Healthy, Desirable, and Powerful
Training a certain skill or trade gives a person a vigilant eye about what they’re examining, allowing them to feel confident that their perception is accurate and, at times, helpful. While in some cases this is very focused and diligent, such as the training underwent for a job or an education, in other cases this happens completely unintentionally. Societies form communal opinions on what’s healthy, what’s attractive, and what’s useful, and most members of those societies are prone to adopting those views. The definitions a society might declare can be so hard-set, that they can partially or completely undermine those determined by studiousness in a trade or an occupation. In the short stories The New Louise by Sharon Pomerantz, and Ask Your Mother by Joanna Rakoff, both protagonists experience the detriments and dangers that occur when society defines certain characteristics of themselves as unhealthy, unattractive, or powerless, and how overwhelming or undermining this can be for them.
In The New Louise, the protagonist the story is named after wakes up one morning to discover her previously undesirable and unhealthy body has been transformed into the beautiful, young, and supple body of a magazine model, Greer. Throughout the entire story, she reflects on how terrible it had been to be in her old body. She mentions how unremarkable this body was, citing the way bank tellers never remembered her, and how even her own mother struggled with her daughter’s image. Partially brought about by society’s standards and partially brought about her mother’s overly-critical behavior, Louise discovers that now that she’s young and beautiful, she’s started running out of things to talk about. Later on in the story, Louise comes to realize just how close to home her previously unremarkable state had been when Burt, her husband, fails to notice the transformation. While he prattles on about his mother and his work, he seeks out the stability and predictability that was always Louise and, not only fails to register her transformation, but disregards almost everything she’s been saying entirely. Louise had always been the average woman with an average job and an average life. She had never been a part of the niche that was considered particularly beautiful, healthy, or powerful. As a result, she had fallen into the backgrounds of the lives of most of everyone she knew. Burt used her as a means of stability and comfort — a blemish on society at a comparable size. Louise served as something for her mother to criticize, allowing them to have something to talk about without being completely detached. To everyone outside these immediate friends and family, she was invisible. While the world around had its impact on her, she had no impact on it.
Meanwhile, in Ask Your Mother, Joanna Rakoff recounts her experience giving birth to her first child. Her mother had always told her she’d had a propulsive labor, meaning the baby came out much faster than it was meant to. When she told her physician, the woman became very serious, expressing concern about how dangerous this could be for Rakoff. When she went into labor, she was rushed to the hospital, and once they learned the physician’s name, they took her in immediately. When the labor took its time, compared to how fast her mother said hers had been, this filled Rakoff with unnecessary and intense worry about whether she’d be able to bear hers, causing the birth to be, overall, more stressful for her. Throughout her time at the hospital, doctors and nurses warned her that she would need an epidural. They spoke about her low threshold of pain (even though she recalled always having a high threshold) and tried to convince her through coercion and fear mongering. They became hostile when she refused. Eventually, she accepted the epidural and insisted they turn it off when she was about to start pushing. The doctors relentlessly argued that she wasn’t strong enough to do it, that she had a low tolerance for pain, and that she’d need to have a c-section. In this scenario, the ideals of healthy, appealing, and powerful brought about by society clouded the training the doctors and nurses had had, causing them to make assumptions about the protagonist without actually investigating. Consequently, this endangered Rakoff’s safety by almost forcing her to undergo a potentially dangerous and scarring surgery. As morning came and the head doctor turned the epidural off, Rakoff was able to have a natural birth the way she wished. But had the doctor not returned, Rakoff ran the risk of being put into danger and scarred by this behavior.
In the first case, the impact on the protagonist was very emotional. Louise came to realize how little of an impact she had on the world, based on her appearance and the perception of her body. Meanwhile, in the second case, the trauma of Rakoff’s birth experience was exacerbated by the perceptions of those around her, who insisted her birth would be fast when it wasn’t, and insisted she wasn’t capable enough to deliver this baby on her own. Louise and Rakoff are two in many who consistently face the way a society perceives the quality of a human body, and show two different examples of how detrimental this can be. The both of them were pulled into minimal games of tug-of-war with how they perceived their experiences and how those around them did, but each were dramatically affected by it. In the end, Louise felt herself molting her new body and reverting to her old, but still yearned to enjoy her newly-gained power for a couple more days. Rakoff had her child naturally, but only after the terror of a birth that wasn’t instantaneous, and the threat of a caesarian looming on the horizon. Both endings are bittersweet as the protagonists come to realize how the world around them has shaped their experiences, and both women came out of these experiences with a heightened understanding of how little they shaped the rest of society.
