Becoming “The Dumb Cunt”: A Reading of Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick (2006) Through the Melodramatic Mode by Isabella Caley
Introduction
In her forward to I Love Dick, Eileen Myles describes Chris Kraus’ work as “a kind of ecstatic mockery, performed in front of a society of executioners” (15). The work reads like a performance art piece because of its nontraditional, experimental, and frankly crazy methods of exploring feminist ideology. Which is realized in both the academic and the real world. Myles echoes this describing Kraus’ publication as an “unswervingly attempted and felt female life as a total work” (15). It becomes clear then that the piece also diverges from performance art due to its lack of a live audience and instead employs its readership after the fact. Its integration of life, fiction, and social commentary becomes a defining trait. Other attempts to define the narrative have labeled it as autofiction in its merging of memoir with fiction, but this term seems to also fall short as it pins Kraus’ work into a strictly literary genre, erasing the significance of performance in the piece. Rather than filing I Love Dick into one of these incomplete genres, it seems that the work is best defined by the melodramatic mode. In this essay, I suggest that the work is largely successful because of the ways in which it resembles Christine Gledhill’s theory of the melodramatic mode. This mode allows for a better understanding of the important work Kraus does in merging the individual and the social and how the manipulation of language becomes a key tool in disrupting the two.
History of Melodrama
In the prologue to Melodrama Unbound (2018), Christine Gledhill describes the birth of the melodrama and redefines its role within the arts. Melodrama, she finds, was formed out of “the slow process of individuation and democratization” (x) leading up to The Enlightenment era, ultimately rebelling against the strict hierarchical structure which predated it. The concept of the ‘individual’ becomes a precondition of the genre and the melodramatic mode itself becomes a means by which the community reckons with the new role of the individual within society.
Although the concept of the individual manifested in early dramas, for some time it was only accessible to the aristocracy, as licensing was restricted to so-called legitimate theaters. The Industrial Revolution in England and the tensions building prior to The French Revolution meant that, “cultural monopoly was challenged by socioeconomic expansion requiring a widening public sphere” (xii). As the middle class emerged there was a demand for entertainment among those who had previously been suppressed by a life of labor. From this sprung ‘illegitimate’ entertainment, which worked under a different set of conditions, including the absence of spoken word, which was reserved for legitimate theater’s productions. The illegitimate theater was initially a performance lacking in language, as the dialogue was reserved for the more educated elites. Despite the formal ban on language, the lower theaters continued to find innovative ways to include it in their performances.
In response to the limitations set by the upper class, Melodrama was born. Gledhill points out that the term itself combines music and drama “on equal footing”. While at first, the performances were strictly nonverbal, as the economic demand for entertainment geared toward common people grew, verbal language was incorporated into the illegitimate theaters. Putting the performances to music became a loophole that evaded the oppressive limits set on working class entertainment. At its core Melodrama was a hybrid of two separate forms, created to placate the changing socio-economic structure. But as it increased in popularity, it began to find itself merging with other genres including “gothic, sentimental, folk, and working-class traditions” (xiii). Because of its diverse range of application “across...genres, across decades, and across national cultures,” Gledhill argues that Melodramatic specificity is best defined as a mode, rather than a genre. She explains that mode differs because “rather than defining content, mode shapes different materials to a given end” (xiii) Even early Melodramas crossed genres, but what remained the same was the way it manipulated aesthetics to achieve its given end. The primary aesthetics employed by the melodramatic mode are the centering of the individual, excess, and sensationalizing, and the ends being a “recognition of classes of people, of social conditions, or of areas of life hitherto unrepresented” (Gledhill 10).
For Gledhill, the end, whatever it may be, is primarily achieved by its “recognition of the personalized virtues and vices of characters whose actions have consequences for others” (5). Therefore, what is distinctive about Melodrama is not the strict morality of the Victorian Melodrama or antireal exaggeration, but instead it is the opposite. Traditional theatrical drama’s set characters to a situation aimed at reflecting an overarching ideology. But the melodramatic mode complicates this by exploring the lives of individuals and their relationship with society. It offers a playing field of opportunity lacking “fixed moral values” and instead “enacts a struggle for a felt sense of justice” (5). Melodrama then becomes the realm of the seemingly mundane human life which does not fit in the neat boxes of ideology and social scripts.
