Female Characters In Other Early Vonnegut Novels example essay topic

Vonnegut's Changing Women What follows is an argument to the effect that, in the novels written before 1973, Vonnegut's female characters generally are presented negatively, either as pro-authority anti-individualists or as helpless or male-manipulated victims who never 'grow' in either a personal or literary sense. In addition I maintain that, in at least two of Vonnegut's later novels, certain female characters exercise individuality in their own existences and effect positively the awareness and attitudes of male characters. From the beginning of Player Piano (1952) through Slaughterhouse Five (1969), Kurt Vonnegut describes the characters of his various worlds in terms of their victimization at the hands of a dehumanizing, or perhaps a better term might be 'de individualizing,' technologically fixated, industrial / militaristic society. Time and time again in these novels the role of the individual is subsumed in the miasma that passes for 'social responsibility.

' Like the real world in which every human being exists, Vonnegut's literary worlds feature nameless and faceless authorities (when such authorities are offered at all) who seem to be the masters in local, regional, global, and sometimes interstellar chess games. Often, as is the case in Vonnegut's 1951 'All the King's Men,' these 'manipulators' move their all-too-sentient pieces in what at times, for the victims, must seem to be diabolical -- and what certainly are tragic -- maneuvers. In The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Slaughterhouse Five the 'accidental' nature or intergalactic point of view of the authority that seems to be 'in charge of things's serves to distance humans from personal responsibility for the results of such maneuvering -- as such results are described in the novels. In Sirens, for example, the inappropriate and often asinine behaviors of Malachi Constant are shown to be products of the direct influence of the Tralfamadorians who for millennia have manipulated human societies simply to communicate with a mechanized messenger shipwrecked on Saturn's largest moon.

The same excuse can be made for the ultimate human manipulator in the novel, Winston Niles Rumfoord, as it can for the actions and attitudes of Bee, Rumfoord's wife and the mother of Constant's son, Chrono. That the communications sent to Salo on Titan consist of such inane and, given the non-human nature of the receiver, unimportant content as, 'Be patient. We haven't forgotten about you,' and, 'You will be on your way before you know it' (271), only makes more pathetic the fact that Tralfamadore has influenced directly the rise and fall of countless human civilizations in order to deliver such messages. In the light of the historicity of Tralfamadorians manipulations of earthling civilizations, the sufferings of the characters in Sirens in effect are trivialized. But this 'trivializing' of human misery is a consistent mark of Vonnegut's satirical message. In Slaughterhouse the Tralfamadorians offer a different type of absolution for human responsibility, but their explanation still is that wars and murders and other 'inhumanities' -- indeed, even the ultimate destruction of the entire universe -- occur because they do happen, always have happened, and will continue to happen since the moments are 'structured' that way; nonetheless, such sophistry serves to release individuals from personal responsibility for either their actions or the results of those actions.

In Player Piano Vonnegut presents the reader with an industrialized anti-Utopia that is too much the product of human beings. Though neither an extra-terrestrial nor exactly a nameless and faceless 'manipulator,' the National Industrial Planning Board (NIPB) serves well the function of a de individualized (and de individualizing) controller -- planning, limiting, and directing the existences of those who make up its subservient population. This novel presents essentially two types of individuals who stand apart from the mass of controlled humanity: those who aspire to maintain and rise within the society -- characters like Kroner, Anita Proteus, and Lawson Shepherd -- and those who desire to separate themselves from and either directly or indirectly usurp the system -- Ed Finnerty, James J. Lasher, and, eventually, Paul Proteus. What is important to note, here, is that, although many of the novels from what I call Vonnegut's 'early' period (novels written before 1973) present both pro-and anti-'government' characters who appear to react as individuals, those characters who strike out against the de individualizing authority are presented in a positive light, while those who attempt to work within the system often are portrayed negatively. Anita Proteus in Player Piano is herself a manipulator, and a very successful one. As the novel progresses we learn that she is uneducated; we learn that her origin is in the lower-class-'Reeks and Wrecks'-Homestead section of society; and we learn that she has 'tricked' the rising-star, engineer-administrator Paul Proteus into marrying her by faking pregnancy and thereby forcing him into the modern form of a 'shotgun' wedding.

