Controlling the narrative,examining the self: The unruly femme subjectivity of Fleabag

Introduction

Toward the end of the pilot episode of the British comedy Fleabag (Waller-Bridge, 2016), the unnamed protagonist – referred to only in the credits as “Fleabag” and played by creator/writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge – appears on her widower father’s doorstep at 2 am, drunk. After a rough date and humiliating day, Fleabag pounds on the door and chortles obnoxiously through the mail slot. When her father, “Dad” (Bill Paterson), finally opens the door, Fleabag stands across the threshold from him, her demeanor simultaneously flippant, dismissive, and tearful. In the face of her father’s befuddled apathy, Fleabag rants, “I have a horrible feeling that I am a greedy, selfish, apathetic, depraved, morally bankrupt woman who can’t even call herself a feminist.” He sighs before responding: “You get all that from your mother.” This scene and the moments that follow set the course not only for a show that explores Fleabag’s femininity and the moral and social frameworks that lead her to the conclusion that she has failed at feminism, but also one in which the protagonist both resists and destabilizes her own story by questioning the very nature of narrative and truth. Articulating the power of feminist failure and femme resistance (Gay, 2014; Halberstam, 2011; Hoskin and Taylor, 2019), Fleabag signifies myriad ways women and other feminized subjects in contemporary popular culture struggle to wrest their agency from normative constructions of femininity and offers resolution through the lenses of reclamation and refusal.

Fleabag was a critically acclaimed, dark comedy, which aired on BBC Three in the UK and on Amazon Prime in the US from 2016–2019; the television show was based on a one-woman play that Waller-Bridge first performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2013 and then in London. Over the course of two seasons, consisting of twelve 30-minute episodes, Waller-Bridge regales viewers with the antics and foibles of Fleabag, a thirtysomething who grapples with the shambles of a life. She owns a struggling guinea-pig-themed café; she repeatedly yet somehow unwittingly antagonizes her on-again-off-again boyfriend until he leaves her for good; she seems utterly dissatisfied with her string of casual sexual encounters; she has a contentious relationship with her sister and brother-in-law; and Fleabag’s widower father is poised to marry her antagonistic godmother. Irreverent, explicit, and darkly funny, the show relies on a series of tropes prevalent in other contemporary comedies engaging in cultural satire via an exploration of (white) women’s lives and sexuality (e.g. Girls (Dunham, 2012), Veep (Iannucci, 2012), and Broad City (Glazer and Jacobson, 2014)). Despite an emphasis on comedy and cringe, Fleabag’s sadness and struggle always linger at the show’s edges. The primary sites of loss and catharsis circulate around the deaths of her mother and her best friend Boo (Jenny Rainsford). Occurring prior to the events of the series, these deaths inform the character’s state of mind while also supplying a ready narrative abyss across and around which she must navigate throughout her day-to-day life.

In addition to its deft negotiation of humor and grief, the most striking aspect of Fleabag is its narrative structure and form. Fleabag seamlessly and insistently breaks the fourth wall, speaking directly to the camera to offer commentary, make predictions, and wryly interpret the actions of her family and friends. She often interrupts her diegetic-self mid-sentence before slipping effortlessly back into the scene, implying that she controls the story or otherwise exerts power over how viewers interpret and experience her life. Certainly, the elision of Waller-Bridge’s roles as creator, writer, and star adds credence to the implication of agency. Throughout the series run, however, Fleabag’s refusal and, sometimes, inability to meet social expectations around public decency, feminine behavior, and heterosexual romance betrays a lack of narrative control despite her interjections. To set up this argument, I first elaborate on direct address as a form of narrative intervention in performance theory before segueing into an interrogation of femme theory’s relevance to the series. Then, I analyze several key moments of direct address and unruly subjectivity on the show alongside the character’s articulation of narrative control, loss, and reclamation. Divided into two parts loosely organized around forms of failure in season one and a narrative of refusal and reclamation in season two, my textual and visual analysis underscores femme resistance on the show as a way of representing the productive potential of feminist contradiction.