The Melodramatic Mode in I Love Dick
Chris Kraus’, I Love Dick catalogs a series of amorous letters written by Chris and her husband Sylvère after their evening with a colleague of his, Dick. They write the letters in response to Chris’s crush on Dick which she claims is fueled by their “Conceptual Fuck” that occurred (21). Quickly, Dick becomes a placeholder in their marriage, and a sounding board for Chris’s thoughts amidst her failing marriage and art projects. The novel has been consistently categorized as autofiction because of the way it blurs the lines between real life, narrative, and theory. Kaye Mitchell describes it best as a mix of “the fictional, essayistic, critical and confessional in highly self-conscious ways” (154). Though Gledhill’s argument is primarily applied to theater and film, I Love Dick as an experimental art piece, employs many of the same gestures. Chris herself describes the work in several different lights: she calls it “abstract romanticism” (27) then, “Calle Art '' (44) and even a “Case Study” (53 and 97). The letters to Dick are broken up into “Exhibits” giving them the effect of an art gallery, rather than a novel. In addition, the title of the first part of the book, “Scenes from a Marriage” acknowledges Kraus’s attempt to adapt Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 miniseries of the same title. Therefore, while the self-reflexivity of the piece does indeed qualify it as autofiction, Chris’s identity as a filmmaker and her interest in visual art translates into her writing. When reading I Love Dick with the melodramatic mode in mind Kraus is able to muddle the separation between individual and social. She accomplishes this by centering language.
Language
At the crux of melodrama is language. The initial push for the spoken word in the form liberated the working class. Performed dialogue embodied in one individual’s experience became a means of reflecting greater social issues and struggles within a group. The use of the epistolary mode in I Love Dick rather than film, photography, or live performance (all previous modes employed by Kraus) is essential to her subversion of male power dynamics. In Anna Fisher Watkins’s The Play in the System: The Art of Parasitical Resistance, she explains that the love letter “represents a state of play by which gendered opponents feed on each other in a dynamically unstable game” (224). By removing Dick’s language, Kraus is able to invert the power dynamic. He becomes abstract, “made to stand in for the very idea of men” (120). The act is powerful both in the voice it gives Chris and in its revocation of male individuality. Chris acknowledges the importance of Dick’s exclusion; while she awaits his response to the project she writes “I wanted to use the last few hours before your call to tell you how I feel” (54). She knows that Dick’s participation in this project would reinstate the power dynamic, effectively muting her. By placing her voice at the forefront, she controls the narrative, speaking the truth of a common female experience.
The epistolatory mode is important in the work because it allows what Watkins identifies as a performance of the female parasite. The female parasite is a misogynist product stemming from “the alien threat of femininity, a destructive and out-of-control dependence on a presumably healthy patriarch” (224). The fear is that the woman, who must be dependent on men, will become dependent to the point of disrupting male autonomy. But by accepting this stereotype and exaggerating it through her letters, Chris works within the structures of the patriarchy to expose not the real Dick, but the men he represents. The letters become a means by which she can ‘literalize’ him, making him a character in her story. Her language destabilizes his subjectivity and allows her “to put into letters [her] social revenge” (115). Although, this is not an attack on the real Dick, rather revenge on the patriarchal system he represents. Just as the excessiveness that characterizes melodrama functions to “release signification into theatrical or cinematic realization” (Gledhill xxii), the excessive nature of Chris’s letters releases signification into the literary world. Because of its dismissal of social norms, its confessional nature, and embrace of public shame, I Love Dick asserts the experience of the female parasite as significant. The “Dumb Cunt’s Tale” becomes something that deserves to be told.
Chris becomes the parasite by “manically embracing her and performing her social role as a romantically dependent woman” (Watkins 117). She sets the stage in her first letter to Dick, by describing it as “reactive” to being “thrown into this weird position” by Sylvère (28). From the beginning, she situates herself as responding to her husband. It makes it appear as if she is just playing the role that has been assigned to her, including being led by and complying with the men in her life. This dissociation from the upstart of these letters is a move to place blame on the system, rather than herself. Furthermore, her relationship with Sylvère depicts her as a parasite, even prior to her attachment to Dick. She describes herself as a “money-hustling hag” (28) and later explains that she initially “ensnared [Sylvère] ten or twelve years ago” with her sickness (108). The negative connotations associated with female ‘ensnarement’ and Chris’s sickness depicting her as weak, embodies the feared parasitical woman created by the male individual. Chris’s full dependence on her husband and failure as a wife—her sickness, demoting her from the role of caretaker—villainizes her character because of her inability to assume her role as a wife.
She goes on to characterize herself as a lovesick juvenile, preying on a crush, and describing herself as “a very romantic girl” attracted to Dick’s “windows of vulnerability” (27). She plays into the image of a girl desperate for love, creating vulnerability in a man where there is none— later learn that Dick has no desire to participate in the type of vulnerability this project requires. The obsession intensifies as she recalls drawing his face. Kraus describes her “beating heart” and “sweaty palms” (27) when receiving his call. It evokes images of teen girls locked in their room, scribbling little hearts in their diaries. Her identity as a forty-year-old woman straddles the line of pathetic and stalkerish. She crosses the line as the letters progress vowing that “we will do this trip together. I will never be alone” (40). Chris’s eerie tone portrays her as a crazed stalker. She utilizes the excess to pull in her audience. Gledhill argues that by portraying excessive emotionality the melodrama, “recalibrates the so-called cause-and-effect logic of Hollywood narrative and television serial drama” (7). The traditional drama insists on a largescale event to propel its narrative. The melodrama reimagines this, asserting that the most mundane things in life have complicated causations. The excessive emotions Kraus feels forces the audience to confront their causes, which appears at first to be a crush, but her story reveals the forces of a patriarchal society working below the surface. By telling her tale, she asks the audience to find empathy in her response to meeting Dick, by beginning to understand her subjugation.
