The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan + How the Light Gets In by M.J. Hyland

Girl lit we’ve covered. So what’s a bad girl and how do we talk about her fictionality? Oh, you know, employ stretchy terminology. Ping the elastic with your teeth. So let us say to begin, a bad girl is someone who doesn’t conform. Who rankles not so much the writers of rules but those citizens who observe and uphold them. She declared bad, she self-declared as bad. Who as her desires dictate stabs and punches and pisses and fucks where she pleases and shows how easy it is for someone who seems powerless to disregard and thus destabilise our norms.

Sometimes the bad girl is mentally ill, specifically coded in ways dangerous to herself and others. She is the Psycho, the crazy bitch. A bad girl is too much, that’s it, to describe in ways that acknowledge her humanity, or how much mental illness is human too. Here’s the line of what is acceptable, and she crosses it, kicks dust on it, deliberately, we might believe. This is one notion of ‘bad girl’ which is not reality but surface. The surface meaning of a word, covered in scum and other fluids. Fiction is all about breaking the surface tension and delving in to what the author finds/thinks (both) lurks there.

There’s something therefore about the energy of a good book about a smart bad girl. Something sharp and high pitched in it, that unsettles, rips the cover out from under the cutlery – and as fiction, capable of multifarious realities, endless return and all possibilities, leaves the plates suspended between disarray and quivering stillness for the duration of reading. Because if a bad girl seems to be urges, seems to be a force – what then of a bad girl who appears to have the intelligence to choose to be this way. What about a bad girl stabilised for the moment in print. And specifically here, bad girl lit that focuses on the girl herself, her inner life, that seeks not to moralise but purely, impurely tell.

I’m saying that sort of girl lit about bad girls cracks the wall enough. Pops the pearl-clutching bubble and lets what is inside that spray out. That is to say, it performs a piece of the human condition for you. So what? That’s what most books do. But isn’t it of interest to see how much empathy and insight you can grow towards someone you (the general you)’d slink cross the street to avoid (is that blood, is that a knife? Why is she laughing so harshly? Don’t let her harm me, don’t let her get the crazy on me). Lit of the bad girl are not those texts which seek to neutralise the Otherness of this girl, to say she’s good at heart, but those which can lower your slick, socially mandated resistance, if only for the duration of reading. To split open old memories, to jar your bones. Queasy acknowledgement of shared humanity for the anti-hero. Or sight that anti-ness is not so clear cut as you might have supposed. Even if, after that re-evaluation, your attitude is just as it was. Fiction is not merely redemptive or curative after all.

Side note – none of this is original on my part. All of these observations are gleaned from Kristeva in poorly understood flecks or carried to me on the tide of internet reading (certainly little of it was from proscribed texts at university). Kate Zambreno, Subashini, RGR, Kristen Stone, a hundred unremembered Tumblr posts linking infinitely off and disagreeing venomously with one another. Sources are slippery (says the bad scholar) but here is one quote for you:

“I’m not like most girls. I’m like all girls. I am the alpha girl and the omega girl. I have many faces, and I am called by many names, not all of which are audible to human ears. I contain multitudes. I am legion. All shall be assimilated.”
– Roundtop, a Tumblr entity

Dispense and apply topically and as needed. A joke that sprawls across its border as contagion. Bad girl monster with the possibility of every girlish face.

The two novels we are looking at today are of this wrenching, plate-quivering sort. Their heroines alike in ferocity, but the action taking place in very different settings. There will be spoilers, but energy of fiction trumps plot, I believe. Read on.

The Panopticon

Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon is place and metaphor in one. A Panopticon, you may know, is a prison organised so that all rooms can be seen at once from the centre – a place where the prisoner cannot escape the eye of the jailer. The capacity for unsettling nakedness, then, is vast. It is the sort of structure that dehumanises, strips back that very basic right of selfhood – privacy. It is, I believe (perhaps naively) rare even in authoritarian regimes that ‘criminals’ are not allowed even an angle in their cells where they can briefly shade their bodies from an all-seeing gaze, for the reason that most powers understand they do not require that much control over the inner lives of their captives to gain what they want from them. It being wearying for the watcher as much as anything else. And there are more efficient ways of seeing almost all of what we do (right, NSA and GCHQ?) So who would feel the need to set up a torture structure like this?

Well, in this instance, the Panopticon is a state run care home set up to monitor children one step away from true incarceration. When fifteen year old Anais Hendricks is suspected of putting a police officer in a coma, she is sent to this facility, a gothic Victorian structure originally used as an asylum – out in the Scottish lowland countryside. Fagan establishes from the very first instance, even before we see the building, that Hendricks always feels the watching eye on her:

“I’m an experiment. I always have been. It’s a given, a liberty, a fact. They watch me. Not just in school or social-work reviews, court or police cells – they watch me everywhere. They watch me hang by my knees from the longest boughs of the oak tree; I can do that for hours, just letting the wishes drift by. They watch me as I outstare the moon. I am not intimidated by its terrible baldness. […] They watch me not cry. They watch me lie like an angel, hiding my dirty feet. They watch me, I know it, and I can’t find anywhere, anymore – where they can’t see.”

