Most of the characters we have met so far are either members of an elite and secret boys club (Win Everett, Laurence Parmenter, George de Mohrenschildt,T. J. Mackey) or one of Lee’s male friends. So far, the women in Libra tend to be playing traditional and supportive roles (love interest, mother, daughter). The exception to this is Dr. Braunfels.
Dr. Braunfels seems pretty cool. She is some sort of spy boss who speaks a ton of languages. When Lee tells her that all he really wants is to defect to Russia, she stays focused on what she needs while keeping Lee calm: “What she wanted him to do, for now, was put aside any thoughts of defecting and concentrate on getting access to classified documents and photographs” (111).
Even though Dr. Braunfels acts really professionally, the narrator describes her completely differently: “She has a full mouth and pudgy hands. There was a mock girlishness about her, several levels of something tricky and derisive” (111). This negative image is directly linked to her gender by “girlishness” and “full mouth,” a description usually only applied to women. The description of “levels of something tricky and derisive” also plays into the idea that any powerful woman is sly and mean. She is a spy, but the male characters in the book who are doing similarly sketchy things aren’t described as “tricky.” The narrator just describes the secret things they’ve done.
Compare the description of Dr. Braunfelds to George de Mohrenshildt. Mohrenshildt is a “tricky” character if any of the characters are. But for Mohrenshildt, the narrator lets his actions speak for themselves: “his marriages didn’t explain his apparent association with Nazis in World War II, his apparent ties to Polish and French intelligence, his expulsion from Mexico, his apparent communist leanings when he was at the University of Texas, his Soviet contacts in Venezuela, the discrepancies in his stated history, his travels in West Africa, Central America, Yugoslavia and Cuba” (55). Dr. Braunfels’ actions should also speak clearly for themselves. She must have a lot of interesting secrets because we know her as a spy and yet DeLillo added odd and unclear generalizations about her personality on top of that.
Since the description of Dr. Braunfels is in the middle of an interaction between her and Lee, I’m not sure how much of it is a description of what Lee thinks of her. Whether it’s based on Lee’s perception or not though, I’m a little disappointed that the first female character who isn’t defined in relationship to a male character couldn’t just be a cool spy without being “girlish”.
I think it’s unlikely that we’ll meet Dr. Braunfels again after Lee leaves the marines but I do hope we meet more women outside of roles supporting a man.
It is interesting that the only female character so far who drives Lee's plot forward is described in a negative manour. However, I wouldn't immediately associate this with some broader plot by DeLillo to make women look ridiculous. I see Dr. Braunfels as specifically a Soviet spy. She is another piece contributing to the contrast DeLillo sets up between Lee's idealized image of the Soviet Union and the real thing. She had to be a ridiculous spy, because she is Lee's link to Russia, not because she is a woman. (Although, the fact that she's female might be meant to contribute to her inadequacy as a spy...)
ReplyDeleteI think an interesting character in this book is Lee's mother. She is in one of the supporting roles that you mentioned, but her role as giver-of-testimony is still important. Marguerite's relationship with Lee has affected him, and this effect continues throughout his life. Marguerite also doesn't let Lee affect her, or at least she doesn't want it to show if he does. She is willing to watch him eat, because although life has beaten her down, she will not lose her dignity.
ReplyDeleteThank you for pointing this out! I completely agree with you on the fact that DeLillo's female characters tend to fit a particular box while the male characters are quite diverse in their ideas and actions. In one of my agora days classes, we spoke about the idea that "good" male characters have traits that "evil" women characters share and I think this is a good example of that.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree, Dr. Braunfels is cool, like a spy boss with high intelligence, etc. And thank you for pointing out that Dr. Braufels' description focuses much more on her appearances than her merit, unlike all the other (male) intelligence agents we've met so far. I also hope that we get some more tough, not-supporting-character women soon!
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting point you brought up. We don't really focus much on the female characters in Libra (perhaps because there aren't many of them at all), but it does seem like Dr. Braunfels has an important impact on Lee. It is also interesting, because many of the other female characters in Libra all seem to be sort of naive and innocent. For example, Win's wife doesn't even fully know what her husband is planning to do with JFK, though Win is practically devoting his whole life to it. Dr. Braunfels seems like an exception to that as she is playing more of a "bad" and involved role in that she is a spy and helping turn Lee to the "dark side", aka the Soviet Union.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really interesting (and in my opinion, pretty significant) point that we haven't talked a lot about in class, but which I think comes up in a lot of the literature we read. With the exception of Kindred (which was written by a woman), all of the novels we read basically don't treat women as real characters at all. It's kind of interesting because even as a lot of these novels address complex themes of morality and stuff like that, they only show men as being affected by that, with women as a side note, or, even, more like a prop. And the specific double standard you describe here -- describing the female spy as "tricky" even though the male spies do the exact same thing and aren't judged for it -- also seems to come up a lot. It's kind of ironic that at face value, these novels try and do something new and unprecedented with literature, but end up falling into the same sexist tropes as so many other pieces of literature before them.
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