The Enfreakment of America's Jeune Fille à Marier: Lily Bart to Carrie Bradshaw

Abstract

A renewed fascination with freaks in American culture leads me to read the single woman as a hermaphrodite, what the Victorian carnies once called a “ half and half.” Despite her enjoyment of a man’s right to autonomy, independence, economic freedom and an increasing sexual freedom, she remains tethered to the female body which requires, as it did for carnival freaks, submission, display, management, silence and economic marginalization. For a limited period, the single girl enjoys a freakish hermaphroditic power until fear of her hybridity overwhelms her spectators, particularly wives, who demand she renounce her freedom and power as a both/and, crossing into a singular norm as an either/or. Instead of the gaze of awe, this boundary-transgressing “unwife” is met with the stare of horror. Refusing to return to the singular female body and renounce her freak status, she is stigmatized as the intolerable deviant, the grotesque, thirty-something woman alone.

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