Chris is aware of the attitude toward the female parasite. In the same letter in which she performs the parasite, she succumbs to her fate proclaiming, “the only thing that I can do is tell “The Dumb Cunt’s Tale” (27). The Dumb Cunt and the parasite are one and the same. They are women who are believed to be so desperate or so stupid, they simply will not stop chasing a man who clearly does not want them. By labeling her letters as such, Chris makes it clear she understands the implications of these depictions. It forces her audience to ask why she would choose to engage in behavior she clearly knows is shameful. The answer lies in her correspondence to Dick. He becomes not only an object of desire but a means by which Kraus is able to “displace [her] own apparent shame/victimhood onto the male objects of their desire” (Mitchell 165). The absence of his voice makes him complicit in Chris’s yearning. By removing him from the dialogue he becomes a soundboard, whose muteness acts as validation. Unwillingly, he becomes her accomplice in unraveling the myth of the female parasite.
Sylvère’s transcription of the first letter further empowers Chris. By making her husband relay these desires in writing she controls the language, and he disseminates it. Although it does not stop him from inserting his opinion, he claims her letter “lacks a point,” is “too literary,” and that she is “squashing out all the trembly little things he found so touching” (28). His desire for the ‘trembly little things’ implicates his desire to retain the power dynamic between he and Chris as an attempt to hold on to their failing marriage. Although by placing this commentary within the context of the very first letter she reveals the tension between her own intelligence and her husband’s desire to squelch it. He goes on to tell Chris that the experiment “has nothing to do with [Dick]” and that it’s “just about us as a couple” (52). This sentiment is repeated throughout Sylvère’s discussions with Chris and his own letters to Dick because, for him, the letters become a way to rekindle the romance between him and his wife. But the literariness of Chris’s writing disrupts this illusion. She does debase herself as pathetic, but it is for the greater purpose of displacing that shame on Dick as a means of reaching the root cause: the system. Sylvère’s own language is manipulated by Kraus to highlight the power dynamic within heterosexual marriage that is threatened by female success outside of the marriage.
Although Sylvère’s interjection seems an attempt to regain the power, Chris maintains her authority. She remarks that “it is not the Dumb Cunt exegesis he expected,” acknowledging her husband’s assumption that the project’s primary aim is to dig up shame and vulnerability in herself simply for personal gain. Kraus reassumes her leverage by employing Dick, claiming that “I know that as you read this, you’ll know these things are true” (28). Her host then becomes a means of authority. She mocks his inability to speak back as the letters remain unsent, placing him in the narrative whether he likes it or not. Watkins explains that “the letters taunt Dick, mocking him for being forced to watch from the sidelines... while inviting him to participate in his own spectacularization” (121). Not only is the real Dick invited to participate, but the invented version of him becomes leverage by which Chris subverts the narrative. The paradox of Dick both being central to Chris’s experience and excluded then becomes the means by which she muddles the personal and the private. The letters allow her to make him a participant in her shameful exegesis, and a source of blame.
There is the question of the ethical merit in this type of performing the parasite. Many, including Dick Hebdige, argued that the project’s goals do not justify the violation of privacy it requires. Chris even wrestles with this question in one of her letters: “Dick, did you realize you have the same name as the murdered Dickie in Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley books? A name connoting innocence and amorality, and I think Dick’s friend and killer confronted problems much like these” (40). It is unclear which Dick she means in the final sentence. She blurs the line between Dickie, the murder victim, and the Dick she writes to. This creates an analogy between the two suggesting that Chris understands her project as a kind of murdering the ‘innocent’ Dick. She and Sylvère are both friends and murderers. Further, it indicates that she views Dick Hebdige as innocent, making it clear that these letters and their publication are not a personal attack, but rather something more. Watkins suggests that the exploitation of Dick Hedbige is justified in the way that the letters “explore how women’s secondary status might allow them to sidestep their supposed ethical and moral responsibility to a patriarchal system on which they depend but in which they hold no stake of ownership” (28). I Love Dick then questions the responsibility of women to uphold norms of a system they are removed from. Kraus is surrounded by two infamous literary critics; their work dominates the field. The things they publish have a significant impact on the ways in which people read literature and therefore, the ways people view the world. But as they continue to succeed, her own art continues to fail. So, while she understands Dick is innocent, he becomes a symbol of the critical discourse that women continue to be excluded from.
Throughout her letters, Krlaus makes it known that these men do not respect her as an intellectual. The night she first met Dick she writes that “because she does not express herself through theoretical language, no one expects too much from her” (21). And after reading one of her letters to Sylvère, he remarks “Chris you can’t send that. It makes no sense at all. You’re supposed to be intelligent” (65). It is significant that this letter to Dick is one that Sylvère doesn’t transcribe, suggesting that his exclusion from the act of letter writing, invalidates its contents.
