Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X
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Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X |
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Jacky Fleming: "Falling in Love" |
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Author: Marie-Catherine BASEL Abstract (E): Fleming is one of the most interesting women cartoonists in Britain today; her cartoons have appeared in the Guardian. "Falling in Love" is a collection of cartoons held together by a storyline, telling the story of a woman who falls in love and loses herself in the process. Fleming's cartoons combine feminist ideas with an acute power of observation. This article provides an analysis of "Falling in Love" and points out some of the influences on Fleming's work. Abstract (F): Fleming est un des auteurs les plus intéressants de la BD anglaise aujourd'hui. Son oeuvre paraît dans le journal The Guardian. "Falling in love" est un ensemble de courts récits qui tournent autour d'une femme qui, en tombe amoureuse, finit par se perdre elle-même. Dans son travail Fleming combine engagement féministe et observation de la société moderne. Cet article contient une analyse de "Falling in Love", notamment des influences subies par l'auteur. Keywords: Women studies, Jacky Fleming, cartoons, communication |
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The following paper is an attempt to discuss the book Falling in Love, published by the British cartoonist Jacky Fleming in 1993, with reference to the feminist philosophy conveyed in it. The unique character of this book becomes obvious in both its contents and its layout. At first sight, Falling In Love seems to consist of independent comic strips, but they are all linked by a common story line as expressed in the book's title. I want to analyse to which extent both contents and layout contribute to convey the author's feminist attitude. That means, I want to explain the feminist message of this book and at the same time try to answer the question to which "category" of feminists Jacky Fleming belongs. This will be done by revealing the richness of graphical means employed by the artist. The biographical data furnished here will serve to explore the cartoonist's feminist roots. The BookTo start with, I would like to describe the various factors which led me to the conclusion that Falling In Love is a non-mainstream comic strip par excellence. The comic is divided into six different chapters which are all more or less connected to each other by the general theme of love. The titles are as follows: "Getting Bigger" , "Getting Smaller" , "Men" , "Sex" , "Romance" , and "Getting Out". The last chapter is linked to the first one, because at its end the reader discovers the invitation 'please turn to page one'. This makes the book a coherent entity and confers to its narration a cyclic character. Moreover, the book contains both a prologue and an epilogue, those classical rhetoric means which round up a story and enhance its coherence. Apart from those characteristics, Falling in Love sports some features which seem very unlike a conventional comic book. First, the panels do not have any frames, except for certain lines within the drawing that could be interpreted as a replacement. Second, dialogues and thoughts are not written in balloons. However, this is of course not an essential criterion for classifying a comic book as non-mainstream. Written text appears throughout the book accompanying the pictures (or is it rather the pictures which accompany the text?), sometimes taking an entire page (e.g. p. 33), just as in prose. This is very uncommon for comics, which normally focus on the graphics. Falling in Love is, as the title indicates, a story about falling in love. It describes in a both humorous and polemical way the different stages a girl goes through while developing from a little child to a grown-up woman in a masculinist (Butler) society, in which the stage of "falling in love" is synonymous (at least from the parents' point of view) with absolute bliss. In the author's opinion, however, it is the worst misfortune a girl can experience. Chapter one, "Getting Bigger" (p.3) describes the first stage of the still untroubled relationships between little girls and boys aged "under three foot" (p.4). At this age, they play and quarrel with each other in turns, without being disturbed by the intervention of grown-ups. This is in fact the longest chapter, consisting of 20 pages (the others are limited to 15 pages at the utmost), which demonstrates the author's intention to underline the importance of childhood. It's seen as a time when gender differences do not yet play a discriminating role but, on the contrary, give way to interesting discoveries such as the difference between the sexes (pp.7-8), including experiences such as swapping dresses. "At four foot six" (p.10), however, boys and girls tend to form peer groups, thus expressing their desire to set themselves apart from each other. At this stage, following natural inclinations, boys and girls may, each on his/her side, develop a "confident, self-possessed homosexuality", which Jacky Fleming considers a "fortunate" situation, indicating that heterosexuality is an "occasional foray", a step that involves many risks and is, therefore, only to be taken by "50ish" people (all quotes p.11). "If they are less fortunate" (p.12), girls (not boys!) undergo a complete change of personality, thus experiencing a "traumatic emotional transition" (p.12). This transition is provoked and backed up by the parents, who set one single goal for girls: please men and eventually fall in love with them. Girls are "moulded and groomed" (p.20) for love until they have all the necessary qualities a woman should have. The cartoonist points out that girls encourage each other in this. There are other examples of criticism against the behaviour of women throughout the book. From the moment the parents interfere, the girl, although conscious of suffering an injustice, is powerlessly confronted with "Severely Restricted Expectations for the Future" (p.16), while boys can develop without meeting any restrictions - except for one: not to behave like a girl. The personality change girls go through affects all possible domains, including school, where they cannot concentrate on the subjects because they are filled with "Perpetual Anxiety About Looking Good" (p.19). In chapter two, "Getting Smaller" (p.23), Fleming quite sarcastically depicts a girl who is obsessed with pleasing her lover. This chapter is probably the most original one of the book, also due to the fact that Fleming includes another text type, a questionnaire. By this means, Fleming tries to get directly in touch with the (female) audience: in the beginning of the book, Fleming uses the impersonal form of address "a girl/girls" or "they", while it is replaced by the more personal "our" in the second chapter and finally becomes "you", introduced by the questionnaire. From chapter three, "Men", to chapter five, "Romance", the woman in love experiences a second serious transformation: overcoming her blindness caused by love, after a series of frustrating emotional and sexual experiences with men, she takes off her "love specs" (represented by heart-shaped glasses) (p.83). In the end, the grown-up woman seems to return to the state of a child, as she is seen, on the last page being pulled away by a little girl (p. 88). Jacky Fleming wishes to show us a woman who is at the same time physically, mentally and emotionally free. The CharactersFalling in Love can, to a certain extent, be described as a comic with a fixed cast of characters. Essentially, there is one important woman character opposed to different types of women and men. The heroine appears for the first time on p. 12. There she is shown as a little girl with a free-thinker's attitude. After the more general depiction on the first pages, this girl detaches herself as an individual from the group of children living in harmony, as she realises that adults want to impose their ideas on her. The girl is "smelling a rat" (p.12), sometimes scowling at boys/men, but she is not yet strong enough to resist social pressure. So she goes through different phases - blind for love, self-reflection, nervous breakdowns, sexual frustration - until she frees herself from the stereotype her parents forced her to adopt. In opposition to the heroine, we find the woman who is doing the household chores happily, at the same time ironing, hoovering, shopping and taking care of the baby who clings to her neck as little apes do (p.63). There is a chance for her, too, as she is represented reflecting on her situation in another picture (p.69). Speaking of the male side, Fleming uses a varied cast of men characters. It ranges from the unappealing harasser (p.74), the dishonest lover (p.44), and the careless father (p.47), the honest, holier-than-thou lover (p.27), the caring lover helping his frustrated girlfriend by "bringing her a brandy when she needs one" (p.41), the eternal boy unable to stand on his own two feet (p.45), and the ideal "Prince Charming" (p.33) who is revealed to be a "fictitious character" (p.48) in a footnote. Besides, men are never shown working - neither at home nor in the office - but only in a relaxed attitude, for example reading a newspaper, drinking, smoking, sleeping or talking to friends (pp.65, 58, 48, 72). At the beginning and the end of the book, however, men are pictured in a less negative way, as boys equal to girls. Besides the girl or woman who suffers from falling in love, some minor characters like former boyfriends or current girlfriends make their appearance. The latter help with useful advice in critical situations, except in one case where a girlfriend is shown encouraging another to fit the social stereotype of a woman. The girlfriends form a cast of recurring characters, normally appearing in twos or threes in the pictures (pp.77, 78, 86). There is a minor character appearing in the first chapter only: the parent. Parents are represented in a strictly negative manner, dominating the little girl or boy using their authority. This character is always drawn without a head, which can be interpreted as the cartoonist's desire to show the impersonal relation between the parent and the child on the one hand, and on the other hand to generalise the parental characters and make them universal figures. Finally, it is important to note that the important women characters in Falling in Love are the only ones who undergo a change, thus being more than just one-dimensional characters. The men or parents as well as the girlfriends are all one-dimensional characters: the first group, because they stick to their chauvinist attitudes or to authoritarian education principles, the latter because they are only shown in their definite stage of experienced feminism and not in their development. Biographical dataJacky Fleming was born in London to parents of German-Jewish origin (cf. Biography in Falling In Love). Her father collected cartoons, so little Jacky soon became familiar with this type of literature. According to herself, she experienced a strong influence from Ronald Searle's bad St Trinian girls. In an interview for the Guardian, Jacky Fleming expresses some regret that she received quite a different education at the North London Collegiate for Girls "where the teachers sometimes spoke in Latin" (quoted by Moir). There is quite a telling anecdote from her schooldays:
