposed” to do. (p. 94)

Before too long, she realizes that pain is what satisfies her, not powerlessness or the surrender of control.

Pain releases endorphins, which can cause a euphoric high, similar to the high that long-distance runners describe. (p. 79)

Keenan describes her relationships with two sadists — who, to be fair, don’t fit the “bad, dangerous, malevolent” characterization I touched on above — but David, the man she falls in love with and eventually marries, is not one of them. She persuades him to spank her but can never get him to hit hard enough. After his first serious attempt, she reaches certain unaoidable conclusions.

Two things were certain: I was in love with my boy with the baseball cap.

And he was as vanilla as a Snack Pack pudding cup. There wasn’t even a sprinkle in sight. (p. 181)

In effect, she resigns herself to several spankless years, though she eventually manages to teach David to inflict severe pain on her against his inclination. In some ways, the real-life story of Jillian and David is a mirror-image of the fictional tale of Marianne and Connell in Normal People. Marianne asks her college boyfriend, Jamie, to hit her during sex and he does so with gusto, also choking her. He’s really obnoxious, though, so she breaks up with him and finds that nearly all their friends in college side with him and think that she has behaved badly.

She spends the next academic year in in a Swedish university, where she gets involved with a photographer named Lukas, who is taking a series of photographs of her. He photographs her in a submissive pose with her hands bound and her bra off, and wants to blindfold her but she demurs. When she says she doesn’t want to do this, he replies “I know”. He goes on to tell her that he loves her, “And I know you love me” (Normal People, p. 197). Marianne recoils in horror and demands that Lukas release her. That’s the end of their game. Clearly she finds it abhorrent that he associates what they’ve been doing with “love”, however gratifying she might have found it before he mentioned that word.

Back in Ireland and eventually reconciled with Connell (again), she asks him if he will hit her while they have sex.

For a few seconds she hears nothing, not even his breath.

No, he says. I don’t think I want that. Sorry. (p. 237)

And so, Marianne discovers that she is not necessarily a masochist after all, but a submissive. She can get what she wants without having to undergo physical torture.

She used to wonder if he really loved her. In bed he would say lovingly: You’re going to do exactly what I say now, aren’t you? He knew how to give her what she wanted, to leave her open, weak, powerless, sometimes crying. He understood that it wasn’t necessary to hurt her: he could let her submit willingly, without violence. This all seemed to happen on the deepest possible level of her personality. But on what level did it happen to him? Was it just a game, or a favour he was doing her? Did he feel it, the way she did? (p. 258)

That’s the end of Marianne’s story qua story. It’s not what you might call a conclusive end, though. The events of a life don’t form a neatly structures narrative, they’re more like one damned thing after another. Here, as in her other fiction, Rooney tries to give the reader both: the formal structure and the realistic, contingent mess. Connell is offered a place on an MFA course in New York. After an initial squabble as to why he didn’t tell her he’d applied — he says he was embarrassed that she might think him “Deluded” (p. 264) — Marianne encourages him to go.

She closes her eyes. He probably won’t come back, she thinks. Or he will, differently. What they have now they can never have back again. (pp. 265–6)

Marianne’s encouragement to accept the New York offer echoes her urging him a few years earlier to apply to study English in Trinity, in preference to Law in Galway. For a while, his acquiescence in her plans had seemed like a bad idea. In his final year, Connell suffers from depression, particularly after the suicide of a former schoolfriend, Rob Hegarty. He sees a therapist/counsellor provided by the college. He tells her that he hasn’t been happy in Trinity.

I probably thought if I moved here I would fit in better, he says. You know, I thought I might find more like-minded people or whatever. But honestly, the people here are a lot worse than the people I knew in school …

I just feel like I left Carricklea thinking I could have a different life, he says. But I hate it here, and now I can never go back there again. I mean, those friendships are gone. Rob is gone, I can never see him again. I can never get that life back. (p. 217)

Unexpectedly, Marianne has had an unhappy time in Trinity too, her apparent popularity notwithstanding. Following her break-up with Jamie, only one member of their friend-group, Joanna, stays in contact with her. She is surprised to learn that Joanna hadn’t liked Jamie or Peggy, thinking of them as Marianne’s friends, not hers. Marianne replies: “I guess I just got caught up in how much they seemed to like me” (p. 194).