Chris goes on to describe the parameters of ‘serious fiction,’ which has been primarily conceptualized by men. She explains that for fiction to be serious it must ‘fictionalize’ the identities of all supporting characters involved. Effectively diminishing their identity and their influence on the main character. This turns the “contemporary hetero male novel” into “a thinly veiled Story of Me, as voraciously consumptive as all of patriarchy” (72). These stories erase the social creation of an individual’s identity and promote the assumption that men like Dick, Sylvère, and Paul Auster, who Chris uses as an example, are fully ‘self-made’ as if the ‘secondary characters’ in their life have had no influence on them and their writing. The people, especially the women, behind the man are made one-dimensional by this reduction.
In contrast, Chris explains that “when women try to pierce this false conceit by naming names because our ‘I’s’ are changing as we meet other ‘I’s,’ we’re called bitches, libelers, pornographers and amateurs” (72). For women, because they are not considered worthy of having their own ‘Story of Me’, their subjectivity then is understood in relation to those in their life. They have not been socialized to understand their selves outside of their connections to men. This sentiment echoes Hollywood’s eagerness to exploit stories of women’s physical, sexual, and emotional abuse in fictional films, and their contrasting need to silence women who name high-powered directors and producers as abusers. Watkins explains how this naming demonstrates “how power is disavowed not on a systemic or institutional level but on a personal level” (116). The connection of the individual to the greater social structure as modeled by the melodrama becomes a means by which Kraus debunks the understanding of the patriarchy as the system absolves individuals of blame. By making Dick into the “secondary character” in Chris’s ‘Story of Me,’ Kraus understands there will be an outcry for Dick’s side of the story. She understands that by reversing the natural order, then maybe the inequality of it will be revealed.
Case Study
Ultimately Kraus’s own understanding of her project with Dick functions in the same way as the melodramatic mode functions. She suggests to him that “a case study is what we’ve started to create with you” (53). The idea of creating ‘with him’ plays on the irony of Dick’s exclusion from the letters. ‘With’ implies that Dick is a tool in Chris’s study, rather than an active agent. He is the object of the study, not an analyst. She goes on to describe a case study as “a total reconstruction of events through documents and transcripts” (53). Understanding the case requires someone to connect the documents into a cohesive narrative, it requires an author. Naturally then, the case study does not become absolute truth, but rather it is one version of the event which is influenced both by the author’s experience and the social context surrounding it. Therefore, the case study as a mode is important because “by understanding one simple thing...it’s possible to understand everything” (53).” Like the melodrama, a case study “fuses individual and social as codependent” (Gledhill xxi). The melodrama and the case study then become metonymic, because of the ways in which they merge the private and the social realms of people’s lives. Whereas common narrative formats rely on the social and ideological to understand the individual, reading Kraus’s work as a melodrama reveals how it is equally important to examine the common dynamics of private relationships to understand societal structures.
Conclusion
Kraus’ work has remained a controversial piece within the Western feminist movement. Many argue that by playing with female stereotypes Kraus only hurts the movement. Additionally, many believe that by targeting Dick Hebdige she encourages the image of vengeful, man-hating feminists. These criticisms miss the point. I Love Dick explores questions of what it means to be a feminist in a patriarchal society. It asks its reader why women should play by men’s rules if they never have a stake in the game? The melodramatic mode allows for these discussions, making language an empowering tool in the decentering of the hetero male individual in exchange for a codependent relationship between Chris’s personal life and the social norms that dictate it. Emerging from a period before the tech surge, I Love Dick is a revolutionary work and important contribution to feminist ideology, because, as Chris points out, “there’s not enough female irrepressibility written down” (210).
In her forward to I Love Dick, Eileen Myles describes Chris Kraus’ work as “a kind of ecstatic mockery, performed in front of a society of executioners” (15). The work reads like a performance art piece because of its nontraditional, experimental, and frankly crazy methods of exploring feminist ideology. Which is realized in both the academic and the real world. Myles echoes this describing Kraus’ publication as an “unswervingly attempted and felt female life as a total work” (15). It becomes clear then that the piece also diverges from performance art due to its lack of a live audience and instead employs its readership after the fact. Its integration of life, fiction, and social commentary becomes a defining trait. Other attempts to define the narrative have labeled it as autofiction in its merging of memoir with fiction, but this term seems to also fall short as it pins Kraus’ work into a strictly literary genre, erasing the significance of performance in the piece. Rather than filing I Love Dick into one of these incomplete genres, it seems that the work is best defined by the melodramatic mode. In this essay, I suggest that the work is largely successful because of the ways in which it resembles Christine Gledhill’s theory of the melodramatic mode. This mode allows for a better understanding of the important work Kraus does in merging the individual and the social and how the manipulation of language becomes a key tool in disrupting the two.
