Gender,love and recognition in I Love Dick and The Other Woman

‘Scenes from a marriage’

First published in 1997, I Love Dick was initially overlooked and only achieved a significant readership after being relaunched in 2015 (the same year as the English translation of The Other Woman). Much of its reception history is thus relatively recent. Made into a TV series by Amazon video in 2016, it has been hailed as a ‘feminist classic’ that offers women a new literary voice. In The Independent, for example, Dawn Foster (2015) wrote that ‘I Love Dick is one of the most important novels about being a woman . . . Friends speak of Kraus’s work in the same breathless and conspiratorial way they discuss Elena Ferrante’s novels of female friendship set in Naples’. Regarding the nature of the work the reader is exposed to, the first-person narrator writes, ‘these letters seem to open up a new genre, something in between cultural criticism and fiction’ (Kraus, 2016: 27).

In I Love Dick, we meet the 39-year-old film director Chris Kraus, who is married to the older and more famous French critic Sylvère Lotringer, a professor at Columbia University. Kraus is having a hard time getting recognition for her films and feels overlooked and worthless. After she and Lotringer enjoy a dinner with Dick, one of his colleagues, she becomes obsessed with the idea of becoming Dick’s mistress. This one-sided obsession, which she orchestrates and explicitly acknowledges as a romantic infatuation, fuels hundreds of pages of letters and diary entries in which she seeks love and recognition from the unattainable Dick.

The title of the first part of the novel, ‘Scenes from a Marriage’, is a read-between-the-lines reference to Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 TV series of the same name. Here, Bergman provided a cross-section of a middle-class marriage that slowly implodes from the pressure of the sexual liberation of that era. The matrimonial relationship in Scenes from a Marriage is no longer bonded by social conventions or moral obligations but is simply held together by mutual desires – what Anthony Giddens refers to as ‘the pure relationship’ (Giddens, 1992). When feelings turn lukewarm and desire is extinguished, it becomes difficult to sustain the relationship. In Bergman’s film, it is the man of that era, Johan, who gets bored and takes off with a younger woman, while Marianne’s whole existence seems predicated on her husband. In I Love Dick, by contrast, the gender roles are turned upside down and it is the middle-aged woman who feels empty and fantasizes about being desired by another man.

At the beginning of I Love Dick, Chris and Sylvère have been married for more than 10 years. The decision not to have children on Chris’s part seems to be a feminist move, a deliberate opting out of the feminized, caring mother role, yet in certain respects, Chris is also depicted as being like a child herself. She feels safe and secure in the relationship, but asks, ‘why are we so bored with our lives?’ (Kraus, 2016: 53).

This is where Dick enters the picture. At first, ‘Project Dick’ is a joint project: a conceptual work of art and a sexual fantasy that Chris sets in motion between herself and Sylvère. They both write letters to Dick (jointly and individually) but never send them: he functions as a fantasized third person who feeds their desire for one another. Here, desire is not mediated by the male gaze, as argued by Mulvey, whose theory is directly written into the novel. Rather, Chris, in her role as a female film-maker, takes over ‘the male gaze’ and describes Dick as ‘a blank screen onto which we can project our fantasies’ (Kraus, 2016: 13). It is the woman’s active desire for another man that temporarily stabilizes the marriage.

Dick refers to a ‘real’ person (the cultural critic Dick Hebdige), but in the novel he appears mainly as an object of fantasy. His function in the text may remind us of Cordelia, the love object in Søren Kierkegaard’s Diary of a Seducer. Chris, just like the classic male aesthete, is less preoccupied with the sexual act than with ‘the energy of it all’, and by holding onto Dick as an object of fantasy, she can ‘postpone’ their relationship by projecting it into the future: ‘I’m torn between maintaining you as an entity to write to and talking with you as a person’ (Kraus, 2016: 114). In her sexual fantasies about Dick, meanwhile, she puts herself in a Kierkegaardian double exposure where she is both the one who is examining and the one being examined: ‘I watch you feel my tits and we both watch my nipples as they get hard’ (Kraus, 2016: 145). Last but not least, the novel imitates the Kierkegaard (1992) Either/Or even in its form, presenting itself as a collection of letters and diary excerpts.

