Sex and Submission: The Sexual Conservatism of Sally Rooney
An examination of Sally Rooney's sexual metaphysics
In an essay published several years ago, I wrote about Sally Rooney’s first two novels, Conversations with Friends and Normal People. In that piece I examined the psychology of her characters in light of her pronouncements about social and class power issues (her so-called Marxism), and how the representation of her characters appears to be influenced by both Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? and the psychologist David Smail’s Power Interest and Psychology: Elements of a Social Materialist Understanding of Class. While many people are familiar with Fisher, this is not the case with Smail1, who influenced Fisher, but whose work focused on investigating the societal origins of individual malaise and unhappiness. In his writing he articulated how inequality causes chronic insecurity. He argued that “global capitalism has enormous effects on vast numbers of people in the world who are themselves in no position to be able to see into its operation.” This lack of transparency creates a kind of angst and alienation and depression that is felt by some of Rooney’s characters, for example, Connell in Normal People.
Beautiful World Where Are You is a sub-optimal work by almost any measure. Uninteresting characters ranting about their first-world woes while pretending to care about the unwashed laboring masses. About this, Brandon Taylor noted, “Characters acknowledging their privilege and access to capital has somehow come to be seen as actual class critique in one’s art.” The structural inclusion of emails (that make up a substantial portion of the narrative) between the two main characters seems like pandering to the concept of the internet novel. “This formal choice, occasioned by Rooney’s desire to smuggle mini essays about matters not directly related to the lives of her characters, makes Beautiful World the most ambitious and least successful of Rooney’s novels,” notes Tara K. Menon.
There is a surfeit of commentary about Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Intermezzo and I’m not inclined to add to those critiques. Some of the many thoughtful analyses of Intermezzo include, among others: an essay by the critic/author Ryan Ruby in the NLR, Like A Prayer, Valerie Stivers’ Sally Rooney’s Crypto-Christian Love in Compact, and, Marianela D’Aprile has a terrific critique in the Jacobin, Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo Feels Very Familiar.
My latest essay about Rooney, The Sexual Conservatism of Sally Rooney, appears in Compact Magazine and addresses what I consider to be the preeminent subject in Rooney’s work—sex. Not just sex in a general way, but specifically, fucking. This makes sense because when we talk about sex we are, more than likely, talking about fucking. Which is the ultimate, most intimate union between men and women, and (if it's good) we derive a lot of pleasure from it. The rush of sensations we feel while fucking can be exhilarating and liberating, freeing us from ourselves. In Literature and Evil George Bataille maintains that it allows us to experience a “divine intoxication,” an intoxication “which the rational world of calculation cannot bear.”
However, sex creates a paradox for Rooney because in her sexual metaphysics, publicly her protagonists are progressives (leaning into Marxism), but privately their sex lives remain removed from their dilettantish political project of reform and revolution. In fact, what one discovers in Rooney's work, as I show in the essay, are characters whose erotic subjectivity remains tethered to the structures of patriarchal dominance and submission. In all the novels her characters—unwittingly or not— demonstrate how purportedly radical subjects carry the traditional residues of libidinal economies into the bedroom. No matter how progressive any one of her protagonists is, there are certain atavistic or primordial instincts (the raw “animal stupidity of desire” that Peter complains about in Intermezzo, ) that inject themselves into their bedroom behavior. In this reading, progressive ideology falters at the threshold of desire—particularly for her female characters.
The dilemma with which readers are left is how to reconcile Rooney’s self-proclaimed Marxist progressive stance with the traditional, conservative sexual ideology that affects her characters’ love lives.
At least that’s my thinking. You’ll have to read the essay to see what you think. Link here: The Sexual Conservatism of Sally Rooney
More information about Smail, from his obituary, who believed that ‘if we are to ease distress we must abandon our faith in therapy and take better care of each other. Psychotherapy might offer comfort, clarification and encouragement, but for many, perhaps most, it does not offer a cure. This can only be found through changes in our social arrangements – an essentially political task. It is no small tribute to David's life and work that his arguments seem truer than ever today.’ You can find the book mentioned above here.