Article by: Sarah Klein, Asst. Editor
8/03/99

Review: Elizabeth Wurtzel Celebrates the "B" Word Put Elizabeth Wurtzel's new book on your coffee table and you have an instant conversation piece. "I just can't seem to put it down," a friend lamented as she sat on my sofa one afternoon thumbing through Wurtzel's latest, reading aloud yet another colorful passage on the life and times of Courtney Love. It's true - Wurtzel's Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women draws you in and holds you fast. The rest of the universe disappears when you enter Wurtzel's world of "bad girls." Which is quite surprising, really. It's not as if Bitch breaks much new ground - at least overtly. This is not the first time a female author has written a cultural history of or offered us a celebratory commentary on women who break the rules. In fact, I've frequently come across this subject matter since at least the late 1980's when the flagrantly outspoken and much-hated academic/entertainer Camille Paglia began publishing a series of tomes on popular culture. I first knew this book was worth reading when a man in my life, who shall remain nameless, reacted with ferocity upon seeing it in my possession. "Oh, so now we should celebrate bitchy, vicious, deceitful, manipulative behavior, just because it's a woman perpetrating it? You aspire to be a real bitch, a 'difficult woman,' do you?" Despite my attempts to discuss the gender and cultural issues at play, to represent the arguments Wurtzel attempts to make, or even to share the jacket synopsis, I found a deaf-and clearly threatened -- ear. I knew then that Wurtzel's subject matter touches a deep, deep nerve. Which comes as no surprise - and, I must admit, brings me a small chuckle of wonderment and amusement. All this uproar and acidity generated by the (original) mere cover of the book (the one at the top of this review is the niced up version on the stands now), having nothing to do with its actual content! Bitch's cover features the impeccably young-and-beautiful (and, I'm obliged to say, airbrushed) author herself, shot in black-and-white from the waist up, topless, blonde-haired, defiantly shooting the middle finger while gazing at the voyeur/viewer sideways and smirking sweetly with painted lips. The girl has . . . uh . . . nerve. The tables have turned on the centuries-old male-authored misogynist text railing against the "femme fatale," the "fallen woman." There is a sense of humor, but there are no apologies. The cover alone proclaims that Wurtzel is self-possessed, out for provocation, and that the lines between subject and author will be inherently blurred throughout the text. This blurring may be Wurtzel's most memorable trademark as a writer, and the most characteristic of her times. Her best-selling Prozac Nation, the autobiographical trek through a young woman's depression and coming of age, was rightly labeled "self-indulgent and self-aware" by critic Michika Kakutani. When Prozac Nation came out, a first book from a Harvard-grad-turned-New-York-Music-Critic, The New York Times compared Wurtzel to Joan Didion, Sylvia Plath, and Bob Dylan all in one breath. Whether or not such lofty comparisons are truly merited, Wurtzel does represent a rare commentator who takes the so-called Generation X seriously, exhibiting both intelligence and a wicked wit in her writing. Wurtzel remains unique as a Gen X cultural critic because she is also (a.) a woman; (b.) nearly as savvy with high art and Biblical history as she is with contemporary pop culture; and (c.) chronologically "one of us," a commentator hardly into her 30's. In Bitch, Wurtzel feels equally at home discussing the Biblical Delilah and Gloria Steinem, Amy Fisher and Anne Sexton, Hillary Clinton and Yoko Ono, Nicole Brown Simpson and Shakespeare's Desdemona. There are flaws. Wurtzel lingers, perhaps too long, on her study of Delilah early in the book, and again on Amy Fisher in ensuing chapters. Considering that Wurtzel starts off with a Biblical character, we don't get much, if any, historical coverage between the pre-Christian era and the 20th century. The gap is forgivable, but noticeable. As in Prozac Nation, the alert reader remains intensely aware of the context out of which Wurtzel understands the world, her race and class. We don't forget for one second that she is a comfortable New Yorker, Ivy League educated, physically passable as "WASP" despite her Jewish heritage, who has had the luxury of a relatively self-indulgent life. As with any writer of such personalized nonfiction, Wurtzel's relative privilege - which, although it does not diminish her perspective, does act as a lens through which she views women's history and popular culture. (To her credit, I sense that Wurtzel is at least partially aware of the lens through which she forms her argument.) Her personal intimacy with the circles of rock-and-roll is evident, and I began to tire of the same names coming up again and again. The unsettling sense that as a reader you are eavesdropping on some serious celebrity namedropping gossip creeps up once or twice. At times there is a characteristically tabloid, MTV feel to Wurtzel's tone, which I for one find unsettling. The most unsettling part about it is that I continue to read on, enthralled and curious about the connections Wurtzel will make next. I find that I frequently disagree with her assertions, but just as often I find her arguments thoughtful, insightful, and right on the money. Plus, I just can't resist chapter titles like "He Puts Her On a Pedestal and She Goes Down on It." As the publisher's promo reads, "Wurtzel gives voice to those women whose lives have been misunderstood, who have been dismissed for their beauty, their madness, their youth . . . She takes to task the double standard imposed on women, the cultural insistence on goodness and society's complete obsession with badness." Doubleday likes to call this book a "bitchography" that "cuts to the core." In the end, the most cutting critiques made by Wurtzel crops up in the book's partially autobiographical, first-person epilogue, titled "Did I Shave My Legs for This?" By the epilogue, Wurtzel moves from cultural criticism to self-examination and blatant confessional, directly critiquing third-wave feminism for, as she suggests, fostering confusion and even despair among women of our generation. Wurtzel sums up her foundational argument about the historical "shrew" by writing, "This is why I root for the bitch who derails the whole applecart, who throws the system off guard and makes a mess of some poor fellow's life. I cheer for her because she has broken the chain. She has taken a taste of what he has completely consumed, what has consumed him. And I would like, so much, to be the dainty sampler of the world's delights instead of the person who has need that is only satisfied with more need." Yet there is a sincere desire here, ultimately, to do more than stew in the pent-up anger and disillusionment felt by so many young women who look at the cultural spaces assigned to women, and who start to see the parallels in their own lives. The beauty and the sadness of this book becomes clear when Wurtzel is honest and gutsy enough to admit that in the end, she has no fix, no lasting comfort. Like most of us, she doesn't have a gameplan figured out yet for transforming the personal or the political. Wurtzel ends the book with a very personal wish that, for many women of my generation, feels familiar: "All I would like in my life, what I wish for so very much, is to someday have the strength and be free of the resentment and anger that I carry around with me like Linus' blanket for just long enough to become one of those people who is better than the worst thing that happens to her. How I would love to be that woman." Wurtzel leaves us with the big questions still looming because she has to. And I respect that.

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