Not satisfied with this level of deception, Vonnegut further makes Anita an adulteress who literally sleeps her way into the arms of Lawson Shepherd, Paul's second-in-command at the Ilium industrial works. While her adulterous activities with Shepherd occur apparently as a means of insuring herself against the eventual collapse of Paul's misguided faith in the industrialized system that is described in the novel, the careful reader notes that there is something especially invidious in the way the author presents the relationship between Anita and Ed Finnerty, Paul's best friend and erstwhile member of the NIPB. And, knowing Anita's propensity for using her considerable arsenal of 'weapons of sex' (29), the reader can conclude that the enmity Paul's wife feels for her husband's friend is more than a reflection of her disgust at Finnerty's distasteful and unhygienic habits and appearance; it may be, rather, the fury triggered by Finnerty's rejection of her attempts to sleep her way into the arms of a man whose career seems destined to eclipse her husband's. The non-conformist, indeed, hobo-like Finnerty's spurning of Anita's advances is consistent with his distaste for those very accoutrements of professional lifestyle so coveted by Anita, and his rejection of her is compatible with an accompanying detestation of those who, in order to cling to their own elite social standing, betray others -- especially if the betrayed is Finnerty's closest friend. This negative portrayal of the novel's social-climbing major female character forms an important part of Vonnegut's anti-Utopian message in Player Piano. Similarly, female characters in other early Vonnegut novels are presented negatively.

Beatrice Rumfoord's sexual frigidity is emphasized to the reader, first through her husband's confession that Malachi Constant's sexual assault of the long-married Beatrice Constant constituted the rape of a virgin (Sirens 164), and again as Rumfoord delineates Bee's lack of human passion and emotion when he attacks her 'excesses of reluctance' (261). In much the same negative way, Mona Aarons Monza no is revealed to be devoid of sexual passion in Cat's Cradle (1963) when she, 'the most heart-breaking ly beautiful girl' ever seen by the protagonist, 'brown as chocolate,' with 'hair like golden flax' (60), proves, on her wedding night, to be absolutely hostile toward John's amorous forays. To his chagrin, he discovers that: The girl was not interested in reproduction -- hated the idea. Before the tussle was over, I was given credit by her, and by myself, too, for having invented the whole bizarre, grunting, sweating enterprise by which new human beings were made.

(178) Even when female characters in these early novels do exhibit 'normal' human desires and emotions, their attitudes and rationales frequently are called into question, as when Howard W. Campbell is told in Mother Night (1961) that the romantic interest evinced by his lovely sister-in-law, Resi North, is simply part of her Soviet espionage 'mission' (146), or in Slaughterhouse when Valencia Marble Pilgrim fantasizes not about her bridegroom during their initial lovemaking on their honeymoon night but rather pretends that she is 'Queen Elizabeth the First of England, and Billy was supposedly Christopher Columbus' (118). Though Resi's attitude seems to deny the implied 'duteous' nature of the affection she shows to Campbell, Campbell remains unconvinced and unsatisfied, and though Valencia seems to be devoted to Billy in her own unintellectual way, certainly Vonnegut's portrayal of her misconceptions concerning both the historical chronology and the personal relationships she attributes to her fantasy alter-ego encourages negativity in the reader's evaluation of her as a competently educated, emotionally secure individual. Other examples of negatively portrayed female characters abound in Vonnegut's early works, but the point of this paper is that a change can be discerned in the way in which Vonnegut portrays certain female characters in some of his post-1972 works -- specifically in the portrayals of Mary Kathleen O'Looney in Jailbird (1979) and Marilee Kemp (Contessa Portomaggiore) in Bluebeard (1987). In Jailbird the main male character, Walter F. Starbuck, is released from a minimum-security federal prison in Georgia after serving two years for his role in the Watergate scandal.

Starbuck has lost family, fortune, and hope as a result of his conviction, and Vonnegut paints an ironic portrait of Starbuck's crime: refusing to testify against a group of 'dirty tricks' conspirators as an act of atonement for his years-earlier, inadvertent betrayal of a fellow civil servant during testimony before the McCarthy Commission. As the novel progresses, the reader is introduced to O'Looney, a fellow pro-labor activist and the eighteen-year-old lover from Starbuck's senior year at Harvard. Mary Kathleen is abandoned by Starbuck after his graduation because she is 'too low class' and doesn't fit his conception of the wife needed by an ambitious, career member of the civil service (208). Vonnegut relates the history of O'Looney in terms of her victimization both by males and by big-business capitalism. Her mother died from radium poisoning associated with her work for the Wyatt Clock Company in Brockton, Massachusetts (144), and she is dumped by Starbuck and physically abused by her labor-activist idol, Kenneth Whistler (224-5). She marries a young mining engineer and eventually becomes the majority stockholder in RAMAC, the world's largest corporation.