History of Melodrama
In the prologue to Melodrama Unbound (2018), Christine Gledhill describes the birth of the melodrama and redefines its role within the arts. Melodrama, she finds, was formed out of “the slow process of individuation and democratization” (x) leading up to The Enlightenment era, ultimately rebelling against the strict hierarchical structure which predated it. The concept of the ‘individual’ becomes a precondition of the genre and the melodramatic mode itself becomes a means by which the community reckons with the new role of the individual within society.
Although the concept of the individual manifested in early dramas, for some time it was only accessible to the aristocracy, as licensing was restricted to so-called legitimate theaters. The Industrial Revolution in England and the tensions building prior to The French Revolution meant that, “cultural monopoly was challenged by socioeconomic expansion requiring a widening public sphere” (xii). As the middle class emerged there was a demand for entertainment among those who had previously been suppressed by a life of labor. From this sprung ‘illegitimate’ entertainment, which worked under a different set of conditions, including the absence of spoken word, which was reserved for legitimate theater’s productions. The illegitimate theater was initially a performance lacking in language, as the dialogue was reserved for the more educated elites. Despite the formal ban on language, the lower theaters continued to find innovative ways to include it in their performances.
In response to the limitations set by the upper class, Melodrama was born. Gledhill points out that the term itself combines music and drama “on equal footing”. While at first, the performances were strictly nonverbal, as the economic demand for entertainment geared toward common people grew, verbal language was incorporated into the illegitimate theaters. Putting the performances to music became a loophole that evaded the oppressive limits set on working class entertainment. At its core Melodrama was a hybrid of two separate forms, created to placate the changing socio-economic structure. But as it increased in popularity, it began to find itself merging with other genres including “gothic, sentimental, folk, and working-class traditions” (xiii). Because of its diverse range of application “across...genres, across decades, and across national cultures,” Gledhill argues that Melodramatic specificity is best defined as a mode, rather than a genre. She explains that mode differs because “rather than defining content, mode shapes different materials to a given end” (xiii) Even early Melodramas crossed genres, but what remained the same was the way it manipulated aesthetics to achieve its given end. The primary aesthetics employed by the melodramatic mode are the centering of the individual, excess, and sensationalizing, and the ends being a “recognition of classes of people, of social conditions, or of areas of life hitherto unrepresented” (Gledhill 10).
For Gledhill, the end, whatever it may be, is primarily achieved by its “recognition of the personalized virtues and vices of characters whose actions have consequences for others” (5). Therefore, what is distinctive about Melodrama is not the strict morality of the Victorian Melodrama or antireal exaggeration, but instead it is the opposite. Traditional theatrical drama’s set characters to a situation aimed at reflecting an overarching ideology. But the melodramatic mode complicates this by exploring the lives of individuals and their relationship with society. It offers a playing field of opportunity lacking “fixed moral values” and instead “enacts a struggle for a felt sense of justice” (5). Melodrama then becomes the realm of the seemingly mundane human life which does not fit in the neat boxes of ideology and social scripts.
The Melodramatic Mode in I Love Dick
Chris Kraus’, I Love Dick catalogs a series of amorous letters written by Chris and her husband Sylvère after their evening with a colleague of his, Dick. They write the letters in response to Chris’s crush on Dick which she claims is fueled by their “Conceptual Fuck” that occurred (21). Quickly, Dick becomes a placeholder in their marriage, and a sounding board for Chris’s thoughts amidst her failing marriage and art projects. The novel has been consistently categorized as autofiction because of the way it blurs the lines between real life, narrative, and theory. Kaye Mitchell describes it best as a mix of “the fictional, essayistic, critical and confessional in highly self-conscious ways” (154). Though Gledhill’s argument is primarily applied to theater and film, I Love Dick as an experimental art piece, employs many of the same gestures. Chris herself describes the work in several different lights: she calls it “abstract romanticism” (27) then, “Calle Art '' (44) and even a “Case Study” (53 and 97). The letters to Dick are broken up into “Exhibits” giving them the effect of an art gallery, rather than a novel. In addition, the title of the first part of the book, “Scenes from a Marriage” acknowledges Kraus’s attempt to adapt Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 miniseries of the same title. Therefore, while the self-reflexivity of the piece does indeed qualify it as autofiction, Chris’s identity as a filmmaker and her interest in visual art translates into her writing. When reading I Love Dick with the melodramatic mode in mind Kraus is able to muddle the separation between individual and social. She accomplishes this by centering language.
