The Language War
Robin Tolmach Lakoff
Chapter 5
Hillary Rodham Clinton: What the Sphinx Thinks
Very Funny
Bill, Hillary, and Al Gore are riding in Air Force One when it crashes and all are killed. They find themselves in heaven, and are directed to a large room, at the far end of which is God sitting on a majestic throne.
Al Gore approaches first. "And who are you?" asks God.I'm Al Gore, sir. I was the Vice President of the United States."
"Well, that's very impressive!" says God. "Come here and sit on the chair on my left."
Then Bill Clinton goes in. "And who are you?" "Sir, I'm William Jefferson Clinton. I was President of the United States."
"Well now, that's even more impressive! Come on over here and sit on the chair to my right."
Then Hillary comes in. "And who are you?" asks God.
"I am Hillary Rodham Clinton, and what are you doing in my seat?"
Bill and Hillary are driving around Arkansas and stop to get gas. The attendant and Hillary recognize each other and go on reminiscing together for a while.
Then Bill and Hillary drive off. "Who was that?" asks Bill.
"Oh, that was Fred, my first boyfriend in high school. We went together for a few years."
"Just think," says Bill, "if you'd married him, you'd be living behind a gas station, not in the White House."
"No, dear," says Hillary. "If I had married him, you'd be living behind a gas station, and Fred and I would be living in the White House."
These jokes, in many versions, are endemic on the World Wide Web, which lists some 17,000 sites dedicated (wholly or in part) to the First Lady. The student of contemporary political discourse must explain why there are so many jokes about both Clintons, why the First Lady continues to preoccupy such a large swath of the public's attention in her own right, and why the jokes, and the attention, take the multiple and often contradictory forms they do. Why does this First Lady--and this First Couple--pass the UAT so spectacularly?
To answer that question, we have to examine the first lady's role. During most of our history the first lady's job description has been vague, if the role was thought of as a job at all. During our first century, Americans didn't have an official title for the president's spouse. Martha was called "Lady Washington." Later, as populism replaced the Hamiltonian quasi-monarchy, titles like "Presidentress" and "Mrs. President" were tried out but didn't stick. It wasn't until 1870 that the title "first lady" came into use (Caroli 1987). The role itself is more problematic than the title. It has no constitutional status, no official duties or privileges. But unofficially, over time a complex if tacit web of expectations has become connected to the role (one can hardly call it an "office"), and even more so, to the woman who inhabits it.
Telling Tales out of School
In the two previous chapters, I examined two recent cases in which language rights had come into sharp competition, provoking undue attention. In Chapter 3, the linguistic artifacts involved were small and concrete: words and phrases. In Chapter 4, there was a mixture: some of the language under dispute was like that in Chapter 3, small and concrete units: the meaning of "sexual harassment." More often the investigation had to move to higher levels: the functions of complex syntactic structures like tag questions; the interpretation of speech acts like threats; the distribution of conversational turns and its consequences; the uses of black and white traditional discourse styles. Finally the analysis moved to a still higher level: the competition over the meaning of the events of Hill/Thomas themselves: who got to make the story at the end.
In this chapter, the narrative will be my major focus. To my mind the most shocking thing about Hillary Rodham Clinton is the fact that, as a woman, she has found ways, either direct or subversive, of retaining control over her own narrative, her own meaning. But there has been from the start hot competition from many sides within the media and the Beltway for that right. We are eager for the story-making rights because we want to construct her, and through her ourselves; but she eludes our narrative grasp.
Some readers may feel a disconnect at this juncture. I have been representing myself as a linguist (I would be a card-carrying member of the LSA if they gave out cards). As long as I mind my business, keeping my attention focused on the minutiae of language (words, sentences, maybe even speech acts), I am safely within my allotted boundaries. Linguistics retains its historical definition (of great comfort to many of my colleagues). But in reaching out to the vastnesses of narrative structure, of stories and meta-stories, of narrative-making rights and their subversions, some readers may wonder if I'm still being a "linguist." Or, if I'm not, whether I retain the authority to speak.
Linguists study language; literary critics study text (including narratives). Once that division of labor made sense; once I obeyed it. But more and more that boundary seems like an artificial barrier that works to stop the flow of understanding. Language doesn't stop with the word or the sentence, or even the conversational turn; to understand its meaning, the analyst has to have the capacity to see it in its totality. Certainly the literary critic can find matter in stories that will be lost to me. Political scientists and historians will find stories here other than the ones I f ind worth exploring; communication theorists will look at these stories in different ways than I do, asking different questions. I think those notions are reasonable ways of drawing disciplinary boundaries nowadays: often different fields try to make sense of the same data, the same artifacts, but they do so in different ways and so arrive at different places that they call "answers." But I reject the older idea that disciplines are absolutely differentiated by the subject matter they may look at. For me, the linguist's job is understanding how language makes us human, and the answer to that question comes from looking at language in all its interlocking complexities, at every level. From each level of language--the sound, the word, the sentence, the turn--we learn something about who we are and how we work. From the higher and more abstract levels--the discourse, the narrative--alone do we learn about what we mean.
Narratives can be subjected to analytic techniques analogous to those used for lower levels of language. We can look at the choices of words, at sentence structure; at the presuppositions and frames assumed; at the speech acts that are chosen; at the levels of directness, or indirectness, the narrator chooses; at what is said, what is implied, and what is absent. All of these, and more, make the story what it is and allow maker and hearer to collaborate in a coherent meaning.
Perhaps more interesting still, at least here, is the meta-narrative: the story about or behind the story, the subtext. Why does the story exist in more than one version? What is the one that wasn't told--the other way to see a set of events? Always tellers have choices to make: in this case, how do those choices tell us what we want to make of our subject, and ourselves?
The Making of the Hillary Rodham Clinton Story
Just as presidents traditionally receive significantly more media attention than do ordinary men, first ladies get more coverage than average women (who until recently were admonished that a woman should get her name in the paper only three times in her life: when she is born, when she gets married, and when she dies). But while the amount of attention given President Bill Clinton is typical of presidents (although the quality of that coverage is not), since the start of her husband's candidacy in 1992 Hillary Rodham Clinton has faced virtually incessant media attention, much more and of a strikingly different type than have previous first ladies. Not only are her doings and sayings tirelessly reported. She is relentlessly interpreted. More significantly, she is relentlessly and deliberately misinterpreted.
Her media presence is ubiquitous: scarcely a day goes by without some report of her activities or some analysis of her psyche. And the fascination is endemic: in daily newspapers, newsmagazines, magazines of culture, Sunday supplements, radio talk shows, television magazine shows--everywhere. Images of her are remarkably diverse, ranging from strongly adulatory to ferociously critical; they represent her as a person of wildly different personalities, doing and saying what it is hard to imagine a single individual doing or saying. The coverage is unusual too for the deep psychological analysis of its target. While other first ladies have been covered largely on the basis of their observable actions, Rodham Clinton has been subjected to the ceaseless ministrations of amateur psychoanalysts: we seem more concerned with what makes her tick than with what she is doing. Also unusual is the fact that, while there are ups and downs in the level of Rodham Clinton's media attention, it has remained high. Ordinarily media coverage of first ladies has a predictable trajectory. When a man first presents himself as a candidate, there is interest in his wife, which increases when the husband becomes the party's candidate. After his electoral victory, interest in her continues for a while, turning now to thefirst lady's adjustment to her new role: her plans for redecoration of the White House; her moving into her White House office and selection of her staff; her family's integration into their new routine; and the selection of the First Lady Project. The latter is normally something decorative and uncontroversial: highway beautification, promoting mental health or literacy, teaching children to Just Say No to drugs. Then the first lady settles into relative obscurity, except for occasional photo-ops of her at work on her project or attending official functions with her husband, the president. Perhaps there is an occasional flurry of scandal, but it usually vanishes fast.
In Chapter 4 I described the levels of media attention given to Hill/Thomas: first the explosion of immediate impressions in the daily press and the electronic media; then the profusion of in-depth coverage in the weekly newsmagazines, followed by the more analytic commentaries of the monthlies. These had exhausted themselves by the end of 1991, a scant three months after the pivotal event. By early 1992, and continuing through that year, the more intellectual popular magazines, followed by scholarly journals, took over the business of analysis and prognostication in greater depth. By the end of 1992, the topic had retreated into obscurity, with only occasional forays back into public consciousness.
But the attention lavished on Rodham Clinton is different. Hill/Thomas was a momentary blip on the radar: the pivotal moment encompassed only the single day of October 12, 1991, the day of Hill's testimony to the Judiciary Committee (although the whole story has to include the penumbra from the resignation of Thurgood Marshall in May of 1991 to the confirmation of Clarence Thomas in late October). But the image catalogued in our minds under Hill/Thomas is one of Hill sitting before the committee, on that October day, in that turquoise suit, an image frozen at a moment in time.