Direct address, bad feminism, and feminine failure

Fleabag’s use of direct address has many antecedents in film and television; indeed, as Jane Feuer (1993: 39) writes, “It is absolutely essential to see a technique such as direct address in [an] historical context. Otherwise one may argue that direct address is inherently subversive or radical. It is not.” While direct address may not always function subversively, the “metareferential turn” (Wolf, 2011) in recent media, especially television, offers a point of view distinctive from more linear and discrete forms of narrative storytelling. Depending on how it is utilized, direct address within film and television may inspire either intimacy or alienation, even as it is “often a marker of the character’s particular power within the fiction” (Brown, 2012: 13–14). Myriad examples from contemporary television employ direct address. In sitcom offerings like the UK and US versions of The Office (Gervais and Merchant, 2001; Daniels, 2009) and Parks and Recreation (Daniels and Schur, 2009) characters speak to the camera as part of a mockumentary format. In British comedies like Miranda (Hart, 2009) and Chewing Gum (Coel, 2015) or the American drama House of Cards (Willimon, 2013), characters interrupt the diegesis to speak directly to the camera and/or provide voiceover narration. As such, there is nothing inherently unique about Fleabag’s use of direct address. Instead, I propose that Fleabag sets the stage for a critique of the limits of feminist subjectivity and the power of femme resistance through its unruly narrative construction and dysfunctional narrator – a position accentuated through the function and placement of moments of direct address. In order to do so, it is worth briefly outlining the theoretical origins of direct address’ subversive potential.

Many discussions of direct address originate in performance theory, primarily the Brechtian model of “epic theater” analyzed at length by German philosopher Walter Benjamin. Originally written in 1934, Benjamin’s “The Author is Producer” (1998) interrogates how Brechtian theater challenges previously accepted notions of truth and fiction, as well as questioning the very nature of performance and the divisions between the characters, actors, and audience. For Benjamin (1998: 100), epic theater “uncovers” the “conditions of our life”

by interrupting the dramatic processes; but such interruption does not act as a stimulant; it has an organizing function. It brings the action to a standstill in mid-course and thereby compels the spectator to take up a position towards the action, and the actor to take up a position towards his part.

In line with Benjamin’s assertions about interruptions as a form of uncovering, Fleabag’s use of direct address forces an intimate relationship between her and the viewer, one that sometimes enters contentious territory. This is particularly the case in moments when she refuses to acknowledge certain memories or when viewers begin to realize that Fleabag’s version of an incident is not necessarily the so-called objective truth or, in some cases, even her truth.

Fleabag insistently places its protagonist front and center as agent of the narrative, but also as the locus of control for what viewers see, hear, and understand. And yet, Waller-Bridge resists claims of autobiography, separating herself from her character in interviews and emphasizing that the show is entirely fiction, especially where depictions of Fleabag’s family are concerned (Thompson, 2020; Thorpe, 2019). As if simultaneously denying the agency of the author and asserting the dominance of the writer/narrator/storyteller, the slippage between Fleabag and Waller-Bridge opens a dynamic space for the examination of the parallel tracks of resistance and reclamation offered by the show. As Beaumont (2021: 105) argues, “Waller-Bridge thereby creates a tension between the impression of auteurist control and a character attempting to influence the narrative according to their own interests.” The tensions between Fleabag as character and Waller-Bridge as creator, writer, and star echo longstanding debates about the relationship of the author to her work and our ability, as viewers, to interpret that relationship (Barthes, 1977). The connection to the conflicts that arise around Fleabag’s story and use of direct address resonate even more clearly with theories of gender performance and ideas around gendered speech, femininity, truth, and belief.

Despite the impression of narrative agency – or perhaps because of it – Fleabag struggles throughout the show with both the norms of femininity and the ideologies behind popular feminism. In her rant to her father, she explicitly calls herself a “bad feminist,” a concept that is worth unpacking further. While the provenance of this phrase is far-reaching, Roxane Gay’s essay collection Bad Feminist (2014: xi) can shed some light on Fleabag’s utterance, as Gay explicitly associates the appellation with an imperfect adherence to what she considers feminist mores. She writes, “I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy. I’m not trying to be an example,” and explains that she is

a woman who loves pink and likes to get freaky and sometimes dances her ass off to music she knows, she knows, is terrible for women and who sometimes plays dumb with repairmen because it’s just easier to let them feel macho than it is to stand on the moral high ground. (Author’s emphasis.)

