Chaandreyi
Mukherjee
Dr
Chaandreyi Mukherjee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English,
Vivekananda College, New Delhi. She pursued
her Ph.D. on "Womanhood in Haruki Murakami's Fiction" from Jamia Millia
Islamia. She completed her M.Phil from the English and Foreign Languages
University. Her research interests include women's literature, Japanese
literature, feminism, postmodernism, Latin American Literature.
Abstract:
Sophie
Mackintosh’s The Water Cure is a
story of three sisters living on an isolated island. Conflict and its
interrogation provides the premise of the novel which in turn is structured in
a post apocalyptic manner with a clear binary between the world of the island
(pure, sacred, different) and the outside world (disease ridden, contagious,
harmful). Women as narrators, perpetrators, victims and observers claim the
island as their home and transform the novel into a particularly female space.
Shattering the myth of wholesome sisterhood and powerful female space is the
mention of their father, interestingly called the King. What becomes clear is
that the creation of the female space is actually the brainchild of the King. Desire-
its articulation and repression becomes an important subtext in the novel. This
paper would analyze the subtle messages about social conditioning in the novel
and the conflicts of gender. This paper would also look into the so called story
of Womanhood - its construction, dismantling and assimilation. What would ascertain
a dialogue of peace in such a scenario? The resolution of conflict in this case
is simultaneously associated with its problematization.
Keywords: Feminist
dystopia, sisterhood, patriarchy, toxic masculinity, womanhood
The
story of a land where women live at peace with themselves and with the natural
world is a recurrent theme of feminist utopias. This is a land where there is
no hierarchy, among humans or between humans and animals, where people care for
one another and for nature, where the earth and the forest retain their
mystery, power and wholeness, where the power of technology and of military and
economic force does not rule the earth. (Plumwood 7)
Plumwood
in her introduction to Feminism and the
Mastery of Nature talks about the construction of a binary when referring
to the so called female and male spaces- “Gaia and Mars” she calls them. The
male space is essentially dominated by technological advancement, unbridled
materialism and overwhelming prosperity- reckless in their achievement. This
creation of a binary provides the foundation of the conflict in Sophie
Mackintosh’s novel. The Water Cure initiates as a story of
three sisters living on an isolated island. Conflict and its interrogation
provides the premise of the novel which in turn is structured in a post
apocalyptic manner with a clear binary between the world of the island (pure,
sacred, different) and the outside world (disease ridden, contagious, harmful).
While discussing female dystopian fiction, Alexandra Alter states:
Most
of these new dystopian stories take place in the future, but channel the anger
and anxieties of the present, when women and men alike are grappling with
shifting gender roles and the messy, continuing aftermath of the MeToo
movement. They are landing at a charged and polarizing moment, when a record
number of women are getting involved in politics and running for office, and
more women are speaking out against sexual assault and harassment. (“How
Feminist”)
She
adds, “Some of the novels are meant to serve as cautionary tales against
political inaction and complacency, and as a warning that steps toward women’s
equality may one day be curtailed” (“How Feminist”). Referring to Alter’s
comments while reading Mackintosh’s novel becomes essential, especially to
underline the subtle dystopian undertones of her fiction. The tone and flavour
of The Water Cure may seem similar to a feminist revision of a
patriarchal myth, however, the premise it seeks to project is fundamentally
mired in ground realities of the twenty first century. In fact, whatever she
writes, the examples she uses to denote the unforgettable gender disparity, are
clichéd in their familiarity, and that may very well be intentional. The
sustained popularity of feminist dystopias and the explosion of the #MeToo
movement undoubtedly point towards the irrefutable fact – the convoluted power
which patriarchy maintains is absolute, toxic masculinity is popular and even
after decades of struggles, men and women are hardly equal.
In
this regard, Sophie Gilbert writes:
Over
the last couple of years, though, fiction’s dystopias have changed. They’re
largely written by, and concerned with, women. They imagine worlds ravaged by
climate change, worlds in which humanity’s progress unravels. Most significantly,
they consider reproduction, and what happens when societies try to legislate
it. (“The Remarkable Rise”)
Mackintosh’s
novel begins with the declaration of the sudden loss of the father, an all
encompassing male figure, predictably called “The King,” “Once we had a father,
but our father dies without us noticing” (Mackintosh 3). What is interesting is
the juxtaposition of the past with the present or the habitual; “dies” almost
referring to an everyday death, a habit. The voices of the three sisters
converge into one homogenous voice stating, “It is possible we drove him away,
that the energy escaped our bodies despite our attempts to stifle it and became
a smog clinging around the house, the forest, the beach” (Mackintosh 3). Female
desire – its articulation and repression becomes an important subtext in the
novel. It becomes interesting to note how the female energy merges the domestic
space seamlessly with nature, or in this case the outside – the “smog” clings
not just to their home, but stretches on to the forest and beach.
