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

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''”{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=80}} 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.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=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,”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=136}} 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.

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.{{sfn|Radford|1975|pp=10, 11}} 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”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}} to do anything about her forthcoming child. Fortunately, O’Faye is willing to save her because he “sympathized with her predicament.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}} Although “he would never marry a girl who carried his own child,” he “considered it right to help a friend out of her trouble.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}} So, to her great expectation and satisfaction, “they quickly married, and as quickly divorced, and her child had a name”.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}} 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.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=6}} 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.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}} 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.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=7}} 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.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=104}} The father does not like Elena because “she was the youngest and she had come much too late.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=104}} 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.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=104}} 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.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|pp=104, 105}} 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.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=49}} 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.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=49}} 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,”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=50}} he sees her as just “a beautiful, warm, simple child”;{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=48}} 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.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=71}}

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.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=24}} 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,”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=26}} 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.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=27}} 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.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=28}} 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.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=28}} His third wife is a woman named Lulu Meyers. She is beautiful and young and therefore “he hardly believed she needed him.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=29}} Knowing that his marriage with her “could never last,”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=31}} 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:

Although Eitel is a man “with considerable masculinity of mind,” his masculine mindset seems to be powerless in front of Elena. He begins to change with his love affair with Elena. To him, Elena has something that other women always lack, just as he believes, “not too many women really knew how to make love, and very few indeed loved to make love,”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=89}} but “Elena was doubly and indubitably a find.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=90}} He learns something about Elena from the way she makes love, for he “always felt that the way a woman made love was as good a guide to understanding her character as any other way.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=90}} Believing that “to be a good lover, one should be incapable of falling in love,”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=90}} Eitel “usually wanted nothing more than to quit a woman once they were done.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=91}} However, when it comes to Elena, he no longer believes what he used to believe because “he not only wished to sleep the night with Elena but to hold her in his arms.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=91}} Elena makes Eitel realize that “he had never been with anyone who understood him so well,”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=96}} and therefore he believes that Elena is “the best woman” he has ever had.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=97}} Consequently, he believes that his affair with Elena “could return his energy, flesh his courage, and make him the man he had once believed himself to be.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=96}} He also believes that he and Elena each “could make something of the other.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=96}} After the affair, “he felt full of tenderness for Elena” and “through the day he toyed with the thought that she should come to live with him.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=96}} But unlike what Eitel expects, Elena does not want to live with him because she does not want to lose her freedom and selfhood she has just achieved, as she tells him, “You can do what you want, and I’ll do what I want.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=98}} When Eitel becomes furious with her for her affair with Marion Faye, Elena refuses to surrender to his criticism; instead, she is very defiant, saying that “I’ll go if you want me to go” and that “I think we’d better quit now, you and me.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=101}} Feeling that Eitel has treated her as “a game,” Elena says defiantly to him, “When a woman’s unfaithful, she’s more attractive to a man.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=101}} Elena does not believe that Eitel loves her, but when she finds that he really does love her, she says with final abandon, “Nobody ever treated me the way you do. I love you more than I ever loved anyone.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=102}} However, when living with Eitel, Elena seems to have lost her selfhood completely once again, as the narrator states, “in the first few weeks of living together, Elena’s eyes never left Eitel’s face; her mood was the clue to his temper; if she was gay it meant he was happy; if Eitel was moody, it left her morose. No one else existed for her.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=104}} That, however, does not mean that she is quite sure of Eitel’s feeling towards her. On the contrary, she is always doubtful. Once she says to Eitel, “You think I’m not good enough for you. . . You tell me I don’t love you because you don’t love me. It’s all right. I’ll leave.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=108}} After Eitel confirms his love for her, she becomes calm and says, “Oh, Charley, when you make love to me, everything is all right again. Is it really the same with you?”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=147}} Another time, she says to him calmly, “I could be happy with somebody else . . . I’m going to leave you some day, Charley, I mean it.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=152}} Still another time, she even says to Eitel, much like an order, “Love me, really love me, and maybe I can do what you want.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=160}} Eitel comes to feel somewhat fed up with Elena and appears to be pleased when she tells him that Marion wants her to live with him because he knows if someone else cares for her, “his own responsibility was less.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=163}} Although he believes that Elena is “the most honest woman I’ve ever known,”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=163}} Eitel finds that “the time had come to decide how he would break up with her.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=178}}

 