Curiously, none of the activities or feelings that Gay lists are intrinsically anti-feminist in a broad sense (i.e., anti-gender equality or anti-woman); instead, she identifies her inability to adhere to popular ideas of feminism (being anti-pink or anti-misogynistic music) as evidence of her failure to be a “good” feminist. Gay’s supposed failure functions as a reaffirmation that she is trying to be a good person rather than merely trying to be a good feminist. This narrow framing of feminism as a label tied to stereotypical invocations of the word evokes a similar question as the one Fleabag asks in the show’s pilot: do inherent aspects of her personality – her embrace of performative femininity, her sexual proclivities, her tenuous empowerment, and her anti-social behaviors – disqualify her from feminism?

Fleabag is no better at being normatively feminine than she is at fitting popular conventions of feminism. In fact, the show reminds us that feminism and femininity are neither commensurate terms, nor are they inherently oppositional. While feminism is sometimes positioned as a threat to conventional masculinity and to “conventional performances of heteronormative femininity, particularly in the ways that femininity functions to reassure men of their dominant position” (Banet-Weiser, 2018: 3), it can also undergird contemporary challenges to feminine embodiment. We can see examples of this latter point through the concept of “Gaga feminism” (Halberstam, 2012), as a way of framing the pop cultural embrace of excessive femininity and performative instability around gender expression. These contemporary challenges also emerge in “precarious-girl comedy” (Wanzo, 2016), which portray alienated young women characters who exhibit a form of abject girlhood. Fleabag navigates the intersection of these models, bringing us a character who at first struggles against, and then rejects, the normative expectations put before her by both her family and the broader social order.

The term femme offers one way to frame a subject who adheres to some aspects of feminine embodiment but does so in performative and/or productively subversive ways that buck social norms. If “femme is a form of divergent femininity that strays from the monolithic and patriarchally sanctioned femininity” (Hoskin, 2017: 99), Fleabag and the friction she continually generates by rejecting normative feminine behavior may fit this definition. As such, her inability to perform normative femininity, according to others, and her inability to be a “good feminist,” according to herself, coalesce into a spectacular but productive failure to control the narrative she initially seems to be steering. I am cautious, though, not merely to assert Fleabag as a cringe-worthy or abjectly unfeminist/unfeminine subject, heeding Simmons’ (2020: 39) admonition:

Understanding Fleabag as that morally-dubious-but-lovable archetype is empowering in a punk sense, but the question then becomes: What is her value if she is only an avatar for our unending struggle and not something in-and-of herself as a character quite separate from us?

Instead, I assert that Fleabag’s loss of narrative control does not manifest a lack of agency nor is she a representative of the charm of a “bad feminist.” Ultimately, Fleabag’s refusal to conform even to viewers’ expectations of her performance instead embodies a resistant femme subjectivity.

At the crossroads of femininity, performance, and authenticity, we can see Fleabag’s femme subjectivity come fully to the fore. In fact, Fleabag’s failures as a feminist subject and her concomitant embrace of femme subjectivity usher in her acts of subversive reclamation. In some ways, my argument falls in line with Halberstam’s (2011: 11–12) reading of failure as “a refusal of mastery, a critique of the intuitive connections within capitalism between success and profit, and as a counterhegemonic discourse of losing.” Under Halberstam’s definition, “failure” constitutes a rejection rather than a mistake, which wrests control back from the institution or the systems of social expectation and reaffirms the agency of the subject; failure pushes back against “punishing norms” and reifies the “wondrous anarchy of childhood” (3). More to the point, I align my analysis with Hoskin and Taylor’s (2019: 4) theorization of the “fem (me)inine art of failure” in that femme embodiment “exposes the resistance lying within feminine multiplicity.” If the politics of femininity dictate the adherence to sanctioned norms and behaviors that are sometimes socially undervalued because of their attribution to women (Hoskin 2017), then “fem (me)inine failure” highlights the ways in which femininity can be adopted and discarded at will. Femininities may also be multivalent and oppositional (Wickström 2021), which contradicts the possibility of a feminine norm. This underscores the opposition imposed by normative femininity, which governs subjects via negotiations of power around social gender norms, so-called ideals of womanhood, and physical presentation (e.g., as feminine) (Hoskin and Taylor, 2019: 6). Femme enactment, then, can operate as a resistance to normativity, and it is this framing through which I will continue my analysis of Fleabag.