The fantasy of being recognized

Chris insists that she is not interested in receiving a man’s approval and recognition. This position cannot, however, be plausibly maintained, since the appeal to Dick is based on a longing to be seen, heard and recognized, as expressed in one of the final letters: ‘Dear Dick, No woman is an island-ess. We fall in love in hope of anchoring ourselves to someone else, to keep from falling, Love, Chris’ (Kraus, 2016: 241). It seems more or less random that this ‘someone else’ turns out to be Dick (Chris addresses one of her letters to ‘Dear Dick, Sylvère, Anyone’). Meanwhile, the desire for recognition that is expressed via the hundreds of letters and diary excerpts, addressed to both Dick and the reader, may have broader relevance for contemporary forms of romantic love and sexuality.

Both men and women are expected nowadays to be individualistic and independent (‘islands’) and we are also expected to provide the same freedom to our partner. ‘The morality of modern sexuality consists now in affirming mutual freedom, symmetry, and autonomy, rather than in respecting, say, sexual honor or norms of monogamy’ (Illouz, 2012: 60). This vision of sexuality has also been shaped by feminist demands for sexual freedom and autonomy. It is a neoliberal ideal to be your own ‘boss’, but at the same time, it is also a feminist ideal to express your sexuality and have a ‘room of your own’. The paradox, however, lies in simultaneously wanting the other person to acknowledge us in our ‘own separate rooms’. We acquire an identity by being seen and recognized in our intimate relationships. This tension splays across the text of I Love Dick. For example, Chris tries to convince herself, the reader and Dick that she does not need anyone else and is an island unto herself. Dick is the ‘perfect listener’ (Kraus, 2016: 80) because he does not respond, and the female protagonist can therefore maintain control over both the text and her self-image. From a feminist perspective she is not looked at, she is looking: ‘I’m giving myself the freedom of seeing from the inside out’ (Kraus, 2016: 65).

Yet, the silent recipient effectively eliminates the opportunity for recognition. Dick is not interested in her advances at all, which only makes Chris crank up the intensity of her letters: ‘How could I make you understand the letters were the realest thing I’d ever done? By calling it a game you were negating all my feelings. Even if this love for you could never be returned I wanted recognition’ (Kraus, 2016: 137). And here Chris seems to be speaking not only to Dick but also to the reader as a potential stand-in or replacement. The issue, in short, is not just about how the male character fails to respond to this onslaught of courting. In documenting this failure, Kraus also makes a bid for recognition from female readers, who may be able to provide the validation she cannot find elsewhere.

In this bid, she was ultimately successful: her memoir harvested massive amounts of attention. I Love Dick has been read as a feminist masterpiece that articulates the experience of being a woman and a female artist in a male-dominated society. As Emily Gould (2015) from The Guardian writes, ‘we are able to write our own letters to Dick now, and to publish them widely: to tell Dick exactly what we think of him, whether he likes it or not’. The enthusiastic response to the novel speaks its own language since I Love Dick has inspired recognition from many of its readers. Such recognition takes the form of what can be called ‘self-intensification’: perceptions of likeness, flashes of perceived commonality, shared history or common reference points (Felski, 2018: 39), anchored around experiences of ambivalence or frustration in relationships with men. Reading, in this sense, can serve as a means of forging an imagined community with other women.

In-between author and reader

Real-life Dick cannot hold a candle to fantasy Dick, but maybe that is the whole point. The understanding and practice of love can become autotelic; it takes place in the individual’s imagination and is maintained for the sake of the fantasies themselves rather than because the fantasies are intended to result in a real binding relationship. That love mainly blooms in the imagination or fantasy means that it is not being exposed to social attacks and can grow unhindered and offer maximal satisfaction and protection. As Chris points out in a letter to Sylvère: ‘I feel so teenage. When you’re living so intensely in your head there isn’t any difference between what you imagine and what actually takes place. Therefore, you’re both omnipotent and powerless’ (Kraus, 2016: 45).

