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.