Just as I indicate above that Fleabag should not presumptively be categorized as an abject protagonist against whom we can identify as viewers, I propose that we look beyond the typical boundaries of the term femme in our discussion of Fleabag’s resistant subjectivity. Two significant oppositions emerge that bear addressing. One, Fleabag is a white, conventionally attractive cisgender woman who, while not economically secure, was raised middle class and has a family safety net. As such, the character’s representational reach may be limited when addressing the experiences of viewers who belong to historically marginalized or underrepresented groups. However, Fleabag makes no claims of universality; in fact, I would argue that the show explicitly eschews relatability across race, gender, and/or sexuality. By discussing a white, cisgender subject along these lines, I do not mean to negate the political efficacy of femme resistance for subjects who experience far more endemic marginalization. Rather, I attest Fleabag demonstrates how a character who has significant social privilege and, thus, is well positioned to comfortably embrace normative femininity if she chooses, still struggles against and ultimately refuses to adhere to these norms.

Second, it is worth questioning whether we can frame Fleabag as a femme subject at all, given that her primary romantic/sexual relationships are with men, whereas femme is often a term reserved for queer embodiments of femininity. However, I contend that the show frames Fleabag as a queer subject, even without an explicit label. Despite her dalliances with men, Fleabag never claims to be straight and indicates to at least one character that she is open to sex with women: midway through the second season (episode 2.3), Fleabag kisses and propositions Belinda (Kristin Scott Thomas), who has just won an award from Fleabag’s sister’s firm for being a successful woman in business. Moreover, Fleabag’s primary intimate relationship on the show is unequivocally with her deceased best friend, Boo, memories of whom dominate Fleabag’s daily life. While even intimate friendships do not necessarily indicate a romantic or sexual interest, Boo and Fleabag’s orientation toward each other and their conversations about love suggest, at the very least, a deep friendship between women that might fall on what Adrienne Rich (1980) posits as a “lesbian continuum.” Although Rich’s writing frames lesbianism (rather than the broader category of queer femme identity) in opposition to “compulsory heterosexuality,” through which male power is fomented by forcing women’s social orientations to revolve around men, she argues that women’s intimacy with other women, on various registers, operates as a form of queer resistance.

In this and other ways, Fleabag defies the urge to deliver pat answers to the questions it posits. Through the show’s underscoring of Fleabag’s performative subjectivity we can start to see the contours of an endgame. Fleabag draws us into her narration, exhibiting an ostensible mastery as the only character able to freely comment on the action. She frets to her father and sister about her “bad feminism,” feeling judged due to her concern for physical appearances, dependency on sex as a means of emotional fulfillment, and inability to keep her business afloat. And yet, Fleabag’s interruptions, and their relative success or failure vis-à-vis narrative control, do much to uncover the conditions of her reality.

Femme resistance: The journey of the headless woman

Even though the first few episodes of the show give Fleabag the illusion of narrative control, Fleabag’s resistance to memory and her eschewal of certain truths destabilizes her position as interlocuter, making her an unreliable narrator. These moments also call into question whether we can believe Fleabag’s pronouncements about and interpretations of both people and events. Although the logics of the series support the idea that “seeing is believing” – that is, the scenes we are shown are as they actually occur in the fictional narrative – Fleabag’s unpredictable willingness to share painful truths with viewers may inspire doubt in her perspective overall. For example, a cataclysmic fight between Fleabag and her disaffected sister Claire (Sian Clifford) that spans the end of season one and the beginning of season two erupts because Claire’s husband Martin (Brett Gelman) kisses Fleabag against her will at Claire’s birthday party (the kiss occurs in episode 1.3, the fight occurs over episodes 1.6 and 2.1). Even though she hates Martin and knows Claire would be better off without him, Fleabag hesitates to tell her sister before eventually coming clean.

