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eshalliday 's review for:
The Spy Who Loved Me
by Ian Fleming
I think it’s important for readers to respond to books on an instinctive level. In this way, I believe that we gain, when responses are taken together overall, a genuinely objective view of a text, be it novel, poetry, non-fiction, translation, graphic novel, audiobook, theory and criticism, article, or any other piece. And I would love to get into all kinds of discussions about how the reader is intrinsic to the reading of a text, and how every reader’s interpretation of a book they’ve read is inseparable from who the reader is themselves, but I really only want to flesh out my immediate response to this James Bond novel.
Bearing in mind the above and although I may be accused of a biased reading towards a feminist critique, as a woman, I cannot help but respond subjectively to the presentation of women in ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’. And neither do I believe that certain discourses should be censored just because they are influenced by a subjective identity.
This novel is a powder keg with regard to considerations of the Male Gaze, and forces me to question everything I have previously written about representations of women in reviews of other Ian Fleming Bond novels. Ultimately here, the construct of Vivienne Michel that Fleming forms in ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ is never anything but a sex object: she is the figure of the sexual prize; she exemplifies the male delight in physical subjugation and violation of women.
Every man in the book, without exception, is presented in terms of his sexual relation to the character of Viv: her first sexual partner coerces her into an (absurdly lewd) encounter, which is itself an instance of public indiscretion and exposure; her second partner amounts to a case of sexual harassment in the workplace. Both of these are affairs with (unbeknownst to Vivienne) men engaged to other women. Both are also instances of privileged male characters subjecting the sole female character to emotional abuse: one an upper-class public schoolboy coercing Viv to ‘go all the way’ with him before he heads off to university; the other her Nazi-sympathiser employer who mandates an abortion when he impregnates Viv.
In fact, Ian Fleming commits nothing to paper that isn’t within the confines of Vivienne’s sexual history. It’s quite extraordinary! He attempts to write in the first-person perspective of a woman, yet can think of no other dynamic that a woman might have in the broad span of the world and her experience, than the sexual. This is despite tokenistic manoeuvres on Fleming’s part to insinuate ironic self-deprecation into Vivienne’s internal monologue: ‘Wasn't I the girl who'd decided to operate without a heart? Silly idiot. Silly infatuated goose. This was a fine time to maunder like a girl in a woman's magazine.’
Viv’s entire backstory is a catalogue of men who have intended to rape her. And from there, it is dangerously easy to extrapolate that this is all a woman can aspire to or expect; a female character’s/woman’s life is reduced to the singularity of contemplating or anticipating the act of intercourse with a man. This stance cannot help but imply that this is all a woman is good for, and I find it curious to remark upon how many male readers have given this a three-star to five-star rating!
If you think I’m being too reactionary, just try and figure out Fleming’s presentation of Vivienne Michel’s character from the following quotation of her inner monologue after having sex with James Bond:
Bearing in mind the above and although I may be accused of a biased reading towards a feminist critique, as a woman, I cannot help but respond subjectively to the presentation of women in ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’. And neither do I believe that certain discourses should be censored just because they are influenced by a subjective identity.
This novel is a powder keg with regard to considerations of the Male Gaze, and forces me to question everything I have previously written about representations of women in reviews of other Ian Fleming Bond novels. Ultimately here, the construct of Vivienne Michel that Fleming forms in ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ is never anything but a sex object: she is the figure of the sexual prize; she exemplifies the male delight in physical subjugation and violation of women.
Every man in the book, without exception, is presented in terms of his sexual relation to the character of Viv: her first sexual partner coerces her into an (absurdly lewd) encounter, which is itself an instance of public indiscretion and exposure; her second partner amounts to a case of sexual harassment in the workplace. Both of these are affairs with (unbeknownst to Vivienne) men engaged to other women. Both are also instances of privileged male characters subjecting the sole female character to emotional abuse: one an upper-class public schoolboy coercing Viv to ‘go all the way’ with him before he heads off to university; the other her Nazi-sympathiser employer who mandates an abortion when he impregnates Viv.
In fact, Ian Fleming commits nothing to paper that isn’t within the confines of Vivienne’s sexual history. It’s quite extraordinary! He attempts to write in the first-person perspective of a woman, yet can think of no other dynamic that a woman might have in the broad span of the world and her experience, than the sexual. This is despite tokenistic manoeuvres on Fleming’s part to insinuate ironic self-deprecation into Vivienne’s internal monologue: ‘Wasn't I the girl who'd decided to operate without a heart? Silly idiot. Silly infatuated goose. This was a fine time to maunder like a girl in a woman's magazine.’
Viv’s entire backstory is a catalogue of men who have intended to rape her. And from there, it is dangerously easy to extrapolate that this is all a woman can aspire to or expect; a female character’s/woman’s life is reduced to the singularity of contemplating or anticipating the act of intercourse with a man. This stance cannot help but imply that this is all a woman is good for, and I find it curious to remark upon how many male readers have given this a three-star to five-star rating!
If you think I’m being too reactionary, just try and figure out Fleming’s presentation of Vivienne Michel’s character from the following quotation of her inner monologue after having sex with James Bond:
‘All women love semi-rape. They love to be taken. It was his sweet brutality against my bruised body that had made his act of love so piercingly wonderful. That and the coinciding of nerves completely relaxed after the removal of tension and danger, the warmth of gratitude, and a woman's natural feeling for her hero. I had no regrets and no shame. There might be many consequences for me. Not the least that I might now be dissatisfied with other men, but whatever my troubles were, he would not hear of them. I would not pursue him and try to repeat what there had been between us. I would stay away from him and leave him to go his own road, where there would be other women - countless other women - who would probably give him as much physical pleasure as he had had with me. I wouldn't care. At least, I told myself I wouldn't care. Because none of them would ever own him, own any larger piece of him than I now did. And for all my life, I would be grateful to him, for everything. And I would remember him forever as my image of a man. How silly could one be? What was there to dramatise about this naked male person lying beside me? He was just a professional agent who had done his job. He was trained to fire guns, to kill people. What was so wonderful about that? Brave, strong, ruthless with women, these were the qualities that went with his calling, what he was paid to be. He was only some kind of a spy. A spy who had loved me. Ha! Not even loved, slept with. Why should I make him my hero, swear never to forget him? I suddenly had an impulse to wake him up and ask him, 'Can you be nice?' 'Can you be kind?'’(Citation typed from an audiobook; any and all errors in the text are my responsibility.)