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COPYRIGHT AND USE OF THIS THESIS This thesis must be used in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. Reproduction of material protected by copyright may be an infringement of copyright and copyright owners may be entitled to take legal action against persons who infringe their copyright. Section 51 (2) of the Copyright Act permits an authorized officer of a university library or archives to provide a copy (by communication or otherwise) of an unpublished thesis kept in the library or archives, to a person who satisfies the authorized officer that he or she requires the reproduction for the purposes of research or study. The Copyright Act grants the creator of a work a number of moral rights, specifically the right of attribution, the right against false attribution and the right of integrity. You may infringe the author’s moral rights if you: - fail to acknowledge the author of this thesis if you quote sections from the work - attribute this thesis to another author - subject this thesis to derogatory treatment which may prejudice the author’s reputation For further information contact the University’s Director of Copyright Services sydney.edu.au/copyright THE BEST ELLIS FOR BUSINESS: A RE-EXAMINATION OF THE MASS MEDIA FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF AMERICAN PSYCHO Justine Ettler A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of: Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences University of Sydney 2012 1 DECLARATION I declare that the research presented here is my own original work and has not been submitted to any other institution for the award of a degree. Signature __________ Date __________ 2 One in five women reported being a victim of rape. Maureen Downey, “Every Woman’s Nightmare” Every 22 days a husband or boyfriend kills his mate; every 15 seconds a man beats up the woman he lives with. Anne Bernays, “Violent Novel Fell Victim to Breach of Contract: the Violence Men Do” 3 ABSTRACT The Best Ellis For Business analyses the mass media feminist critique of Bret Easton Ellis’s third novel, American Psycho (1991), and employs this to challenge the dominant modes of reading Ellis’s work. The thesis identifies the major shifts in literary criticism about American Psycho, both journalistic and scholarly, and discusses them in relation to the novel’s problematic sexualisation of misogynistic violence. In particular, the neutralisation of the mass media feminist critique in scholarly literary criticism is questioned, then contextualised in terms of the backlash, and finally linked to postmodern defences of the novel that ignore the important role played by the reader. The thesis employs a mixture of narratological and theoretical approaches to perform close readings of the sexually violent scenes. The thesis challenges dominant defences of American Psycho such as the ubiquitous defence of the novel as a satire, as well as the equally prevalent defence of the novel as a postmodern classic. The formalist qualities of the novel, which this thesis claims make it a postmodern parody, prevent the novel from ever being read as a straightforward satire. Further, analyses that focus on the novel’s form at the expense of its content tend to fail to account for the reader’s response to the sexualised violence. This thesis raises the oft-ignored but important issue of reader competence, particularly in relation to the marketing practices of Ellis’s corporate publishers. It will also be argued here that the novel’s excessive ambiguity leaves the reader no choice other than to resort to their biographical knowledge of the author in order to make sense of it. Thus, the thesis rereads the novel in relation to Ellis’s biography, as well as in relation to Ellis’s recent revelations about his sexuality and his interview practice. 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the following people for their support and guidance: Catherine Lumby, Ken Wark, Steve Shaviro, and Will Christie. I would particularly like to thank Rebecca Johinke for her astute comments and tireless work. I am also grateful to the PRSS for financial assistance. Without the help of my family and friends, this thesis would not have been possible. Special thanks too to Neil Mansfield. 5 CONTENTS Introduction 7 The Squeakiest Wheel Chapter 1 63 “‘Sex Sells, Dude’”: The Feminist Critique 1990-1998 Chapter 2 122 The Baby and the Bathwater: The Feminist Critique 1999-2012 Chapter 3 174 Protesting Too Much: Satire and Parody Chapter 4 224 The Wood and the Trees: The Realist Critique and the Postmodernism and Affective Defences Chapter 5 275 The Proof and the Pudding: Ambiguity and the Homosexual Subplot Bibliography 331 6 INTRODUCTION THE SQUEAKIEST WHEEL ... the controversies surrounding ‘American Psycho’ received—however ephemerally—more and wider public attention than any novel in recent memory.1 Perhaps more than any other American work of the last twenty years, ‘American Psycho’ can legitimately be labelled a scandalous novel.2 The chief thing to