Interest in Rodham Clinton, though, has extended over many years, waxing and waning. Long-term assessments and scholarly analyses of Rodham Clinton are significantly sparser than those of Hill/Thomas. While there have been a number of long analytical pieces in the intellectual popular media,1 scholarly journals have contained relatively little discussion of the First Lady. One reason may be that Rodham Clinton's fifteen minutes aren't over yet, and academics prefer to concentrate on completed events. They're safer--you're less likely to be contradicted by what happens next. (And we are in this business because it's safe.)
The Rodham Clinton story develops gradually. She comes into public awareness in 1991-92, as her husband debates his candidacy and decides to run. It is clear from the start that she isn't like the other candidates' wives, even as her husband isn't like the other men: a new generation has come of age. For the male half of the couple, that means that a series of World War II-generation presidents (all of whom either served or had some reason not to or, in one case, allegedly believed he had served because he was in war movies) from Kennedy to Bush gave way to the Vietnam War generation, with its very different ideals, views of war, and social attitudes. Those changes make us nervous, but nowhere near as nervous as the change on what might once have been called "the distaff side."
Because Rodham Clinton was a curiosity, media and public attention focused on her; because she quickly became, like her husband but even more strikingly so, a symbol of the New World Order--the changing roles of women, the replacement of old mores by new--that attention was polarized from the start, either passionately positive or virulently negative. Clichés and stereotypes were tested, toyed with, fitted on her. Her refusal to fit into them was exhilarating to some, infuriating to others. Because she fits no pattern, the media flounder in their treatment of her. She slithers out of the analysts' grasp, resisting definition or categorization.2 That both piques our interest and arouses anxiety and rage in many of us. Unlike any previous occupant of her position, she remains continually in the public eye, continually under scrutiny, examination, and reanalysis. She is the first first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt to pass the UAT.3 When we examine her, we are trying to know ourselves.
The MAGS and NEWS databases provide a record of the ebb and flow of Hillariana over eight years:
| MAGS | NEWS | |
| (816 total) | (2,152 total) | |
| 1991 | 0 | 2 |
| 1992 | 56 | 159 |
| 1993 | 152 | 410 | 1994 | 197 | 448 | 1995 | 89 | 271 | 1996 | 213 | 538 | 1997 | 71 | 214 | 1998 | 38 | 110 | (through July)
The rest of 1995 was relatively uneventful for Rodham Clinton, and media interest ebbed (although it still exceeded the attention normally given to first ladies). The great upsurge in 1996 was largely due to the publication of Rodham Clinton's book, It Takes a Village,which was on the best-seller list for many weeks, aroused immense controversy from all sides of the political spectrum (see below), and required the author's presence on interview shows and book tours. Again, interest subsided by the next year.
A Little Background Noise
Why is Rodham Clinton endlessly fascinating? In large measure, like other UAT-passers, because she has come to represent something that makes us uncertain of who we are and what things mean--specifically, the new woman playing a new role. While Rodham Clinton is in many ways a representative of that novelty in her own right, her notoriety arises to a significant degree because, as first lady, she symbolizes the contrast between the old and the new, and especially because her predecessor, Barbara Bush, so perfectly represented the comfortable traditional woman and wife. Barbara Bush left Smith College in the late 1940's to get married, without taking her undergraduate degree. She had a large family and no career outside the home. The women's movement happened when Mrs. Bush was in middle age, a bit late for her to attempt to adapt, even if she had wanted to. The one book she wrote as first lady was a quasi autobiography of her springer spaniel, Millie--cute, charming, uncontroversial: the very model of first lady work.
Hillary Rodham Clinton was born about when Barbara Bush was getting married, in 1947. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1969 as a student leader, delivering a valedictory address that was featured in Lifemagazine. She went on to Yale Law School, where she met Bill. It never occurred to her not to have a career--the only questions were what career, and how, or whether, to combine it with marriage and motherhood. Those were the difficult questions facing women of the baby-boom generation, as their male cohorts agonized over Vietnam. She served as an attorney on the staff of the Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment inquiry during Watergate. She followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas, taking a position at the University of Arkansas Law School. After Bill became attorney general, Hillary moved from law school to private practice at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock.4
The Clintons were married in 1975; Hillary kept her birth name. Her refusal to change it was later blamed as the cause of Bill's failure to win reelection in 1980. The amount of vitriol expended on what in a rational world would be just a simple personal choice (but in Arkansas in 1980, clearly wasn't) was extraordinary. According to Connie Bruck (1994),
One friend recalled standing next to her at a reception at the Rose firm in the late seventies, and seeing a man approach her, jab angrily at the nametag pinned to her blouse, and fairly spit out, "That's not your name!"
And, according to David Maraniss:
During the 1980 campaign, one powerful member of the Arkansas House offered the opinion to Representative Ray Smith, Jr., of Hot Springs that "Hillary's gonna have to change her name and shave her legs." (1995, 399)
There is evidently a lot more at stake, in the minds of people like those quoted above, than a mere change in nomenclature, especially with the added injunction about leg-shaving (which in a reasonable universe would surelybe None of His Business).
A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery inside an Enigma
Who is the most feared and hated woman in America?
Tonya Rodham Bobbitt.
The multiple mystery is this: why does Rodham Clinton generate the amount, and kind, of attention that she does? Human nature needs to resolve mysteries: those that cannot be readily penetrated become objects of deep fascination. As a woman, Rodham Clinton's unwillingness or inability to be "penetrated" is itself contradictory. Women are meant to be penetrated and interpreted; a woman who resists is no woman. Of course, a woman who permits herself to be penetrated by strangers is no lady. But Rodham Clinton, even as she is no woman, is First Lady.
Since its inception, the presidency itself has been a locus of both symbolic and literal power. The president presides over the nation's business and executes its laws; uses his position as the bully pulpit, for purposes of persuasion; advocates for the passage of bills by Congress; utilizes veto power; makes appointments with the advice and consent of the Senate; and declares war. His literal power is relatively circumscribed by our system of checks and balances, the two-party system, and the limitation of his term of office to two four-year terms. His symbolic power is greater, and because its terms are never expressly stated, it becomes mysterious and like other mysteries generates fear. Among the symbolic powers, or roles, of the President of the United States is the expectation that he represents the current version of the ideal man.
To be sure, there is no single "ideal man" that we all agree on. We have different ideals in our minds for different purposes: the big moneymaker, the loving Daddy, the hunk, the competent worker, the creator, the athlete, the nice sensitive guy...But the president ideally plays at least some of these symbolic roles. Typically an older man, he is Father, or at least Daddy, of the country; he is a take-charge guy, he has stated opinions, he acts on them, he gets results. People listen to him and obey him. He is a good family man, faithful to his wife, loving to his children (but not overly attached to either: his work is his real life). He is Ward Cleaver, Ben Cartwright, Dr. Ben Casey, images of a time remembered (or encountered in reruns) as a golden age.
The first lady's literal role is virtually nonexistent. As a symbol--the totality of her job--the first lady serves as an ideal and role model for women. She must be the womanliest, the most feminine, of us all. That is not to say that she should be sexy: no man wants to be caught desiring Daddy's mate. So she should be feminine in a womanly rather than sirenly way. That means that she should be devoted to her man and concerned for his well-being; attentive to her (usually grown-up) family and its domestic animals; occupied in traditional kinds of good works and worthy projects; ladylike and stereotypically feminine (demure, submissive, compliant); well, but not flamboyantly, dressed; her home and family should be her life.
Because the first lady has no real role, her symbolic role becomes all-important. This is especially true because she defines contemporaneous womanhood, and thus (if she plays her part properly) serves as a standard and a source of instruction for all American women. Her propriety keeps us all in line. If the rest of us can grasp the first lady as a simple caricature or stereotype of ideal womanhood, then we control both the first lady and all women.
The first lady and the president thus perform similar symbolic tasks, and as a result are sharply differentiated by sex role stereotyping and polarization. First ladies who play by the rules are by no means exempt from criticism (thus Barbara Bush, an almost-perfect specimen, was needled for her amplitude and her white hair--there were comments about her looking older than her husband). But what there is, is rare and relatively mild.
Occasional first ladies overstep. Eleanor Roosevelt was described, if jocularly, by her husband as out of his control. Mary Todd Lincoln was seen as eccentric and demanding, if not an outright Confederate spy (mad and bad). Rosalynn Carter was dubbed "the Steel Magnolia" and chastised for attending her husband's cabinet meetings and otherwise meddling in affairs of state. Nancy Reagan caught criticism for consulting an astrologer for guidance in governance, meddling in the running of the White House, and extravagance in dress and in the purchase of White House furnishings. But Mrs. Carter and Mrs. Reagan staved off more severe criticism because they behaved in other respects like traditional ladies. Nancy gazed adoringly at her husband at all photo-ops, the prototype of proper wifeliness. Rosalynn spoke in a soft Southern drawl. By fitting the stereotype, a typical first lady allows herself to be readily interpreted and invites us to make of her what we will--the result will threaten no one. No wonder that the first lady always comes out high on the list of "most admired women."
