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Against ‘Women’s Writing’
Rachel Cusk’s gender fundamentalism fully surfaces in her latest novel, Parade.
As in Cusk’s previous novel, the feverish melodrama Second Place, the old themes of domesticity and maternal guilt have returned in full force — but now their delivery is cold and explanatory, to the extent that much of Parade reads like catalogue copy for an unseen art exhibit. It seems that, in claiming her freedom from the sphere of need, the woman artist must learn to pass as an “honorary man.” Yet she remains attached, as if by umbilical cord, to the home life she tries to leave behind; ultimately, she is consumed with rage at her emasculated husband and guilt over her abandoned children. The erstwhile crush of In the Fold now has a “coarse shadow of black hair” on her upper lip; her sister-in-law speculates that she “doesn’t actually want to be a woman.” One night, the eponymous heroine of Saving Agnes has a dream: “She had found herself in possession of a giant penis like an elephant’s trunk and was forced to bundle it up beneath her skirt like a dark and terrible secret and walk around in mortal fear of its discovery.”
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