Hannah Markos Williams | February 2022

Hannah Markos Williams

“That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.”—Tim O’Brien

This Story Is About Empowerment & Triumph;
This Story Is About Betrayal & Murder

In fiction and in life, the stories of people grappling with their own major transgressions often contain multiple truths. Sometimes these truths contradict or work against each other. There are the objective facts: the timeline of events, the details of those events from a neutral witness’s perspective—and there are the subjective facts: the events as described by a person who was or is immersed in them. The latter will tend to depart from the former as a result of the intensity of the experience, the passage of time, the desire to be likable, or simply the need to make sense of what happened.

When unreliable narrators recount such stories, and authors allow the reader to glimpse the objective facts as well as the subjective ones, the reader receives two stories at once: the version in which something terrible was done by the narrator, and the version in which that terrible something either mattered less than it did, was absolutely crucial to the narrator’s ability to survive or self-actualize, or even represented a triumph. The retelling of such stories can itself be an act of meaning-making with its own distinct importance. The beauty of this type of narrative is that it invites the reader to believe that even when two stories are in conflict, both can be true.

The challenge for the author, then, is in preserving both, the interpretive meaning conveyed by such a narrator and the fact of its departure from an objective retelling. In that way, the big questions without easy answers are kept intact. In the case of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen and Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs, the authors employ several innovative strategies to bridge this gap, and in so doing, subvert the false stories their narrators present.

Eileen, the eponymous narrator of Moshfegh’s novel, describes her dismal homelife with her abusive alcoholic father, and how her circumstances are transformed by the arrival of a vibrant young woman, Rebecca, at the boys’ home where she works. As a result of Rebecca’s influence on Eileen and through what appears to be their developing friendship, Eileen presents a narrative in which she finally and dramatically separates from the darkness of her life and leaves behind the town where she grew up. It is easy to mistake her tale for one of true empowerment and healing—that is, if you can ignore the fact that Eileen achieves her newfound freedom in part by murdering a stranger and abandoning her body in the woods.

Nora, the first-person narrator of Messud’s novel, similarly presents her life as one limited by the constraints placed upon it by others: she is not seen for the artist she is, and she feels pigeonholed into a career as an elementary school teacher and by the traits she assumes are ascribed to her by others because of her age, gender, and profession. Nora begins to reclaim her artist identity through a friendship with Sirena, the mother of one of her students and a successful artist herself. When Nora is ultimately betrayed by this friend in a humiliating and public manner, she would like the reader to believe that the resulting rage liberates her from the oppressive weight of society’s view of women like her, and that she is able to truly live for the first time—but this narrative ignores the fact that the initial betrayal was actually her own: Nora’s sexual indiscretion with Sirena’s husband, Skandar, violated their friendship well before Sirena’s betrayal of Nora took place.

The strategies Moshfegh and Messud use to offer glimpses into the objective circumstances of each story allow the reader to see when the narrators may be engaged in deliberate misdirection or may genuinely be misinterpreting their experiences. While both authors utilize common strategies for providing these crucial insights, including the body language of and dialogue with other characters, Moshfegh and Messud each also bring unique tools to this effort. In Eileen, Moshfegh uses vivid descriptions of corporeal phenomena as a tool for hinting at the inner experience our narrator is hesitant or unable to reveal. In The Woman Upstairs, Messud uses the juxtaposition of conflicting viewpoints and beliefs, and vacillation between these viewpoints and beliefs, to show a broader view of the story’s events. These juxtapositions also show the inner conflict and confusion of the narrator, revealing the limitations of her perspective and casting her assertions in a very different light.

As a result of these innovative craft strategies, the reader of each book is able to avoid falling for the faux-empowerment story both narrators attempt to convey and can find a deeper truth in the liminal space between the real, the imagined, and the wished-for.

IT MADE ME SICK; IT GAVE ME HOPE—
THE CORPOREAL IN EILEEN

Throughout Eileen, bodily imagery, especially within the narrator’s thoughts and fantasies, is used as a way of offering insight and information that the narrator is not able to convey directly. At times, Eileen uses the body as a proxy for powerful emotional states. This is seen both through her behavior at twenty-four and in her recounting of these events fifty years later.

