No getting away from it: Claire Fisher (Lauren Ambrose) is one confused young woman. She takes drugs, is drawn to psychotically dangerous young men, pinches a severed cadaver foot to place in a classmate's locker for lovelorn reasons, may or may not be an arsonist, drives around in that lime-green hearse (what's that all about?), and has had an abortion. Critics share the opinion that she is acting out—a teenage rebellion put down to the sudden death of the father she had yet to know (Leonard 93; O'Hehir 6). Is it any wonder that the troubled adolescent from the Home Box Office (HBO) series Six Feet Under needs therapy? But are her "mistakes" Oedipal gaffes, or indicative of wider problems facing young women in a postfeminist, postpatriarchal world?

Sketched in this paper is how Six Feet Under comes to know Claire—represents her sexuality, labels her behavior—through therapy, as well as her attempts to resist subjection. It is no small coincidence that Claire is obliged to explain herself in a professional counselor's office at the moment she loses her virginity. Such an event may at first be accompanied by a fantasy song-and-dance routine, where our recently deflowered maiden muses on "What a Little Moonlight Can Do" (a great deal apparently), but she now becomes ensnared in "clandestine, circumscribed, and coded types of discourse" (Foucault 4). Despite the series' general candidness about bodies, female sexuality remains shrouded in taboo and silence. Underlying my argument here is the notion that the series produces a contradictory female subject—between introducing insurgent identities while revealing how modern American Puritanism imposes its rules on the feminine—which it embeds right into its dramatic structure. Other confessional television formats such as daytime talk-shows are appropriated along with the American rewriting of Freud's "talking cure" (taking such forms as self-help, self-actualization, 12-step revisions, and counseling) that privileges individual self-knowledge over patriarchal authority (Starker). Just as the series confronts us "with the departure of the father who seems to bear the phallus" (Tobin 87), Six Feet Under draws on the individual-oriented therapies made popular during the anti-authoritarian post–World War II period (Shattuc 114)—therapies that transferred agency from expert to patient (Miller). Such discourses proliferated as postwar American society busied itself with challenging the patriarchal order—through Vietnam War protests; emancipatory movements such as second-wave feminism, and gay and civil rights; and a counterculture defined by popular music, New Age philosophies, and experimentation in the arts. As a product of this history, Six Feet Under is saturated with these anti-authoritarian social rules and cultural values, but, like American culture itself, the show does not embrace them fully. Simply put, Claire remains enclosed in power relationships—the family, the therapist couch, the Six Feet Under narrative structure—that compel her to endlessly talk about her sexuality, justify her behavior, and communicate her most intimate feelings.

Seasons 1 and 2 find Claire seeing the school guidance counselor, Gary Deitman (David Norona). She is initially sent to him to explain why she put a corpse's foot in a classmate's locker ("The Foot," episode 3). Her justification of "protesting Footlocker's inability to sell a decent-priced sneaker" appeases no one. But Claire's presence in this clinical space reveals how female behavior bears the taint of abnormality and is labeled dysfunctional precisely because the clinical (male) space of the counselor's office defines it as such. Julia Sherman detailed back in 1975 the ways in which psychoanalysis proved detrimental to female patients: from promoting "dependency and mystification [and] locating the problem and the blame within women" to "providing a negative view of women [and] handy rationales for the oppression of women" (Sturdivant 52). Is it any wonder that the series' other female patient, "Charlotte," a fictionalized version of Brenda as a child (Rachel Griffiths), resorts to barking at her therapist; or that Claire is often reduced to a sulky silence?

Michel Foucault describes "the confession [as] a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement" (61). Modern times find confessional techniques appropriated by disciplines like psychoanalysis in which truths related to Oedipal desire and libidinal drives are central to eliciting essential truths about the self. Yet, as Foucault further postulates, such presentations of self unfold "within a power relationship," in which "the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile" (61–62). If Foucault is to be believed, then Claire's guidance counselor Gary is there to infer meaning, to solve dilemmas and heal familial rifts. Immediately Gary asserts his dominance, making known that interpretative power resides not with the one who speaks but "the one who listens and says nothing" (Foucault 62), by inviting her mother (Frances Conroy) along to join them ("An Open Book," episode 5). Claire has no say in the matter—"I told her it wasn't my idea." Gary deciphers for Ruth the reason for Claire's unhappiness—that she missed out (but more on that later). Claire stops him: "No, you said that. I told you I don't think there was a time when this family was ever happy." Ruth and Claire start bickering while Gary sits back to listen (a virtual position shared by the viewers). Letting the women exhaustively rehearse their complaints reveals certain truths about this mother-daughter alliance. But Ruth and Claire emerge as exhibiting "signs of distress and mild clinical depression" (Ball and Poul 144) precisely because what they say is read as troubling and difficult by the secular interlocutor who desires to bring about an emotional adjustment and modify female behavior.

Just as the televisual dramatic form provides a space for inciting a discourse of female subjectivity—presenting it for an audience, staging dilemmas, allowing the viewer to observe and read a performance—the clinical space also functions as an incitement to discourse. Under his watchful gaze, and removed from close kin, Claire's revelations become defined as an emotional display, a disclosure of family dysfunction and a female self laid bare. Made to talk about her feelings of growing up reveals a discourse of female invisibility and marginality. An unexpected addition to the Fisher clan, born some 14 years after David (Michael C. Hall), Claire feels she missed out (or so Gary interprets). No one noticed her growing up—her elder brother Nate had left home, her other sibling was closed-down and closeted, her father too busy with dead bodies in the basement, and her mother preoccupied with keeping house. Putting her stories of childhood into the language of psychoanalysis imposes knowledge on her about what she has to say and uses it to construct a standard narrative in which the female child learns about nonexistence.