However, problems arise when the fantasy can no longer be maintained as a fantasy and reality sets in. Of course, both ‘fantasy’ and ‘reality’ are socially shaped; fantasies of love take shape not least in encounters with cultural representations of love. This is significant in I Love Dick, where the female protagonist’s fantasies about love swirl together like a ‘kaleidoscope’ composed of fragments of the literature she has read. Chris feels, dreams and thinks via her literary knowledge. As Illouz writes, ‘To the extent that we encounter many of our own emotions in and through media culture, we can say that a part of our emotional socialization is fictional’ (Illouz, 2012: 212). Chris takes an ambivalent stance towards this question: she rejects the ‘fantasy world of romance’, yet also reproduces it in her romantic staging of Dick. One moment she is proclaiming that ‘to be in love with someone means believing that to be in someone else’s presence is the only means of being, completely, yourself’, and the next she declaims, ‘I detest the idea that love between two persons can lead to salvation. All my life I have fought against this oppressive type of relationship’ (Kraus, 2016: 151). Chris seems to oscillate between the dream of symbiosis and the demand for independence.

In certain respects, Kraus is the incarnation of a knowing, sophisticated and critical feminist intellectual, and displaying an impressive knowledge of literature, film and theory. And yet she also fantasizes about male recognition and romantic love. This fantasizing, as we have noted, is linked to reading and writing; the female protagonist is both an avid reader and a budding author. Her fantasies about love and her various incarnations of the love object Dick are linked to her attachment to literary works, her role as a reader, her fantasies about her own voice and gaze and, last but not least, to becoming an author and a film director. Yet, imagination and fantasy are not just self-centred but also a way to communicate and share experiences with other women. In I Love Dick, reading and writing serve as a key mechanism of recognition, alongside, and partly as a result of the failure of other forms of social recognition.

In this vein, Chris confides, ‘writing this has been like moving through a kaleidoscope of all our favorite books in history’ (Kraus, 2016: 54). She depicts herself as an omnivorous reader – devouring everything from literary classics to Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Sartre to Harlequin Romances – and identifies with various authors, characters, film directors, painters and performance artists – both women and men. In the Harlequin novels, she is searching for romantic scripts she can relate to and recycle: ‘underlining, footnoting and annotating all the passages that could relate to me and you’ (Kraus, 2016: 86); meanwhile, from Werner Fassbinder, she seeks identification as a film-maker (Kraus, 2016: 154). As mentioned previously, the main figure she identifies with is Kierkegaard’s male seducer, yet at the same time, she feels an intense kinship with Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, who is often associated with the female reader. In contrast to Emma, however, Chris is actively writing. In a letter to Dick, she plays with the idea of herself as Emma and Sylvère as the cuckold Charles Bovary and she writes (on his account): ‘Emma and I created you out of nothing, or very little, and all in fairness, You owe us everything. While you flounder in your daily life we have built you up as a truly powerful icon of erotic integrity’ (Kraus, 2016: 96).

That Chris oscillates between masculine and feminine literary personae shows that gender is treated as a masquerade in I Love Dick; she, as an author, can actively experiment with various roles. This mobility also applies to her role as a reader, which she transmogrifies through her pen. Where Emma is unfaithful through her reading (passive), Chris is unfaithful via her pen and hence her role as an author (active). In this way, the passive female reader (Emma) is transformed into an active author/writer (Johannes the Seducer). That she identifies with both the stereotypical male seducer and the stereotypical female reader via her fantasies distorts the landscape we are familiar with: Emma Bovary now becomes a seducer and Johannes becomes a lovesick dreamer. As a feminist heroine, Chris both ironizes and embraces the cultural scripts that women are subjected to, not only by thinking, feeling and writing in a stereotypically masculine way but also by blending the cliché-filled gender identifications of readers and authors. In lockstep with this masquerade position, Chris at one point refers to herself an androgynous ‘de-gendered freak’ (Kraus, 2016: 157).

As a highly self-conscious work of auto-fiction, I Love Dick thus explores fluctuating forms of recognition as they shape sexual and romantic love as well as the desire for feminist solidarity and female friendship. Thematically, it ironizes yet also embraces women’s desire for recognition from a male partner, while rewriting the conventional gender scripts through which such desire has conventionally been articulated. Even as the desire for male recognition is thwarted at the level of content, it becomes the precondition for a possible experience of mutual recognition between author and (female) reader – promoted by the work’s aesthetically self-conscious treatment of gender as a performance, though not all women, as we are about to see, may be able or willing to accept such an invitation.

