The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/“Her Problems Were Everyone’s Problems”: Self and Gender in The Deer Park

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« The Mailer Review • Volume 13 Number 1 • 2019 »
Written by
Hujun Ren
Abstract: An examination of "Her Problems Were Everyone's Problems": Self and Gender in The Deer Park to the work of Norman Mailer.
URL: https://prmlr.us/mr16gord

Before its publication in 1955, The Deer Park had been refused by seven publishers in ten weeks for no reason than its “six not very explicit lines about the sex of an old producer and a call girl.”[1] After its publication, it received more criticism than praise, and “the most common objection to the book was its sexual explicitness”[2] because “in the early 1950s no description of sexuality, however evasive, was readily accepted.”[3] In spite of responses from publishers and critics, Mailer refused to make any change of the original lines about “the sex of an old producer and a call girl” and the novel came out as it is now, with the sexuality of his characters to play “the more significant role” in the story.[4] The issue of sexuality in The Deer Park has drawn much attention from critics. Nigel Leigh argues that “in The Deer Park sexuality is both foregrounded and incorporated into Mailer’s political epistemology”[5] and “Mailer investigates closely the sex lives of Sergius, Eitel, Elena, Faye and Lulu Meyers in a search of a discourse of pleasure.”[6] Robert Merrill holds that the novel is “only incidentally a satire on Hollywood or an outlet for Mailer’s philosophical predilections; at heart it is the story of a rather tragic love affair.”[7] Norman Podhoretz points out that “it is on the sexual affairs of his characters that Mr. Mailer concentrates in The Deer Park.”[8]

Why does Mailer concentrate on the sexuality of the characters in The Deer Park? Many critics have noticed that in The Deer Park, Mailer’s major concern moves from “the problem of the world” to “the problem of the self, or, from ideology to the individual or self.[a] As a result, he is highly concerned with the rebellious imperatives of the self, among which “none is more exigent than sex”.[9] A number of critics have directed their attention towards and made close investigations of the nature and meaning of the sexuality of the characters in The Deer Park, and, consequently, a variety of conclusions have been drawn. To Jennifer Bailey, the sexuality of the characters in The Deer Park is of great importance to themselves because it is “potentially redemptive.”[10] Nigel Leigh also believes that the sexuality of the characters in The Deer Park is of great significance because their sexual activities can decide whether they will be able to grow or decline.[6] Norman Podhoretz notes the relationship between the sexuality of the characters and themselves in The Deer Park, arguing that the world in the novel is populated with those “who have no true interest in anything but self” and for whom “sex has become a testing ground of the self.”[8] Like Podhoretz, Diana Trilling also considers the relationship between sex and self. She observes that in The Deer Park Mailer distinguishes two different kinds of sexuality, one “appears to be free but is really an enslavement,” as displayed by the movie colony in Desert D’Or, and the other “expresses a new, radical principle of selfhood,” as valued by Hipsterism.[11] Unlike the critics above mentioned, Jean Radford argues that in The Deer Park the sexuality of the characters functions as “an index of other things” and “at the more general level it is used to symbolize the moral state of the nation.”[12]

When investigating the nature and meaning of the sexuality of the characters in The Deer Park, many critics direct their attention towards the love affairs between Eitel and Elena and Sergius and Lulu. To many critics, the relationship between Eitel and Elena is absolutely productive and constructive. For example, Gabriel Miller argues that, due to his relationship with Elena, Eitel can manage to recover “his sense of self” and “his sexual potency” and therefore is able to return to “work on an ambitious script,” thereby, to “reclaim his integrity as an artist.”[13] However, unlike the relationship between Eitel and Elena, the relationship between Sergius and Lulu is not so productive and constructive because one sees the other as nothing but a sexual object and their sexuality is very much like “sport” and “war” in which the man tries every means to test and prove his “manhood” and the woman becomes his “opponent” and “enemy” he “must fight and conquer.”[14]

