Promiscuous Times

Abstract

I have argued in my reading of The Stepford Wives that the conception of the housewife trapped in repetitive labor offered a particularly rich ground for the imagination of static time. Because the housewife seemed to lack plot and progression above all else, the negative aspects of her situation could be associated with the absence of narrative, and her release into the historical time could be experienced as a movement toward freedom rather than ideological closure. Her liberation promised a rejuvenation of public narratives of historical progression, which from the perspective of the housewife represented motion and fulfillment rather than the stasis and impasse that had come to be associated with narrative totalization. Yet this was a vexed strategy because stories of the achievement-oriented female artist—the ultimate liberated woman according to The Stepford Wives—were not truly immune to the totalizing operations of narrative. In what follows, I argue that Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) and Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), two of the most well-known popular feminist novels of the 1970s, explore precisely this problem through their depiction of aspiring female artist heroines. This exploration unfolds on the formal level through the novels’ adoption of the picaresque genre, which thwarts narrative teleology, and on the level of content through an exploration of promiscuous sexual behavior.