At the end of the season, Claire turns on Fleabag, claiming Martin told her Fleabag was the one who initiated the kiss. Claire insists, “How can I believe you? […] after what you did to Boo” (episode 1.6) – and, indeed, the way Fleabag’s flashbacks bombard viewers with loving memories of her time with Boo but initially deny the truth about Fleabag’s betrayal of her friend and Boo’s resulting death, corroborate Claire’s concern that Fleabag’s account is suspect. Up until this point in the season, viewers have only been given hints regarding the events that led to Boo’s death – caused when she intentionally walked into a bike lane in order to sustain a minor injury and regain the attention of her cheating boyfriend, but instead caused a serious crash resulting in her death. Most of Fleabag’s memories of Boo, scattered liberally through the episodes, show a loving bond between the two women who exhibit a similarly oddball sense of humor and intimate knowledge of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. However, several grief- or guilt-triggered flashbacks attempt to break through in earlier episodes before Fleabag can shut them down, not allowing viewers to see what she is thinking. Following Claire’s accusation, Fleabag has another involuntary flashback, revealing that she was the other woman who slept with Boo’s boyfriend and triggered her best friend’s spiral of self-doubt and fatal bid for attention. These revelations, in turn, may fuel doubts regarding Fleabag’s trustworthiness despite the fact that viewers have witnessed Martin’s general lasciviousness and his specific assault on her. At the beginning of season two, the sisters have not spoken in a year, but Fleabag has gotten her life back on track. It is only midway through the season (episode 2.3) that Claire admits she knew Martin lied about the kiss, an admission that also has the effect of reframing all of Fleabag’s interpretations as accurate.

Like her experience with Claire and her memories of Boo, other moments exemplify Fleabag’s loss of control over situations in which she initially has the upper hand. In an open act of resistance, which Fleabag shares with the viewer, she steals a work of art, the effects of which reverberate throughout the series in the form of a running gag serving various aims: revenge, greed, mercy, love, hate, ingenuity, and reparation. After Fleabag makes her “I can’t even call myself a feminist” speech towards the end of the pilot, her father reluctantly leads her into the house so he can call her a cab. While waiting, she migrates into her artist Godmother’s (Olivia Coleman) studio. The Godmother, we later learn, is a former student of Fleabag and Claire’s deceased mother – as well as Dad’s current lover. “To be fair,” Fleabag quips toward the camera as she enters the room, ‘she’s not an evil stepmother. She’s just a cunt’ (episode 1.1). Having thus summed up her Godmother, Fleabag demonstrates their strained relationship in a conversation full of underhanded politeness and veiled barbs. When Fleabag lifts a small golden statue of a nude headless and limbless female torso off a shelf to inquire about its monetary worth, her Godmother waxes poetic about the statue as an “expression of how women are subtle warriors, strong at heart.” Uncaring of her Godmother’s further invocation of women’s “innate femininity,” and perhaps in resistance to it, Fleabag steals the statue, intending to ask Martin to fence it for cash (episode 1.2).

From this moment in the series, the golden torso migrates between the characters and between locations. Instead of selling the statue for Fleabag, Martin gifts it to Claire, who immediately recognizes the stolen valuable (episode 1.3). While her sister, at first, forces Fleabag to sneak the statue back into their Godmother’s studio, Claire eventually steals it again and gives it back to Fleabag near the end of the first season (episode 1.5). A crucial scene from the season one finale underscores the statue’s importance to the larger narrative and to Fleabag’s interventions, failures, and reclamations. During her Godmother’s awkward “sexhibition,” a celebration of her sex life through art, Fleabag’s initial glee that the statue is conspicuously missing from its pedestal turns to frustration when her Godmother constructs a narrative through which the statue’s absence becomes more valuable than its presence. Its theft, the Godmother announces in a speech to her assembled guests,

was a blessing. In fact, her brutal snatching made me think of all the women of the world who have been robbed of their freedom, of their happiness, and, in the saddest of cases, of their bodies. So, in many ways, I have to thank the thief for creating my most profound piece of work to date: A Woman Robbed (episode 1.6).