Not only have many critics noticed the difference between the nature and meaning of the sexuality of Eitel and Elena and that of Sergius and Lulu, they have also observed the difference between Elena and Lulu. To Philip Bufithis, although Elena is “a discarded mistress” and “an unimpressive actress with an ungainly social manners,” she “is yet heroic in her embattled desire to be self-reliant and take her own measure free of men’s estimation of her” and therefore she always “clings to the hope of self-knowledge” and “retains her individualism.”[15] Jean Radford believes that Elena is the most important of Mailer’s women characters because she exists “not merely as a secondary human being who is an index of others’ moral possibilities, but who has herself a moral nature with distinctive ideas and possibilities for self-development and growth.”[16] Howard Harper makes a comparison between Elena and Lulu, arguing that “Elena is more generous, more perceptive, more honest, more sensitive than Lulu” because Lulu values “career” more than “any human considerations.”[17] Likewise, Jessica Gerson takes a positive attitude towards Elena, ranking her among those “benign, redemptive and creative women” who “repeatedly offer their men redemptive love.”[18]

Although many critics have commented upon the relationship between sex and self and the difference between Elena and Lulu when talking about the sexuality of the characters in The Deer Park, few critics have seen the love affairs and marriages of the characters in the novel as part of their pursuit of selfhood and happiness, nor have they noticed the puzzlements that Elena and Lulu confront after marriage. In fact, the sexuality of the characters in their love affairs and marriages is always linked with their pursuit of selfhood and happiness. It is always indicative of whether the partners involved are content with their lives or not, and whether they can satisfactorily do with their own lives or not. It is both a preserver and destroyer of happy love and marriage. It is an index both of love and hate. It involves not only warmness and tenderness but also coldness and indifference and it is founded on the ground of honesty and loyalty but, sometimes, it also grows out of deception and betrayal. Further, it is both redemptive and hurting and it makes one partner gain and the other partner lose. It is supposed to be love-bound and marriage-bound but sometimes it has little to do with love and marriage. It seems to facilitate selfhood outside love and marriage but it also seems to imprison selfhood inside love and marriage. So, it cannot be read as merely a sexual activity; instead, it should be read and understood in association with its performers’ pursuit of selfhood and happiness and should not be read without taking gender into consideration. Only in this way can we really understand the nature and meaning of the sexuality of the characters in the novel and the puzzlements of Elena and Lulu after marriage.

In The Deer Park, Mailer seems to concern himself more with the relationship between self and gender than with the love affairs or sexuality of one character or another; in other words, what he is deeply concerned with in the novel are the problems closely related to self and gender, such as: Whether living alone or together with someone else, married or single, what should one do with his/her life? Should one be honest with himself/herself or deceptive of himself/herself? Should one be obedient to another to lose his/her pride and dignity or defiant of another to keep his/her pride and dignity? Should one live for himself/herself or for others? What does happiness mean to men and women? Does the life of a wife mean that she should maintain a house, love her husband and children, be on good terms with family members, and learn to grow so as to make herself match well with her husband or people around her? Are love and marriage enough to make a woman really happy? What does life mean to a woman? Does it mean to find a good husband, have children, be a good wife and mother and on good terms with family members? To be herself or serve others? Can being a lady make a woman a really happy wife? Can being a gentleman make a man a really happy husband? What can make a man a happy husband and a woman a happy wife? In the novel, Mailer tries to give answers to these questions by closely investigating the love affairs and marriages of his characters. It should be noticed that Mailer’s investigation of the love affairs and marriages of the characters in the novel reflect his concern not only with the problem of selfhood but also with the gender issues of his time. In The Deer Park, gender differences in male and female pursuits of selfhood and happiness is explicitly manifested in the affairs and marriages of the characters, but it has not drawn much attention from critics. Many critics have directed their attention towards Charley Eitel, Sergius O’Shaugnessy and Marion O’Faye as the major characters in the novel, as clearly shown in Norman Podhoretz’s remark that “Sergius and Marion are the natural heroes of the world of The Deer Park” [19] or Jean Radford’s argument that “there are in fact three heroes in the novel: Eitel the ‘potential artist’ and professional film director, Marion Faye the nihilistic pimp and pusher to the film world, and Sergius O’Shaugnessy, the would-be writer and narrator of the novel.”[20] No critic has paid much attention to Elena or Lulu or Dorothea as major characters in the novel. Further, many critics tend to read and understand the significance of the love affair between Eitel and Elena from a male perspective. Although Jean Radford claims that Elena “has herself a moral nature with distinctive ideas and possibilities for self-development and growth” [16], she fails to see that Elena’s possibilities for self development and growth are not the same as or equal to Charley Eitel’s, Sergius O’Shaugnessy’s, or Marion O’Faye’s. Although Elena can pursue her selfhood in her love affairs, she cannot transcend her marriage life to pursue her true self as can Eitel. Further, we can say that Lulu cannot have a happy life so long as she does not know what a woman should do with her own life after marriage.