Language
At the crux of melodrama is language. The initial push for the spoken word in the form liberated the working class. Performed dialogue embodied in one individual’s experience became a means of reflecting greater social issues and struggles within a group. The use of the epistolary mode in I Love Dick rather than film, photography, or live performance (all previous modes employed by Kraus) is essential to her subversion of male power dynamics. In Anna Fisher Watkins’s The Play in the System: The Art of Parasitical Resistance, she explains that the love letter “represents a state of play by which gendered opponents feed on each other in a dynamically unstable game” (224). By removing Dick’s language, Kraus is able to invert the power dynamic. He becomes abstract, “made to stand in for the very idea of men” (120). The act is powerful both in the voice it gives Chris and in its revocation of male individuality. Chris acknowledges the importance of Dick’s exclusion; while she awaits his response to the project she writes “I wanted to use the last few hours before your call to tell you how I feel” (54). She knows that Dick’s participation in this project would reinstate the power dynamic, effectively muting her. By placing her voice at the forefront, she controls the narrative, speaking the truth of a common female experience.
The epistolatory mode is important in the work because it allows what Watkins identifies as a performance of the female parasite. The female parasite is a misogynist product stemming from “the alien threat of femininity, a destructive and out-of-control dependence on a presumably healthy patriarch” (224). The fear is that the woman, who must be dependent on men, will become dependent to the point of disrupting male autonomy. But by accepting this stereotype and exaggerating it through her letters, Chris works within the structures of the patriarchy to expose not the real Dick, but the men he represents. The letters become a means by which she can ‘literalize’ him, making him a character in her story. Her language destabilizes his subjectivity and allows her “to put into letters [her] social revenge” (115). Although, this is not an attack on the real Dick, rather revenge on the patriarchal system he represents. Just as the excessiveness that characterizes melodrama functions to “release signification into theatrical or cinematic realization” (Gledhill xxii), the excessive nature of Chris’s letters releases signification into the literary world. Because of its dismissal of social norms, its confessional nature, and embrace of public shame, I Love Dick asserts the experience of the female parasite as significant. The “Dumb Cunt’s Tale” becomes something that deserves to be told.
Chris becomes the parasite by “manically embracing her and performing her social role as a romantically dependent woman” (Watkins 117). She sets the stage in her first letter to Dick, by describing it as “reactive” to being “thrown into this weird position” by Sylvère (28). From the beginning, she situates herself as responding to her husband. It makes it appear as if she is just playing the role that has been assigned to her, including being led by and complying with the men in her life. This dissociation from the upstart of these letters is a move to place blame on the system, rather than herself. Furthermore, her relationship with Sylvère depicts her as a parasite, even prior to her attachment to Dick. She describes herself as a “money-hustling hag” (28) and later explains that she initially “ensnared [Sylvère] ten or twelve years ago” with her sickness (108). The negative connotations associated with female ‘ensnarement’ and Chris’s sickness depicting her as weak, embodies the feared parasitical woman created by the male individual. Chris’s full dependence on her husband and failure as a wife—her sickness, demoting her from the role of caretaker—villainizes her character because of her inability to assume her role as a wife.
She goes on to characterize herself as a lovesick juvenile, preying on a crush, and describing herself as “a very romantic girl” attracted to Dick’s “windows of vulnerability” (27). She plays into the image of a girl desperate for love, creating vulnerability in a man where there is none— later learn that Dick has no desire to participate in the type of vulnerability this project requires. The obsession intensifies as she recalls drawing his face. Kraus describes her “beating heart” and “sweaty palms” (27) when receiving his call. It evokes images of teen girls locked in their room, scribbling little hearts in their diaries. Her identity as a forty-year-old woman straddles the line of pathetic and stalkerish. She crosses the line as the letters progress vowing that “we will do this trip together. I will never be alone” (40). Chris’s eerie tone portrays her as a crazed stalker. She utilizes the excess to pull in her audience. Gledhill argues that by portraying excessive emotionality the melodrama, “recalibrates the so-called cause-and-effect logic of Hollywood narrative and television serial drama” (7). The traditional drama insists on a largescale event to propel its narrative. The melodrama reimagines this, asserting that the most mundane things in life have complicated causations. The excessive emotions Kraus feels forces the audience to confront their causes, which appears at first to be a crush, but her story reveals the forces of a patriarchal society working below the surface. By telling her tale, she asks the audience to find empathy in her response to meeting Dick, by beginning to understand her subjugation.
Chris is aware of the attitude toward the female parasite. In the same letter in which she performs the parasite, she succumbs to her fate proclaiming, “the only thing that I can do is tell “The Dumb Cunt’s Tale” (27). The Dumb Cunt and the parasite are one and the same. They are women who are believed to be so desperate or so stupid, they simply will not stop chasing a man who clearly does not want them. By labeling her letters as such, Chris makes it clear she understands the implications of these depictions. It forces her audience to ask why she would choose to engage in behavior she clearly knows is shameful. The answer lies in her correspondence to Dick. He becomes not only an object of desire but a means by which Kraus is able to “displace [her] own apparent shame/victimhood onto the male objects of their desire” (Mitchell 165). The absence of his voice makes him complicit in Chris’s yearning. By removing him from the dialogue he becomes a soundboard, whose muteness acts as validation. Unwillingly, he becomes her accomplice in unraveling the myth of the female parasite.