As Fleabag’s face falls in recognition of her Godmother wresting back control over the statue’s absence, the Godmother makes deliberate eye contact with her godchild, announcing to the assembled crowd, “And that’s what this show is really about; it’s about power.” Momentarily bested by her Godmother, Fleabag ends the first season in a state of exile: Claire will not speak to her because of the incident with Martin; her ex-boyfriend is fully invested in another relationship and has no intention of reuniting with her; and even her Dad has aligned himself with the Godmother and distanced himself from Fleabag.

Fleabag’s quiet devastation reaches a crescendo in the final scene of season one when a bank employee who had denied her a business loan due to an embarrassing misunderstanding and his own chauvinism, visits her in the café. As Fleabag admits that her business is failing alongside everything else in her life, her rant elides the breakdown of her social relationships with her body as a site of desire:

I also fucked [the café] into liquidation. And I fucked up my family. And I fucked my friend by fucking her boyfriend. And sometimes I wish I didn’t even know that fucking existed and that I know that my body as it is now really is the only thing I have left and when that gets old and unfuckable I may as well just kill it. And somehow there isn’t anything worse than someone who doesn’t want to fuck me. […] Either everyone feels like this a little bit and they’re just not talking about it, or I am completely fucking alone, which isn’t fucking funny (episode 1.6).

Demonstrating the versatility of the word “fuck,” the meaning of which slips seamlessly from sexual to emphatic to accusatory, Fleabag invokes her sexuality as a performative understanding of being desired as a normative feminine subject. Her speech draws a distinct connection between the losses Fleabag fears and has already shouldered, while explicitly likening the frequency of her sexual activity with the matched frequency of her perceived “fucking up.” And yet, the surprising reversal of this scene comes from her interaction with the bank employee, who, instead of feeding her despair, offers Fleabag a redo of her previously failed loan interview. This unusual act of compassion suggests the possibility for, not only change, but also reparations amidst narrative and personal chaos. Fleabag’s admission that she fears the betrayal of her own body can be read as a fear over a loss of control. While the statue’s absence from its exhibition pedestal symbolizes, for the Godmother, “women who have been robbed of their freedom,” for Fleabag, freedom remains a fiction as long as she is tethered to feminine norms wherein fuckability is a compulsory metric of success.

Despite her end-of-season rant, in many other areas of her life, Fleabag presents outward confidence both diegetically – getting away with shenanigans some might consider “liberated” or “empowering,” but also that many people would be too apprehensive of breaking social norms to even consider – and extra-diegetically via her seeming narrative agency. And yet, as Banet-Weiser (2018: 95) asserts,

confidence sustains neoliberal capitalism: all one has to do is work on confidence, and mastery and success will apparently follow. Indeed, in the twenty-first century, confidence is a condition of both neoliberal capitalism and popular feminism.

This kind of neoliberal feminism, related as it is to normative femininity and the trap of confidence, is one that McCann (2020) labels “toxic,” alongside others like trans-exclusionary and essentialist femininity. We can see evidence of the toxic attitudes Fleabag confronts as her attempts to “improve herself” in season two result in her breaking several social taboos, such as punching her brother-in-law (episode 2.1) when he makes grossly insensitive comments about Fleabag having a miscarriage (when it is in fact Claire who is having a miscarriage; Fleabag lies to protect her sister from unwanted attention) and falling in love with the Priest (Andrew Scott) who is officiating Dad and Godmother’s wedding. Even when Fleabag attempts to hew to social norms, she fails. Her apparent loss of control evinces both a failure of popular feminist logics around individual choice, confidence, and mastery and a renegotiation of her subjectivity from actor to hostage to femme resister. Signifying the change in tone, the statue that was so prominent in season one makes a different set of rounds in season two, functioning as a steady, but subtler, leitmotif of the show’s complex political interventions and Fleabag’s slippery grasp on narrative control. It also signifies a return of her agency through the body of her mother, whom Fleabag discovers was the statue’s model.