Without context, this reads like paranoia in a bad girl (troubled, you might say, in benevolent judgement). Grandiose and fractious. But, of course, it turns out that it is both paranoia and the truth. Anais, born in an asylum to a mad mother, given a number first before a name, before being named with some real oomph by a literature-loving prostitute foster-mother, is in some ways being watched. Just as she is, in other ways, crumbling mentally under the unbearable pressure of her life. The abuses and indifference and constant shifting through families and care, and the arhythmic scrutiny of various gears of authority have removed from her any sense of stability – they say she has borderline personality disorder, because she struggles to know who she is or why she does what she does. But this smart bad girl knows that this is so and why it is, even if she is trapped in modes of behaviour. She has to be brutal to defend herself, even if violence only plunges her still further towards a destiny of incarceration in adulthood. That which is expected of her. Given her files. Her details on record. Reports of burnt-out social workers who see only surface, too tired to look past her steel, unbreakable shield.

Thinking of metaphors: in The Panopticon we can see Hendrick’s insides. Her impossible reality and all its warping filters, her sorrow. And the fragments of her past – drug-washed pre-teen years. Predatory adults she struggles to recognise as such (shielding herself from the facts). We witness the terrible gang rape she experiences – lured to a high flat by an ex-boyfriend who needs her body to repay his debts – we are unable to look away. A book, then, that is also a Panopticon. Protagonist as prisoner. Watcher taking the liberty, but trapped in the watching, too. At the moment of promise, the moment when Anais, fierce, fighting to the last, attempts escape (and we believe I think she will escape) – this is the end of the novel. She has escaped the reader, the stand-in, in some ways, for a terrifying faceless societal judgement. The girl goes beyond the page, the girl escaping into the blank.

I think of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, woman-made-girl by the removal of all responsibilities from her. The old mansion house, the condescending authority figures, the undeniable, understandable madness. I think of the grotesque obsessed-over wallpaper suddenly growing a woman on it who creeps her way to freedom across the fields, just as Anais does at night, creeping out to her freedom – destructive as it is – but with the reader always in tow. Until Anais does not break, and gets away.

How The Light Gets In.

This novel begins with its protagonist getting away from her life and life coming with her, or the burdens of existence anyway – Lou Conner, resident of suburban wasteland Sydney, has been given the chance to move on exchange to suburban Chicago, and she is taking it with her teeth. But from the opening, just as with Anais, there is a sense of the impossibility and grimness of life. The sense that behaviours are being monitored to some great, sinister end. On a plane heading to her destination, Lou watches a programme about the death by execution of a prisoner in Texas. The woman sitting next to her seems to wholeheartedly agree with capital punishment, dismissively eating her aeroplane dinner, while Lou, to stop herself screaming, silently counts the peas on her tray and gives them names.

““What do you do with bad eggs in your country?” she asks.
“We put them in the bin.”
Paula, Patrick, Patricia, Penelope, Paul, Pilar.
“Huh?”
“The trash,” I say. “The garbage. We put them in the garbage for the cats and birds to eat.”
She says “Oh,” and then is quiet. I know she would gladly watch an execution, stare through the glass as the needle is plunged into somebody’s arm.
“Have you come to America to study”, she asks.
“Yes,” I say, “I’m an exchange student.”
I look away.
“That sounds fun,” she says.
I turn back to her, just in case she is a plant from the Organisation, sent to check on my civility. This is just the kind of thing the Organisation would do.
“What city are you from?” she asks. She has green sleep in the corners of her eyes.
“Sydney,” I say. “I can see the harbour and the opera house from my bedroom window.”
“How wonderful.”
“Yeah, it is.””

We know she is lying before she tells us – or dimly do. Something cannot be right. The girl on the cover, whose lower face we see, gloss red lips holding a tilty burning down fag, does not live in one of those huge gorgeous houses on the harbour. Throughout the novel, Lou lies compulsively. Invention is creation, but for such petty points as these – they will wreck her. The family she goes to all American Beauty charm and equal, but differing gloss will suck her will to live just like that cigarette. But it’s her too. Being gifted is shown not to be a gift. And all else that she is: exchange student, visitor, working class teenage girl – do not provoke that much curiosity. A girl who has to know herself because others only project upon her. A girl who has to lie to be. Two things that can’t be resolved.

So it is that the ending of How The Light Gets In is bleaker than The Panopticon but I think they make a perfect pairing. Anais’ bluntness (her lies only temporary, not glassy, like Lou’s). Their dual intelligence, madness. One without knowledge of home, the other with home and origins a stifling she wants to –must, doesn’t know how to – escape. Here are the bad girls, holding hands down the corridor. We know they are frightening, but we know how they got there too.

Questions:

1. How bad are you? Have you ever been in prison? Or has no one ever caught you yet? Write an essay on the manners of your maliciousness. Self-aggrandisement encouraged. Blow the roof off the barrier between paper, ink and self.

2. What makes these girls bad? Is locating blame and sources of pain important in bad girl lit? Is badness in the bone, or on the skin? What is skin to a bad girl? What is bone – hollow like a bird? Give examples from fiction written by women and girls 1830s-2013.

3. What is home and how does it make us (this question open like a waterfall, be wary and choose your paddle and your boat well).

4. How is the internet shaping the signifiers of ‘bad girls’? The brand new idée fixes? Multimedia entries accepted for this question. Or put together a Tumblr blog. Remember to be intersectional or it hardly counts, now, does it?