Part
of what made the old world so terrible, so prone to destruction, was a total
lack of preparation for the personal energies often called feelings. Mother told us about these kinds of energies. Especially
dangerous for women, our bodies already so vulnerable in ways that the bodies
of men are not. (Mackintosh 12)
Through
the lessons of their parents, the sisters come to know about the terrifyingly
toxic nature of the world that lies outside the realm of their island. Women –
victims of abuse, trauma and violence, mostly at the hands of men, frequently
turn up at the island. The King is responsible for inventing various “cures” or
“treatments” to heal these broken women. The sisters have been taught that
women are fundamentally associated with weakness of body, mind and spirit, and
the only way to survive is to not let feelings overwhelm you or cloud your
judgment.
Strong
feelings weaken you, open up your body like a wound. It takes vigilance and
regular therapies to hold them at bay. Over the years we have learned how to
dampen them down, how to practise and release emotion under strict conditions
only, how to own our pain. I can cough it into muslin, trap it as bubbles under
the water, let it from my very blood. (Mackintosh 18)
The
repression of feelings is maintained through years of continuous brutal
physical and psychological abuse interestingly called “therapies” at the hands
of their parents. The systematic torture is intended to help strengthen their
bodies and minds against the toxins of the outside world. The girls are made to
play the “drowning game” and brought to the brink of drowning in the swimming
pool. They are stitched into coarse fabrics and made to stand at the overheated
saunas till they collapse. Each year, the family performs a ritual, “the
drawing of the irons” in which they are randomly assigned a family member to love
more than the others, leaving the odd one out to suffer in neglect until the
next year. In one of the most disturbing
pages of the novel, one of the sisters, Lia, lists the wounds on her body, “Two
dark purple fingertips on my left hand, from being submerged in ice…The
starburst at the back of my neck where Mother once sewed my skin into the
fainting sack…Water mark on my flank. Mother poured the hot kettle on me”
(Mackintosh 40). The construction of the so called safe haven for women, the
female utopia is manifested through violence on women by women. The so called
female utopia is ravaged by patriarchy in which the mother becomes an unwitting
agent of toxic masculinity. “Traditionally,
women are ‘the environment’—they provide the environment and conditions against
which male ‘achievement’ takes place, but what they do is not itself accounted
as achievement” (Plumwood 22). The Mother in this case becomes a stronger, more
resilient and inflexible parameter of patriarchy, not only providing the
space/environment to the man/Father to achieve his dream of utopia, but also
believing in his regressive ideas to such an extent as to forget her own
identity. What is unique in the novel is the association of repression of
feelings with environmental toxicity and accumulation of one’s resilience
against it, not with morality. Giving it a scientific edge is trying to fuse it
with rationality and reason; a subtle trick in which patriarchy can cherish its
unquestioned and unrivaled kingdom.
In
an interview, Mackintosh reveals her intention about associating pain with
womanhood. She says:
Pain
is so often written off in women as overreaction—a specifically female kind of
overreaction. I’ve seen women in my life suffer for years, doubt their own
symptoms, say that they do not wish to be seen as melodramatic. Conflating the
physical and mental with women leads us to be seen as silly, as unreliable, too
often—as attention-seeking rather than as a person suffering deeply. (Le Blanc,
“Sophie Mackintosh’s”)
Mackintosh deliberately chooses to narrate pain and
the paraphernalia associated with it. In one of the most perceptive essays
questioning the importance of recognizing pain in women, Leslie Jamison writes:
The moment we start talking about wounded women, we risk transforming
their suffering from an aspect of the female experience into an element of the
female constitution— perhaps its finest, frailest consummation. The ancient
Greek Menander once said: “Woman is a pain that never goes away.” He probably
just meant women were trouble, but his words hold a more sinister suggestion:
the possibility that being a woman requires being in pain, that pain is
the unending glue and prerequisite of female consciousness. (Jamison 3)
She adds:
A 2001 study called “The Girl Who Cried Pain” tries to make sense of the
fact that men are more likely than women to be given medication when they
report pain to their doctors. Women are more likely to be given sedatives. The
study makes visible a disturbing set of assumptions: It’s not just that women
are prone to hurting— a pain that never goes away— but also that
they’re prone to making it up. The report finds that despite evidence that
“women are biologically more sensitive to pain than men …[their] pain reports
are taken less seriously.” Less seriously meaning, more specifically,
“they are more likely to have their pain reports discounted as ‘emotional’or
‘psychogenic’ and, therefore, ‘not real.’ ” (Jamison 6)
Mackintosh’s womanhood is deliberately fraught with
extremes of emotions; the girls ‘hyperventilate’, ‘scream’, ‘go into
hysterics’, ‘stuff muslin in their mouths to stop feeling pain’, ‘cut
themselves to avoid distress’ and others. The physical pain of childbirth is
juxtaposed cleverly with the shock of losing the child. What is relevant to
note is that, both physical and emotional pain are essential to be
acknowledged. It is patriarchy which deems pain purely as an attribute of
womanhood.
