No, I Haven't Read That: "A Frozen Woman" by Annie Ernaux
French Adolescence, "Having it All," and "'The Massive Chain of Inevitable Feminine Tragedy.'"
Okay: before we jump in here with what I can already feel is going to be a highly charged and soap box-adjacent book review/rant from *moi,* I want to quickly say that this is the very first time I managed to get the screenshot size for this goddamn1 Substack banner heading (that I so intelligently decided I should change with every iteration of this newsletter) CROPPED RIGHT ON THE FIRST TRY. This is huge for me. I doubt this means anything to anyone else reading this. So: on brand for the whole thing I’m doing here re: internet, void, and screaming into it. Moving on! Beep boop.
I initially picked up A Frozen Woman by Annie Ernaux because I thought that it had won the 2022 Nobel Prize for Fiction, and due to my own personal brand of once-A-student trauma and perfectionist shame,2 I love to tear down anything that’s won a prize. Not really but whoo boy, does the Man Booker Prize be getting it wrong a lot. Probably because there’s “Man” in the name. OooOOOOooOOOOOhhhhhh.
It turns out that Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in 2022 for her body of work, not this particular novel, much like Jamie Lee Curtis and her 2023 Best Supporting Actress Oscar win vis-a-vis “Everything Everywhere All At Once” and her whole, totally not nepopotic,3 career history. Still: I doubt even if Ernaux had won the Nobel for this particular novel that I could’ve found fault with it, no matter how hard my predispositions might have tried. In fact, this novel in and of itself deserves the highest prize awarded to literature (besides being featured in this illustrious Substack), and Ernaux’s name deserves to be mentioned in league with Simone de Beauvoir’s and Betty Friedan’s and Gloria Steinem’s for all that she has contributed, and continues to contribute, to feminist literature and discourse.
I almost don’t want to write “feminist” literature, as I believe such terminology is reductive, and because I believe the nomenclature will likely turn some people4 off, as calling anything feminist seems to do. Labeling a text, like The Second Sex, or The Feminine Mystique, or even the Elena Ferrante novels, as “feminist” pretends at reverence by seeming to attach a work of art to an idea, a movement, an epoch, when in actuality, the moniker diminishes the necessity and viability of the texts by allowing them to be easily dismissed as politicized provender written by women who think they hate men, but really they just haven’t had a good G-spot orgasm from someone over 5”9 yet.
In reality, a “feminist” novel is usually, simply, a story written by a woman about things that women aren’t usually supposed to say out loud. It makes people5 uncomfy when women do this! Thusly, such stories are relegated to the non-arable tundra kept dry under the umbrella of “Feminism” so that they can be more easily ignored or turned into syllabus fodder; rote, perfunctory; “required,” but not admired.
See? I warned you! I. Am. Gonna. Be. Serious. In. This. One! Turn back now, Theresa of the Dog Park, wherever you are, there’s a lot of academia coming your way!
Ernaux’s A Frozen Woman follows the female life-cycle (pre-pubescence, adolescence, mother and wifehood and then whoopsie we forgot are you still there?), of Anny—a loosely fictionalized version of the author herself—whom we meet as a young French girl in the beginning stages of what bell hooks referred to in Bone black as “double consciousness:” the realization, which usually begins for girls on the cusp of pre-pubescence, that one is both a person—a human—and a woman, but that those two things, despite existing in a singular body, are not one. In the mind of hooks, a woman is constantly interacting with both the self awareness of their own personhood, and vigilantly keeping track of how the world6 perceives their personhood, which is to say, how the world perceives their femininity.
****It bears mentioning that bell hooks was also in constant conversation with the triplicate consciousness of being a human and black and a black human woman, and I no way mean to elide the importance of how she came to understand her race in the context of a racist society, and thusly, came to coin the term “double consciousness,” by ascribing her theorem to a white character in a fictional novel. I, also, do believe the term can be incredibly useful for women writ large.****
Anny, when we first meet her, is as yet unburdened by having to make herself attractive to the opposite sex, and thusly, she is carefree and has ample time and energy to use her mind to read, write, daydream, and generally feel pretty good about herself. She is growing up working class in what would, even to this day, be considered a pretty atypical family dynamic: her father cooks, cleans, reads to her at night, tends to her boo-boos, and generally takes on the bulk of what is (STILL!) considered feminine work, while her mother keeps the books and runs the store that is the main source of their familial income. Her mother thinks cleaning is boring, reading and studying are the only worthwhile pastimes, and cannot cook worth shit. This makes her, in a word, different from the other mothers in their small hamlet.