But Hillary Rodham Clinton is the striking exception. Right up there with Mary Todd Lincoln, she kept her birth name. Even worse than Mrs. Lincoln, she tried at first to avoid using her husband's name at all. By so doing, she sought to maintain her own individual identity, one not defined in terms of her marital status. Hence, in the joke at the beginning of this section, it is "Rodham" that stands for Hillary Rodham Clinton, along with "Tonya" for Tonya Harding and "Bobbitt" for Lorena Bobbitt. "Rodham"--and all that that implies--stands for everything that makes her "feared and hated."
Her reluctance to change her name is only the most obvious and concrete sign of the threat Rodham Clinton poses as First Lady. The real problems are much deeper. She refuses to be interpretable, remaining contradictory and enigmatic; even as she is supposed to be a symbol of ideal womanhood, she changes the roles women play and our definitions of womanhood, and she does so at the very moment at which real roles for women are changing and resisting easy definition. The complexity and ambiguity distress not only many men, but women too, especially those who have come to maturity under the old regime. In fact women may be even more disturbed, since women writers have supplied the most vicious and undercutting critiques of the First Lady. An editorial writer in the National Review (March 30, 1992) quotes Kipling's line that "the female of the species is deadlier than the male." Especially to uppity females.
Here's Camille Paglia (1996), discussing Rodham Clinton as "Ice Queen, Drag Queen": she is high and mighty; she puts on airs; she is a "Queen" like all the Quota Queens and Welfare Queens of conservative infamy. She looks"glamorous," but it's just a ploy to get us into her clutches:
A limousine pulls up and out steps not Hillary the shrewd lawyer or Hillary the happy homemaker but Hillary the radiantly glamorous movie star. Her blond hair is dramatically, seductively styled. She is wearing, quite improbably, a long black velvet coat trimmed with royalist gold brocade. Head high, she stalks grandly to the microphones and greets the press as if they were dear friends come to bid her well. Then, like Mary Queen of Scots on her way to the scaffold, she sweeps away for her grueling four-hour rendezvous with independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr.
It is not unreasonable to detect in Paglia's equation of Rodham Clinton with Mary Queen of Scots a threat or malevolent wish--and look what happened toMary! (a point underscored by the reference to the "scaffold").
New York TimesOp-Ed columnist Maureen Dowd has been on Rodham Clinton's case unremittingly since the start. One regrettable characteristic of Dowd's commentary is the way she combines the omnipotence of those born to the Times's Op-Ed page with the age-old female ways of cutting down to size other women who aim too high: irrelevant comments on looks, style, clothing, and figure. The comments need not be explicitly negative to have the desired trivializing effect. At one press conference, Dowd (1996) notes that Rodham Clinton "wore pink." In a front-page article, Dowd (1994) describes her in the second paragraph: "But Mrs. Clinton, pert in a navy blue suit and a print scarf held with a gold frog pin, never looked weary for a moment."
Particularly vituperative is an article by Noemie Emery (1993) that makes explicit many of the deep anxieties that motivate much of the negative response from both sexes. Emery fears that the Clintons exemplify a move within the culture toward androgyny that started with "giving dolls to little boys and trucks to little girls, neutralizing the female as the movement pursues its real interest of negating and containing the male."5 She is "a lot tougher" than he and, worse, has "made much more money"--proof positive that she is no real woman. "He insinuates. She orders. He seduces. She demands." This analysis is as fuzzy as it is weird: it's not clear whether Emery is seriously suggesting that the Clintons are at the vanguard of a feminist conspiracy to rob us of our gender, but if the article is ironic, you'd never guess it from its tone. It's peculiar to see medieval superstition and gullibility given a new life in the pages of an intellectually respectable magazine.6
I think, though, that it isn't so much either of the Clintons' actual gender indeterminacy (if such it is) that is troubling, as that that indeterminacy forecloses the possibility of certainty, of "pinning down" either of them. And if we cannot pin Hillary down, we cannot get control of her. Her insistence on defining herself makes her a new kind of woman--to some, not a woman at all. "[N]othing has been more conspicuous (or distracting)," says Bruck (1994), "than the barrage of changing images of Hillary." That obfuscation occurs in many aspects of the perceived character of Rodham Clinton. The repeated boomeranging between opposites suggests both a need to classify her via absolutes and the frustration and anger of the would-be classifiers.
She is poised between polar opposites: is she...
icy or emotional?
She is often described as imperturbable under stress that would drive most of us to drink or mayhem. Indeed, it is her very unflappability that wins her epithets like "Ice Queen" or "Sister Frigidaire" (Bruck 1994). It would seem that her detractors are disappointed they can't get a rise out of her, because when they do, they can describe her as "out of control," "angry," or "depressed." "'She has a temper like you would not believe,' a male former associate at the Rose firm said. 'It's not so much that she screams--it's more the tone in her voice, the body language, the facial expressions. It's "The Wrath of Khan"'" (Bruck 1994).
competent or incompetent?
On the one hand, when she was appointed to the Health Care Task Force in 1993, she turned in a stellar performance, according to early ratings. Bruck (1994) quotes Lawrence O'Donnell, Jr., the Senate Finance Committee's chief of staff: "[A]nd what I had just heard were the most perfectly composed, perfectly punctuated sentences, growing into paragraphs, in the most perfect, fluid, presentation about what our problems in the field were and what we could do about them....And then she held her position in the face of questioning....And she was more impressive than any Cabinet member who has sat in that chair." But when the Plan failed, she was blamed and widely savaged as incompetent:7 she was too insistent on secrecy, the report was over a thousand pages long and impenetrable, she alienated congressmen with alternative but compatible plans, etc. The earlier raves were totally forgotten.
radical or conservative?
She is regularly denounced in the conservative media as a "radical" who kept her name, wants to allow children to sue their parents, wants the state to take over the control of your kids, and is in favor of reproductive rights. But there is also a chorus of opposition on the left, which scourges her for her conservative and un-feminist stands: for permitting the passage of the Welfare Reform Act; for preaching religion, chastity, and opposition to divorce; for failing to ensure the passage of health care reform; for the "therapeutic policing" Alexander Cockburn alleged she was advocating in It Takes a Village.8
feminist or sexist?
Here too it's all in the eye of the beholder. Conservatives see a "radical feminist" who kept her name when she married and as a married woman with a child, works outside the home as a high-powered attorney. But liberals, including many feminists, see a woman who has used a traditional female path to influence, marriage to a powerful man, whose feminism cracks under critique: she changes her name back to appease critics, dresses in pastels, apologizes abjectly when attacked, as reported by Marian Burros (1995): "Saying that she is eager to present herself in a more likable way, Hillary Rodham Clinton said today that she had been 'naive and dumb' about national politics and was to blame for the failure of the health care overhaul plan of last year." In It Takes a Villageshe expressed opposition to several tenets of feminist theory and practice, in particular the easy availability of divorce.
The criticism of Rodham Clinton for piggybacking on her husband's career might be apropos in a society in which a woman could hope to achieve influence and fully utilize her abilities by the same direct route available to men. When a female presidency has become unremarkable, we can sneer at career moves like Rodham Clinton's.
straight or lesbian?
And if the former, "normal " or sexually predatory?
Persistent rumors on the Internet and on radio talk shows have Rodham Clinton installing a coven of lesbian conspirators in her husband's cabinet; and, at the other extreme, murdering (or arranging the murder of) Vincent Foster to conceal the "torrid affair" she was having with him. The coexistence of both suggests that the troglodyte right either does not know what "lesbians" are, or does not know what a "torrid affair" is, or (as is consistent with Freud's characterization of infantile thinking) is untroubled by contradictions. On the other hand, perhaps (recall the discussion in Chapter 4) the contradiction vanishes if we understand the true meaning of the gossip. What lesbians and sexually predatory straight women have in common is that their sexuality is not intended for the pleasure of men. Thus both are equally outlaws, and both are "the same."
saint or sinner? (naughty or nice?)
The saint-or-sinner duality is repeatedly invoked--twice in Newsweek, once as the title of an article (Clift and Miller 1994) and once as the title of a cover story (Brant and Thomas 1996). The religiosity of the terminology is striking: one is reminded of Eve and her role in the Fall; it's always a woman's fault. The subhead of the 1994 story continues the theme: "Hillary: She wasn't all that greedy in Little Rock. But her pose as selfless public servant set her up for a fall."
Here as throughout, the dichotomization is striking. In our sophisticated age we seldom find it necessary to pin down our male public figures as "saint" or "sinner." The modern, post-Freudian consciousness recognizes and encompasses complexity. But when it is a woman under a microscope, we want an answer, a single answer, couched as "either/or," not "both/and."
To be sure, Rodham Clinton herself sometimes seems to be encouraging the confusion, creating ambiguity for the heck of it. She has often referred to the pleasure she takes in changing her hairstyle continually; and she often reshapes her fashion image, now in hats, now headbands; in pastels, black, or bright colors. This is sometimes seen as a mark of indecision and fuzziness, the external counterpart to her husband's waffling in the politico-rhetorical sphere. But it could be another way she keeps control of her persona and her meaning: as soon as someone thinks they can predict how she'll look, she's onto something else. Now you see it, now you don't. And we don't even know what her mutability means: is she out of control? in control? So at the metalevel, she evades interpretation yet again. We don't even know whether we know.