The sins of the mother and reclaiming the self

When Fleabag’s Dad quips, “You get all that from your mother,” he signals at least two things: one, his refusal or even inability to acknowledge his daughter’s loud cry for help and, two, a kind of acceptance or dismissal around the notion that his daughter may really be all the things she fears: greedy, selfish, apathetic, depraved, a bad feminist. The absent mother, no longer alive to defend herself, haunts Fleabag, and yet she never appears in her flashbacks, which do not extend further back than the mother’s funeral. At the funeral, which we see during a flashback in season two (episode 2.4), Boo urges Fleabag to give all the displaced love she has for her mother to her instead. ‘I’ll take it,’ Boo insists. “It sounds lovely. You have to give it to me. It’s gotta go somewhere.” When Boo dies, we might wonder, where does Fleabag’s love go then?

Season two focuses on what Fleabag calls a “love story” between herself and the Priest, an unconventional young clergyman who attempts to resist Fleabag’s flirtations, eventually succumbs to them, and then admits his love for her in practically the same breath that he declares he must leave her to continue his divine relationship with God (episode 2.6). In a startling turn of events during their interactions prior to his confession, Fleabag discovers that the Priest can see her “go somewhere” when she engages in a direct address with viewers. Midway through the season (episode 2.3), Fleabag seeks out the Priest, questioning his commitment to God and his life of celibacy. Flirting openly but in a relatively restrained way, Fleabag asks him, “What if you meet someone you love?” When the Priest insists that he and she are not going to have sex, that they can, instead, remain friends, Fleabag turns to the camera, remarking to the viewer in a wistful and knowing tone, “We’ll last a week.” This typical direct address observation, suggesting clairvoyance and control on Fleabag’s part, as if she’s already determined the outcome of their relationship, is interrupted by the Priest, who furrows his brow and asks, “What was that?” After Fleabag’s confused response, he insists, “You just went somewhere,” to which she turns incredulously to the camera, only to be interrupted again: “There! There,” the Priest exclaims. Caught interacting with the camera/viewer, Fleabag forces herself to maintain eye contact with the Priest during the remaining minute of their conversation; when he finally looks away, she turns sharply back to the camera, expression shocked and disbelieving as the episode ends.

The Priest’s ability to witness Fleabag’s deviations from the confines of the diegesis are unprecedented in the series. Whether we want to blame his insight on a divine connection that allows him to see beyond the camera lens – a literalization of the omniscient viewer, or God as ultimate narrative master – or we want to see the Priest’s recognition of Fleabag’s slippage as a quirk of the show, both options leave us with the Priest as an interloper in a domain previously reserved for the show’s protagonist. Perhaps this is one reason Fleabag decides to leave her direct relationship with viewers behind in the series finale: it has begun to intrude demonstrably on her lived experiences. Much like her invasive memories, the flashbacks she welcomes as well as the ones she is only able to hold at bay for so long, Fleabag’s performativity can only take her so far when being able to narrate does not equate to being in control. Even though her premonition that her platonic arrangement with the Priest will not last is accurate, their eventual sexual encounters do nothing more than bring her further heartbreak. In the show’s final scene, Fleabag sits alone at a bus stop in the middle of the night waiting for a bus that will never come. She determines to walk home, left by the Priest and holding only the statue for company, having stolen it one last time. Rather than see these final moments as a defeat, however, I argue they reveal an important resistance and reclamation on the part of Fleabag via her femme subjectivity.

The final episode of the series opens on the morning of Dad and Godmother’s wedding. Fleabag wakes up in bed with the Priest, but by day’s end, he will have chosen God over her. When Fleabag offers the stolen statue to her Godmother as a cheeky yet apologetic wedding gift, her Godmother cannot resist one final dig, even though her tone, too, belies a sense of gratitude for what she registers as a peace offering from her soon-to-be stepdaughter. “You know, I often thought it strange that out of all my pieces, you chose to take her,” the Godmother muses. “She was based on your mother. So nice to have her back in the house” (episode 2.6). Fleabag, aware that her mother had been her Godmother’s teacher but unaware of the statue’s provenance, blanches. Unlike Boo, the other dead interlocutor of Fleabag’s conscious, we never see her mother in the series. The only embodiment of the mother, besides the inert statue, are her daughters, Fleabag and Claire, who live out her legacy through their choices and bodies. But Fleabag, especially, shares something else essential with her mother: a penchant for being “difficult.” As it turns out, her Dad’s quip in the pilot was not an offhand, comic barb, but an honest assessment. In the finale, he again reminds Fleabag that the qualities he finds most discomfiting in her were ones she inherited from her mother. “I love you, but I don’t like you all the time,” Fleabag’s Dad offers in a kind, halting voice shortly before the wedding ceremony. Then, he qualifies his superficially callous assertion by insisting, “You’re not the way you are because of me. […] You’re the way you are because of her. And it’s those bits that you need to cling to.” Here, Dad answers his daughter’s cry for help from the pilot by acknowledging that Fleabag may in fact be a “greedy, selfish, apathetic, depraved, morally bankrupt woman who can’t even call herself a feminist,” but she is also a whole and legitimate subject who owes some of her most challenging traits to her lost mother. These traits are ultimately bound to Fleabag’s resistance, empowerment, and survival as a femme subject.

