The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Tales of the “Great Bitch”: Murder and the Release of Virile Desire in An American Dream: Difference between revisions

{{quote|The novel is like the Great Bitch in one’s life. We think we’re rid of her, we go on to other women, we take our pulse and decide that finally we’re enjoying ourselves, we’re free of her power, we’ll never suffer her depredations again, and then we turn a corner on a street, and there’s the Bitch smiling at us, and we’re trapped. We know the Bitch has still got us.

Mailer’s conception of novel writing as having intercourse with a “Great Bitch”{{efn|Mailer uses the term “great bitch” in the novel to describe the character of Deborah.}} reveals much about Mailer’s concerns regarding his own performances–both sexual and creative. For Mailer, creative expression, like sexual performance, involved the release of something innately true about oneself.{{efn|In that respect, Mailer seems to want Vidal to operate as witness here to his sexual desires. As a homosexual, Vidal is perhaps a non-threatening witness, one who doesn’t appear to resemble a threat to Mailer’s masculinity.}}

That Rojack’s relationship with Deborah would fail on both a sexual and emotional level is thus required to set the novel’s plot in motion. Her existence, like the German homosexual’s existence, undermines or threatens to undermine his own gender identity. Like Rojack’s description of the German, his description of Deborah serves as a way of separating her from that orgasmic treasure that Rojack originally sought. She cannot provide him with the apocalyptic orgasm he desires, the text seems to suggest. Mailer once remarked that calling Deborah “‘evil wife’ oversimplifies” but that “ ‘[t]ragic, tormented, half-evil wife’ or something of that ilk might be more satisfactory.”{{sfn|Lennon|2004|p=51}} To be sure, Rojack’s description of her does either title justice, for we are told that Deborah’s body “radiated a detestation so palpable that my body began to race as if a foreign element, a poison altogether suffocating, were beginning to seep through me. Did you ever feel the malignity which rises from a swamp?”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=25}} Deborah’s touch is equally revolting, described as “soft now as a jellyfish and almost as repugnant—the touch shot my palm with a thousand needles which stung into my arm.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=26}} Even Deborah’s odor is repelling: “When she drank too much, a stench of sweet rot lifted from her.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=24}} Such descriptions demonize the feminine by focusing on particular aspects of Deborah that one would associate with sexuality and desire. Her touch, her odor, her body have become repulsive and evil, foreign and repugnant. Female sexuality is rotting inside Deborah.

Mailer returns, in a sense, full circle in this chapter by linking Rojack’s failure with Deborah to the recursive rhetoric of war and conquest: “[F]or the last five [years] I had been trying to evacuate my expeditionary army, that force of hopes, all-out need, plain virile desire and commitment which I had spent on her.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=9}} War, violence, and sexual relationships again merge. Rojack continues, saying, “I wanted to withdraw, count my dead, and look for love in another land, but she was a great bitch”;{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=9}} later he admits that “there would come a moment, there would always come a moment, after everything else had gone, when it was impossible not to call her ... it was the remains of my love for her, love draining from the wound, leaving behind its sense of desolation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=15}} The image of “love draining from the wound” in particular has connotations that suggest virility, which is paralleled in the passage by a militaristic rhetoric–desolation and counting one’s dead–that also implies concerns regarding his virility. Later, Rojack will compensate for these fears through two acts of aggression–murdering Deborah and having sex with Ruta. However, for the moment, Rojack finds himself with a need “withdraw” and “count” his “dead” sperm. Years later, Mailer suggested that the only idea in ''An American Dream'' was that human love can never be attained without paying an enormous price.

Rojack, moreover, seems wiser now, having learned enough about the ways of the “Great Bitch” to see through Cherry’s exterior. Rojack refers to her as attractive, but remains wary of the “blonde devil” she may represent. As Rojack watches her, the newfound “treasure” that Cherry represents seems, once again, to have turned into blood and fear. “Women must murder us unless we possess them altogether (so said the luminous logic of this liquor in my hand) and I had a fear now of the singer on the stand.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=100}} Her painted toes, Rojack believes “talked of how bad this girl could be.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=100}}

In that sense, Shago endangers Rojack’s masculinity in a way that Cherry could never do alone. Now Rojack must not only make Cherry moan (in a literal and figurative way), he must do so better than Shago. Once again, Rojack has come full circle, for the potential emasculation here by Cherry/ Shago parallels the troubles that Rojack had with the emasculating Deborah earlier in the book. Deborah emasculated Rojack by suggesting he was an insufficient lover (he just went “pop, pop, pop” with his “little gun”), but it wasn’t until Rojack discovered that his sexual role has been usurped by other male lovers who performed better than he did that Rojack turned to violence and murder.