But Anny does not know, or not yet know, that there’s anything “wrong” with how her family does things. She loves and admires her mother; she loves and cherishes her father. Dust is something that is supposed to pile up on shelves; beds are fine to be left untidy; your father in a frilly pink apron is pretty cool, if we’re being honest. It’s only when (as underlined in the above quoted text), men and the dire need to garner male approval invades Anny’s consciousness, riding the coattails of her period like Timothée Chalamet on that Sand Worm in the Dune 2 trailer, that Anny suddenly realizes she’s supposed to hate herself.
“What an intense way to end a sentence, Nora!” you might be thinking. But isn’t that exactly what happens, as soon as a girl realizes she has to be a certain thing in order to attract the “right kind of man?” And that what she is naturally, who she feels herself innately to be, might be in direct conflict with What Men Want? So what, then, is left for a girl to do but discard those parts of herself deemed unfit or imperfectly suited to the world of men? To offer up that which makes her, her, at the alter of the greater ideal of male approval and attraction? As Ernaux explains:
“The [female] body is under constant surveillance and restraint, abruptly shattered into a heap of pieces—eyes, skin, hair—that must be dealt with one by one to reach perfection. Not an easy task, since a single detail can spoil everything…
…There it is already, the awful mess I won’t be able to escape. I need boys, but to please them I’d have to be simperingly sweet, admit that they’re always right, use ‘feminine wiles.’ Kill what still resists, the love of accomplishment, the desire to be really truly myself. That or loneliness. That or looking at my lips and breasts and telling myself that they’re useless. That, obviously.”
Here, already, is the tacit agreement, lifted from the collective unconscious and foisted upon individuals: the male is cast as judge, jury; deemer, chooser; actor, penetrator; and the woman is cast as supplicant, passive, receiver; the one who looks to another’s7 opinion of herself to form her own. NEAT, HUH?!?!
Anny’s mother, despite living in a more egalitarian way, believes herself to be shackled by the expectations of her sex, her economic station, and in order to resist dooming her daughter to the same fate, encourages Anny to excel in school; to cultivate her mind so that she might cultivate her options. Which Anny does. To a certain point. Here is where I think Ernaux’s novel proves both its uniqueness and importance.
When I was in college, I took a class called “Children of Divorce.” A bold choice for me, as a child of divorce myself and someone who had yet to really unpack what that meant for me in my adult relationships. But, it was a soft science and I needed the credit to fulfill my liberal arts degree (lol), so there I was and here we are. In that class, which I ended up valuing highly, the professor mentioned a longitudinal study wherein those polled with lower income brackets and less education, on paper had more conservative values (God, marriage, no children out of wedlock, recycling is a hoax), but in actuality, were living more progressive lives (separate income streams, co-habitation before marriage, just cut the mold off, the bread will be fine). Whereas those polled with the most education and the highest income brackets, professed to have liberal and egalitarian values (totally cool if the wife goes back to work, absolutely share the housework 50/50, a courthouse wedding seems nice!), but in actuality were living far more conservative lives (one income stream from the man, wife stays at home and does the bulk of the cooking/cleaning, having children post-nuptials; how many Amazon boxes can we order in one week before the rainforest we named our daughter after is depleted?).
A Frozen Woman exists in this liminal space, in the lacuna between what we profess to want, and how we actually expect to live. Anny and her eventual husband (spoiler alert!), fall victim to the lies we tell ourselves about our capacity for difference, when the whole wide world of archetypal conformity is working against us. Furthermore, what makes Anny’s story all the more interesting is that she did have a pretty good shot at breaking the mold. Her mother had modeled a different familial structure for her from infancy; Anny went to a prestigious school and met a man who seemed not only to have similar goals, but support her goals, in turn. But it is, as it turns out, very difficult to be honest about what we actually expect from one another.
