The girl in the flammable skirt by aimee bender

Bender Gender: Un-Writing the Female Form in The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

Reading Aimee Bender’s The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, one is inevitably struck not only by the surreal quality of her prose, but also by a continual and obsessive focus on the human form.  The father in “Marzipan” wakes up one morning with a giant hole in his stomach while his pregnant wife’s belly expands.  In “Legacy,” a pregnant woman falls in love with a hunchback and “When they slept, she spooned him from behind, her extended belly fitting perfectly into the space created by the hunch in his back” (144).  In “The Rememberer” the female protagonist’s male lover de-evolves, his body shrinking to a “one-celled” wonder while she places her hands on her own head to “see if it is growing” (7).  And in “Drunken Mimi,” a male imp on stilts makes a romantic connection with a mermaid whose nerve cells extend even throughout her hair.  In these ways, the male body initially appears to be constantly shrinking, disappearing and deforming, while the female body is a site of creation, sensuality and continual expansion. 
Upon a cursory glance, then, it would appear that Bender’s characters typify gender in a relatively expected way, her male and female characters assuming an almost perfect binary coherence to one another.  However, in her more “realistic” stories (which in and of themselves still carry elements of surrealism) Bender deconstructs these binary relationships, transforming the female body into a complicated social text.  In these texts, gender becomes an object of distortion, inversion and, appropriately, “bending.”  Masculinity and femininity are deconstructed, parodied, and made surreal while physical bodies deconstruct themselves, both figuratively and literally, disappearing, disarticulating, and deforming.
Given Bender’s apparent interest in corporeality, it would seem productive to relate her fiction to Helene Cixous’ notion of “writing the body.”  In “The Laugh of the Medeusa,” Cixous writes of the necessity for women to take control of their bodies through writing, to insist upon a mode of literary expression  which will liberate femininity from gender construction under patriarchy.  Cixous writes that “Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes and rhetorics, regulations and codes…” (886).  While Bender does not follow Cixous’s appeal to “sweep away syntax,” her fiction still works to construct a type of “impregnable language” that disrupts traditional boundaries of both gender and form. Most strikingly, her prose, described by Sybil S. Steinberg as writing that “blurs the lines between prose and poetry” and takes place “at the intersection of fairy tale and everyday life” occupies the same transitional space as the bodies that she “writes.”  In fact, examining the female protagonists of Bender’s more “realistic” stories, we find the female form “unwriting” itself as much as it has been “written” in her more fantastical tales. Within these stories, the female form becomes a destabilized text while the written text, simultaneously, suggests a destabilized female form.  In other words, Bender’s collection of stories suggests a body of writing that mirrors the un-written bodies of her female protagonists. 
Examining Bender's text in light of Cixous, one cannot ignore her female protagonists’ relationship to patriarchy.  Cixous claims that
…writing has been run by a libidinal and cultural—hence political and typically masculine—economy; that this is a locus where the oppression of women has been perpetuated, over and over, more or less consciously, and in a manner that’s frightening since it’s often hidden or adorned with the mystifying charms of fiction. (879)

Hence, language itself is a patriarchal construct and the power of “writing” that language is typically a male prerogative.  This notion is to a degree allegorized in Bender’s “The Healer” through the character of Roy, “a cutter” who masochistically inscribes his own body.  The narrator describes how Roy “showed me how he carved letters into his skin.  He’d spelled OUCH on his leg.  Raised and white.  I put out a hand and touched it and then I walked directly home. It was hard to feel those letters.  They still felt like skin” (124).  Here, Roy transforms his own body into a text to be read.  While this has interesting gender implications since, in feminist theory, the body inscribed is generally a female one, the fact remains that the power of inscription remains in the male’s control.  Further, when the fire girl burns Roy (at his own request) it leaves him with “a new mark on his arm.  This one did not form a letter.  It swirled into itself, black and detailed, a tiny whirlpool of lines” (124). Hence, the “writer” is always male.  The female cannot inscribe the male body, can barely inscribe her own; at least not in a recognizable syntax.  
Central to both The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and contemporary gender theory is this idea of a patriarchal “male gaze” which inscribes and interprets the female form from a position of power.  John Berger, in his book Ways of Seeing, describes the ways in which a woman’s self is
split in two.  A woman must continually watch herself.  She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.  Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping.  From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. (46)  