Now, it seems in order to make a close investigation of the major characters and their self-pursuit in terms of love affair and marriage. Unlike earlier critics who see Eitel, Sergius and Marion as major characters in the novel, I would add Elena, Lulu, and Dorothea to the group of major characters, and unlike those critics who focus their attention mainly on the major male characters, such as Eitel, Sergius and Marion, I would like to direct my attention towards the major female characters in the novel, such as Dorothea, Elena and Lulu, whose life experiences demonstrate different alternatives of women in their pursuit of selfhood and happiness.

Dorothea is a showgirl, a night-club singer, a call girl, a gossip columnist, a celebrity, and a failure. Her father is a drunkard, dies that way, and her mother remarries. She begins to work when she is twelve, collecting rent from tenants and taking care of household duties. She is seventeen when she has her first love affair with a man named O’Faye, who makes her considerably unhappy because “she was crazy about him,” but “he liked a different girl every night” and never wants to meet her desire “to settle down, to have children” and, therefore, when she gets pregnant, he does not hesitate to choose to leave her [21]. She does not gain much from this affair; instead, she suffers a lot from it. We do not know how much pain she experiences, but we can be sure that she does suffer to no small extent. However, her fate always seems to be connected with that man. When she turns nineteen, she becomes pregnant by a passing European prince and, after he leaves, she is left to take care of everything on her own. With no one to help her, she seems to have no choice but to turn to O’Faye to help her out of trouble because “three months went by, four months went by, it was too much late” [22] to do anything about her forthcoming child. Fortunately, O’Faye is willing to save her because he “sympathized with her predicament.”[22] Although “he would never marry a girl who carried his own child,” he “considered it right to help a friend out of her trouble.”[22] So, to her great expectation and satisfaction, “they quickly married, and as quickly divorced, and her child had a name.[22]”Clearly, Dorothea’s quick marriage with O’Faye is not grounded on the love of one for the other; it is essentially a loveless one. It seems to help Dorothea gain, but this gain, if it really is one, is founded on her miserable experience with the irresponsible European prince who gets her into trouble. She later marries a man, of whom she says, “I can’t remember him as well as guys I’ve had for a one-night stand.” [23] She then has a romance with an Air Force pilot who, unfortunately, is killed in a flight and she is, in a sense, a tragic woman. She has more than one affair and, more than once, she loses more than gains. The only affair from which she seems to have gained something is the one that she has with Martin Pelley when she settles down in Desert D’Or and “their romance began on the sure ground of his incapacity.”[22] That is to say, instead of being at the mercy of others, as she used to be, now Dorothea is able to decide her own life, but her ability to make decisions of her own is grounded on the incapacity of the man she chooses as her partner. Although she begins her life as a victim of men, she grows as a woman who can make men yield to her; as the narrator remarks of her, “Dorothea had lasted. If her night-club days were finished, if her big affairs were part of the past, she was still in fine shape. She had her house, she had her court, she had money in the bank; men still sent airplanes for her.”[24] If we take a backward look at Dorothea’s life experience with men, we find that she loses her selfhood, but she manages to regain it by becoming a woman who seems to be able to dominate men rather than be dominated by them.