Billary
Why won't Hillary wear miniskirts?
She doesn't want us to see her balls.
What does Hillary do after she shaves her pussy?
Sends him to the Oval Office to work.
The same ambiguity and indeterminacy exist between the First Couple. Bill and Hillary combine and recombine, mix 'n' match their characters and roles. Some refer to the aggregate as Billary.They bend gender. He is in many ways more traditionally "feminine": he is intuitive, he "feels your pain," he is warm and caring, he worries about his weight, he has fuzzy outlines: his hair is frizzy, his body is--well--a little sloppy. He used to parade before us in skimpy running shorts. All too often he exercises the famous female prerogative of changing his mind. He needs discipline: he eats junk food, he pursues trailer trash, he needs a "bimbo watch." He speaks in a southern accent, which Americans often associate with a feminine speaking (and thinking) style. He is, generally, soft.
Sheshares many traits with the stereotypical male. She is direct and precise. She is nonspontaneous, as Eleanor Clift (1992) reports: "[S]pontaneity has never been Hillary's style. She decided to become a blonde only after reading Margaret Thatcher's autobiography." She plans (or schemes), she is carefully controlled and seeks to control her environment. She is often perceived as cold or even icy, as by Paglia (1996): "The woman her classmates called 'Sister Frigidaire' has the 'mind of winter.'...This coldness is the brittle brilliance of Hillary's calculating, analytic mind, which at its most legalistic has a haughty, daunting impersonality." Her clothes tend to conceal and cover, to shield her and define her boundaries precisely. Her hair, too, is a bit helmetlike: at least, it is clearly differentiated from the surroundings. She has no discernible regional accent. She is hard.9
The Clintons' image problems, then, include gender indeterminacy and gender-bending, fuzziness and ambiguity of character and intention; indeterminacy of role; and multiplicity of meaning. We have here the very model of postmodernism. To an America that never even warmed to modernism, this is a threat--certainly not something you would want to find in your Chief Symbologists. The criticism is all the more potent since many conservative critics have identified deconstructionism and postmodernism (along with "radical feminism" and multiculturalism) as the most pernicious of the evils destroying modern America.
The fears gain momentum from the observation, all around us, of the erosion of the ancient, rigid (and to many comforting) divide between men and women. In the very Paper of Record is a report that men are...well...turning into women, even as women are turning into men. In this article a therapist (worse yet--therapists are our new authority figures!) says:
Our culture hasn't made sense of either the women's or the gay liberation movements, and as a result, the narcissistic roles are shifting between men and women. Traditionally, women have expressed their narcissism through sexuality, by being the identified objects of beauty. Men affirmed themselves through aggression, by gaining power and possessions. Now, not only have women gained much more power, but men are allowing themselves, in a way that wasn't possible 20, 10, or even 5 years ago, to display themselves publicly as sexual objects. Most men see this as both exciting and frightening. (Henderson 1998)
To many, this is scarier than a Stephen King movie. The article goes on to describe men's preoccupation with their own beauty and perfection: workouts, face-lifts, manicures. "I've got to maintain my girlish figure," says one--no doubt ironically, but that we understand it at all is a sign of changing times, changing roles. And when the nation's Ideal Couple themselves represent this fearsome switch, there is everything to fear, including fear itself.
If the nation's highest symbolic office is (co-)occupied by a pair who represent everything that many fear and loathe, Rodham Clinton in particular has become a symbol of all our fears: social change, intellectual indeterminacy, loss of national purpose, loss of individual initiative and morality, loss of parental control over children and male control over women. As a symbolic figure, she can only be dealt with by the construction of reductive, and destructive, images. As Paglia (1996) notes: "Like Judy Garland, Maria Callas or Madonna, with their excesses, heartbreaks, torments and comebacks, Hillary the man-woman and bitch-goddess has become a strange superstar whose rise and fall is already the stuff of myth."
Conservatives sometimes seem unable to pinpoint exactly what it is about her that drives them so crazy. They try to find character traits in her that anyone would despise. For instance, according to Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (1996): "'A lot of Americans are uncomfortable with her self-righteousness,' Arianna Huffington says....Peggy Noonan...speaks of 'an air of apple-cheeked certitude' that is 'political in its nature and grating in its effects,' of 'an implicit insistence throughout her career that hers were the politics of moral decency and therefore those who opposed her politics were obviously of a lower moral order.'" Yes, self-righteousness is distasteful, and moral certitude and superiority unattractive. But the critique would sit more persuasively in the mind were it not from those who equate homosexuality with criminality and sin, abortion with murder. Rather than speaking, as Rodham Clinton does, in generalities, they are very specific about what you may notdo in the privacy of your home, and what should happen to you if you do; and what I may notput into or take out of my body, and what should happen to me if I do. Huffington and Noonan should recall the old adage about pots calling kettles black.
Meeting the Press
Predictably, the Clintons' obfuscations distress the members of the Fourth Estate. In part it's the same distress that affects many others; and the media reflect public opinion at least as much as they create it. But the level of rancor seems to demand more of an explanation. The media seem fixated on Hillary's negative poll numbers, and at each election offer up prognostications about how her numbers, lower than his, will hurt his chances of reelection. What is missing from this calculus is a realization that the people who claim to hate Hillary so much that her existence makes them "less likely" to vote for her husband (a very small percentage--14 percent in 1992) are unlikely to vote for him anyway (Carlson 1992; Corcoran 1993).
Media perceptions may not accurately reflect popular opinion. Katherine Corcoran notes that at a period when "at least 20 major publications had compared Hillary to Lady Macbeth," her favorable rating was at 56 percent, the same as Bill's. Corcoran discusses the attempts of the media to demonize and blame Rodham Clinton, and the refusal of the public to be swayed very deeply, or very long, as a result. She notes that some of the harshest critique came from female members of the press corps, all of whom when interviewed denied that they were being in any way sexist or unfair. Eleanor Clift of Newsweek,after writing an article quoting an "anonymous friend" of Hillary's to the effect that "[A]s bitchy as she comes off, he [Bill] really loves her," told Corcoran that "Hillary's views were covered for the most part by women reporters who were very sympathetic to her." If this is sympathy, I'd just as soon be tarred and feathered. But it's hard to explain this snideness among just the women who, logically, should be the most supportive of the First Lady--women very like herself, women for whom, in the eyes of traditionalists, she is a stand-in. All are women who could be (and undoubtedly are) seen, by the same people who fear and hate Rodham Clinton, as pushy feminists usurping men's traditional power and expressive rights.
One partial explanation is Rodham Clinton's own distrust of the press and open hostility to them (though the treatment she has received from them makes that a rational attitude). They may feel, too, that they have to bend over backwards to avoid the appearance of favoritism. But there was much less bending over in previous administrations. Possibly they see Rodham Clinton as keeping them from doing their job, interpreting her. If she makes interpretation impossible, must they not feel, at some level, that she is deliberately thwarting them, even making sport of the whole journalistic project? And, finally, their resentment against Rodham Clinton could conceal regrets about their having been forced to become "one of the boys" to survive. As Maurine Beasley (1993) says:
Deborah Howell, Washington Bureau Chief for Newhouse Newspapers, confessed in the Media Studies Journal that she, as did many women of her generation, patterned herself after successful men. "I thought it was wonderful when a colleague said I was 'a credit to my sex.' To be 'one of the boys' or 'a man's woman' were compliments...."I really had three categories of gender--men, women who are men, and women who stayed home."
If that kind of uncertainty and self-doubt is characteristic of women in the press corps, it could explain their coverage of the Clintons, and Rodham Clinton in particular, who (as a new woman) might seem to be having all the fun and none of the pain.
One more reason for ambivalence toward the Clintons, by the media and the rest of us, is their age.10 Bill Clinton is our first president from the post-World War II generation. As a result, he not only lacks war experience, but also grew up in a period of changing mores and morals. Americans older than the Clintons might be expected to resent the takeover of everything by young whippersnappers. The President arouses anxiety as the most visible exemplar of the scary fact that they are aging and threatened with losing their jobs to younger workers, and at the same time the First Lady reminds them that, for the first time, women are competing for jobs with men on terms of relative equality. On top of that, the President's life style is one many Americans, especially older ones, view with suspicion if not outright loathing: his extramarital escapades (involving as they do kinky forms of sex), his tendency to prevaricate, his various excesses. While the First Lady herself seems above suspicion in these areas at least, if the First Couple blend together as Billary, some of the stigma might rub off on her.
Love and Hate
Rodham Clinton arouses passion in almost everyone: love or hate, nothing in between. Over the last eight years the media and the public have veered wildly in their feelings about her. An article in the New York Timesplots the swings in public opinion over time (Alvarez 1998). For most of the Clinton administration, her "favorable" ratings have exceeded the "unfavorable," at times (mid-1992) by as much as 35 points (45 percent to under 10 percent). At times (during the Health Care Initiative period and its aftermath, and after the publication of It Takes a Villagein 1996) the negatives have jumped above the positives by as much as ten points. At the time the article was written, the ratings were 50 percent favorable to about 27 percent unfavorable.