In other words, according to Berger, women are acutely aware of how they are being read, and with this knowledge, transform themselves into interpretable texts.  Therefore, women simultaneously occupy the dual role of both spectator and spectacle, both story and reader. 
Perhaps one of the most striking examples in Bender’s fiction of a woman “continually watch[ing] herself” is the female narrator of “Fell This Girl.”  This narrator, Susie, exists primarily as a detached viewer of her body, and only secondarily as the body itself.  She, in essence, takes doubly gendered role, explicitly stated when she describes one of her sexual encounters: “It’s the three of us in bed: me the woman, me the man, and him… He doesn’t know that I’m also a shadow on his back pushing in” (107).  In fact, in the first paragraph of the story, the reader is led to believe that the narrator is, in fact a man: “I see this woman wearing a short shirt that shows her belly button… and I feel a wave of desire to stick my dick in that deep, dark belly button hole, to fuck this woman in the short shirt, to lay her down on the sidewalk and take her” (105).  Here, the gender-bending that is implied by Berger is exaggerated as Susie, watching another female form, becomes a man.  However, while watching herself, she simultaneously becomes both male and female, appropriating the gaze that is directed towards her.
I remember in high school, I was so good at this kind of fake-out.  I rehearsed thoughtfulness, I appeared carefree—and how many guys did I trick?  As I sat there, hair tucked behind my ear, supposedly lost in a book, thinking this exact monologue, rereading and rereading the same paragraph, waiting for them to see me and want me, caught in this image of myself as a reader… and all I’m thinking is what do I look like, and all I’m thinking is that I own their thoughts.  (108)

A perpetual outward reflection of her “self,” she becomes a constantly transforming spectacle that destabilizes all interpretations of her.  In this regard, we might usefully compare Bender’s fiction to the photographic work of the experimental artist Cindy Sherman.  Reviewer Vincent Aletti describes Sherman’s work thus:
Sherman became famous by taking her own picture, but keeping herself out of it.  Countless other selves, some of them male, occupied her body, allowing Sherman to avoid the camera even as she filled its lens.  The artist’s elusive mercurial presence is part of her early work’s enduring power and fascination.  Refusing autobiography, squelching vanity, she disappeard into her own cinematic fictions, and inhabited each new role as both every woman and no one: the stranger in the mirror.