Lost in recognition

The struggle for recognition is also a central theme of Bohman’s novel. Originally published in Swedish and soon translated, The Other Woman is not as widely known in the English-speaking world as Kraus’s work, but it offers some striking parallels. Here again there is an imagined and at least partly delusional relationship between a first-person narrator and a male lover, and also, as we will see, a concern with relations between the female protagonist and female readers.

There are also, however, some important differences. The heroine of The Other Woman is a woman in her late 20s who works as a cafeteria worker at Norrköping Hospital. Ashamed of her life, she tries to convince herself (and the reader) that she is too beautiful, smart and sexy for her economically precarious existence. A romantic dreamer, she fantasizes about becoming a famous author and also about falling in love with Carl Malmberg, one of the doctors who eats in the cafeteria. That the doctor is married only adds to his desirability, allowing her to position herself in the role of the ‘other woman’.

At the beginning of the novel, we thus find ourselves in what looks like a popular romance, where the protagonist tries to escape her class by fantasizing about climbing the social ladder. Her dream is that the love connection with the doctor will become ‘romantic, like in a film’ (Bohman, 2015: 171). Not unlike Dick, Malmberg comes to represent the perfect man. But where Kraus is being ironic in her creation of Dick, the protagonist in The Other Woman is in earnest: Malmberg is the man whose recognition and love will change her life for good.

Unlike Kraus, Bohman’s protagonist is obsessed with being hyper-feminine as a means of pleasing men and identifies mainly with female authors from the romantic canon – especially those women of the past who, unlike women today, were allowed to fantasize about symbiotic love and did not need to feel ashamed about it:

I have searched in my books for others who are like me. Or for those who are the way I want to be: those who lay themselves open to life, who love and lose, who do not distance themselves from life with theories and ideologies. But things do not go well for them, these women writers, young, lyrical modernists who reveal so much about themselves, these nineties authors who write from the perspective of the completely unguarded love for one man. (Bohman, 2015: 28–29)

Such attachments, the protagonist feels, have been rendered shameful and impermissible in a feminist context.

We can see here how the protagonist, like Kraus, interprets literary descriptions of feelings, characters and narratives as guideposts for her own life – she identifies with fictional depictions of women’s lives and fates and judges herself accordingly. But rather than engaging in a critique or deconstruction of gender norms, she is looking for what Kraus wants to challenge, namely, pure dreams of love and happiness: from the perspective of a working-class woman, she is criticizing the avant-garde disdain for beauty articulated by Kraus: ‘Do you have such an excess of beauty that you need to slum it a little bit, embrace what is ugly?’ (Bohman, 2015: 70–71).

In The Other Woman, it is significant that the protagonist’s feelings are structured via attachments to film and literature in particular. As with Kraus, the fantasy about the man comes before the man himself:

I have thought about where we would meet, imagined him at home with me, even if the idea of him in my tiny apartment among my things is an unlikely scenario. I picture him sitting on my sofa, we are drinking a glass of wine, chatting. Perhaps we are discussing literature, which turns out to be a shared passion. I think of him as an educated man, interested in art and literature and politics, he is well traveled, well read, well bred, he would stand in front of the bookcase examining my books, impressed by what he sees. (Bohman, 2015: 7)

The love object, who is treated as an ironic ‘case study’ for Kraus, becomes a true ‘artwork’ for the heroine of Bohman’s novel. In both cases, the man is constructed by the woman’s auto-erotic fantasies, by Kraus as a combined cowboy and intellectual and by Bohman’s protagonist as a fairy-tale prince who can provide recognition through his social status as a doctor.

It is noticeable that the protagonist of The Other Woman tells us very little about her work in the hospital cafeteria. Fantasizing about her first encounter with Carl Malmberg, she imagines she will say to him: ‘That’s just something I happen to be doing at the moment’ (Bohman, 2015: 25). Meanwhile, she is obsessed with impressing Carl (and the reader) with all the books she has read, as signs that she actually belongs to a different social class. The narrative impetus here is that the prince will accidentally come by, see her nice bookshelf and save her from her precarious existence. For example, she considers buying an edition of The Magic Mountain from the late 1950s in two volumes with the justification ‘that they would look lovely in my bookcase’ (Bohman, 2015: 24). In her fantasies, she seeks recognition for her intellect and cultural capital from the doctor: ‘Carl Malmberg would stand in front of it, take out the first volume, and say that this is a really good book . . . He would be impressed by the fact that I have read it . . .’ (Bohman, 2015: 24–25). The bookshelf becomes a means of receiving both the romantic and social recognition she feels she deserves. Yet, as we have noted, the married doctor with whom she enters into a relationship is not at all interested in her wonderful book collection, but only in seeing her dress up in teenage undergarments. This experience, however, does not lead to any common ground or a growing sense of feminist solidarity with other women.