The split is nowhere better demonstrated than in the reviews of It Takes a Village on the Amazon Web site by nonprofessional readers. Visitors to the site are encouraged to provide capsule reviews and award books one to five stars. With most books, both opinions and stars tend to cluster together: a book gets three to four stars, or four to five. For instance, the Bob Woodward book about the 1996 presidential election, The Choice,which was on the best-seller list at roughly the same time as the First Lady's, got only a few reviews, whose writers gave the book either four or five stars. But It Takes a Villagegot eleven reviews, an unusually large number. The site gives the "average" customer review as three stars, but that is the one rating not found. There are five single stars, four fives, and two fours. The first two reviews illustrate the schism:
*It takes a phoney!!!! A pathetic attempt to show concern for others from a woman who has nothing but contempt for others, especially if those others stand between her and power! Along with her husband, she has no apparent sign of moral behavior, nor does she or her husband stand on or for any principles.cowards, cowards, cowards !!!
*****Well written (and spoken on audio) and from the heart. Hillary Rodham Clinton has written a wonderful, thought-provoking book. Obviously written from her heart and substantial knowledge of children's issues, it explores how each of us impact children's lives and ultimately our own. Mrs. Clinton has the ability and intelligence to see that and to verbalize it very well in an engrossing book that everyone of us should read. It is too bad that under the dissimulation of a review, some people have chosen to bash it based on their political stand instead of their literary one.
As the second reviewer suggests, the book itself seems the last thing on several of the (especially negative) reviewers' minds. One suspects some of them may not have read it too closely: a couple complain that she gives short shrift to parents, when in fact the roles and importance of parents are discussed on virtually every page. Reviewers here and in more conventional media also are prone to seeing "village" either as a euphemism for "state" and the book as a call for taking children away from their parents to be raised (presumably, in Gingrichian orphanages); or understanding the "village" as exclusive of the "family" or "parents," when in fact Rodham Clinton makes it clear she intends "village" to include the "family" and "parents" (as real-world villages normally include the families that compose them). Here as elsewhere, conservative critics betray their ignorance of much of what human adults normally know about the workings of ordinary language (e.g., frames and presuppositions) in order to make their points.
In fact Rodham Clinton's advocacy for children--which might offhand seem to be a moot point--appears to function as the red flag to many a conservative bull. Just as Eleanor Roosevelt's advocacy of black civil rights made many contemporary critics foam at the mouth, Rodham Clinton's discussion of the culture's inhumanities to children does the same now. Many reviewers barely hide their rage against children and against those who would claim that children--anychildren, ever--need advocates or protectors from adults. Some of the reviews express a panicky fear that our children are out to get us, that they are just lying in wait for the opportunity to report us to the Child Protection Agency for no reason at all.This alienation is not unrelated to the media's current preoccupation with children who kill. Taken together, both kinds of stories illustrate the movement, in our collective psyches, of the semantic concept of "children" from helpless figures in need of nurture to manipulative or downright hostile creatures we can neither understand nor trust. Thus in her review Jean Bethke Elshtain (1996) sneers at Rodham Clinton's encouraging people to "'help' people in various ways, whether the people in question have asked for it or not." Following in the footsteps of many conservative critics, Elshtain suggests that the purported "epidemic" of child abuse is much overrated. No statistics are given to support that implication. (The review also takes a passing slap at the "chattering classes" excoriated by Peggy Noonan [1991], a current favorite in the neocon slogan armamentarium. I keep wondering who comprises the "chattering classes" if not people who write for intellectual(ish) magazines like The New Republic.)
The arguments themselves are less puzzling than the rage that fuels their overheated rhetoric. It is true that presidents other than Clinton have been the targets of virulent anger. In the last fifty years, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon certainly qualify. But that anger never extended to their wives, and in both of these cases, it was directed at the president's official actions and behavior: LBJ's and Nixon's escalation of the Vietnam War, Nixon's anticommunist smear campaigns, his documented Enemies List, Watergate. Absent from the screeds on the Web and in the media is any clear indication of just what the writers or speakers are so furious at the Clintons for. There are fulminations about lying, immorality, and among the wing nuts, murders and cover-ups, but as far as documented political misbehavior--nothing. (And--by contrast with the LBJ and Nixon administrations--no one today faces getting sent off to die in the jungles of southeast Asia.)
From other quarters come equally passionate defenses of the Clintons, whose source is just as difficult to document. The more scandals are exposed, the higher their popularity soars and the more money pours into his defense fund and the Democratic campaign coffers (Seelye 1999). It is difficult not to conclude that the Clintons are detested, when they are, and adored, when they are, not for what they do but for what they are, and in fact not even so much for what they are as for what they symbolize: changes in the allocation of power and authority from those who always had it to new groups, new rules or no rules at all--the threat of anarchy, a new style of public (as of private) discourse.
Those fears may explain the passion of conservatives. But many liberals, including feminists, have taken up the cudgels against both Clintons, and especially against Hillary, and in particular against It Takes a Village.On this side, the critique isbased on the perception of real misbehavior and is fueled by the bitterness of betrayal. A lot of it is directed at Hillary, because no one with any political acumen saw Bill as the great liberal hope. It was clear from the start he was a member of that new breed, the Republocrat. But many thought she was the liberal in the family and, even more, that once they won their second term, her (and perhaps his) "stealth liberalism" would emerge. In that they were disappointed, and many blamed Hillary for the betrayal.
Two questions are often raised: Is she (really) a feminist at all or merely an opportunist who has taken advantage of the gains made by feminism to achieve power? And does she support the goals that "feminists"--whatever that may be--support? Several writers answer one or both of those questions in the negative.
If you are a feminist and you believe that Rodham Clinton is not adhering to what you see as a feminist program, what should you do? Criticize her or (since her symbolic role is more important than anything she actually accomplishes) keep quiet and be supportive? Opinions are divided.11 In an article by Zelda Bronstein in Dissentfollowed by commentaries,12 several feminists argue about the Rodham Clinton problem. Feminists, says Bronstein, might have "taken the First Lady to task for her leading role in the disastrous campaign to overhaul health insurance," a position Ruth Rosen blasts as being as "absurd as condemning Truman for 'losing' China." Bronstein addresses Katha Pollitt's suggestion that criticisms of Rodham Clinton's role are veiled attacks on feminism and strong women. On the other hand, she notes that other feminists, for instance Karen Lehrman, question Rodham Clinton's feminist bona fides for achieving power in the traditional male-identified way: through marriage to a powerful man.
Bronstein and other feminist critics are also scathing about the Clinton administration's welfare reform bill. But it's uncertain how much of this discredit ought to reflect on Rodham Clinton. It's not clear first of all that the Clinton administration, working with a Republican Congress, could have done much better; and by enacting the bill that was passed, they might have fended off something even worse. Even if this is not true, we just don't know how much influence on her husband's, and his administration's, decisions she really has. (There are plenty of rumors, but they are only that--rumors.)
Then there are questions (which might better be filed under "None of Our Business") about the marriage itself. Rodham Clinton famously, or infamously, said in an interview on Sixty Minutes in January 1992, that she hadn't chosen to be "sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette." Rather, she made the choice to stay with Bill because she loved him and believed in him, despite "problems" in their marriage. But (if we must be nosy) is that the best choice for someone who purports to be a role model for today's young women?
Well, if we must be nosy, let's think about it. In a strange way, Bill and Hillary have an ultratraditional arrangement: he fools around, she looks the other way or forgives. In the old days, wives did this because they had no alternative that was socially and economically feasible: to acknowledge unforgivable wrong on the spouse's part was to either see oneself as a helpless victim (intolerable to a woman of character) or necessitate a divorce. Divorce, back then, was social and economic death for a respectable woman.
Rodham Clinton, the thoroughly modern role model, may be refusing to acknowledge the seriousness of the problem for analogous if different reasons. For her, divorce would mean a loss of political influence dearly won. Would it make sense to have endured twenty-five years of "problems," only to lose the prize now that it is hers? So--like traditional wives--she can't acknowledge her anger and disappointment, for that would force her to be a pitiful victim or lose it all. In this view, she's doing the only rational thing.
Or maybe she just loves the big lug. (Smart women, foolish
choices.)
Or maybe, conceivably...it really is none of our business.
Conspiracy Theory 101A
In January 1998, Rodham Clinton suggested on a morning television program that the allegations against both Clintons emanated from a "vast right wing conspiracy." She was promptly excoriated and ridiculed from all sides. But the right has been alleging explicitly and continually that the Clintons themselves are part of any number of conspiracies.13 These allegations of conspiratorial behavior of the most serious kind are, to my knowledge, unprecedented in commentary on First Couples prior to the Clintons. It is true, to be sure, that conspiracy theories generally have flourished mightily in recent years, encouraged by the Web (not to mention the movies of Oliver Stone). But the virulence and prevalence of the rumors about the Clintons still call for explanation.