If Dorothea’s life is one of misery and happiness, loss and gain, Elena shares much with her, but is quite different from her, as well. She was born into an unhappy family. Her father is “a bully” and so is her mother. Neither of them treats her really well. The mother coddles Elena but scolds her as well, “made much of her and ignored her, given her ambitions and chased them away.”[25] The father does not like Elena because “she was the youngest and she had come much too late .”[25] Although she has a big family consisting of brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, cousins, and grandparents, she does not feel that it is a happy one because “fist fights started” whenever there is a family party. In addition, the father is “a dandy” and “could not be alone with a woman without trying to make love to her,” and the mother is “a flirt,” always greedy and jealous (). Born into such a family, Elena suffers significantly and experiences more misery than any other girl her age. When she is a child, more often than not, she “would cry silently while the mother and father yelled insults at one another” and therefore she has to spend her childhood “listening to their jealous quarrels.”[26] She has her first love affair when she is in her teens, with Collie Munshin. She lives with him for three years but fails to develop her relationship with him into marriage. She loves him but receives no love in return. In her eyes, Collie is “a hypocrite” because he claims himself to be “a good liberal” who does not believe in a double standard but rather in the equality between man and woman, white and black, and the rich and the poor, but he looks down upon Elena for no other reason than that “she’s obviously from a poor background.”[27] Unlike what he claims himself to be, Collie has “always been full of prejudices about women” and “wanted girls with some class and distinction to them.”[27] It is no wonder that three years of living with Elena is not long enough for him to develop a bit of love for her. Although he believes that “Elena is a person who hates everything that is small in herself” and is “consumed by the passion to become a bigger person than she is” and therefore is “the sort of girl who would love a husband and kids”[28], he sees her as just “a beautiful, warm, simple child”[29]; that is to say, he never sees her as his equal. Being innocent, Elena spends three years being cheated on by Collie. Although she is Collie’s mistress, she has never been treated as such by him. To Collie, Elena is not a “beautiful, warm, simple” young woman who has given herself wholly to him but a possession he can exchange with others when he becomes fatigued with the relationship, which is the reason why Collie transfers Elena to Charley Eitel. Leaving Collie and coming to Eitel, Elena seems to have freed herself from imprisonment, just as the narrator says, “she reminded me of an animal, ready for flight.”[30]

Indeed, living with Eitel, Elena feels quite different than when she is with Collie. Eitel is a man of over forty. He has “a big reputation as a film director” but is “better known in other ways” because he experiences more than one marriage and is believed to be “the cause of more than one divorce.”[31] He has had three failed marriages and more than one love affair before he meets Elena. His first wife “worked in a bookstore to support him”[32], but as his own career grows, he begins to forget what she has done and sacrificed for him because “he wanted a woman who was more attractive, more intelligent, more his equal” and even “wanted more than one woman”[33]. Quarrels between them become more and more routine and, as a result, they end up divorced. His second wife is an actress from the social register. From her, he “picked up what he wanted and paid for it of course”[34]. Like his first wife, his second wife ends her relationship with him in a divorce. After divorce, Eitel is commissioned into the Army in Europe and, when he comes back from the war, he becomes extremely notorious because “there was a year or two when he was supposed to have slept with half the good-looking women in the capital, and it was a rare week which did not have his name in one gossip column or another.”[34] His third wife is a woman named Lulu Meyers. She is beautiful and young and therefore “he hardly believed she needed him.”[35] Knowing that his marriage with her “could never last”[36], he soon falls into an affair with a Romanian actress, which lasts just one year. Although he has never been faithful to any woman that he has ever been with, he believes that he is truly loyal to his Romanian woman, as he states:

I’ve never been the kind of man who can be faithful with my regularity. I’ve always been the sort of decent chappie who hops from one woman to another in the run of an evening because that’s the only prescription which allows me to be fond of both ladies, but I was faithful in my own way to the Rumanian. She would have liked to see me every night for she hated to be alone and I would have liked never to see her again, and so we settled for two nights a week. It didn’t matter if I were in the middle of a romance or between girls, whether I had a date that night or not—on Thursday night and Friday night I went to her apartment to sleep.[37]

. . .