Sylvère’s transcription of the first letter further empowers Chris. By making her husband relay these desires in writing she controls the language, and he disseminates it. Although it does not stop him from inserting his opinion, he claims her letter “lacks a point,” is “too literary,” and that she is “squashing out all the trembly little things he found so touching” (28). His desire for the ‘trembly little things’ implicates his desire to retain the power dynamic between he and Chris as an attempt to hold on to their failing marriage. Although by placing this commentary within the context of the very first letter she reveals the tension between her own intelligence and her husband’s desire to squelch it. He goes on to tell Chris that the experiment “has nothing to do with [Dick]” and that it’s “just about us as a couple” (52). This sentiment is repeated throughout Sylvère’s discussions with Chris and his own letters to Dick because, for him, the letters become a way to rekindle the romance between him and his wife. But the literariness of Chris’s writing disrupts this illusion. She does debase herself as pathetic, but it is for the greater purpose of displacing that shame on Dick as a means of reaching the root cause: the system. Sylvère’s own language is manipulated by Kraus to highlight the power dynamic within heterosexual marriage that is threatened by female success outside of the marriage.
Although Sylvère’s interjection seems an attempt to regain the power, Chris maintains her authority. She remarks that “it is not the Dumb Cunt exegesis he expected,” acknowledging her husband’s assumption that the project’s primary aim is to dig up shame and vulnerability in herself simply for personal gain. Kraus reassumes her leverage by employing Dick, claiming that “I know that as you read this, you’ll know these things are true” (28). Her host then becomes a means of authority. She mocks his inability to speak back as the letters remain unsent, placing him in the narrative whether he likes it or not. Watkins explains that “the letters taunt Dick, mocking him for being forced to watch from the sidelines... while inviting him to participate in his own spectacularization” (121). Not only is the real Dick invited to participate, but the invented version of him becomes leverage by which Chris subverts the narrative. The paradox of Dick both being central to Chris’s experience and excluded then becomes the means by which she muddles the personal and the private. The letters allow her to make him a participant in her shameful exegesis, and a source of blame.
There is the question of the ethical merit in this type of performing the parasite. Many, including Dick Hebdige, argued that the project’s goals do not justify the violation of privacy it requires. Chris even wrestles with this question in one of her letters: “Dick, did you realize you have the same name as the murdered Dickie in Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley books? A name connoting innocence and amorality, and I think Dick’s friend and killer confronted problems much like these” (40). It is unclear which Dick she means in the final sentence. She blurs the line between Dickie, the murder victim, and the Dick she writes to. This creates an analogy between the two suggesting that Chris understands her project as a kind of murdering the ‘innocent’ Dick. She and Sylvère are both friends and murderers. Further, it indicates that she views Dick Hebdige as innocent, making it clear that these letters and their publication are not a personal attack, but rather something more. Watkins suggests that the exploitation of Dick Hedbige is justified in the way that the letters “explore how women’s secondary status might allow them to sidestep their supposed ethical and moral responsibility to a patriarchal system on which they depend but in which they hold no stake of ownership” (28). I Love Dick then questions the responsibility of women to uphold norms of a system they are removed from. Kraus is surrounded by two infamous literary critics; their work dominates the field. The things they publish have a significant impact on the ways in which people read literature and therefore, the ways people view the world. But as they continue to succeed, her own art continues to fail. So, while she understands Dick is innocent, he becomes a symbol of the critical discourse that women continue to be excluded from.
Throughout her letters, Krlaus makes it known that these men do not respect her as an intellectual. The night she first met Dick she writes that “because she does not express herself through theoretical language, no one expects too much from her” (21). And after reading one of her letters to Sylvère, he remarks “Chris you can’t send that. It makes no sense at all. You’re supposed to be intelligent” (65). It is significant that this letter to Dick is one that Sylvère doesn’t transcribe, suggesting that his exclusion from the act of letter writing, invalidates its contents.
Chris goes on to describe the parameters of ‘serious fiction,’ which has been primarily conceptualized by men. She explains that for fiction to be serious it must ‘fictionalize’ the identities of all supporting characters involved. Effectively diminishing their identity and their influence on the main character. This turns the “contemporary hetero male novel” into “a thinly veiled Story of Me, as voraciously consumptive as all of patriarchy” (72). These stories erase the social creation of an individual’s identity and promote the assumption that men like Dick, Sylvère, and Paul Auster, who Chris uses as an example, are fully ‘self-made’ as if the ‘secondary characters’ in their life have had no influence on them and their writing. The people, especially the women, behind the man are made one-dimensional by this reduction.