Conspiracy theory is a way to make sense of the randomness of the universe. It gives causes and motives to events that are more rationally seen as accidents. By attributing motives to chance happenings, believers gain control of the uncontrollable, bringing the disturbing vagaries of reality under their control, enough to make accurate predictions and maybe even alter reality: omnipotence, or at least omniscience. But the control is always threatened, and the renewed fear is often replaced by anger, since anger is powerful and controlling, while fear is weak and helpless. In this strange and scary world, irrational rage and weird conspiracy theories coexist happily.
Those theories work even better if much of the evil in the world can be blamed on powerful parental stand-ins like the First Couple. As children, we knewour parents were omnipotent; whatever good or bad happened to us, it was their doing. So (especially for the not fully mature) finding the root of all evil in the White House is deeply satisfying. If the First Couple themselves, by the literal and symbolic changes in gender relations that they represent, are contributing significantly to some Americans' fears of obsolescence and impotence beyond the reach of Viagra, blaming them for more traditional and impersonal conspiracies--murder and financial double-dealing--is a way to avoid direct recognition of the real source of the fear. It is uncomfortable to admit that Bill Clinton's defense of gay rights or Hillary Rodham Clinton's assertiveness in public raises doubts about one's own manhood or womanhood. If those fears and doubts can be transferred to murderous conspiracies (which shouldbe feared and brought to light), how much more comfortable life is!
Eleanor Roosevelt, whose real and symbolic roles are in many ways similar to Rodham Clinton's, attracted conspiracy theories too. Doris Kearns Goodwin (1993) mentions a couple:
rumors (none of them true, of course) that Eleanor had created "Eleanor Clubs" for black maids who promised to get out of white people's houses and go somewhere else to work. "Whenever you see a Negro wearing a wide-brimmed hat with a feather in it," they said, "you know it's a sign of the Eleanor Club." There were warnings of "Eleanor Tuesdays," when black women were supposed to bump into white women in honor of Eleanor.
Bizarre as these rumors seem today, they have the same source as the modern Vincent Foster rumors: fear of change in the power structure. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Deliberate Misinterpretations
A similar anxiety underlies another peculiarity of the Rodham Clinton reportage, the way in which practically everything she says is at best overinterpreted, but more often deliberately misinterpreted. I say "deliberately," because commentators knowingly take her remarks out of context, misconstrue them, or go off on wild tangents that suggest they have not even bothered to find out what the First Lady actually said.
If Rodham Clinton causes distress by resisting interpretation and insisting on speaking for herself, then stark misinterpretations of her are not--as they might otherwise be--necessarily a sign of the interpreter's thickheadedness. Thatwould be ordinary garden-variety misinterpretation; thisgoes so far beyond it, in its floridity, its closeness to self-parody, that it must be intentional, it must be accorded the dignity of purposefulness. If you can chooseby your interpretation to decide what Hillary Rodham Clinton is to "mean," you can deny her the right to determine what she intended by her words. You score a preemptive strike, you co-opt. You take back the taking-back, you reassign the right to make meaning to those who have possessed it in the past. Deliberate misinterpretation is a daringly reactionary, excitingly business-as-usual speech act. That is one reason why it doesn't matter when Rodham Clinton or her supporters painstakingly explain what was really meant, when they put the remark back into its original context. It only makes things worse if she apologizes, since by apologizing she acknowledges their right to make meaning for her. She isn't seen as apologizing for the comment per se, but for commenting about anything, in any way, at all.
Additionally, the misinterpretations, painting Rodham Clinton in the worst possible light, serve to justify on rational grounds the fear and anger she has aroused. If you can use "her own words" to show what a bad person she is, and how much she hates you and people like you, you legitimize your anger. Deliberate misinterpretation demonizes its target and justifies its user. And finally, by smacking her with her own words, you punish her for speaking publicly, thereby warning women everywhere to shut up. Deliberate misinterpretation functions as punishment is meant to, as a deterrent to others.
This is one way to make sense of the ruckus over the "famous-cookies-and-tea-remark," as it has become known. The story is this: during the 1992 primaries, in response to a charge by rival Democratic candidate Jerry Brown that the Rose Law Firm had profited improperly from a partner's marriage to the governor, she was reported to have replied, "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas." There was an immediate flurry: the remark was taken as a deliberate slur on all women who did not work outside the home.
On its own, the quoted statement can be read that way (among others). But, as Barbara Burrell points out, none of the interpreters paid any attention to the rest of the remark that immediately followed the quoted portion: "I chose to fulfill my profession, which I had before my husband was in public life. The work that I have done as a professional, a public advocate, has been aimed...to assure that women can make the choices...whether it's full-time career, full-time motherhood or some combination" (1997, 31f.). Now when you factor in the complete comment, the famous cookies-and-tea remark becomes much more readily interpretable, not as a putdown of women working in the home, but as first, a justification for her personal choice as an act of autonomy rather than a move toward corruption (that is, it was directed at countering Brown's charge, rather than intended as an irrelevant commentary on her choice vs. that of other more traditional women); and second, an attempt to express solidarity with women who have made choices other than hers: her choice, she suggests, supported the right and ability of women to make any choice they deemed right. (It's not clear to me how her choice of a career helped other women stay at home, but I guess it's the thought that counts.) It does seem extraordinary that the media, well-known for their passion for ferreting out every detail of anything that catches their interest, were virtually unanimous in ignoring the full intention and contextualization of Rodham Clinton's comment.
The treatment of It Takes a Villageis similar. Many of its reviewers seem either not to have read the book at all or to have read a different book entitled It Takes a Village,by Hillary Rodham Clinton, than I did. One is loath to come down too hard on the amateur reviewers on Amazon for confusing politics with literacy, but it's surprising to find the same level of contempt for the written word in reviews by authoritative persons in serious publications. Years before the book's publication, one such writer is already putting the party line in place. Couched as a Bobbsey Twinsparody (i.e., putatively from a child's perspective), his cover story opens with a riddle:
Question: What's the difference between a children's rights activist and a pit bull?Answer: You might get your child back from the pit bull (Olson 1992)
and goes on in that vein from there, pausing to sneer at Garry Wills's supportive article on Rodham Clinton in the New York Review of Books ("'I think he's sweet on her,' Freddie [the Bobbsey twin] scoffed"), and stirring up the old fears that, given the "rights" Rodham Clinton champions, children will waste no time in hauling their innocent and ideal parents into court. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (1996), also in the National Review, makes the typical misinterpretive leap in her review: "The appalling evidence of children's distress and alienation leaves no doubt that a village cannot raise a child. It takes a family--ideally a mother and a father--to raise a child, and the village's first responsibility is not to hamper them in doing so." But what about when the family isn't doing the job right? Should the village ignore that? What about when the family can't make ends meet? And the purposeful dichotomization of "family" and "village" is a blatant distortion of Rodham Clinton's argument. Fox-Genovese sneers that the "cozy, confidential" tone of the book "thinly disguises an engaged partisanship"--pots and kettles again.
Another case is discussed by Lizette Alvarez (1998). Questioned about the hostility toward her and the president, Rodham Clinton replied, "I think a lot of this is prejudice against our state. They wouldn't do this if we were from some other state." The argument gains some point if one scans the Clinton jokes on the Web: quite a few are barely retooled "Arkie" or "hillbilly" humor. (Example: How do you break Bill Clinton's finger? Punch him in the nose.) But Republican Arkansans leaped to misread her intent. Representative Jay Dickey growled: "It is sad and unfortunate that Arkansas is depicted by the First Lady as a backward state, worthy of ridicule and prejudice. It would be much better if the First Lady would make a mature and responsible assessment of the situation and not blame Arkansans for their troubles." Of course, the First Lady did not "depict" Arkansas as backward: she depicted her enemies as depicting Arkansans (herself and her husband included) as backward. It may be a small difference--"just semantics," the pundits like to say--but significant.
As with most effective propaganda, these conservative misreadings are wrapped around a scintilla of truth, to which they can retreat when challenged. It's true that It Takes a Villageincludes institutions other than the nuclear family in the child-rearing process. The cookies-and-tea remark did get made, and in another context could plausibly have received the interpretation it was given. Urbanites have been known to belittle Arkansans. By suggesting that their targets are anti-family and anti-little guy (Arkansas), the propagandists forge an emotional and quasi-populist link with "regular" folks, placing their targets beyond human comprehension, cold snobs without empathy.
Cynosure of All Eyes
So Rodham Clinton gets subjected to continual public interpretation, reinterpretation, misinterpretation, and overinterpretation, because that is the best way to neutralize her. We haveto solve the equation for "Hillary," because only by solving it will we ever be able to control what it stands for. But by its nature it is not solvable: it remains a paradox. Rodham Clinton passes the UAT with flying colors: she gets more attention than any previous first lady, probably more than most movie stars (or your average multiple murderess). But media attention is not all she gets. Because she cannot be pinned down in the normal, rational way, she is not only mediacized,but also subjected, in our desperation, to more invasive techniques: she is psychoanalyzedand ultimately mythologized.