As Anny says about her husband: “Intellectually, he champions my liberty, he draws up schedules for errands, shopping, vacuuming, so how can I complain?” But, as their “shared” life unfolds, it happens that her husband participates in next to none of these duties of house and home and eventually, child. Even despite all their grand plans to the contrary. Thus, we watch Anny’s progression from living girl to frozen woman—or, was the frozen woman there all along, idling just beneath the surface? Was there ever any real shot to aim for at “having it all,” or “doing it differently?” Is there any real shot, for any of us, to choose a different path? Not without compromise, but without a significant loss of what self or society believes us—needs us—to be?
These patterns of behavior are not in the distant past. This novel was published in 1981. Part of why Ernaux’s works have only just now reached a larger audience is because when Ernaux was writing and attempting publication, she was stymied by the French press, and yes, I mean that exactly like the how the coffee maker do be doing it. I think about how things are changing, how we are becoming more aware, but also how close we still are to the event horizon of our collective expectations. I think about how we, as women, continue to give ourselves so little credit. “Organization: the watchword of women everywhere…but it’s really a method of sticking yourself with the most work possible in the least amount of time without pain or suffering because that would bother those around you” (164).8
I don’t know. I don’t think there’s any honest way to talk about this without acknowledging that I, too, am a woman who has benefitted from the gender binary, as well as been stymied by it. I like men and I want men to like me—sometimes to a fault. I am a woman who has wanted to succeed professionally, at least on paper and in purported ambition, but much of my actual behavior has been in line with curtailing myself, my opportunities, or my choices in order to fit more neatly into the expectations or needs or opportunities of whichever man I happened to be dating. I have not been very brave; I have not been too cowardly. This is an almost impossible needle to thread. It makes me ashamed of myself; I don’t know if I had any real shot at choosing differently.
I was finishing this book at 35,000 feet in the middle seat on a red-eye between someone who kept farting putridly in their sleep and someone who was an influencer and also kept turning the brightness up on my screen “by accident”, so I already had enough reasons to be upset. But I found myself getting particularly emotional when I read this line:
“Sometimes I think that with a man at my side, all my actions, no matter how insignificant—winding the alarm clock, fixing breakfast—will become charged with life, take on a weight that would let me stop floating, get a grip on the world.”
Because I do believe, in many ways, that this is what we want out of relationships in general, and love in particular. I am also not sure if this is a uniquely female thought or feeling (men sound off in the comments below!). I think many, if not all of us, crave the particular significance of who we become when we become someone another loves, wholly and completely. I also wonder if waiting for this significance to arrive is a fool’s errand—the heat mirage in the desert, always further out of reach the closer we get to it. And I feel incredibly sad and angry that for many women—including my own goddamn self—there exists, and persists, the tacit belief that only attracting or warranting the romantic love of a man is what makes you as an individual, valid.
In the words of Carrie Bradshaw (complicated to bring her into this, I know, she messy!!) I couldn’t help but wonder…as women, is our existence unsettled until we settle down?
I do have hope for a future wherein we are less immune to and accepting of women’s suffering. Wherein “The massive chain of inevitable feminine tragedy” is broken. I just wish more people were picking up sledgehammers.
READ THIS BOOK IF: You read this review and were like: “Hmm, I don’t think I’d be into that.” Trust me. You need to read it MORE.
DO NOT READ THIS BOOK IF: You don’t enjoy a little crying on airplanes, a.k.a. sky sadness.
NORA’S RATING: 9.5/10
How does everyone spell goddamn? Like, do you do: God damn? OR: god dammit? Or: God dammit? OR: something else entirely? I feel like it’s always different. Just pure chaos. I think I remember Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield having a really strange way of saying/spelling it but he also might have had the temperament of a school shooter were he born in a different time, so perhaps not the best case study.
When we were shooting on location and I was apologizing for getting the exact location of on-set dinner wrong, my old boss responded by telling me that I was “addicted to shame.” This is also the same man who routinely told me I was getting “hifalutin’” because I wanted to transition out of being his assistant after four years, so.
Not a word; don’t care.
Str8 men
Str8 men
Str8 men
A man’s! Has this joke run it’s course yet?
Eat ur heart out, Strunk & White, MLA is here to stay!
Goddamn, this is good.