Susie, like Sherman, is firmly entrenched in her own “cinematic fictions,” so much so that by the end of the story she also becomes a “stranger in the mirror”: “I stand in front of the mirror and look at my body in this little dress I’m wearing… But I just see some girl in a blue dress with short hair and sad eyes…” (116).  By this point, Susie is completely dissociated from her body.  She has stood figuratively behind the lens for so long that her body has disappeared into its own representation.  By the very end, her body has entirely vanished as she imagines, “I will feel the wind fill up my dress and pass through me in tunnels until I am so numb with cold, can’t tell when we stop” (117).  Her dress filled with nothing but air, the narrator has, in a sense, unwritten her body.
A similar sort of un-writing of the body occurs in “Dreaming in Polish.”  The female narrator appears to be involved in a process of erasing her identity.  “I scrubbed my body fiercely with soap,” she writes, “as if it were not mine” (154).  She later tries to “fill [her] brain with hundreds and hundreds of lyrics” (160) in the same way that Susie ends up “letting the wind fill up [her] dress.”  Watching television, this narrator says “I didn’t really watch much, but stared at the reflected silhouette of my body in the TV screen, twirling my ankle sometimes just to remind myself that I was there” (158).  Again, there is a sort of “stranger in the mirror” phenomenon, where the visible reflection becomes more real than the body it represents.  Here, the female narrator appears to become the literal embodiment of the metaphoric “reflecting” that Susie does to dissociate herself from her body.  In the end, both bodies (silhouette and wind-tunnel) becoming a type of outline, discernible only by their absence.  Consequently, Bender’s way of “writing” the female in these instances, becomes conversely an un-writing.
Perhaps the female form that most literally portrays its own textuality is the one that appears in “Quiet, Please.” After learning of her father’s death, a female librarian goes to work and systematically sleeps with every eligible male who enters the library.  Bender writes that “This is the sex that she wishes would split her open and murder her because she can’t deal with a dead father.”(58). A muscleman enters the library and undermines her plan by not having sex with her.  Instead, he lifts up the couch she is sitting on and parades her through the public areas of the library.  The ensuing chaos includes the patrons throwing books at the elevated librarian who “covers her face because she can’t stand to look down at the floor where the books are splayed open on their bindings as though they’ve been shot” (63).
We have seen the ways that the other female protagonists speak to Berger’s notion that the female form is a site of continual surveillance and how they speak to Sherman’s reaction to this surveillance as she destabilizes and transforms the surveyed self.  The female form, in this sense, becomes like a text that is constantly subject to a male reader.   From this vantage point, it would seem then that the damaged and exposed books, as texts, figuratively depict the librarian’s own body; further, her sexual encounters can be seen as a form of deconstruction, through which she is hoping to escape or destabilize that “text” of her body, to unwrite herself in the same way that the other female protagonists have. 
For instance, it is interesting that the librarian tries to “fill up her body until there’s nothing left inside,” as though she is attempting to erase her body into an outline, much like Susie and the protagonist of “Dreaming in Polish.”  With the notion of self-erasure in mind, it is perhaps also of note that during the sex she puts her hand on the “pale white wall,” which is much like a blank page.  Further, during these encounters it becomes “hard for her to tell the difference between fantasy and reality,” and afterwards the librarian “concentrates on putting herself back together”(59) in order to face the library patrons.  It would seem that both she and Susie, in their respective stories, are attempting at some level to transcend the “texts” of their bodies by destabilizing their meanings.  Both are “readers” who exercise some amount of control over what is read, yet, neither really succeeds in being in control.  
While the librarian destabilizes the text of her body in private, in the public areas of the library she safely re-articulates herself like the calmly shelved books surrounding her.  Her self-deconstruction can perhaps be seen, like the other female characters’, as a private attempt to subvert the male gaze.  However, the muscleman stands in opposition to this attempted subversion of its power.  Instead of helping her destabilize her body through sex, he makes her a spectacle to the entire library.  This perhaps places him as an allegorical symbol of patriarchy, transforming the female back into an object of inscription.  Appropriately then, as the librarian herself is exposed, so are the books, “splayed open on their bindings.”  In this way, the librarian who has previously un-written herself is turned back into a text, rewritten by the muscleman.
In this sense, like the example of Roy in “The Healer,” the power of inscription still remains patriarchal.  At the same time, it is that same patriarchal power (the muscleman’s enormous shoulders) that enables the librarian literally to inscribe a female body, allowing her to draw a grin on the mouthless fairy depicted on the library’s ceiling. The librarian’s triumphant inscription of that body, however, ends up becoming a symbol of horror: the inscribed fairy is “clearly dancing against her will, dragged along with the circle, her mouth wide open and screaming” (64).  It is in this way that Bender seems to be in direct dialogue with Cixous.  According to Cixous, language (as conceived under patriarchy) constructs woman as a type of “other,” so much so that even conventional female attempts to write the body become, to an extent, a masochistic mimicking of patriarchy.  
Instead of inscription then, Bender’s characters attempt deconstruction and erasure.  By destabilizing the social texts of their bodies, they make the problem of identity, through gender, a central one.  Bender’s female protagonists have trouble existing as wholly articulated beings.  They instead find themselves somewhere in between their bodies and their bodies’ reflected image, inhabiting one or the other and sometimes both and sometimes neither.  Identity and gender become distorted, complicated and fragmented.  The texts that inscribe their bodies (unstable, constructed and fluid) seem to be somehow separate from the women themselves.
Is Bender’s collection then, simply a deconstruction and a disappearing of the female form or does it work at the same time to reconstruct that form?  We have seen how Bender’s female protagonists have become both spectacle and spectator, and in certain quite literal instances, both the reader of a text, as well as the text being read.  Following the notion that Bender’s female forms becomes destabilized texts or even “cinematic fictions,” one cannot at the same time ignore the ways that Bender’s fiction becomes, conversely, endued with corporeality; an unconventional re-writing of the body. 
In order to emphasize the corporeality of Bender’s fiction, it may be productive to begin again by examining the narrator’s role in “The Healer.”  An interesting reversal takes place as it Roy’s body, not hers, which becomes increasingly present as the focus of the female narrator’s gaze and touch.  Roy is, in a sense, feminized as his body is now the one to be inscribed and is read this time by a female reader.  This inscription is, in this instance, both literally and figuratively masochistic; yet the power to inscribe remains a male power.  However, there is an interesting complication here: it is a female narrator who, in the context of the story itself, constructs Roy’s body through words.  The power in inscription then, the position of writer as well as reader, seems to flip from the male to the female.  This switch also seems to play itself out in the narrator’s relationship to the “speechwriter” who left town.  She writes that she “thought about J. in the Big City.  He didn’t give speeches about me anymore.  Now we stood together in the middle of a busy street, dodging whizzing cars, and I’d pull him tight to me and begin to learn his skin” (131).  Initially in her fantasy, the male speechwriter constructs the narrator through speech; now it is the speechwriter who becomes the object of focus, his skin, a text to be “learned” and constructed through the actual text of the story.
“Fell This Girl” also works with the concept of text in ways that transcend the story itself, causing it to become the very body it depicts.  It is interesting that in the passage quoted earlier, Susie becomes “caught in the image of herself as a reader.”  While in the context of the quote, she is referring to the fact that she uses books as props to appear a certain way to men, the statement additionally carries some interesting and paradoxical implications.  By being both the spectator and the spectacle, changing her image based on how it will be interpreted, Susie is also, ironically, present as both “reader” and text being read.  While she is literally on display for her male audience within the story, she is also on display as the story itself. 
This is perhaps most striking in that Susie transforms not only in the eyes of her male acquaintances, but in the eyes of the reader too.  In the first paragraph of the story, the reader is led to believe that the narrator is male, yet by the second paragraph the reader learns that this was simply a fantasy.  So, while Susie explains her manipulation of the male voyeurism, it becomes apparent that she has manipulated the reader’s voyeurism in the same way.  The reader thus becomes aware of his or her own voyeuristic gaze, a gaze that is then, like Susie, destabilized by its own self-awareness.
Another element of Bender’s fiction that suggests the same type of corporeality given to her protagonists is the style itself.  Incorporating elements of fantasy, it has been said that her stories represent an “intersection between fairy tale and every day life.”  At the same time, her characters seem to have trouble separating fact from fiction, existing both as the self and a representation of that self, often confusing the two.  While this can be applied to Susie as well as the narrator of “Dreaming in Polish,” it most striking in the case of the protagonist of “Quiet, Please,” who realizes that “now its hard to tell the difference between fantasy and reality” (58).  At the same time, the story itself is not quite fantasy, though it is surreal; the most fantastical occurrence is the muscleman’s ability and desire to lift the couch with the protagonist on it.  So, while the actual events of the story are certainly implausible, they are not impossible.  The text of the story itself, happening at the same unstable border between fantasy and reality, therefore enacts the same anxieties of its female protagonist.  The fiction that depicts her, in a sense, actually becomes her.  
Additionally, the fragmentation and dissociation that characterize the protagonists discussed becomes central to Bender’s collection not only thematically, but literally as well.  Bender’s story, “Fugue” stands out from the others in The Girl in the Flammable Skirt because of its narrative fragmentation.  Bender splits apart three different storylines into nine distinct sections and weaves them back together at odd angles.  Appearing at the exact middle of the middle section of the collection, it would appear that “Fugue” constitutes the “center” of Bender’s book.  This carries some interesting implications.  If it has been established that her character’s bodies often constitute texts, and that in many ways Bender’s text constitutes a body, then in examining “Fugue,” we find a body that is disarticulated and fragmented at its core.  It is interesting too that the word fugue is defined not only as a musical arrangement, but also as a “loss of awareness of one’s identity” (329).  Many of her characters, operating within the dual role of “watcher” and “watched” experience a similar dissociation of self.  It can perhaps be said then, that the fragmentation and dissociation that are central in the identities of her characters also literally characterize the center of the collection.
In this way, Bender appears to be asking a question about identity: can we ever be differentiated from the complex texts that adorn us?  How deep must we dig to find an unchangeable, “unwritten” core?  Again, one can draw a parallel to the work of Cindy Sherman.  Describing her new series of portraits, Aletti states that “each depicts seated woman self-consciously near the camera… One, with a bright yellow flip hairdo and a fat lip job clasps her hands girlishly… like the other women here she has a façade that may be cracking, but it’s carefully maintained.”  One could perhaps say that Bender’s characters attempt to shed one “façade,” only to find another.  Caught behind a complicated series of layerings, inversion and reflections, their goal is ultimately to find a type of “core,” or perhaps a body which becomes more than simply a silhouette or an outline but instead, one which they can truly inhabit.  This conflict is well-stated by Berger in terms of painting:
To be naked is to be without disguise.
To be on display is to have the surface on one’s own skin, the hairs of one’s own body, turned into a disguise which, in that situation, can never be discarded.  The nude is condemned to never being naked.  Nudity is a form of dress. (54)