The Inside Story: Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis has been with us for a century now, and functions for us variously as a medical subspecialty; a philosophical system; a quasi religion; a modernist object of postmodern critique; and a way to cut people we are afraid of down to size and render them harmless, while defanging any response from them. Camille Paglia (1996) invokes the last to deal with the First Lady Problem. Paglia spends a good part of her article venting spleen at her target. But to disguise the pure venom of her attack, Paglia claims the "objectivity" of science and medicine by couching it in psychoanalytic terminology (even as Freud legitimized misogyny by making it scientific).
A hostility to conventional masculinity can be detected in both Clintons' past....While she idolized her father and seems to have competed with her mother and siblings to be daddy's number one girl, Hillary also saw the psychic damage inflicted by his iron rule in their close-knit, secretive family....In her book Hillary tells of an incident in grade school when an older boy...chased her, threw her to the ground and kissed her....The theme of male intrusion and contamination would recur....[Paglia uses as her example Rodham Clinton's criticism, as Wellesley commencement speaker, of the invited guest, Sen. Edward Brooke.]...The sexual repressions and resentments of Hillary the snow queen would have long-reaching effects on policy when the Clintons arrived in Washington.
This is what responsible psychoanalysts would call "wild analysis," made worse by the fact that, as far as I know, Paglia has never met "Hillary" in person, much less been made privy to her innermost thoughts. Paglia's aim is not to cure, but to neutralize; to render Rodham Clinton harmless because she is not only "bad" but also "mad." Yet psychoanalysis has its positive uses. Our fascination with Rodham Clinton's psyche may represent our deep curiosity about Rodham Clinton as a role model at a time when we all are exploring new identities. We need to know what she is "really" like in order to determine what we want to be "really" like--not to hate her, but to emulate her. "I'm a Rorschach test," she has taken to telling interviewers. We psychoanalyze Rodham Clinton in order to try to see how she works, because that might be a clue to how we all will shortly work, or perhaps already are working.
Here She Is...Myth America!
Wild analysis at a distance cannot give us real control. We must examine not just the individual, but our culture. Before psychoanalysis, before even what we think of today as proper "religion," our species, just achieving consciousness, developed a tool to explain the world, themselves, and other people: mythology. We use it still, to try to account for the way things are, and predict the way they will turn out, by inventing stories about the way things came to be as they are. The cohesion of the narrative gives tellers and hearers a sense of control over the events it describes, even though the stories are fictional.
Thus we mythologize Rodham Clinton, as we never have any previous first lady. She becomes an object of awe, veneration, fear, and fascination. Walter Shapiro, in Esquire (1993), lays out some of the myths we have constructed to make her make sense:
Hillary has the sense of humor of Pat Nixon....And the common touch of Nancy Reagan.
Hillary takes her cues from Marx (and it ain't Groucho), and is at the core of a secret radical coven.
Hillary the Virtuous--the greatest feminist role model since Joan of Arc.
As Shapiro shows, all of these are false, although all have a grain of truth at their cores. But we are less concerned with finding the true Hillary than with constructing a mythic "Hillary Rodham Clinton." Accepting these myths gives us a superiority that allows us to dismiss her. When we need more depth, we try to pin her down by fitting her into a preexisting plot. We borrow from familiar narratives, snipping and stretching them as necessary, in order to construct a plausible simulacrum.
Lady Macbeth
Over the last several years there have been an inordinate number of productions of Macbeth.14 Just coincidence? I don't think so.
Recall the plot and characters of the play. The Macbeths--medieval Scotland's two-for-one power couple--lie, scheme, and kill to achieve the throne. (Already it sounds familiar.) Besides the blood and gore, the Macbeths serve as a worst-case marital scenario, a warning about what happens when the unnatural attains ascendancy, when boundaries are transgressed and the nonnormal becomes the rule. The play abounds in lines suggesting that sheis the man of the family and he, not quite a man. (Queen Elizabeth I had died shortly before the play was written, to be succeeded by a man, a proper King, and the descendant of Elizabeth's hated rival, Mary, Queen of Scots.) Lady Macbeth plots and schemes. Her husband just follows orders. They gain the throne, but get little pleasure from it, in large part because (being unnatural and ambiguous in gender) they have no offspring to succeed them. Finally, the same supernatural forces that brought them to power snatch it away, and at the end hefinally dies, as a man at last, and she reverts to true womanhood--madness, illness, helplessness, depression, and suicide.
Hmmm.
The Sphinx
In ancient Greece there was a terrible she-monster with the head of a woman and the body of a lion. The Sphinx lay in wait for travelers and posed them a riddle. If they could answer, she let them go; if not she strangled them and ate them.15 Until Oedipus, no one ever answered her riddle. She ate them up, every one. Sound familiar?
Well, not literally, any more than that the Clintons reign over medieval Scotland. But current paranoid fantasies create connections.
Like the Sphinx, Rodham Clinton is mysterious and enigmatic. You cannot know her, that is, answer her riddle; yet it is of the utmost importance that you do so.She is voracious and deadly. She kills for sport.
She is not quite human, not quite female: a monster, half and half.
But most especially, like the Sphinx she deprives men of speech,or surpasses men at speech--asks them things they cannot answer, silences them, and thus kills them--renders them impotent. The Sphinx's M.O. was (as is true of cats) to bite the victims' windpipes shut so that they cannot breathe or make a sound. She cuts off their communicative capacities, as any self-defining woman does to men (or so some fear). There must be some connection between the Clinton administration and the Viagra craze.
As The World Turns: The Rehabilitation of Hillary Rodham Clinton
The Lady Macbeth/Sphinx image is not the last we have tried on the First Lady. In August 1998, the president admitted to an "improper" relationship with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. At once public perception of Rodham Clinton changed, from omnipotent controller to helpless victim of marital infidelity. (Again the pendulum had to go all the way.) Her popularity soared.
The visual representation of Rodham Clinton in the media underwent a concomitant and probably uncoincidental sea change. In the past, she had regularly been photographed in the most unflattering poses available: mouth open, silly hat, funny looks. Now she was depicted in a candlelit photo in the December 1998 Vogue (take that, Monica!) by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz, looking undeniably...glamorous. News photos suddenly showed her smiling and looking good. It was as if she had suddenly become a woman, indeed a desirable one, not because of any change in herself, but because she had been brought down: she was suffering, she was a victim. She was harmless, helpless, not in control: womanly.
The need for interpretation continued, now fixated on the First Couple's relationship. Tea leaves were endlessly scrutinized: Were they still partners? Was he in the doghouse? Was the marriage effectively over? Former detractors sound bemused, uncertain what course to take. Thus Arianna Huffington: "Well now Hillary has become the Wronged Woman and has the sympathy factor, which is something everybody is much more comfortable with than the strong, determined Hillary" (quoted in Clines 1998), although it's not entirely clear who "everybody" includes.16 Grist is still required for the interpretive mill. Among the entrails regularly scanned are photos of the First Couple. It is noted that they rarely touch any more; in public at times when he attempts to take her arm, she unobtrusively brushes it off. In an article (Fineman 1998) that discusses Topic A at length, there is a photo that tells all. They are caroling at the national Christmas tree lighting ceremony. He has his arm around her shoulder--so far, so good. But...he is facing to his right (away from her), she to her left, in fact not only facing left but standing perpendicularly away from him. They are together but apart.
The tea leaves are compulsively stirred up. In his State of the Union message in January 1999, the President included a love note to his wife: "I honor her, for leading our millennium project, for all she has done for our children and for her historic role in serving our nation and in advancing our ideals at home and abroad" (New York Times,January 20, 1999). In the standing ovation that followed, Mr. Clinton ad libbed "I love you" sotto voce.The moment occupied the pundits for the next couple of days. What was he reallysaying? What was she reallyfeeling?
The Big Question all America wants answered remains: What are they going to do? What is the state of the First Marriage? Rumors reach me from far-flung Buenos Aires: she has demanded a divorce in the immediate post-millennium; she had a tantrum while they were on vacation. And so on.
The story sets off echoes in the minds of the boomers and gen-X'ers of their own childhoods, the divorces of their own Mommies and Daddies. The Clintons--they are us. Like those children, we wantto ask the Question, but (perhaps for other reasons now) we cannot bring ourselves to do so. So we frame another substitute question to satisfy our prurient curiosity: Will she, or won't she, run for the Senate from New York in 2000? At this writing (July 1999) Rodham Clinton has formed an exploratory committee, received the blessing of the man she would replace, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and embarked on a sort of pre-campaign "listening tour" of New York State. She has not officially announced her candidacy, but the eventual announcement is taken as a fait accompli. Extraordinarily, out-of-state Republicans are already mobilizing to "pillory Hillary" in an election still almost sixteen months off (Van Natta 1999a). But for most, the question itself is titillating: will she or won't she? Of course it's a tantalizing question in its own right...but would we care as much if it weren't a stand-in for The Big One?
