We are delighted to publish more of our Humanities students’ original research. Adriana Maria Murphy is half-Peruvian and half-British, is currently working as a teaching assistant in a secondary school, and is going to train as a secondary school English Teacher. Adriana studied the BA in English Literature in the School of Humanities at Westminster
John Green’s novel Paper Towns, published in 2010, was according to its author ‘devoted in its entirety to the destruction of the myth of the manic pixie dream girl’. It has, however, been accused as perpetuating the trope it sought to destroy (Green, 2013). Green’s failing is therefore revealing of the way in which seemingly outdated tropes of femininity are so engrained in our modern culture that they are reproduced even by those who wish to subvert them.
The “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” was a trope coined by critic Nathan Rabin in his 2007 review of the film Elizabethtown to describe a female character who ‘exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures’. The trope reproduces and reasserts the patriarchal notion that men are entitled to woman’s inspiration and that women function as side characters in men’s destinies (Rabin, 2007).
Watson (2014, p. 66) describes the way in which ‘the manic pixie dream girl does not exist outside of the troubled male’s fantasy, and she exists only as long as he desires’. To this extent, the fantasy of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a product of the male gaze, which objectifies female characters and constructs them as projections of male fantasy. According to Laura Mulvey, the gendered nature of this gaze reflects the voyeuristic nature of cinema, which is structured by visual pleasure; the audience experiences ‘fetishistic scopophilia’ (the pleasure of looking) when they gaze at the female figure through their identification with the male protagonist.
Although novels, unlike cinema, are not so explicitly involved in the voyeuristic pleasure of looking, the pervasiveness of visual metaphors within literary criticism reveals the way novels are implicitly structured through a fictive reproduction of the gaze. Narratological approach to literature conceive the agent, whose perception orients the presentation, as a focalizer who ‘sees’ and its counterpart as the focalized object perceived (see Newman, 1990; Rimmon-Kenan 2002).
In the novel Paper Towns the narrational look is focalised through Quentin and directed at Margo, the focalized object. Quentin’s attempts to unravel the mystery of Margo’s disappearance are centred around ‘all the way’s [he’d] seen and mis-seen Margo’ (p.97). Quentin reflects on the difference between Margo ‘as [he’d] seen her’ and the things he learns she had done. He realises that everyone was ‘looking at her reflection in different fun house mirrors’ and that there was ‘a Margo for each of us – and each more mirror than window’ (pp. 114, 103, 112). These attempts to “see” Margo only emphasise her “difference” from him and so prolong the pleasure he derives from looking: the ‘warmth’ he feels from being ‘in a place that saw her after [he] did’ (p.95).
When Quentin is unable to satisfy his desire through directly seeing, he instead imagines Margo as if he were watching her on a screen: Quentin ‘picture[s]’ Margo, ‘imagine[s]’ that she ‘unravels the carpet halfway each night so her hip isn’t against the bare concrete…she crawls beneath the blanket, uses the rest of the carpet as a pillow and sleeps (p.95). In such moments, Quentin is a voyeur, with no threat that the object of his gaze will looked back. Quentin’s voyeuristic role thus arrogates for itself the power to narrate, to appropriate, Margo’s story; he places himself as narrator in the conventional position of the masculine spectator, as voyeur, and makes Margo the feminine spectacle.
Green does manage to subvert the male gaze for a brief moment when Margo looks back at Quentin and ‘remarks his pleasure in look’, accusing him of finding her so that she would ‘beg [him] to ravish [her] body’ (p.154). However, this subversion does not last long as Margo apologises, telling him she misses him, admitting she had slept two days in the abandoned mini-mall because she ‘thought maybe [he] would find it really quickly somehow’(p.158), and asking him to ‘come to New York’ with her (p.162). This quickly reinstates Quentin’s dominance over her in the narrative and demolishes the important recognition that entire plot of the novel is impelled by Quentin’s delusional fantasies. Similarly, in the last moment of the novel Quentin and Margo kiss both with their ‘eyes open’ (p.163) and yet Quentin insists to the reader, ‘yes, I can see her almost perfectly in this cracked darkness’ (p.163).
Once Quentin is confronted with the fact that Margo will not return with him, he rejects her, having used this discovery in the realisation of his own selfhood and purpose. Margo exists mostly in terms of what she represents to him. Her agency and humanity only exist as a lesson for Quentin in recognising other people’s agency and humanity. What Green fails to realise is that a male character’s understanding that a female has these things is not the same as her actually possessing them within the narrative (Rhee, 2016). In engaging in an impersonation of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Green’s novel does not escape patriarchal specular relations and actually unwittingly reinforces them.
Bibliography
Green, J. 2013. Hey John, I was just wondering what your explanation. Tumblr. Archived at Wayback Machine. Available from https://web.archive.org/web/20130812051836/https://fishingboatproceeds.tumblr.com/post/57820644828/hey-john-i-was-just-wondering-what-your-explanation [Accessed 26/01/22].
Green, J. 2010. Paper Towns. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Mulvey, L. (1975) ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16(4), pp. 6-18.
Newman, B. (1990) ‘”The Situation of the Looker-On”: Gender, Narration, and Gaze in Wuthering Heights’, PMLA, 105 (5, October), pp. 1029-1041.
Rabin, N. (2007). The Bataan Death March of Whimsy Case File #1:Elizabethtown. AV Club, 25 January. Available from https://www.avclub.com/the-bataan-death-march-of-whimsy-case-file-1-elizabet-1798210595 [Accessed 13/12/2022].
Rimmon- Kenan, S. (2002). Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, 2nd ed. Taylor & Francis e-Library: Routledge. Available from https://www.vlebooks.com/Product/Index/60410?page=0 [Accessed 26/01/2023].
Watson, J. (2014). Mary Wollstonecraft as Anti-Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Sexuality, Melancholia, and the Death Sequence in Godwin’s Memoirs. Explorations The Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities for the State of North Carolina, IX, 59-68. Available from https://uncw.edu/csurf/explorations/archivesexplorationscsurfuncw.html [Accessed 26/01/2023].
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