‘I am a failure as a feminist woman’

The Other Woman has a double meaning; it refers to the first-person narrator’s role as a mistress and also to her actual and fantasized relationships to other women. The latter idea is repeatedly invoked as a vague object of reflection; the protagonist feels it is necessary to position herself in relation to other women lest she be destroyed by them. However, she cannot find her identity via solidarity with other women (as Kraus can), but only by distancing herself from or misrecognizing other women: ‘I couldn’t get away from the notion that all forms of sisterhood would mean lowering myself to an inferior level, that I would be forced to diminish myself to some extent’. (Bohman, 2015: 14).

The heroine’s act of mirroring vis-à-vis other women is ambivalent since she seeks both recognition and misrecognition:

I don’t know why I think everything I do needs the approval of other women. It feels like I will be brought before a women’s tribunal to justify every decision I make, while at the same time I have no interest whatsoever in the approval of other women. (Bohman, 2015: 46)

While expressing a need for recognition from other women, she also insists that she absolutely does not need their approval – and thereby does not need, or in fact want, the recognition of female readers.

Why this ambivalent attachment to other women? Female identity is seen by the narrator as having two dimensions: it is created via recognition from a gender-specific community (other women) and also via relations to men, where different assumptions and modes of behaviour are in force. Recognition by a heterosexual partner in the dating marketplace is potentially at odds with relations between women, especially in a feminist context where heterosexual identity is often understood as a potential source of oppression. In real life, to be sure, things are not so straightforward; there is not one single feminist community but multiple communities with different agendas. However, the narrator in The Other Woman views most Swedish women not just as feminists, but as part of what she calls ‘the sisterhood’ (Bohman, 2015: 15). Feminism is portrayed, in short, as an imagined middle-class community based on shared assumptions that she, as a working-class woman, is not ‘respectable’ enough to join. That is why she finds female company ‘suffocating’ and ‘claustrophobic’; ‘everyone else was the same, while I was dramatically different’ (Bohman, 2015: 14). When it comes to her own sense of being a woman, the narrator feels the need to capitalize on her femininity and be ‘sexy’, as the only way of attracting a man and thereby gaining the chance to escape her class position. Yet, in behaving this way, the protagonist of Bohman’s novel also fears the judgement of other women and the condemnation of a feminist superego for ‘wrong’ behaviours and desires.

In Why Love Hurts, Eva Illouz explains that sexiness has today become a core value. Female beauty has always been valued in heterosexual relations, but the mainstreaming of sexiness is a newer phenomenon; something you are expected to devote yourself to, an active form of self-making. The fact that gender identity is so closely tied to ‘sexual identity’ is particularly relevant for women. Yet acting in line with these gender expectations may in turn limit opportunities to gain recognition from other women. How are these tensions negotiated? Somewhat ironically, Chris in I Love Dick labels herself as ‘a die-hard feminist’ and proudly points out that she does not have any sex appeal (‘a sexless hag’). She views herself from a third-person perspective: ‘unlike Sylvère’s many other girlfriends, Chris’ body didn’t offer any pleasure. It wasn’t blonde or opulent; dark, voluptuous – it was thin and nervous, bony’ (Kraus, 2016: 93). That her body does not offer ‘pleasure’ but is ‘bony’, androgynous and unappealing may elicit a response of recognition and sympathy from feminist readers. Compare this to the first-person narrator in The Other Woman who sees herself as ‘a woman who wants to sleep with a married man’ (Bohman, 2015: 46) and who thinks that, ‘my body looks voluptuous in a tasteful way, like an expensive gift wrapped in beautiful paper’ (Bohman, 2015: 25).