On the subject of the death of her beloved dog around the time of her mother’s passing, for example, Eileen speaks mostly about the problem of the dog’s corpse:

I left the wet laundry basket, but draped a sopping pillowcase over Mona’s body. It took a day for me to muster the courage to go back out there. By then the laundry had congealed and dried, and the sight of the dead dog when I lifted the pillowcase made me gag and spill the contents of my stomach—chicken, vermouth—into the dry dirt.¹

Eileen goes on to mention her mother’s death, but emphasis is placed on the dog’s body. Eileen describes this as “...a romantic story”² and notes “...it may not be accurate at this point since I’ve gone over it again and again for years whenever I’ve felt it necessary or useful to cry.”³

Moshfegh’s inclusion of this particular anecdote does the work of laying out the interconnectedness of the physical and the emotional for Eileen: in order to cry, she sometimes needs to think about the stomach-turning and horrific realities, not the emotional despair, of her dog’s death. The author lets Eileen directly indicate her unreliability as it relates to this story. Because of the degree to which she’s revisited and reprocessed it, she is uncertain of the details. Eileen’s ruminations on this vignette raise the question of the accuracy of her narration overall, given how much time has passed at the point of retelling. The passage further suggests that Eileen’s emotional experience is either deeply shallow or deeply buried; she needs an aid to induce crying, a notion in direct conflict with Eileen’s later discussion of the emotional richness of her current life: “I cry easily, from pain and pleasure, and I don’t apologize for that.”⁴

Through her ongoing discussion of corporeal phenomena, the reader continues to receive clues into Eileen’s interiority and her unreliability. This both sets the stage for her later murder of Mrs. Polk—she fantasizes about her own and her father’s death frequently, reads library books about blood rites and trepanning, and generally shows comfort with or even interest in mutilative acts; the constant simmer of such thoughts feels destined to escalate—and demonstrates the ways in which present-day Eileen’s retrospective claims or beliefs about past Eileen are flawed.

Eileen often asserts that the way she had seen things at age twenty-four, particularly about her body, is drastically different than at seventy-four, usually suggesting that in her youth her perspective was off: “...I was always furious, seething, my thoughts racing, my mind like a killer’s.”⁵ Yet it is present-day Eileen who delineates in gruesome detail the types of horrifying thought patterns that led to this assessment, as if deriving gratification from the retelling. One can infer that either present-day Eileen does not want to acknowledge that this type of thinking continues to bring her pleasure, or that she is genuinely self-deluded into believing that she has evolved more fully than she shows. This combination of simmering rage and delusion are present in each category of corporeal phenomena shown in the book, which roughly break down into purging, rebellion, and self-harm.

Purging reveals Eileen’s need for emotional catharsis and release, and the intensity of her desire to exert some control over her environment. This behavior puts in sharper relief the degree to which she feels trapped, stifled, and blocked-up, and is helpful in a narrative where Eileen mentions, but downplays, this aspect of her life. When Eileen discusses purging, through the use of laxatives to induce intense bowel movements, a desire for the same type of control appears to be present: she seeks privacy; she revels in the sense that “...all of my insides had melted and were now gushing out,”⁶ and in order to reach this state she requires the “...safe and private territory”⁷ of the basement—a place she can control.

As for rebellion, Eileen frequently skips showering for long periods of time. As a narrator recalling this time in her life from fifty years in the future, Eileen still notes that she is perplexed by this behavior, and cannot fully explain it: “I liked to languish in my own filth as long as I could tolerate it. Why I did this, I can’t say for sure.”⁸ Eileen states early on that she was terrified by the idea of bodily judgment, noting that dying and having her naked corpse examined was mortifying enough to keep her alive, and that swallowing mouthwash had been a routine practice for her, geared toward preventing others from realizing that any organic processes occurred inside of her body. The decision to “wallow in filth” in spite of so intense an awareness or expectation of bodily scrutiny by others shows a desire to fight against the power of others to examine and judge her in the first place.

Eileen’s impulse toward self-harm is a tool Moshfegh uses to show the disconnect between Eileen and her physical self—she describes the destruction of her body with clinical distance—and to further demonstrate the degree to which Eileen was and is struggling with her own intentions and self-understanding. Moshfegh returns several times to the notion of Eileen, or sometimes Eileen’s father, being impaled by icicles: “...and I stood there imagining [the icicles] cracking and darting through my breasts, slicing through the thick gristle of my shoulder like bullets or cleaving my brain into pieces.”⁹ In a similar reverie, her uncertainty comes through as well:

I imagined [an icicle] plummeting through the hollow of my collarbone and stabbing me straight through the heart. Or, had I tilted my head back, perhaps it would have soared down my throat, scraping the vacuous center of my body—I liked to picture these things—and followed through to my guts, finally parting my nether regions like a glass dagger. That was how I imagined my anatomy back then, brain like tangled yarn, body like an empty vessel, private parts like some strange foreign country. But I was careful shutting the door, of course. I didn’t really want to die.¹⁰

The last line of the passage complicates our understanding of whether her impulse toward death is sincere, especially in light of the pleasure one can see her taking in the grim minutia imagined with such clarity and precision, and to which she returns and builds upon so frequently.