In contrast, Chris explains that “when women try to pierce this false conceit by naming names because our ‘I’s’ are changing as we meet other ‘I’s,’ we’re called bitches, libelers, pornographers and amateurs” (72). For women, because they are not considered worthy of having their own ‘Story of Me’, their subjectivity then is understood in relation to those in their life. They have not been socialized to understand their selves outside of their connections to men. This sentiment echoes Hollywood’s eagerness to exploit stories of women’s physical, sexual, and emotional abuse in fictional films, and their contrasting need to silence women who name high-powered directors and producers as abusers. Watkins explains how this naming demonstrates “how power is disavowed not on a systemic or institutional level but on a personal level” (116). The connection of the individual to the greater social structure as modeled by the melodrama becomes a means by which Kraus debunks the understanding of the patriarchy as the system absolves individuals of blame. By making Dick into the “secondary character” in Chris’s ‘Story of Me,’ Kraus understands there will be an outcry for Dick’s side of the story. She understands that by reversing the natural order, then maybe the inequality of it will be revealed.
Case Study
Ultimately Kraus’s own understanding of her project with Dick functions in the same way as the melodramatic mode functions. She suggests to him that “a case study is what we’ve started to create with you” (53). The idea of creating ‘with him’ plays on the irony of Dick’s exclusion from the letters. ‘With’ implies that Dick is a tool in Chris’s study, rather than an active agent. He is the object of the study, not an analyst. She goes on to describe a case study as “a total reconstruction of events through documents and transcripts” (53). Understanding the case requires someone to connect the documents into a cohesive narrative, it requires an author. Naturally then, the case study does not become absolute truth, but rather it is one version of the event which is influenced both by the author’s experience and the social context surrounding it. Therefore, the case study as a mode is important because “by understanding one simple thing...it’s possible to understand everything” (53).” Like the melodrama, a case study “fuses individual and social as codependent” (Gledhill xxi). The melodrama and the case study then become metonymic, because of the ways in which they merge the private and the social realms of people’s lives. Whereas common narrative formats rely on the social and ideological to understand the individual, reading Kraus’s work as a melodrama reveals how it is equally important to examine the common dynamics of private relationships to understand societal structures.
Conclusion
Kraus’ work has remained a controversial piece within the Western feminist movement. Many argue that by playing with female stereotypes Kraus only hurts the movement. Additionally, many believe that by targeting Dick Hebdige she encourages the image of vengeful, man-hating feminists. These criticisms miss the point. I Love Dick explores questions of what it means to be a feminist in a patriarchal society. It asks its reader why women should play by men’s rules if they never have a stake in the game? The melodramatic mode allows for these discussions, making language an empowering tool in the decentering of the hetero male individual in exchange for a codependent relationship between Chris’s personal life and the social norms that dictate it. Emerging from a period before the tech surge, I Love Dick is a revolutionary work and important contribution to feminist ideology, because, as Chris points out, “there’s not enough female irrepressibility written down” (210).
Works Cited
Anna Watkins Fisher. “Manic Impositions: The Parasitical Art of Chris Kraus and Sophie Calle.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 1/2, Apr. 2012, pp. 223–235. EBSCOhost, search-ebscohost-com.ezp.slu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.23333446&site=eds-live.
Fisher, Anna Watkins. The Play in the System. [Electronic Resource]: The Art of Parasitical Resistance. Duke University Press, 2020. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat00825a&AN=slu.b5097335&site=eds-live.
Gledhill, Christine, and Linda Williams. Melodrama Unbound. [Electronic Resource]: Across History, Media, and National Cultures. Columbia University Press, 2018. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat00825a&AN=slu.b4894468&site=eds-live.
Kraus, Chris. I Love Dick. Semiotext(e), 2006.
Mitchell, Kaye. “"The Dumb Cunt’s Tale": Desire, Shame and Self-Narration in Contemporary Autofiction.” Writing Shame: Gender, Contemporary Literature and Negative Affect, edited by Kaye Mitchell, Edinburgh University Press, 2020, pp. 149–198. EBSCOhost, search-ebscohost-com.ezp.slu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=202121657050&site=ehost-live.
Anna Watkins Fisher. “Manic Impositions: The Parasitical Art of Chris Kraus and Sophie Calle.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 1/2, Apr. 2012, pp. 223–235. EBSCOhost, search-ebscohost-com.ezp.slu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.23333446&site=eds-live.
Fisher, Anna Watkins. The Play in the System. [Electronic Resource]: The Art of Parasitical Resistance. Duke University Press, 2020. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat00825a&AN=slu.b5097335&site=eds-live.
Gledhill, Christine, and Linda Williams. Melodrama Unbound. [Electronic Resource]: Across History, Media, and National Cultures. Columbia University Press, 2018. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat00825a&AN=slu.b4894468&site=eds-live.
Kraus, Chris. I Love Dick. Semiotext(e), 2006.
Mitchell, Kaye. “"The Dumb Cunt’s Tale": Desire, Shame and Self-Narration in Contemporary Autofiction.” Writing Shame: Gender, Contemporary Literature and Negative Affect, edited by Kaye Mitchell, Edinburgh University Press, 2020, pp. 149–198. EBSCOhost, search-ebscohost-com.ezp.slu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=202121657050&site=ehost-live.