It was true, Peggy and Jamie were not very good people, bad people even, who took joy in putting others down. Marianne feels aggrieved that she fell for it, aggrieved that she thought she had anything in common with them, that she’d participated in the commodity market they passed off as friendship. (pp. 194–5)

Given how isolated Marianne had been Carricklea, both at home and at school, what a lonely existence she’d had throughout her childhood, it’s not surprising that she should have fallen for the illusion of popularity. So, would she and Connell have been happier if either or both of them hadn’t gone to Trinity? I take it for granted that Connell — ultimately editor of a college literary magazine and likely MFA student — is better off having studied English rather than Law, but he might equally well have done that in Galway. At least their both being in Trinity meant that they stayed in touch, something that is hard to imagine otherwise.

(At the end of the novel Marianne is working for a dodgy business type, possibly a property developer, who pays her in cash and doesn’t seem to do very much. Not a job that need keep her anchored to Dublin. So it might make sense for her to accompany Connell to New York. Maybe her mother would be willing to pay her to leave the country. But this possibility doesn’t seem to have occurred to Marianne — yet.)

In Sex with Shakespeare, Jillian Keenan twice mentions the film Secretary (dir. Steven Shainberg, 2002) which she first went to see with a group of high school friends. Her first impression was that the film was “close to right up my alley” (Sex with Shakespeare, 40). Later, though, she comes to have reservations: “Secretary seemed to suggest that sadomasochistic relationships are merely an alternative form of self-mutilation” (p. 40).

Shainberg’s film is “based on” a short story also titled “Secretary” from Mary Gaitskill’s first collection, Bad Behavior. There are major differences between the story and the film. Shainberg has made no bones about his intention to present masochism and submissiveness as liberating, fulfilling and healthy, whereas Gaitskill’s story is more enigmatic. In the story, when Debby’s employer masturbates behind her and ejaculates on her, she goes to the bathroom to masturbate (and clean herself off), then stays at home the next day and never returns to the office. When a journalist (named “Charming”) phones her looking for dirt on the employer, who is now running for local office, she has nothing to say. What the journalist has told her is not news: she has already seen a report in the paper of her former employer’s candidacy.

For the first time, I felt an uncomplicated disgust for the lawyer. Westland was nothing but malls and doughnut stands and a big ugly theater with an artificial volcano in front of it. What kind of idiot would want to be mayor of Westland? (Bad Behavior, p. 149)

This suggests that she already felt disgust at the lawyer’s behaviour but that her disgust was complicated by her own reaction to it. And perhaps she holds back from helping to scupper his chances of election because she feels that to be mayor of Westfield is what he deserves.

The other story in Bad Behavior that has most to do with masochism or submission is “A Romantic Weekend”, in which Beth, a self-described masochist, goes away for a weekend with a married man she met at a party a week before. Each of the parties is quickly disappointed in the other.

“Why did you tell me you were a masochist?”

“What makes you think I’m not?”

“You don’t act like one. (p. 40)

Beth says things like “Anything you do will be all right” (p. 35) and “I would do anything with you” (p. 42), but is clearly thinking in generalities rather than specifics, and claims to find the things he says he’d like to do to her “incredibly banal” (p. 43). It’s likely that she’s one of those people who find the abstract idea of “submission” arousing but can’t conceive of, still less submit to, any concrete behaviours. (I suspect that such people comprise a significant part of the audience for the film Secretary.)

The man threatens her with torture and says he wants to force her to do things she doesn’t want to do. (She replies that she won’t do anything she doesn’t want to: he has to make her want it.) There are suggestions, though, that the man is actually submissive — I have in mind his recollections of the “rather combative girl who wanted his number” (p. 32), the “little Italian girl” who squatted over his head (p. 39) and “this great girl at Billy’s Topless” (p. 43) — but presumably feels that it’s more “masculine” to act the sadist. Anyway, they both fail to realize their fantasies, at least on this occasion. On the 6-hour drive back to New York from Washington DC, their fantasies reassert themselves and the story ends with him thinking “This could work out fine” (p. 49).

I may well write about the remaining seven stories in Bad Behavior at some point.

Editions: Sex with Shakespeare William Morrow paperback, 2017; Normal People Faber paperback 2019; Bad Behavior Penguin Modern Classics, 2018); all ellipses added.