March Issue
Lou Hildebrandt
March
What do Prada, dissociative feminism and a fictional protagonist using drugs to hibernate for a year have in common? - Novelist Ottessa Moshfegh, who has created literary brilliance with her novels Eileen, My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Lapvona, as well as the short story collection Homesick for Another World. Now, as part of a collaboration with Prada on the brand’s spring-summer 2025 collection campaign, Moshfegh's Ten Protagonists, a collection of short stories, was published in February of the same year.
In the short story collection, we see model Carey Mulligan wearing various Prada outfits, each embodying a brief story of one of Moshfegh's heroines. The women give us a glimpse into their professions: a physicist, an interior designer and a corporate translator. Not only their profession, but their lives, too, seem to be diverse, based on what is revealed. Nonetheless, they have something in common: they're all predominantly young, white cis-women who are somewhere on the unlikability spectrum—between counterintuitive and flat-out antiheroine—like Eileen and the narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation before them.
The Epic of an Antiheroine and Dissociative Feminism
The tale of an unlikeable white cis-woman seems to be Ottessa Moshfegh's signature. Her heroines never show any hesitation to disappoint the norms of female protagonists in fiction: they are unsympathetic, disagreeable, occasionally disgusting and driven by their own perverse desires. In Eileen, the main character lives with her drunkard father in a run-down house. Her brooding intellect and peculiar habits—like keeping a dead mouse in the glove compartment of her vehicle or stalking her crush, Randy—are not those of a stereotypical heroine, but rather an antiheroine. The ending is just as dissatisfying, since Rebecca, the one character Eileen looks up to for how organizes she appears to be, turns out to be as unreliable as Eileen. Instead of tackling the challenges of her life, the realization of Rebecca’s irresponsibility gives Eileen the motivation to leave her hometown for good to start all over in New York City.
This type of protagonist is featured in My Year of Rest and Relaxation, too. The unnamed narrator attempts to cure her trauma following the death of her parents through radical withdrawal: she locks herself in her apartment in New York for a year, consumes huge amounts of sleeping pills and attempts to erase herself from the world. Her friend, who visits every now and then, is treated with mercilessness and ruthlessness. The protagonist shuts all avenues for empathy; she is completely dissociated.
Psychologically, dissociation is the separation of perception and memory, a “disconnection between a person's sensory experience, thoughts, sense of self, or personal history.” But when women cognitively and emotionally disconnect from their surroundings, it's a survival mechanism. The famous Buzzfeed article by Emmeline Clein, The Smartest Women I Know Are All Dissociating, describes that this gendered dissociation of “women using intellectual detachment to dull pain or avoid emotion isn’t at all a new phenomenon.” Therefore, discussion about feminism and dissociation requires acknowledgement of the specificity of women’s mental health issues. Hence, a construct such as dissociative feminism carries intrinsic solidarity—a mutual knowledge of women's gendered experience of mental health issues. It is an acknowledgment that, instead of meeting expectations pushed upon them, women create coping mechanisms of their own.
Re-shaping one’s own suffering and re-narrating it as a feminist tragedy can be regarded as the claiming of agency by a person who lives under patriarchal oppression. The historical and oppressive tale of “female hysteria” is re-appropriated: rather than women being victims of whatever diagnosis, they appropriate dissociation as an act of resistance. They use it as protection against the difficulties of patriarchal life—to endure terrible sex, to filter out toxic men, to avoid the squeeze of productivity.
Dissociative feminism also exceeds nihilism and is critical of capitalism. In Moshfegh's novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, when the protagonist locks herself up in her apartment for a year, she also evades capitalist exploitation logic. She takes medication to detox herself from work and social life. The book is thus the very definition of dissociative feminism, with a clear emphasis on dissociation. It is not a mere individual retreat but a feminist statement.
A Defense of Dissociative Feminism
Dissociation isn't apathy; it's a survival mechanism. Women are not dissociating because they ignore patriarchal violence, but because they have to disconnect from it. Active withdrawal is resistance—a safety mechanism against the constant demands of the expectations of society.
Identifying dissociative feminism as neoliberal feminism, as many critics have done, disregards its significantly different stance. While neoliberal feminism would call women to adapt to the system, maybe even to embrace a “girl boss mentality” in the face of patriarchal and capitalist injustice, dissociative feminism rejects this entirely. Denial of being productive or emotionally available is a rejection of the capitalist requirement to constantly improve oneself, a resistant non-adherence to the patriarchal view of women as carers and nurturers.
Feminism does not always require being vocal, an activist, or engaging in mass mobilization. Sometimes resisting is retreating—in the choice to withdraw from cultural pressures knowingly. Dissociative feminism expands the scope of what feminist action can entail. The same counts for the tale of anti-heroines. Women like Eileen, whose greatest joy is indulging in explosive diarrhea, reject traditional notions of femininity. The way her quirks are shown and how she acts, along with her dark fantasies, is a resistance or defiance of the restrictions that come along with gender-based oppression and the ideology of femininity.