Eileen’s car offers her ample opportunity to talk about the urgency with which she desires freedom and autonomy, and her willingness to suffer in order to maintain whatever semblance of those things she has:

One thing about that Dodge was that it made me sick to drive it. I knew there was something wrong with the exhaust but at the time I couldn’t think of dealing with such a problem. Part of me liked having to roll down the windows, even in the cold. I thought that I was very brave. But really I was scared that if I made a fuss over the car, it would be taken away from me. That car was the one thing in my life that gave me any hope.¹¹

Perhaps more importantly, the Dodge allows Eileen to overtly share with the reader that she likes the feeling of being brave—this is one of the ways in which Moshfegh is able to show that Eileen is actively engaged in constructing a persona. It also shows that, weighed against even a very small measure of freedom, her own well-being is not a priority.

In each of her passages of corporeal exposition, Eileen invites the reader to see the world as she does, and eagerly provides entry points for doing so. Moshfegh, meanwhile, creates opportunities for Eileen to demonstrate her own fallibility, allowing small glimpses of her strange world which subvert her presentation of it.

I’M A NICE GIRL & FUCK YOU ALL—
JUXTAPOSITION IN THE WOMAN UPSTAIRS

In The Woman Upstairs, Messud allows space for Nora to present multiple conflicting views beside one another. Nora will discuss several interpretations of the same event or phenomenon. Sometimes she will appear to vacillate between the two, arguing with herself. At the start of the book, Nora presents the notion of a woman upstairs and her attributes—predictable, reliable, dull, sexless, etc. She then presents an opposing view: women upstairs are actually furious, powerful, capable of surprise. The former view is one Nora attributes to others. The latter is the view Nora puts forth as empirically true, based on her experience of being such a woman. The juxtaposition of these two views, as well as Nora’s assertion that there are two views in the first place, helps to show Nora’s uncertainty, even when she speaks with great authority and conviction. It also serves to suggest that the objective facts—how others see Nora; the complex character that Nora is, rather than how she simplifies and makes sense of herself; what truly happened between Nora and Sirena—may be unknowable.

Through her use of juxtaposition, Messud lets Nora do the work of demonstrating her own unreliability in all of the forms it takes. Sometimes this highlights Nora’s genuine confusion about what can be understood of her experiences. At other times, it’s Nora’s willingness to downplay or ignore her own culpability in Sirena’s betrayal, presenting herself as the victim, that comes through. Ultimately, Nora shows her deep desire to have transformed, triumphed, and evolved in response to Sirena’s betrayal, even when evidence of a triumph or transformation itself is absent.

Messud hints at a fascinating possibility: the emotional entanglements of complex characters can make the objective truth of a story both impossible to ascertain even for those involved, and less important to the story than the relationship each person has with their own subjective experience. Nora’s anger, justified or not, is powerful and real. That anger is a compelling story unto itself, even if the narrator’s vacillation betrays the ambiguity of the circumstances upon which it is founded.

The Woman Upstairs opens with a passage that demonstrates the author’s use of this strategy:

How angry am I? You don’t want to know. Nobody wants to know about that.
I’m a good girl, I’m a nice girl, I’m a straight-A, straight-laced, good daughter, good career girl, and I never stole anybody’s boyfriend and I never ran out on a girlfriend, and I put up with my parents’ shit and my brother’s shit, and I’m not a girl anyhow, I’m over forty fucking years old, and I’m good at my job and I’m great with kids and I held my mother’s hand when she died, after four years of holding her hand while she was dying, and I speak to my father every day on the telephone—every day, mind you, and what kind of weather do you have on your side of the river, because here it’s pretty gray and a bit muggy too? It was supposed to say “Great Artist” on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say “such a good teacher/daughter/friend” instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL.¹²

Nora acknowledges the fact of her immense anger in the same short line where she first introduces the notion that there is a perspective on her, an outside set of judgements and expectations of her behavior, a lens through which she should be expected not to be angry.