Although one of the most powerful people in the world, Kathleen's victimization does not cease, as she is forced back to the lowest class of society; in order to hide her identity and keep herself safe from those who would kill her in an attempt to gain control of her power and wealth, she becomes a bag lady living in the abandoned bowels of New York's Grand Central Station. From society's cellar Mary Kathleen observes civilization; with her enormous power she positively effects as much of the world as she can; and in her moment of death she influences a change in the life of Walter F. Starbuck. That O'Looney, a woman repeatedly victimized by society, manages to achieve good things on a massive scale through her ability to put American industrial power to good use is Vonnegut's testimony to the native abilities of this relatively uneducated but loving and competent woman. That the Harvard-educated Starbuck fails to maintain her charitable endeavors and is eventually imprisoned for concealing her will marks an interesting difference from the male / female characterizations of the author's early novels.

Yet another female who rises from the role of emotional and physical victim to that of strong and effective influence on a male character is Bluebeard's Marilee Kemp. The main male character in this book is Rabo Karabekian, the pseudo abstract expressionist painter whose real artistic talent is expressed in his ability to reproduce perfectly on canvas what he observes in the real world -- literally to 'hold the mirror up to nature. ' He meets Marilee Kemp in his youth during his apprenticeship to the famous illustrator, Dan Gregory. Marilee is Gregory's mistress; she and Rabo become lovers, and after they are discovered together, Rabo in effect abandons her.

At the beginning of World War II she accompanies the fascist Gregory to Italy. Gregory is killed in the war, and Marilee is recruited as a spy by the United States War Department. She then marries Mussolini's Minister of Culture, who turns out to be the head of British Intelligence in Italy. In 1950 she contacts Karabekian and subsequently buys some of his collection of contemporary abstract art. It is during their reunion at her Italian palace that Marilee's most striking and long-lasting influence on Rabo Karabekian occurs. After revealing to Karabekian and the reader just how men had victimized her during her life -- beaten daily by her father, gang raped by her high school's football team, forced into prostitution by the manager of the Ziegfeld Follies, thrown down a flight of stairs and nearly killed by Dan Gregory, and abandoned by Rabo Karabekian (212) -- Marilee goes on to elicit from Karabekian the stories of his exploits during the war.

In the course of this conversation she calls Karabekian to task for exhibiting a typical male attitude toward women when he, elated over what he presumes is about to be a resumption of his sexual relationship with Marilee, states that he'd spent his years since the beginning of the war engaging in numerous love affairs with many women (210). In an epiphanic moment of sudden conviction for Rabo, Contessa Portomaggiore deflates his pride at his sexual prowess by saying, 'wherever you went there were women who would do anything for food or protection for themselves and the children and the old people' (215). When she goes on to point out that 'the whole point of war is to put women everywhere in that condition. It's always men against women... ' (215), Karabekian is struck by an awful truth: all the years that he has deluded himself into feeling proud and heroic for his exploits and heroism in the war, he has really been revelling in his abuse of women -- all men have.

From this moment in his life Rabo Karabekian becomes a man obsessed with his gender's guilt, not just its culpability for war, but its responsibility for psychological, physical and emotional abuse and devastation at every level. Near the novel's end we learn that his guilt has inspired him to produce a gigantic mural entitled, 'Now It's the Women's Turn' (273). The sixty-four-foot painting depicts, in the artist's own words, 'Where I was... when the sun came up the day the Second World War ended in Europe' (268), a valley filled with the broken victims of all of war's senseless cruelty. Karabekian's message is clear -- men have had their chance, and the resulting failure speaks for itself. It is time for women to save humanity, if humanity is to be saved at all.

Both of these novels present other female characters who positively effect the male protagonists: Jailbird's Sarah Wyatt and Ruth Starbuck, Bluebeard's Circe Berman and Edith Taft Karabekian to name a few, and certainly not all of the women in Vonnegut's early novels are presented in strongly negative terms. Whether or not a reader agrees with Vonnegut's various portrayals of the state of the human condition, characters like Mary Kathleen O'Looney and Marilee Kemp do stand out as women different from those in the pre-1973 works. O'Looney and Kemp are women whose refusals to succumb to victimization positively affect the male protagonists in these works. Is there a parallel between this change in characterization and Vonnegut's own personal philosophy? I do not know. However, I believe that Vonnegut's propensity for eschewing what Keats termed 'negative capability' (aesthetic distance) may indicate a change in the author's point of view.

Bibliography

Vonnegut, Kurt. Bluebeard. New York: Dell, 1987.
Cat's Cradle. New York: Dell, 1963.
Jailbird. New York: Dell, 1979.
Mother Night. New York: Dell, 1961.
Player Piano. New York: Dell, 1952.
The Sirens of Titan. New York: Dell, 1959.
Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Dell, 1966.