Her Ten Protagonists are Ten True Girl Bosses
As previously mentioned, the ten protagonists in the eponymous short story collection are as detached from the outer world as in all of Moshfegh’s tales. Interior architect Betty, for instance, recounts how she does not like the collection of things; she says: “It’s important for me to be detached, my hands as clean as a surgeon’s.” Puppeteer Tabitha, who drops out of college after a great realization, which she gets from a fever, says that what makes us human is our inconsistencies. Scientist Tara’s greatest aim is to prove that basic laws of physics and biology are not true, with an eagerness that apparently results in her losing her funding from the university where she is employed. It is unclear whether Tara’s keenness stems from a concern for the planet or plain hatred for humanity itself. he describes her vision as “a world of microbial calm, where the cacophony of human progress is finally silenced.”
Some stories entail the narration of dissociation to a greater extent than others. One of the most profound dissociations can be found in Victoria/Veronica—a short story that almost seems like a schizophrenic new interpretation of the classical doppelgänger-motif. This ambiguity is already emphasized with the title and, whilst those are technically two protagonists, we have nine other short stories with protagonists. Since the title of the short story collection tells us that there are only ten protagonists in the book, Moshfegh makes those seemingly two protagonists count only as one. Similarly, it seems to be an element unique to this story, as there have been other short stories where there was a very important secondary character, but without a similar reference in the title. An instance is Cecily, which deals with two actresses, Cecily and Amelia. Amelia is significant for this story, like Victoria is for Veronica’s, yet the story is not named “Cecily/Amelia” but only “Cecily.”
This insinuation, that we might be dealing with one person instead of two, is further exemplified by the fact that not once is it mentioned whether the speaker is Victoria or Veronica. The impression that it might, in reality, be only one schizophrenic woman arises through the increasingly sickly appearance of “the sister,” especially in the moments where the narrator does unusual things like sleeping on the ground or in lines like: “Whereas it used to feel easy, now my breathing feels labored. Harder, as if I’m breathing for two sets of lungs.” Another striking line is: “It’s like there’s only one of us.”. “I’m the real me, and you’re the part that watches.” Given that all the protagonist ever does revolves around “the sister,” this makes us question: Could it be that she is hallucinating her into existence? There is not one single activity pursued by the speaker that suggests she has a life separate from her ‘sister.’
On to a New Self-Destruction Feminism
So far in the short story collection, we have seen women who are detached, disagreeable and dealing with their mental health problems. However, stories like Rachel give us the impression that with Prada and Moshfegh, we leave dissociation behind and are moving to a new form of self-destruction feminism— the protagonist, Rachel, dissociates and is unreliable to the point of almost driving her lover and herself off a cliff. The story starts off with an “enchanted evening,” in which Rachel spends time with her partner Freddie for the first time. They are in a car and are driving through the most romantic and beautiful scenery imaginable. Then, the scene is interrupted by Rachel almost driving them off a cliff.
This was not merely an accident, as is revealed by the lines: “Later it scared me because I thought I had done it on purpose. Because I’d had the thought: I’m happy. Because sometimes just the thought of that is enough to cut you loose.” However, throughout the story, it crystallizes that this was not an instantaneous thought or, even less so, suicidal ideation. To her core, Rachel believes that people should experience situations where they are not safe: “I believe that everyone should, at some point in their lives, get stranded. Or at least get lost. Go missing.”
Self-destruction has been a long-standing trope for male geniuses, from literary figures such as Hemingway to musicians such as Kurt Cobain and artists such as van Gogh. Their own destruction is mythologized, keeping the notion of a tortured genius alive. For women, however, the story has been the contrary—writers such as Sylvia Plath have been either fetishized or pathologized just as much as they have been for their mental illness. It took a long time until her art was acknowledged in a similar manner and even today it is questionable whether she is seen predominantly as ‘a mentally ill woman’ or a professional writer. As Heather Clark, in her introduction to Sylvia Plath, explained, people cannot accept women as professional writers as they do for their male counterparts. A reclaiming of self-destruction can therefore be a kind of resistance. This is not to say that everybody should destroy themselves, but when life does, one should not hesitate to use that as a creative source.
Rather than constantly urging women to “get through it,” a self-destruction feminism could encourage a form of radical solidarity—one that would understand failure, resignation and breakdown as common experience rather than individual failure. Instead of trying to pathologize or individualize self-destruction, it could acknowledge it as a legitimate response to an unbearable world and create a space where women do not have to be strong but can merely be. Photo source: Wikimedia