Feminine Charms and Horrors in J.G. Ballard’s “The Smile” and Iain Sinclair’s Downriver

Abstract

Feminine Charms and Horrors in J.G. Ballard’s “The Smile” and Iain Sinclair’s Downriver Ann Tso (bio) The sight of [her smile] has unsettled my entire life, but I find it impossible to move my eyes from it. As her face has sagged, her smile has become wider and even more askew. [. . .] As I look at it now across the study it seems to contain a complete understanding of my character, a judgment unknown to me from which I can never escape. —J.G. Ballard’s “The Smile” (1976) It is difficult to ascertain from the epigraph to Ballard’s short story what or who is more unsettling: the Edwardian doll Serena, the one who smiles, or Serena’s owner, the one enamored enough with the smile to tell its story. The owner in question tries to appeal to our sympathy as a first-person narrator; he demonizes Serena by projecting onto her his worst personal qualities—most notably his arrogance and timidity—so that he can pretend she has come alive. Oddly enough, the emasculated narrator finds himself more romantically drawn to Serena as he grows more terrified of her. In making feminine charm the centerpiece of his short story, J.G. Ballard follows in the footsteps of numerous canonical English writers. For instance, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela rejects her kidnapper’s sexual advances so persistently that, in the end, even this villainous man finds himself touched by her virtuousness and feels the need to repent. Charlotte [End Page 154] Brontë’s Jane Eyre is a governess, a working woman with considerably more social power than the ‘mad’ wife from Jamaica locked up in the attic—though the decision to empower the one and disempower the other rests with Mr. Rochester, the patriarch and sole arbiter of power in the house. In these canonical texts, Englishmen often find themselves in a position to decide which kind of femininity is charming and which grotesque, which virtuous and which obscene. But this male egotism was weakened in the wake of World War I, when Western civilization was—in the words of the modernist writer D.H. Lawrence—in “a flux of death” (Markert 551). Although Britain and its European Allies emerged from the Great War victorious, they struggled to maintain their imperial influence abroad. The British Empire, in particular, began to fear the prospect of dissolution partly because of the lukewarm wartime support it had received from its dominions, colonies, and protectorates (specifically from India, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand), some of them already entitled to a high level of self-governance. The empire’s enfeebled control over its foreign subjects undermined the imperial mandate, and, in effect, its proponents on the British Isles were disempowered. Some English writers took to describing this disempowerment as an experience of emasculation or as a post-colonial future, which, if imagined in gendered terms, would entail a radical role reversal: the post-colonial New Man (formerly the egotist) was to play a humbler role in relation to the New Woman, who was to be neither confined to the domestic realm nor expected to show (sexual) modesty in public. Lawrence’s Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, for instance, both exemplify feminine horrors that deviate from what remains of a phallocentric sociality. In the second half of the twentieth century, gender fluidity was conceived in this manner as a deconstructive process, one dedicated to breaking down rigid conceptions of masculinity and femininity. Writing between the 1950s and the 1990s, Lawrence Durrell continued to explore the existential crisis into which post-colonial English men and women were plunged. Durrell’s The Black Book presents tepid female archetypes—all specimens of feminine horror—who lead men into scripted love affairs, both sides prompted into sex not by passion but rather by an epochal dis-passion, i.e., the onset of a traumatic psychosis. Then in the 1980s, some female writers chose to “tak[e] female monstrosity away from the hands of patriarchy” (Martin 195) and articulate for themselves an untamable, monstrous, [End Page 155] but seductive femininity, whose “excess and … power … are seen as the solution to counteract the patriarchal model...