Notes

  1. ↑ See Lucid (1971, p. 82-83), Leeds (1969, p. 110), Leigh (1990, pp. 55-56, 62-63), and Glenday (1995, pp. 79-81).

Citations

  1. ↑ Mailer 1981, p. 330.
  2. ↑ Lennon 1986, p. 6.
  3. ↑ Mills 1982, p. 145.
  4. ↑ Mills 1982, p. 143.
  5. ↑ Leigh 1990, p. 77.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Leigh 1990, p. 78.
  7. ↑ Merrill 1978, p. 45.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Lucid 1971, p. 78.
  9. ↑ Lucid 1971, p. 123.
  10. ↑ Lucid 1971, p. 28.
  11. ↑ Lucid 1971, pp. 125-126.
  12. ↑ Radford 1975, p. 133.
  13. ↑ Bloom 2003, p. 175.
  14. ↑ Radford 1975, p. 135.
  15. ↑ Bufithis 1978, p. 46.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 Radford 1975, p. 136.
  17. ↑ Harper 1967, p. 111.
  18. ↑ Bloom 1986, p. 172.
  19. ↑ Lucid 1971, p. 80.
  20. ↑ Radford 1975, p. 20.
  21. ↑ Radford 1975, p. 10,11.
  22. ↑ 22.0 22.1 22.2 22.3 22.4 Radford 1975, p. 11.
  23. ↑ Radford 1975, p. 6.
  24. ↑ Radford 1975, p. 7.
  25. ↑ 25.0 25.1 Radford 1975, p. 104.
  26. ↑ Radford 1975, p. 104,105.
  27. ↑ 27.0 27.1 Radford 1975, p. 49.
  28. ↑ Radford 1975, p. 50.
  29. ↑ Radford 1975, p. 48.
  30. ↑ Radford 1975, p. 71.
  31. ↑ Radford 1975, p. 24.
  32. ↑ Radford 1975, p. 26.
  33. ↑ Radford 1975, p. 27.
  34. ↑ 34.0 34.1 Radford 1975, p. 28.
  35. ↑ Radford 1975, p. 29.
  36. ↑ Radford 1975, p. 31.
  37. ↑ Radford 1975, p. 30.

Works Cited

  • Bailey, Jennifer (1979). Norman Mailer: Quick-Change Artist. The Macmillan Press Ltd.
  • Bloom, Harold, ed (1986). Norman Mailer. Chelsea House Publishers.
  • Bloom, Harold, ed (2003). Norman Mailer. Chelsea House Publishers.
  • Bufithis, Philip H (1978). Norman Mailer. Frederick Ungar Publishing Co.
  • Glenday, Michael K. (1995). Norman Mailer. St. Martin's Press.
  • Harper, Howard M. (1967). Desperate Faith: A Study of Bellow, Salinger, Mailer, Baldwin, and Updike. University of North Carolina P.
  • Leeds, Barry H. (1969). The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer. U of London P Limited.
  • Leigh, Nigel (1990). Radical Fictions and the Novels of Norman Mailer. Macmillan.
  • Lennon, J. Michael (1986). Critical Essays on Norman Mailer. G. K. Hall & Co.
  • Lucid, Robert, ed. (1971). Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work. Little, Brown and Company.
  • Mailer, Norman (1955). The Deer Park. G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
  • — (1981). The Deer Park. Perigee Books.
  • Merrill, Robert (1978). Norman Mailer. Twayne.
  • Mills, Hilary (1982). Mailer: A Biography. McGraw Hill.
  • Radford, Jean (1975). Norman Mailer: A Critical Study. The Macmillan Press.
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