Glorious Days of Yesteryear
Our preoccupation with a woman in a high position may seem unique in history. We may think that this is the first woman who has been in such a position, and therefore the first woman who has ever received this sort of ambivalent but most often malevolent treatment. It is true that it is rare for a woman to achieve power via means other than divine right and inheritance. But while such cases are rare, they are not unheard of. I know of three historical parallels, all women who came to power through marriage (and were excoriated on those grounds).
The first we know already, Eleanor Roosevelt. Rodham Clinton herself has often cited Roosevelt as a spiritual ancestor and role model, the contemporary criticism of whom is similar to what she herself suffers, and who, in historical retrospect, has largely been rehabilitated. According to the examples cited in Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time, the most frequent, personal, and vitriolic attacks on Roosevelt came from women; and the attacks intensified as Roosevelt was seen as empowering the historically powerless--particularly African Americans.
kquote>To take a few representative examples from Goodwin:
Across the country, Eleanor's activism on behalf of blacks engendered scathing comments. "If you have any influence with the President," a New Jersey woman wrote Missy LeHand, "will you please urge him to muzzle Eleanor Roosevelt and it might not be a bad idea to chain her up--she talks too damn much." (1995, 164)
"Mrs. Roosevelt," a woman from Kalamazoo wrote Eleanor, "you would be doing your country a great service if you would simply go home and sew for the Red Cross. Every time you open your mouth the people of this country dislike and distrust you more." (325)
"I know, of course, you are bidding for negro votes for your good husband," an "outraged" woman wrote Eleanor, "but isn't it rather a costly price to pay?...Would you have enjoyed seeing your daughter Anna being hugged by those negroes....You are the most dangerous woman in America today and may I beg you to stop and think before you are guilty of such a thing again." (503)
At least Eleanor Roosevelt was never accused of outright criminal
conduct. But that happened often to my second example, the wife of Augustus
Caesar, Livia Drusilla. As with both Roosevelt and Rodham Clinton, the age
in which she lived, the late first century
Livia, however, was accused of having caused the death of Marcellus because he had been preferred before her sons. (53:33)
So Gaius resigned at once all the duties of his office and took a coastwise trading vessel to Lycia, where, at Limyra, he breathed his last. Prior to his demise the spark of Lucius' life had also paled....His death was due to a sudden illness. In connection with both these cases, therefore, suspicion rested upon Livia. (55:10)
So Augustus fell sick and died. Livia incurred some suspicion regarding the manner of his death....She was afraid, some say, that Augustus would bring [Agrippa] back to make him sovereign, and so smeared with poison some figs that were still on trees from which Augustus was wont to gather fruit with his own hands. So she ate the ones that had not been smeared, and pointed out the poisoned ones to him. (56:30)
A third example is discussed by Pierre Saint-Amand, in a paper entitled "Terrorizing Marie Antoinette." The author looks at the negative representations in the media during the reign of Queen Marie Antoinette, which contributed to the downfall of the monarchy and the coming of the French Revolution. "The hatred trained upon Hillary Clinton during the last presidential election," says Saint-Amand, "was reproduced in the very same language as the discourse of infamy that sent Queen Marie Antoinette to the guillotine" (1994, 379). The author identifies three aspects of this syndrome: (1) the demonization and cloning of the woman's influence; (2) the accessibility of the woman's genitalia as the very organ of influence; (3) a seizing of the woman's body by way of sexual appropriation. The article describes in detail the pornography of the period, in which the Queen is represented as engaged in acts of sexual perversity and debauchery; the deliberate creation and dissemination of scandalous gossip about her, accusing her of lesbian and extramarital heterosexual activity; the attribution to her of undue influence over her husband, blaming her for the wrongs of his regime ("Let them eat cake!")--and connects them to Rodham Clinton's treatment in the contemporary American media. Both Rodham Clinton and Marie Antoinette, says Saint-Amand, "are victims of a backlash against the advancement of women in the public sphere, against their increased visibility and competition with men for participation in social institutions" (384). Women's influence in both cases "is seen as a form of hysterical persuasion" (385). And just as Rodham Clinton is denied the right to name herself, so Marie Antoinette is referred to in the literature of the Revolution as the "Widow Capet"--a title containing no name of her own or any she herself had ever used. Elsewhere her given name is diminutized as "Toinon" and "Toinette." Analogous to Marie Antoinette's detractors' use of her body and sexuality are the jokes about Rodham Clinton exemplified above.
While the political situations in Ancient Rome and in France at the end of the eighteenth century bear little direct resemblance to the scene in this country today, these parallels are intriguing. The three societies, different in so many ways, nevertheless find it essential to undermine the power of influential women and use remarkably similar means to do so.
Hillary Rodham Clinton's role in the making of meaning is--like everything else about her--complex and even contradictory. On the one hand, her action is negative: she subverts the attempts of traditional meaning makers to define her and control her by her ambiguity and ambivalence. On the other hand she is a positive and active maker of meaning, a woman who--at least sometimes--chooses her own words, makes her own meaning, speaks for herself. But that active and positive role is counterbalanced by her tendency to backpedal and apologize, to repackage herself in a more traditional form at any sign of controversy. Hillary Rodham Clinton herself, with her uncertainties, is one thing. The discourse about her, with its conflicting absolutes, is something else. It has taken on a life of its own.
There are good reasons why. The source is larger than life and arouses responses in us that go beyond our responses to people whose role is only literal. Hillary Rodham Clinton is who some of us want to be and want women to be, and who others fear that women have become. Therefore everything we feel about her is distorted and exaggerated. Responses to her are provoked less by her actual behavior and more by the symbolic function she plays and the narratives we wrest from her. The symbolic and largely imaginary "Hillary Rodham Clinton" was created out of the real Hillary Rodham Clinton and continues to be so created, by each of us, to serve our own particular needs, to galvanize us on one side or the other, to exemplify the major angstof the 1990's, the growth of women's power and influence. The ambiguity of both her current role, and her personality; and the indeterminacy of both Clintons in their roles as idealized gender representations--the postmodern co-presidency--encourage an ambivalent public response, as well as guaranteeing that the public will never be satisfied with any single media representation of Hillary Rodham Clinton. We may embrace Hillary Rodham Clinton's presentation of the feminine ideal of the 1990's; oppose it; deny her right to represent it; or attempt to undermine it. But it is always with us and will remain a part of our culture and our individual identities.
Notes: Chapter 5
Parts of this chapter are adapted from Lakoff 1996b.
1. Notable examples are Bennetts 1994 and Bruck 1994.
2. Hence the frustration implied in Bennetts' title: "Pinning Down Hillary."
3. At least during her husband's term in office. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis passed the UAT when she died in 1994, when more attention was lavished on her funeral, and on retrospectives on her life, than was given to Richard Nixon, who had died a couple of weeks earlier. But I would suggest that a good part of the attention given to Jackie was really a covert assessment of Rodham Clinton via the contrast between them: Jackie, who never spoke above a whisper, and Hillary, who is notoriously voluble; Jackie, who "never took a bad picture" and Hillary, whose photos are often uncomplimentary.
4. For biographical information on Rodham Clinton see Clinton 1996; Maraniss 1995; Woodward 1994, 1996.
5. As I suggest below, it would be more accurate to describe the Clintons as exchanging traditional gender stereotypes with each other, rather than blending them together, as Emery suggests.
6. Many things about this article put one in mind of Woody Allen's remark in Annie Hall: "Commentaryand Dissenthave merged to form Dysentery."
7. Many commentators suggest that the failure was at least as much due to the administration's lack of support (it needed to reserve the heavy guns for NAFTA) and the virulent and well-financed opposition by the health care industry (i.e., the "Harry and Louise" commercials that played on television for much of 1993-94).
8. Mentioned in Bronstein 1997a.
9. I know this analysis sounds like Emery's, which I castigated above. But while Emery, as far as I can tell, is terrified about Clinton's sexual ambiguities, I find them kind of fun.
10. This problem was discussed on the Charlie Rose Show (PBS) on August 3, 1998, by David Gergen, Frank Rich, and Alan Brinkley.
11. While conservatives tend to see a monolithic "radical feminism" that thinks and acts as one, in fact the "movement," if any, includes a vast array of opinions about almost everything, the present case being only one example. On the other hand, the neocons seem to demonstrate extraordinary solidarity, down to their slogans and rhetorical style.
12. See Bronstein 1997a, and responses: Barkan 1997; Ehrenreich 1997; Jong 1997; Pollitt 1997b; and Rosen 1997; plus a reply by Bronstein 1997b.
13. A small sampling from the Web and elsewhere: Hillary Rodham Clinton arranged for the murder of Vince Foster to cover up their "torrid affair"; Bill Clinton had Commerce Secretary Ron Brown killed to cover up what Brown knew about illegal campaign contributions; Bill Clinton was responsible for the death of General Boorda, generally considered a suicide (no reason given).
14. See Blumenthal 1998. Note also the comment in Corcoran 1993
cited earlier.
15. The word sphinx is derived from the same source as
sphincter,and means "the strangler," or "the smotherer."
16. Huffington was to attain the "sympathy factor" herself almost
immediately with the widely publicized revelation that her former husband,
Michael Huffington, was gay.