In The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam (2011: 124) offers “the injunction ‘Lose your mother’ and build [s] toward a conclusion that will advocate a complete dismantling of self.” In doing so, he sets out to

explore a feminist politics that issues not from a doing but from an undoing, not from a being or becoming women but from a refusal to be or to become woman as she has been defined and imagined within Western philosophy.

Fleabag’s actual loss of her own mother and, subsequently, of Boo – the memory of whom she has imbued with feelings of love and acceptance arguably tied deeply to her own self-worth – results in a loss of self that can only be reclaimed once she acknowledges that the legacy she has imagined as stemming from her mother is a false one. Rather than feeling stifled by loss, Fleabag allows herself to see in her grief an opportunity to push back against those who would observe, contain, or demand of her certain observances of femininity, to undo both their and her own assumptions as to her agency. She can then reclaim the figure of the mother as symbolic of a femme resistance that, perhaps ironically, makes Fleabag a powerful, multivalent feminist subject.

Conclusion

In the final moments of the series, Fleabag walks away from the bus stop alone having just revealed to the viewer that she stole her Godmother’s statue once more, signifying its continued value (not monetary) to her now that she knows it was modeled after her mother. With a shake of her head, Fleabag asks that the camera, that viewers, do not follow her. She gives a little wave as she distances herself, holding firmly onto the stolen statue, headless and speechless, but nonetheless symbolic of her ever-changing conditions. This denial of the viewer reestablishes Fleabag’s control over her narrative at the same time she relinquishes it. No longer telling us a story, which requires her framing via direct address, Fleabag has chosen to live her life. This ending suggests that, having productively failed according to earmarks of popular feminism and normative femininity, Fleabag instead accepts that aspects of her personality, inherited from her mother, which others may deem difficult, not enough, or too much are the parts she needs to thrive. Moreover, this final act of femme resistance – which we can read as both a productive “fem (me)inine failure” (Hoskin and Taylor, 2019) and an “undoing” of expectation around traditional markers of success (Halberstam, 2011) – emphasizes that she no longer needs to justify her behavior to others (whether within or outside the diegesis). She may still be a performative subject, but only for herself.

Fleabag’s ending illuminates an embrace of femme subjectivity through its repudiation of the viewer’s gaze, restoring Fleabag’s agency via her refusal to give us any more of her time. She fails as a narrator in order to succeed as a subject. In the first season, Fleabag’s attempts to dictate how viewers interpret her life flounder when intrusive memories of Boo prove disruptive and destabilizing. After exorcizing her grief over Boo’s loss, Fleabag starts the second season ready to reinvent herself, but she continues to get caught up in the expectations of others – some of whom, like Martin and her Godmother, actively expect Fleabag’s misbehavior and are disbelieving and disappointed when she remains untouched by their provocations. Even the Priest, whose dalliances with Fleabag seem poised to upset Dad’s remarriage and who disrupts the intimacy of Fleabag’s direct address toward the viewer by noticing her distraction in these moments, does not ultimately control Fleabag’s choices. By choosing to fully inhabit her mother’s legacy – reclaiming the statue and embracing her position as a difficult feminist and unruly femme subject – Fleabag confirms the potential of a failure to reproduce both feminine and feminist norms as productive forms of self-acceptance, agency, and femme resistance.