Despite Eitel’s confession that “he ruined everything he touched,” Elena does not believe that he is really honest. When he tells her, “You must know that I care about you. I can’t stand the thought of hurting you. I mean, I want you always to be happy,”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=225}} she does not believe what he says. When Eitel seriously says to her, “I want us to be married,” Elena just simply replies, “What I thought is that we could go on like this.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=225}} When he once again says to her, “You have to marry me,” she tells him once again, “When you don’t want me, I’ll go. But I don’t want to talk about it any more.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=226}} Elena’s uncompromising refusal to cooperate and comply with Eitel suggests that she minds not only his love for her but also his respect for her. She wants to love and be loved deeply by Eitel, but she does not want to be controlled and manipulated fully by him. On the other hand, Eitel does not want to be controlled and directed by Elena. Although “he loved her as he had never loved anyone,” Eitel is afraid of his love for her because “if he stayed with her, he would be obliged to travel in ''her'' directions.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=226}} Although “he loved her as he had never loved anyone,” Eitel does not want himself to be locked by his love for Elena. He needs love, but he desires freedom even more. His love for Elena seems to be quite abnormal because “it was only after quarrels and crises that he could feel love for Elena the way he desired.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=259}} However much he loves her, “he hated her” because “it was impossible not to remember how she had given herself to others.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=259}} Although he says love words to her more than once, he does not truly love her, just as the narrator says, “they had been tender to each other, they had forgiven one another, and yet he did not love her, she did not love him, no

in the few weeks they live together, Elena “passed from gaiety to high excitement to illness to depression and back to the liquor again.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=290}} Although “she felt free with him,”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=290}} Elena is not able to develop “a decent

her since she did not realize how much she depended on his promise.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=292}} When she swears that she will leave him “in a day or two,”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=298}} Marion has

a little? Why didn’t you know you could have loved me?”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=300}}

husband and children and can manage to be on good terms with her family servants. It seems that she gets herself out of trouble and has a happy life because she has successfully developed “a decent healthy mature relationship”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=50}} with Eitel, but the fact is that she does not feel really happy, for she

To Elena’s problem, Eitel does respond, but his response is just a few comforting words because he does not really know how to solve it. He tries his best to comfort her by saying that she has grown so much that there will be

at home, where can a wife go after a busy day of doing housework and taking care of her husband and children inside home? Eitel does not really know how to solve Elena’s problems because he realizes that her problems are

manage to have “a decent healthy mature relationship”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=50}} with her husband after marriage, she is not able to have her selfhood when she is a wife and mother. It seems impossible for her to have both at the same time, and,

lovers, nor is she satisfied with her relationship with Eitel as wife and husband. She is puzzled, and her puzzlement is, to some extent, the puzzlement of every woman because Lulu Meyers is also puzzled with a similar puzzlement.

describes, “the meeting on zero and zero,”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=31}} and therefore, it soon comes

that he is not sure whether they are “in love or about to break up,” whether they will “make love or fight, do both or do nothing at all.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=113}} Besides, she is too much self-centered. Sometimes, she wants Sergius to leave her alone, and other times, she will not let him quit her for a moment. He has no choice

but “to follow every impulse” of hers.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=114}} However different and self-centered Lulu is, Sergius does not feel unhappy when being together with her, just as he says, “We were great lovers . . . I was superb. She was superb . . . We played our games. I was the photographer, and she was the model; she was

met even to even.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=120}} It seems that they are in a fully harmonious relationship, but beneath it lies great disharmony. When Lulu suggests that they get married, the thought of marriage makes Sergius “badly depressed”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=124}} because he believes that Lulu’s self-centeredness will turn him into “Mr. Meyers, a sort of fancy longshoreman scared of his wife, always busy mixing drinks for Lulu and the guests.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=124}} He wants to be Mr. Sergius rather than

enjoyment” for him. He does not want to marry Lulu because they are having more and more quarrels than harmony between them, just as he says, “Lulu and I had come to the point where we fought more often than not, and

forward to the separation,”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=125}} but, when separated, they have a strong desire to be together and an equally strong desire for love from each other, just as Sergius says, “Once she was gone, I could not get myself together . . . While she was gone, we were always on the phone. I called her up to tell her I loved

The separation, however, has very much changed Sergius. He begins to realize that there will be no love without weakness and that he should have loved Lulu and married her. However, somewhat to his surprise, when he proposes marriage with her, she refuses his proposal. Although their lovemaking makes Lulu “feel like a woman for the first time”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=203}} and makes them really love each other, just as Sergius says, “I loved her and I think she

loved me,”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=203}} Lulu does not let herself turn into Mrs. Sergius; instead, she leaves Sergius and gets married to Tony Tanner to continue her pursuit of selfhood and happiness.

is capable of choosing her own love and marriage and retaining her selfhood; she, however, does not really know why she is not able to be really happy after she is married, and, therefore, is not what she really wants to be.

illustrate three alternatives of women in their pursuit of selfhood and happiness in love and marriage, but none of them seems to be an ideal persona. Dorothea chooses to cohabit with Martin Pelly, a man who is much inferior

{{Reflist|20em}}

* {{cite book |editor-last=Bloom |editor-first=Harold |date=1986 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Chelsea House Publishers |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |editor-last=Bloom |editor-first=Harold |editor-mask=1 |date=2003 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Chelsea House Publishers |ref=harv }}