Following this logic, Bender’s characters appear to suffer from an acute self-awareness of their “forms of dress,” a recognition of their own “nudity,” no matter how exposed they become.  In a sense, “adorned with the mystifying charms of fictions” they become, at times, unable to discern what is real and what is a disguise.  Thus, we can see a type of stripping down throughout the collection as characters search for a final stable identity, an elaborate series of wrappings and unwrappings. 
The idea of wrapping is explored in “Fugue” through the character of the ugly man who has stolen a mirror from his rich boss in the hopes of being reflected handsomely in it.  Upon his disappointment at its failure to do so, he discovers that the silver surface of the mirror’s frame is just that: a surface.  He rubs at the frame and “silver paint lifted off, thin and papery.  Beneath it was scarred wood…He rubbed the entire frame until his hand were black and it was no longer silver at all, but just a rectangle of flawed bumpy brown wood ” (95).  Upon this unmasking, the ugly man decides to wear the frame as a necklace, becoming in a sense, a reflection without a body.  In light of the above quote, it is interesting that the surface is described as “thin and papery,” similar to a page in a book.  The frame is encircled in a type of text just as the ugly man later becomes encircled in the frame, making the ugly man himself, then, into a type of text. 
One of most striking examples of this attempt to unwrap the body from the texts adorning it occurs in the second story of collection, “Call My Name.”  The narrator appears to be obsessed with notion of essence.  To this end, she spends time searching for a man who will “look down on me with that look and tell me something brilliant about myself, unveil my whole me with one shining sentence…” (10).  Asking one man if he preferred dogs or cats and hearing him respond “whichever turns around when you call its name,” (12) she decides that he’s the one to follow home.  It is interesting that the narrator sees this “unveiling” as a solely masculine power, as well as an action that can only be performed while being “look[ed] down on.”  It is also interesting that here, naming is associated with a type of mastery, and that power of inscription is also male.  If this inscription is to be seen as a type of patriarchal construction of femininity, then, the narrator of “Call My Name,” (as even the title suggests) appears paradoxically interested in being veiled even as she is being unveiled.  The “whole me” becomes simply another type of inscription.  However, it is intriguing that when the narrator convinces the same man to tie her up and cut off the dress she is wearing, she finds him more interested in watching game shows than her.  By not directing any sort of gaze at her, not “calling her name” in any way, he refuses to re-inscribe the body that has been unwrapped.  
Clothing also plays an interesting role in her title story “The Girl in the Flammable Skirt,” in which a woman is partially consumed by that which adorns her:
…the first second when she felt her skirt burning, what did she think?  Before she knew it was the candles, did she think she’d done it herself?  With the amazing turns of her hips and the warmth of the music inside her, did she believe, even for one glorious second, that her passion had arrived?” (818)