Women
as narrators, perpetrators, victims and observers claim the island as their
home and transform the novel into a particularly female space. Shattering the
myth of wholesome sisterhood and powerful female space is the idea that the
creation of the female space is actually the brainchild of the King. “When the
damaged women saw King for the first time they often recoiled. Man. But our mother explained that here
was a man who had renounced the world…Here was a man who put his women and
children first” (Mackintosh 41). There is a mention of “scream therapy” where
the girls would expel gusts of air from their mouths so as to get rid of excess
feelings. The King, the man, would have a stick called “conducting baton” and
would guide the purge of emotions of the women. The man with his baton would
orchestrate the performance of the women. The novel provides important messages
about social conditioning, in this particular case, the passive conforming of
the women to all the family rituals which are crafted by the Man supposedly to
enable the sisters to become more like the traditional description of manhood-
rational, cold, repressing emotion, becoming mentally and physically strong
enough to harm anyone without thinking.
Mackintosh's
novel flows seamlessly as water, the most important metaphor of the novel.
Water is essential for survival, part of nature and culture, domesticity and
science. Water, the most elemental and intrinsic part of nature is used as a
cure to treat broken individuals, in this case, women. Water from nature, being
transferred into the realms of domesticity, being used as a medical cure, to
heal women who crave peace, safety and comfort from conflict. Water, thus,
becomes an unlikely metaphor for identifying, clarifying and prioritizing difference
between the two sexes. Water is also symbolic of violence, repression and
angst:
We
have never been permitted to cry because it makes our energies suffocating.
Crying lays you low and vulnerable…If water is the cure for what ails us, the
water that comes from your own faces and hearts is the wrong sort. It has
absorbed our pain and is dangerous to let loose. Pathological despair was the King’s way of describing an emergency
that needed cloth, confinement, our heads held underwater. (Mackintosh 68)
Water
is also what surrounds the island, separating the toxic from the pure, the
world of masculine domination and violence on women from the carefully crafted
utopia. Water, thus, ironically represents the hollowness of these differences.
The world inside the island is equally toxic with subtler and more refined
forms of domination of female bodies and minds. Water is the passage to the
outer world, through which the King, the provider, makes solo weekly trips to
arrange food and sustenance to his family. Water is also the place where the
still born baby of one of the girls is released. Life and death are intrinsically
associated with the metaphor of water. The fluidity associated with it, stands
in stark contrast against the stasis of the lives of the sisters. Water is also
the symbol through which the demarcation between the outside male world and the
inside female world is diffused, with the entry of the three males into the
already conflicted female space.
The
washing up of the men on the shore brings in more Shakespearean references into
the King Lear-esque narrative of three daughters and a King. However, the world
of The Tempest finds extremely different
versions of power play associated with gender, sexuality and expression of
desire- “The men have been watching us…At meals they chew and stare…Maybe they
would eat us given half a chance. Anything is possible with these hungry
looking men” (Mackintosh 82). Fear and passive aggressive demeanours dominate
this section of the novel; the Mother trying to assert her dominance by
“protecting” the girls from the men, the men trying every trick possible to
initiate amicable relations. Lia’s seduction by Llew unfolds in a breathless
pace through traumatic expressions of passion, “My body is a traitor, I am also
a traitor,” (Mackintosh 96) gushes Lia with her unrestrained physical and
psychological surrender. Her falling in love with the so called “enemy/man”
occurs through debasement of her self, profound guilt, angst and confused
evocation of a passion repressed for years:
Again
I want to hurt him, want to save his life or ruin it, something, anything, I
have not decided. I want him to leap for my approval like a fish, body twisting
and I want to be the one who dictates the terms, but when I try, small stabbing
gestures towards intimacy, he doesn’t react enough. (Mackintosh 144-145)
Llew
responds to her baffled adoration with curt statements like, “Don’t cry…I hate
it when women cry. It’s manipulative” (Mackintosh 148), “Are you my shadow
now?” (Mackintosh 172), “Can you please be normal for a second?” (Mackintosh 184).