As the passage goes on, Nora lists several bullet point details of her life which, taken together, form the gestalt of the woman expected or desired by the same external perspective that would prefer not to know about her anger. This is how Nora builds the concept of “The Woman Upstairs,” which she will overtly name a few paragraphs later. Meanwhile, when her anger interjects at the end, the effect of the line “...and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL”¹³ is to take that conception of a woman who holds the hand of her dying mother, speaks with her father every day, and is loyal in social relationships, and creates from it an inverse type: the one who does all of those seemingly altruistic things in a manner that is dripping with resentment.

These two women are completely different people, placed side by side in this first passage. Looking at the middle ground that isn’t explicitly painted, but does exist between the two extremes, the reader can find a clearer picture of Nora’s character and her emotional relationship to her circumstances: It is true, for example, that she held the hand of her dying mother over the course of a four-year period while her own health deteriorated, and it is true that that act was a demonstration of social expectations she perceived to be placed on her, and that her sense of guilt and duty likely had a role.

But it is also true that Nora loved her mother: “I loved being her child. I remember looking at her and thinking she was the most beautiful thing in the world.”¹⁴ Nora had agency in remaining present in her mother’s life until the end. Her resentment at such obligations does not override the volition she exercises. If side A is characterized by goodness and the fulfillment of duty and side B is characterized by rage at having had to fill a particular role, the truth of Nora’s identity lies between those extremes; it blends them.

Nora’s mother, Mrs. Eldridge, exerts influence over her daughter’s decision to become a teacher rather than pursuing art—out of an arguably feminist desire to ensure Nora’s financial independence that ironically ends up pushing Nora toward a traditionally female-dominated profession, which takes time away from her artwork—and she models a similar dual existence to the one Nora inhabits. This is another important place where the juxtaposition of two extremes is used; in this case in presenting two opposing halves of Mrs. Eldridge. We see the duality of Mrs. Eldridge’s relationship to her life’s work in a conversation between the two women:

“Didn’t you know, I make a house a home? That’s what mothers do.”
“But I’ll go and then—”
“I love your daddy. He needs a home, too.”
And then we were back to the college question, and it seemed that art school wasn’t really a choice, because there wasn’t any money—barely enough, even with loans, to get me to university at all—and it mattered to my mother that I be employable at the end.
“You’re such a baby, you can go to art school afterward and still come out even. Get a master’s in Painting on top of your B.A., and you’ll be ready for all of it. I want you to have it all. It’s not like when I was a girl, the MRS degree and all that. You won’t live off pin money, off any man, no matter how much you love him. You won’t depend on anyone but yourself. We agreed, right?” And there was that edge to her voice, which I thought of then as darkness, and recognize now as rage, the tone that came in her intermittent phases of despair.¹⁵

Nora’s mother exists as two women in this scene: one is the loving wife and mother who is happy to tend to her family and work in the domestic sphere. Another is an advocate for financial self-reliance and overall independence from men, who argues for this autonomy with rage in her voice. Yet she finds happiness in her circumstances even if she would have preferred that they be less limited.

Nora’s discussion of her mother often involves the placing of blame: blame for Nora’s having pursued teaching rather than art, and blame for some measure of her own rage. Meanwhile, Messud uses Nora’s discussion of her mother to show that Nora struggles to see the whole picture in emotionally complex situations: rather than a woman who loves her life and her family but bristles at some of the constraints thereof, Nora perceives a false binary, just as she will see herself as either a “woman upstairs” or its utter opposite. Further, Messud uses Nora’s ambivalence about her mother to demonstrate her inability to accept that her own choices have been factors in the dissatisfactions of her life. Just as Mrs. Eldridge modeled a particular duality for her daughter, Messud’s use of Nora’s mother teaches the reader to look for a blending of extremes in its central character.

Because of Messud’s use of juxtaposition up to this point, the reader is prepared for the culminating moment when Nora wrestles with different explanations for Sirena’s betrayal: perhaps Sirena intentionally recorded the sensitive footage that would later become the vehicle for this betrayal, or maybe it was entirely an accident; maybe Skandar and Sirena plotted against Nora, or maybe Skandar had never even seen the footage. Neither Nora nor the reader will be able to unravel exactly what occurred, and the objective truth becomes the fact of the complexity of the situation itself.

Nora, though, reaches her own conclusion, her own truth, about Sirena: “She’d cared little enough to use the tape—to sell the tape—or else she’d been angry enough.”¹⁶ Nora decides that she’s been used, betrayed, even if her indiscretion with Skandar was in fact the cause of Sirena’s betrayal. She states this with certainty; she wants it to be true; and so Messud has created multiple truths—the truth of the complexity, that an objectively accurate story is not available to Nora or to the reader—the truth of Nora’s desire to have been a victim, rather than to have transgressed—the truth of Nora’s confusion—the truth of Nora’s intense need for and willingness to proclaim certainty.