Prompted by her sessions with Gary, Claire works through these invisibility issues in her dreams. Relaxing with a cigarette in front of the television, watching old home movies, she confronts her dead father about her undocumented childhood: "How come there are no home movies of me as a kid?" ("Knock, Knock," episode 13). The super-8 camera images of the happy and wholesome-looking Fisher boys enjoying Easter complete with chocolate eggs and chicks under the watchful eye of an adoring Nathaniel (Richard Jenkins) are undercut by the cynicism and shared laughter between father and daughter. He may confirm her suspicions ("after you came along I guess we felt . . . been there, done that"), and she may be aggrieved ("yeah I know, and it made me feel totally secondary, thank you"), but her indignation seems somehow faux—as illusionary as the blissful memories caught on celluloid (and let us not forget that Claire never believed this family was ever happy). The dream sequence may actually be about her future (her father says, "maybe some of that attention you never got will motivate you to get off your ass and do something interesting with you life," but he is merely a device through which to reveal her own thoughts); however, it is her use of the Oedipal language of invisibility and exclusion already identified by Gary that troubles the text. Later, she fantasizes that her father is videotaping her skipping down the stairs. While her absent female body is now replaced by an infantilized one complete with pigtails ("I thought this is what you wanted," she imagines her father saying), the incongruous (if not amusing) sight of Claire dressed as a little girl reminds the viewer that Claire is struggling with an Oedipal language that defines female behavior as neurotic, a symptom of invisibility.

Claire bitterly objects to the attention paid to what she does with the rest of her life when she had long been invisible. But does not such a complaint coincide with the moment when Claire starts having sex? Of course the reason she is seeing Gary in the first place is because of her sexual relationship with a fellow student, Gabriel Dumas (Eric Balfour). Foucault draws our attention to how scientific knowledge in the nineteenth century delivered up the female body to a process of "hysterization" (104). Medical and psychiatric institutions analyzed the female body as "saturated with sexuality" (Foucault 104) and inherently pathological. Claire is endlessly required to rehearse her reasons for being attracted to Gabe ("A Private Life," episode12; "The Plan," episode 16). Summoned back to see Gary under the threat of suspension, Claire struggles to articulate her fury at him for permitting the police to crash their last session (to find out what she knows about Gabe's whereabouts) ("Driving Mr. Mossback," episode 17). But the more she tries to comprehend the complex emotional terrain of her internal life, the more Gary steps in to narrate her feelings for Gabe and pathologize what she has to say when she falters. Rationalizing meaning—drawing out the confession, alerting her to hidden (sexual) desire—prevents Claire from speaking in certain ways. No wonder she is reduced to petulantly knocking over the coffee mug.

In the aptly titled episode, "The Invisible Woman" (episode 18), Gary alerts her to the "sexual tension between them." It is a strangely inappropriate moment, coming after Claire's violent outburst toward Parker McKenna (Marina Black) for cheating on the SATs. Despite Gary telling her she is displacing, he goes on to say, "And now is probably as good a time as any to talk about the sexual tension between us." Claire lets out an incredulous "What?" He continues: "It exists. It is a normal part of transference and counter-transference. We should both acknowledge it is out there and will never be acted upon." Claire is stunned—and silenced. Seen from her position (and let us not forget how the mise-en-scène of the office, with its closed Venetian blinds and counselor peering out from behind his desk, hems her in and often leaves her prowling around the room like a trapped animal), the intrusive process of probing for any traces of sexuality and desire, of wrenching out the most stubborn confessions, and of opening the female subject to unremitting scrutiny is made uncomfortably visible here.

Although Gary aims to build up her self-esteem, confidence, and identity (he is after all responsible for getting her into the Sierra Crossroads program and passing on details about the LAC-Arts school), the therapeutic process nevertheless circumscribes Claire's self-articulation since only certain things can be uttered—despite him telling Claire she can say anything. Visibly disappointed and annoyed about what she sees around her, and the ways she is interpreted within the male confessional space, Claire often fails to give adequate voice to her frustrations. One need only think of how Gary responds to her rant about making her life matter rather than getting into college, with the suggestion that she attend the outward bound program designed to build character and get her out of her head, for another example of a tactical strategy designed to police the dysfunctional adolescent female ("Brotherhood," episode 7). She is often lost for words, silenced by thwarted rage, or provoked to say things she does not quite mean. Here, rigor mortis is not the preserve of the cadaver only. It also speaks of the stultifying discourses available to the female subject when she attempts to speak differently. Claire's frustration seems to me less about her rejection of normative female social roles—daughter, sister—than about the limits of discourse to adequately express and describe her experiences, her desires, her identity. But try she must. Just as each episode is structured by liminality—between someone dying in the opening and funeral service at the end—where a space opens up for suspending rules and challenging taboo, Claire represents within the narrative logic of Six Feet Under another kind of liminal space—a gendered liminality in which the possibilities for representing female identity differently are, for better or worse, negotiated.

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.