In this way, there is a continual confusion of the body and its coverings.  It is difficult to discern whether is the clothing here that is being shed, or the girl who inhabits the clothing.  A tension emerges between the body and the complex texts that adorn it.  Ultimately, the idea of “text” itself becomes destabilized and Bender’s characters, aware of this destabilization search for something solid and permanent within themselves.
Not only does this tension emerge between the body and its coverings, but also between the body and the self, the body becoming its own type of “mystifying fiction”.  The female protagonist of “Skinless” for example, remembers “the day she first grew breasts, how her usually olive skin was covered in red, crisscrossing stretch marks, like a newly revealed secret map to the treasures of her body” (66). Her newly inscribed skin is not herself or her body, but instead a “map” by which one could navigate to her core.  At the same time she, describing her boyfriend, imagines that “beneath that sheath of flesh, he was made entirely out of pearl” (66).  Here, nudity really is “a form of dress,” the body itself becoming yet another covering or form of disguise. 
In this way, Bender’s characters are constantly shedding one layer of inscription only to find another beneath it.  Similarly, Bender’s direct and unadorned prose suggests a stylistic sort of stripping down.  However, it ultimately becomes difficult to discern whether the identities of her characters ever become distinct from their social inscriptions.  Are those inscriptions simply adorning their characters, or do they constitute a sort of essence in and of themselves? While The Girl in the Flammable Skirt may be a collection that is fragmented at its core, it is, after all, the “Girl” and not the “Flammable Skirt” which signifies the collection. It is also interesting that the “tiny whirlpool of lines” that the fire girl leaves on Roy’s arm is shaped like a fingerprint.  Connoting essence and permanent identity, the fingerprint-shaped mark perhaps suggests a type of feminine inscription that operates outside of convention, a figurative representation of Cixous’ notion of “ecriture feminine.”  Similarly, Bender has constructed a unique method of writing the body, even if it is a body that simultaneously un-writes itself.

Works Cited

Aletti, Vince.  “The Lady Vanishes,” The Village Voice. Vol. 45 No. 46. New York:
November 21, 2000.

Bender, Aimee.  The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. New York: Anchor Books, 1998.

Berger, John, et al.  Ways of Seeing.  London, England: British Broadcasting Corporation
and Penguin Books, 1972.

Cixous, Helene.  “The Laugh of the Medeusa,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society. Vol. 1, No.4.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Steinberg, Sybil S.  “The Girl in the Flammable Skirt,”  Publishers Weekly. Vol. 25
No.21. New York: May 25, 1998