Lia is sensitive enough to understand the shaming of her need by the man.
Female desire never did have any place in patriarchy and have more than often
been linked with hysteria. However, Lia is neither equipped to converse about
her newly emancipated feelings nor does she find a safe space of acceptance and
acknowledgement. “You girls are a new and shining kind of woman,” (Mackintosh 228)
King tells them, proudly — after he has raised them vitamin-deficient and
weakened by his therapies, and ignorant of basic human biology. They have been
told repeatedly that their isolation is a privilege and their ignorance is
innocence. But it is increasingly clear to the reader that these young women
have simply been raised to fit their patriarch’s ideal of what pure, fragile,
privileged womanhood should be.
The
eldest daughter, Grace takes over the narration of the final section of the
novel. The voices of the sisters which seemed almost unidentifiable in the
initial pages, become more different and individualized. The change in tone
from Lia’s poignant explorations of sexuality and helpless emotional pain to
Grace’s narrative is represented through clarity, rage and understanding. The
King is not the biological father of Grace and has impregnated her. The King
has sent the men to bring the sisters to the mainland. The King has charted out
their lives for them. It is almost necessary that Grace’s narrative unfolds as
a monologue addressed to her foster father/lover/father of her dead baby. “Long
before the days of the cure, you came for our books…Then you came for our
hair…Finally you came for our hearts…They panicked you” (Mackintosh 241). It is
interesting to note the trajectory of patriarchy, the domination begins from
restriction of knowledge so that the girls unquestioningly accept everything
they are told, to the curtailment of their physical selves and finally to the
repression of their passions. Grace states, “Love was a great educator…It
taught me first of all that women could be enemies too” (Mackintosh 219). She
is jealous of the intimacy shared between her mother and the King and even imagines
her sisters as competition. This is exactly what patriarchy tries to
accomplish, pitting one woman against others, transforming them into “enemies”.
Grace understands the conflicts associated with her Stockholm syndrome
situation. In a way she is a captive in the so called utopia constructed by the
King. However, in a space which restricts emotions in any form, any show of
tenderness, even if incestuous/untoward/inappropriate/sexually deviant can be
construed as attachment by the unwitting victim rather than unfiltered lust. Grace
is traumatized and tormented by the realization of her own feelings for the
King and he in turn relishes and encourages her extreme crisis of identity:
What
it was like to be in love with you: fucking awful, even after you revealed it
was technically all right. The love of the family magnified. Except I wasn’t of
your blood. Except you had raised me like your own. Except I knew no other
families to compare ours with. It was like having a permanent hangover. A pure,
lightning nausea, not unlike how it would later feel to be pregnant.
(Mackintosh 227)
She,
however, is intelligent enough to see the cracks in the utopia:
We
are your property, your rightful goods. Mother was worn out, a liability; I
have replaced her. Half her age, body and mind equipped for survival. It is
simple. You would explain it to us so reasonably if you were around. We would see
it as the only rational act. (Mackintosh 223)
Reason
and rationality are the tools which patriarchy glorifies in order to establish
itself against the so called irrational hysteria of womanhood as is the
transformation of women into commodities, used, maintained and exchanged as per
their value.
Perhaps
more a tale of patriarchal family structures taken to an extreme — the father
as both predator and god, the mother a collaborator who occasionally protects,
all three daughters hovering in a limbo somewhere between cherished possessions
and future concubines for the patriarch. (Jemisin, “Three Sisters”)
It is definitely a story about Womanhood -
its construction, dismantling and assimilation. Unfortunately, here too, the
women are either inferior puppets, or superior samurais killing men and
refabricating a new female space. Women are never equal to men, men are never
blameless.