At the same time, however, she also sees herself as vulgar: ‘My body is slightly too voluptuous, my mouth slightly too fleshy, nothing about me is toned down or cute’ (Bohman, 2015: 29). Not just her mind, but her body reflects a failure to conform to prevailing and class-inflected norms of what it means to be a woman. Arguing that ‘Being, becoming, practising and doing femininity are very different things for women of different classes, races, ages and nations’ (Skeggs, 1997: 98), Beverly Skeggs observes that these differences are primarily linked to the performance of sexuality. ‘Working-class women’s relationship to femininity has always been produced through recourse to vulgarity’ (Skeggs, 1997: 100). This distinction seems highly applicable to I Love Dick and The Other Woman: Kraus performs an androgynous and sophisticated form of femininity that appeals to educated feminist readers. Meanwhile, the narrator of Bohman’s novel fantasizes about a middle-class life with a doctor – a dream about escaping the stigma of working-class sexuality by being recognized as a respectable woman: ‘In a well-to-do future I would be the most elegant woman of all, and the most feminine’ (Bohman, 2015: 15).

In short, that the narrator in The Other Woman is obsessed with hyper-femininity and pleasing men prevents her from gaining recognition from other women inside the novel.

Femininity was another topic I found difficult to discuss with other women; I somehow felt it wasn’t entirely acceptable to embrace it as I wished to do, that it required a kind of metacognition, an ability to recognize the highly charged aspect of stereotypical femininity and its destructive potential, which to me was the idea that everything men routinely regarded as sexy was in fact objectionable and should not be given to them. (Bohman, 2015: 15–16)

Illouz claims that sexiness is a primary currency that makes itself relevant across social divisions and believes that sexiness is in and of itself a social mobilizer. However, she overlooks what Bohman’s narrator sees and what she gets us to see: namely, that sexiness is hardly a viable currency in all contexts and that the intellectual woman may barely consider it to be currency (at least when in the company of similar minded women). As the female protagonist writes about her relationship to other (Swedish) women, ‘Being attractive to men was never the right idea’ (Bohman, 2015: 16).

Educated/middle-class readers may thus be inclined to identify with ‘the other women’ in Bohman’s novel who disapprove of the protagonist’s misogyny and her self-deceptive attempts to please men, while failing to grasp the class dimensions of her sense of alienation from other women. The protagonist of The Other Woman tries to conceal the fact that her aversion towards what she calls the ‘sisterhood’ is related to her failure to understand the habitus of feminist communities, but it nevertheless becomes clear that her discomfort in the company of other women is tied to her class background.

To the protagonist, then, feminism is associated with privileged women and has no personal relevance: it is a ‘non-existent issue’. Yet she also fantasizes about experiencing ‘the myth of the male artist’ and dreams of being a ‘flâneur’, since she points out that ‘there are no female flâneurs’ (Bohman, 2015: 27). She would like to write ‘not like a man, but like a woman who writes like a man’ (Bohman, 2015: 27), and in this way touches on how women have been limited as creative authors – just as Kraus does. Yet, points of commonality or affinity are seemingly blocked. The class dimensions of Kraus’s discourse assume a certain kind of highly educated, savvy, feminist reader – an interpellation that, in turn, has the potential to provoke the sense of alienation and anti-feminism that characterizes Bohman’s narrator.

The way the first-person narrator evaluates herself in relation to other women, whom she either rejects or idealizes, is not just a theme of Bohman’s novel. Rather, it also speaks to the question of reader response: whether female readers can be expected to identify with, or at least relate to, such a protagonist. One reviewer observed that

Bohman paints a vivid picture of what it’s like inside the mind of the bad guy, or ‘The Other Woman’, if you will. This captivating, character-driven tell-all provides the reader with a unique insight, from what the other woman wants out of the affair to how she justifies it to herself. (Gesualdi, 2016)

Here, the female protagonist is presented as a ‘bad guy’ in her role as mistress and, implicitly, in her lack of solidarity with other women. However, her voiced antipathy towards female readers (who are assumed to be middle class) does not necessarily lead to a failed reading experience – perhaps it might create a different attachment to the text. For example, any potential aversion towards such an anti-feminist anti-hero might also modulate towards a greater awareness of the class issues she embodies. This reader reaction is inscribed in the novel itself:

I am a failure as a feminist woman. I am a failure as a perfect ordinary woman as well, I am too clever – I said that to Emelie once when I was drunk, she got angry with me, really angry, she looked at me as if I was a traitor. I have always felt like a traitor. I am a traitor in every camp, because I don’t really need other people. That is the greatest betrayal of the sisterhood, an awareness that you have no need for it. (Bohman, 2015: 28)

Here, the outraged response of the heroine’s friend Emelie, who through the novel serves as the representative of middle-class feminism, might also express what a similarly situated female reader is thinking and feeling. Yet, her reaction might also force readers to consider their own involvement with the text: that the protagonist is not only ‘the bad guy’, but she is being dismissed because of her inability to perform the required scripts of middle-class feminism. For example, an academic reader of the novel writes in her blog:

Bohman also shook me up with small jabs at feminism. She in fact leaves me with a bit of shame. It is easy for me to rehearse feminist phrases, but feminism also has to do with class, which is easy for middle-class academics like me to forget. Feminism ought to accommodate a diversity beyond the narrow politically correct track we try so hard to stay on. (Linneas Bokblogg)

Any recognition that occurs in such a context has little to do with affinities and shared sensibilities between female protagonist and feminist reader, as in the reception of I Love Dick. Rather, it involves a more discomfiting experience of being challenged and caught up short, as the image of the feminist reader is reflected back to her from an unexpected angle. ‘We can value literary works precisely because they force us – in often unforgiving ways – to confront our failings and blindspots rather than shoring up our self-esteem’ (Felski, 2018: 48).

Conclusion

In this essay, we have traced out the tangled net of relations between gender, love and recognition and drawn out their relevance to two recent works of fiction. As we have noted, these two works from the United States and Sweden reveal intriguing similarities that are illuminated by a comparison. The protagonists of both texts seek recognition from male partners, to no avail, and compensate by orchestrating elaborate romantic and sexual fantasies that bear. Meanwhile, they are both driven by a longing for recognition from other women and from their male lovers; in Honneth’s terms, recognition as love and recognition as a desire for esteem and solidarity are intertwined. Finally, they both meet and confront the world as readers; literature is a central reference point and a mechanism by which relations to both fictional persons (Emma Bovary) and existing persons (the imagined female readers of both works) are forged.

In I Love Dick, the process of recognition between protagonist and readers runs relatively smoothly; Chris practices a performative and theoretical understanding of gender that is widespread in academic feminism. And in this context, many readers have expressed their sense that Chris Kraus is an ally. As Leslie Jamison (2015) writes,

For years before I read it, I kept hearing about Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick. I mainly heard about it from smart women who liked to talk about their feelings . . . then I read it. I was nearly two decades late to the party . . . but I loved the party anyways. I was finally part of it, and it made me feel even more part of it – part of something.

By contrast, the heroine of The Other Woman does not feel that she belongs to the feminism of Swedish middle-class life as ‘an intricate network of rules . . . where everything was unspoken into the bargain. I often caught myself wondering whether everyone else had been given instructions that I had missed’ (Bohman, 2015: 17). And here the reader is framed as someone with knowledge of feminist issues, holding expectations that the protagonist does not fully understand. Yet even as she expresses hostility towards ‘other women’ from whose company she feels excluded, she also envies them. ‘it seemed so pleasant, so reassuring: to be able to relax in a sense of community, to know that there was always someone there to provide support’ (Bohman, 2015: 14). In this respect, the imagined female reader of the novel is pushed away, yet also solicited as a potential source of recognition, in an ambivalent dance of intimacy and distance.

Even if recognition is, as Taylor remarks, a vital human need, it can take on very diverse forms. In this essay, we have traced out relations between recognition, heterosexual love and feminism in two recent literary works, as shaping both the content of the works and the invocation of a certain relationship between work and reader. These arguments have a broader relevance to contemporary women’s writing: recent widely reviewed works by Sheila Heti, Maggie Nelson, Rachel Cusk Siri Hustvedt or Sally Rooney could be fruitfully analysed along similar lines. Rather than leaving debates over recognition to social and political theorists, literary critics would do well to intervene in such debates and demonstrate the central role of literature in contemporary struggles for recognition.