understand about Bret Easton Ellis’s ‘American Psycho’... is that it counts as an incident in the annals of contemporary American publicity, not American literature.3 American Psycho is without doubt a scandalous novel: whether it is also misogynistic, however, is a matter for ongoing debate. Inviting comparison (in terms of the degree of vitriol expressed) with the scandal that accompanied the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, not only did the novel include a degree of sexually graphic detail foreign to literary fiction but also more common to snuff pornography, but it presented scenes of sexualised misogynistic violence without a clearly discernible moral framework, and amidst a 1 Rosa Eberly, “Novel Controversies : Public Discussions of Censorship and Social Change,” (Ph.D. diss., The Pennsylvania State University, 1994), 151. Eberly’s dissertation was later published as a book, Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres, (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2000). 2 Julian Murphet, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho: A Reader’s Guide, (New York and London: Continuum, 2002), 65. 3 Roger Kimball, “Much Less Than Zero,” Wall Street Journal, Mar 6, 1991, A7. 7 confusing plethora of aesthetic conventions.4 American Psycho is a flawed novel (this thesis suggests it is technically inferior to both Less Than Zero [1985] and Lunar Park [2005]), and yet its sensationalistic content made literary headlines and has ensured its author and his oeuvre lasting notoriety, commercial success and ever increasing scholarly attention. Paradoxically, of all the critiques levelled at American Psycho, the critique that did most to ensure the novel’s notoriety was the mass media feminist critique, the very critique that protested the novel’s extremity and misogyny. Published in 1991, many interpreted American Psycho as an example of Faludi’s anti-feminist backlash.5 The combination of Ellis repeatedly refusing to remove four misogynistic scenes prior to publication—Ellis mentions “three or four violent sequences that they not only wanted trimmed but they wanted excised from the manuscript”—with his publisher deciding to market American Psycho “aggressively,” amounted to something of a red flag (Ellis’s novel) to a bull (feminists).6 Curiously, in spite of the prevalence of the feminist critique in the mass media, there is little evidence of this critique in scholarly analyses of American Psycho. Indeed, most scholars erased the misogynistic violence by means of the postmodern defence. In a second paradox, the feminist critique that made American Psycho famous has been effectively neutralised by scholars. This thesis aims to reverse the process whereby political debate has been erased from both the novel and literary criticism about it by revisiting the mass media feminist critique and thereby to challenge current scholarship about the novel. While American Psycho also contains a scene depicting racist torture and assault, this thesis will focus on the four sexualised misogynistic scenes that featured in the scandal. 4 Maureen O’Brien, “American Gothic,” EW.com, March 8, 1991, http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,313573,00.html, (accessed April 7, 2010). 5 Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, (New York: Crown, 1991), xvi. 6 Robert Love, “Psycho Analysis,” Rolling Stone, April 4, 1991, 51; R.Z. Sheppard, “A Revolting Development: A Forthcoming Novel by Bret Easton Ellis Has Repelled Many of the Publisher’s Employees and Promises to Nauseate Readers as Well,” Time, Oct 29, 1990, 100. 8 Literary critical scholarship has tended to ignore the feminist political aspects of the novel and to limit its analyses to aesthetic and/or theoretical subjects and concerns. Scholars argue feminists, publishers, journalists and commentators misinterpreted American Psycho by failing to appreciate its aesthetic postmodernity. Two seminal studies of American Psycho, Elizabeth Young’s essay, “The Beast in the Jungle, the Figure in the Carpet,” (hereafter, “Beast”) and Julian Murphet’s book, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho: A Reader’s Guide, (hereafter, Reader’s Guide) make precisely this case for the novel. More recently, Baelo-Allué’s book-length study of Ellis’s work claims the novel is an aesthetically misunderstood combination of minimalism and Blank Generation Fiction (this latter term coined by Young and Caveney); of high and low culture.7 Aesthetic defences come in a variety of guises. Thus, Riquelme, Eldridge, Phillips, Heyler, and Price read the novel in terms of various literary tropes and genres such as the Gothic, the unreliable narrator and parody.8 Kauffman and Frances Ferguson read the novel in relation to pornography, while Murphet, Young, Storey, Sahli and Williams read the novel according to aesthetic criteria.9 Stubblefield reads American Psycho in terms of the history of 7 Sonia Baelo-Allué, Bret Easton Ellis’s Controversial Fiction: Writing Between High and Low Culture, (London and New York: Continuum, 2011), 1.