IN THE END, THERE WAS PEACE.
IN THE END, WAS THERE PEACE?

Our narrators would like us to believe that their stories end with hopeful, triumphant, and clear conclusions. When we look closely at each book’s ending, we see Nora and Eileen presenting a resolution—something like a happy ending, albeit with the strangeness one expects from these narrators—but we also see, through the hints each author offers, that authentic, objective resolution eludes them both.

When Eileen finally says goodbye to her father, her home, her past life, she says this:

I wish I could feel again the brief peace I found on that northbound highway. My mind was empty, eyes wide with wonder at the passing forests and snow-filled pastures.¹⁷

It is hard to take at face value that Eileen felt good about leaving Mrs. Polk to die at the edge of a forest, however picturesque, or that she felt much serenity on that drive. Mrs. Polk admits culpability in the ongoing sexual abuse of her son by his father, which makes her an ideal proxy for Eileen’s anger toward her own abusive dad, but she is still a stranger, a person who has not harmed Eileen in any way. When Eileen allows her to die, there’s no justification, it’s just murder. The murder catalyzes her escape, but that escape is dubious: Eileen will go on to wind up alone, presenting her solitude as a joyful and chosen state. Given her tendency toward obfuscation and the objective similarities between the life she leaves and the one she goes on to live, it is unclear that this break away from the miseries of her past life gives way to a happy and fulfilling new one, or that much has changed for her at all.

What is clear is that Eileen wants to believe, and wants the reader to believe, that her actions were necessary to the achievement of her current life, and that her current life is worthy. She has built her entire narrative around this point. She has spent years going over and over some pieces of it in her mind until the objective truth is lost to her, just as the objective truth surrounding the death of her dog and her mother has been worried like a tongue worries a loose tooth until the tooth itself is gone and its outline in the gum no longer accurately describes its full shape. Moshfegh shows us that Eileen has convinced herself of some things that do depart from the objective facts of the story. Through her use of corporeal phenomena to convey Eileen’s inner state, we can see discrepancies between how Eileen says she views things and perceive information that contradicts these presented views. But the subjective truth, the one Eileen wants to believe in, exists; a whole life has been built upon it.

In Nora’s case, we are told that an incredible transformation has occurred: she, because of the rage born of her humiliating betrayal, will fully embrace her life:

Virginia Woolf, in her rage, stopped being afraid of death; but I’m angry enough, at last, to stop being afraid of life, and angry enough—finally, god willing, with my mother’s anger also on my shoulders, a great boil of rage like the sun’s fire in me—before I die to fucking well live.¹⁸

We doubt whether that’s objectively true, or even subjectively true. We only know that Nora has constructed a compelling narrative to convince herself, and the reader, that it is. Messud, using the juxtaposition of opposite extreme interpretations in Nora’s description of events, allows the reader to glimpse some elements of the objective truth: that the relationships between these characters are as complicated as the characters themselves; that Nora is prone to exaggeration and to experiencing things as more emotionally significant than others would feel they were; that Nora finds it difficult to accept responsibility for many things that cause her to feel hurt or dissatisfied in her life; and that Nora deeply wants this painful experience to have meant something, even if she’s not sure what, so she names it with authority: the ability to live.

Messud and Moshfegh navigate complexity in a way that shows fragments of many different truths and false assertions of “truth”: there are the facts; there’s the experiential or subjective truth; there’s the story that a narrator cobbles together because she isn’t entirely sure what’s true, but longs for certainty; and there are the things a narrator so badly wants that she internalizes and builds her life around them.

To some degree, all human beings engage in this type of meaning-making. They downplay their transgressions and synthesize resolution where objectively there is none; their lives become the product of the stories they tell about themselves, and living becomes an act of unreliable narration wherein the truths different people tell may be in conflict. The complication of truth created through Eileen and Nora’s unreliable narration, coupled with Moshfegh and Messud’s use of strategies to show a wider picture, lets these stories mirror life. This honoring of complexity enables the reader to wrestle with questions of culpability, perception, memory, and its fallibility; how truth is constructed, and what truth actually is. For those who write fiction, it invites us to consider how much truth even matters, and what kinds of untruth can stand in when the facts simply don’t tell the whole story.

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Hannah Markos Williams is a writer and educator. She teaches high school and college. Williams holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and an M.Ed from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

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Notes