The
Water Cure is not a simple book. It unspools
ideas around solidarity and sisterhood, danger and gender, and the ways that
families become their own toxic ecosystems. It takes that original, irreducible
problem named in Genesis and asks it in a way that incorporates this
increasingly prevalent idea of toxic masculinity and both gives it credence and
names its limitations. The Water Cure doesn't, of course,
offer a solution to that problem. But it does show us, in the
bond between Lia, Grace, and Sky, that we have at least one tool not available
to Eve back at the beginning of the world: sisterhood. (Quinn, “The Water
Cure”)
The acknowledgement, recognition and acceptance of
the new reality by the sisters lead to the formulation of a new and more
vibrant sisterhood – very different from the coerced, tragic and manipulative sister-love
propagated by their parents. This sisterhood is maintained through difference
and divergence rather than homogeneity. The sisters perceive each other as complete
individuals, not faceless shadows of each other. Together they embrace the
liberation of a stifling utopia and commence an optimistic journey toward
future growth. What makes this hopeful decision problematic is that the
emancipation of women is carried on the complete annihilation of men. It is
only when each of the three men are dead, that the power of the King over the
sisters lessen. The novel is filled with testimonies from grieving/traumatized
women who narrate the violence on their bodies and selves by men. In a way,
sisterhood seems possible only when manhood is absent. Discussing the range and
variety of contemporary speculative fiction, especially written by women and
about women, Sophia Gilbert states:
The
conventional thinking on dystopian fiction is that it serves as both a comfort
and a warning. Speculative stories point to how much worse things could be, but
also how much worse they could get. They remind readers of the stunning breadth
of human frailty. We see the world distorted, sometimes beyond recognition, and
it prompts us to look at our own reality from different angles. The
Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood told me in 2017,
is just a mashup of elements taken from different moments in history. Nothing
was invented. Nothing was inconceivable, because everything had already
happened in one country or another. (“The Remarkable Rise”)
The Water Cure is a glaring reminder of the excruciating
realities of the present day, of the distortions of feminism and the
inescapable violence associated with it. In an interview with Rhiannon
Cosslett, Mackinstosh states:
There are so many things happening at the moment,
such as #MeToo and the abortion referendum. It shows that women’s bodies are
still very much up for debate. I read an article that said that dystopian
feminism was ‘a big trend’, and I thought, ‘It might be a trend, but it’s also
our lives.’ (“Dystopian Feminism”)
The Water Cure is Mackintosh’s way of imagining a world which is
essentially problematic in itself. “Can a reign of women possibly be the answer
to the earth’s destruction and to all the other related problems? Is
ecofeminism giving us another version of the story that all problems will cease
when the powerless take over power? Is ecofeminism inevitably based in
gynocentric essentialism?” (Plumwood 8). This female utopia verges close to a
dystopia, something more problematic than the simplistic notion of patriarchy.
Toxic femininity is almost as equally reductive and regressive as toxic
masculinity. The
Water Cure emerges as
a relevant, undeniable question, both subtle and vehement. It is simultaneously
a plea and an admonishment addressed to the human kind to acknowledge and
rectify their limitless capabilities of violence and destruction. It becomes
the prerogative of the human beings to stall the bleakness and horrifying vision
of future.
Works Cited
Alter,
Alexandra. “How Feminist Dystopian Fiction is Channeling Women’s Anger and
Anxiety.”
The New York Times. 8 October 2018. Web. 18 October 2020.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/books/feminist-dystopian-fiction-margaret-atwood-women-metoo.html
Cosslett,
Rhiannon Lucy and Sophie Mackintosh. “Interview.” Guardian. 24 May 2018.
Web. 18
October
2020.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/24/sophie-mackintosh-the-water-cure-interview
Gilbert,
Sophie. “The Remarkable Rise of the Feminist Dystopia.” The Atlantic. 4
October 2018.
Web.
18 October 2020.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/10/feminist-speculative-fiction-2018/571822/
Jamison,
Leslie. “Grand Unified Theory of Female
Pain.” VQR. Spring 2014. Web. 2
February
2020.
https://www.vqronline.org/essays-articles/2014/04/grand-unified-theory-female-
Jemisin,
N.K. “Three Sisters, an Island and an Apocalyptic Tale of
Survival.” The New York
Times. 8 January 2019. Web. 21 November 2019.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/books/review/water-cure-sophie-mackintosh.html.
Le Blanc, Lauren. “Sophie Mackintosh’s Modern Fairy Tale Imagines a World Where
Masculinity Is Literally
Toxic.” Observer. 3 January 2019.
Web. 2 February 2020.
Mackintosh, Sophie. The Water Cure. Hamish Hamilton, 2018.
Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature.
Routledge, 1993.
Quinn, Annalisa. “'The Water Cure' Makes Toxic Masculinity Literal.” NPR. 13 January 2019.
Web. 2 February 2020. https://www.npr.org/2019/01/13/684210575/the-water-cure-
makes-toxic-masculinity-literal