Janet McCabe, "Claire Fisher on the Couch: Discourses of Female Subjectivity, Desire, and Teenage Angst in Six Feet Under" (page 3 of 3)
So how, if at all possible, does Claire attempt to resist
definitions? It seems to me that the therapeutic space, while not
allowing her subjectivity, does give her the opportunity to exhaustively
critique the models available to her. If daytime talk-show techniques
(like those witnessed on The Oprah Winfrey Show or The Ricki
Lake Show) reveal anything, it is that uttering grievances can be
experienced as a form of female empowerment. Jane Shattuc makes a
persuasive case for suggesting how the talk show demonstrates "the
tension between theories of power and control as described by Freud and
Foucault and an active/activist individual who has the capacity to think
and disagree" (136). Claire speaks in ways similar to those favored in
humanist therapies (those which allow the patient to assign meaning to
their lives and explore how environment determines psychology); in this
way Six Feet Under operates in contradistinction to TV formats
that purport to promote female empowerment but actually endorse
traditional models of feminine behavior. As she names the paradox and
hypocrisy around her, Claire operates at a border, a space of
interaction between the outer social world with its norms, laws and
cultural values and an interior world of private (often difficult to
express) experience. Two examples will serve to make this point. After a
disastrous visit to her mother's cousin, recently divorced Hannah
(Cristine Rose), and her daughter Ginnie (Jordan Ladd), Claire is back
in the counselor's office slumped in the chair ("An Open Book," episode
5). Dealing with divorce finds Ginnie refusing to let her mom mope
around the house and become a passive victim. Instead she encourages
Hannah to overcome heartbreak and take control of her life.
Superficially at least, Hannah and Ginnie celebrate the power of the
female community to heal and help build self-esteem. But Claire's
diatribe against their "plastic way of life"—their clean bodies
and beautiful home (more Stepford Wives than Homes and
Gardens), Spinning classes (more secular evangelicalism than
keep-fit routine), pastel knitwear, how they fancy the same
guy—makes strange. Pointing to the falseness of their existence,
whereby reasons for the marital breakdown are never sought, instead
replaced by a performance of female suffering and the quest for feminine
perfection, allows Claire to reveal how the language of empowerment may
not be as liberating for women as Oprah would suggest.
Consciousness-raising, the strategy underlying daytime talk shows, is
turned into another form of self-regulation and policing of the female
body through Claire's testimony: as she repeatedly claims, "I don't know
what I want but I know I don't want this."
If Claire makes known how models of female selfhood offered in these
techniques never seriously question female victimhood (men take
advantage, women endure), then her excitement at finding out who Brenda
really is reveals the possibility for resisting and changing the
patriarchal script. She is awed at meeting "Charlotte" from Charlotte
Light and Dark—the child protégé with an IQ of 185
who was "like way smarter than the people who [were] analyzing her, and
so [was] constantly fucking with them" ("In Place of Anger," episode
19). "It's like meeting Gandhi. Or Jesus," gushes Claire ("The Room,"
episode 6). Brenda is having none of it. "Don't tell me. The book spoke
to you. Like it was written specifically for you." But Brenda misses the
point. That her story reaches out to "lonely" teenage girls like Claire,
and "Charlotte" is the poster girl for disaffected adolescent females,
says much about how the female becomes labeled dysfunctional for dissent
and "annexed to mental illness" (Foucault). This book is not read by the
likes of Claire as a psychological study of a child with borderline
personality disorder but as an anarcha-feminist manifesto that exposes
techniques by which the female is identified as a problem and offers
strategies for resisting patriarchal labeling. Uncovering the nature of
Brenda's precocious behavior and putting it into discourse (Charlotte
Light and Dark) makes her knowable and subject to constant
surveillance. Only Brenda knows the price paid for her defiance. Yet her
performance of psychological disorders and disruption of her
treatment—her process of building up narratives and tearing them
down—reveals to Claire, who is also able to read against the
patriarchal therapeutic grain, the pleasures involved in refuting
labels, interrupting those with the power to define, and resisting
cliché definitions. She admires Brenda's female narrative authority
and aspires to wield it for herself.
In therapy, Claire lays bare the processes involved in producing
knowledge of the female subject—or more precisely female
sexuality—as hysterical, as troubling, and as a problem. From her
perspective, and given space to talk, Claire turns her therapy into an
analysis of the social constructed-ness of gendered roles and
patriarchal power. Once she finds another possible way of changing the
patriarchal script—the possibilities offered to her through her
artwork—she no longer has need of Gary who is quite literally
surplus to requirement ("I'll Take You," episode 25). She begins
locating new spaces and finding different media through which to develop
her own discourse and assert her own subjectivity. Yet it remains to be
seen if she can negotiate this next phase without being consigned back
to therapy.
Works Cited
Ball, Alan and Alan Poul, eds. Six Feet Under: Better Living
through Death. New York: Melcher Media, 2003.
Foucault, Michel. The Will to Knowledge: The History of
Sexuality. Vol. 1. Translated by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin,
1998.
Leonard, John. "The Big Sleep." New York. June 4, 2001.
Miller, George C. "Psychology As a Means of Protecting Human
Welfare." American Psychologist 24 (1969): 1063–75.
O'Hehir, Andrew. "The Undertaker's Tale." Sight and Sound 12
(May 2002): 6.
Six Feet Under. Created by Alan Ball. HBO. 2002–.
Tobin, Robert. "Six Feet Under and Post-Patriarchal Society."
Film and History 32 (2002): 87–8.
Shattac, Jane. The Talking Cure: TV, Talk Shows, and Women.
London: Routledge, 1997.
Starker, Steven. Oracle at the Supermarket: The American
Preoccupation with Self-Help Books. New Brunswick: Transaction,
1989.
Sturdivant, Susan. Therapy with Women: A Feminist Philosophy of
Treatment. New York: Springer, 1980.
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