This anecdote reappears in the book, although there is a slight difference: the school pinafores of Fleming's childhood have been replaced by a dress on the one hand, and a boyish shirt and trousers on the other. Jacky Fleming went on to study Fine Arts at Chelsea and Leeds Universities, where she first really learned about feminism from a girlfriend. She adapted feminism as her personal lifestyle: "a lot of things in my life started to make sense once I applied some sort of feminist understanding to it" says Fleming (Moir). Today, she gets inspiration for her drawings from her surroundings, treating big and little injustices suffered by women, while "making a fuss" by denouncing e.g. sexist attitudes (Moir). Characters and FeminismHow does Jacky Fleming convey her feminist attitude through the story's characters? It is interesting to note that none of the characters bears a name. Fleming wants to convey a certain universality. As we have already seen, the cartoonist offers a wide range of mostly negative male characters. Apart from standing for a creative and polemical writing/drawing, her vast choice of male characters offers the feminist cartoonist the chance to underline that she did not fall for "the effort to identify the enemy as singular in form", which "is a reverse discourse that uncritically mimics the strategy of the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms" (Butler, 13). Moreover, Fleming's feminism is not one-dimensional, because she criticises not only men, but also women. The woman obediently fulfilling her domestic role, pining for attention from her lover/husband (p.63-67) is a good example. She is dressed up like a prostitute and her mouth is drawn into an artificial distorted smile. In my view, Fleming shows a woman prostrate at her master's feet (p.67) and compares her to a sexual and domestic slave. Incidentally, you could even go one step further in the analysis of Fleming's pointed description of a self-humiliating woman. To some extent we can speak of the beginning process of dehumanisation as the author describes her as "moulded and groomed for love" (p.20) and says "a memory stirs in our [women's] nostrils" (p.68), as you would normally about animals. As noted earlier, Fleming's feminism is rather open-minded. Let us take a look at the subjects treated in Falling in Love. The cartoonist uses them to dismantle cliches one might associate with falling in love, sex, and romance. A telling example is the chapter entitled "Sex" . It is entirely devoted to showing two people in their bed, yet it does not contain one single scene where both partners are shown as happy: either the man or the woman enjoys having sex or gets an orgasm. It's never both at the same time. The last panel in the chapter is quite a telling example, the man asking "Did you come?" , the woman replying "No. When I come I go aaaaaahhAAAAHHHaaaahhh" in a rather malicious way (p.58). The feminist cartoonist Fleming denies the existence of real love; i.e. love which makes both partners happy. If you look at page 18, the author is at a loss for words in which to express the reward girls can expect for their efforts to fit the stereotype. The word "love" is only said twice, each time by a man. The first time it can be found in the chapter "Sex" when a naked man says to the woman next to him: "If you LOVED me you would ..." and she replies: "let's thank god I don't then" (p.57). The reproachful man is depicted earlier in a rather negative way, as he behaves rude to the woman during sexual intercourse. The other example is on page 72 in a dialogue between two men making derogatory remarks about the efforts one ex-girlfriend made for the benefits of a relationship. Their comment: "THAT'S LOVE". To conclude this chapter, the cartoonist s basic assumption expressed in the book is that serious conflicts between men and women appear as a consequence of the "gender hierarchy" (Butler), awoken and promoted by the parents in early childhood. Fleming proposes an alternative to the process of a socialised transition from girlhood to womanhood: encouraging her likes to resist social pressure and free themselves from any prejudices, overcome the obstacles inherent to society, in order to act and think in a self-respecting manner. Witness the last chapter, where the formerly victimised woman is shown leaving her friends in a joyful state of mind, being happily dragged away by the little girl (p.86). She has become a strong and self-assertive woman who has analysed her situation and reacts to the injustices inflicted on her by her surroundings (pp.12, 69). In a certain sense, this woman has "regained" the character of the little girl, the one acting "stroppy and spiky" (Moir) who is also shown at the beginning of Falling In Love and best expresses Fleming's philosophy. According to Fleming, a woman should be prepared to give up her femininity, a state which in her opinion is synonymous with "dim, vulnerable and accommodating" (p.20, also p. 17):
Graphic DetailsGraphic details within the drawings serve to subtly reinforce the feminist message already conveyed by the pictures and text/dialogues. In the chapter "Romance" (pp.59-72) a character which I have not mentioned so far, appears in the shape of an "Old Bad Fairy" (p.61) who comes and makes false promises referring to love and romance. By employing the figure of the bad fairy, a purely fictitious character (although visually reminiscent of Barbara Cartland), ugly and fat, looking more like the unsuccessful version of a transvestite than like any kind of fairy, the artist underlines her conviction that romance does not exist. Another stylistic means is a little heart, either black or white, always lying in the heroine's way (e.g. pp. 22, 87, 88). At first, the woman stumbles over the black heart which marks her "falling in love". She experiences all sorts of frustration and depression in her dealings with men. At the end of the book, the woman has overcome her state of "slavery" and is free for a positive relationship, symbolized by the white heart. Her heart is, in a certain sense, white with innocence, light, etc. The two hearts forming the glasses (pp.24, 82, 83, 86) are of course the accessory of the woman blind for love, underlining "blind" both in a literary and a figurative sense. The capitalisation of complete words also plays an important part. The author uses it with different purposes in mind. On pages 14-15, parents are shouting at their children, with the capitalisation underlining the menacing, severe tone. The second purpose, however, can be seen on pages 16 and 19: the capitalisation of words such as "Severely Restricted Expectations for the Future" (p.16) or "Perpetual Anxiety about Looking Good" (p.19) increases the worries suffered by the girls and makes these worries appear like horrible diseases. The cartoonist also employs the eye-catching method of varying the size of her characters. Take as a telling example the panels on pages 25-28 and 36. In the first example, we see a man and a woman in bed. She is an exaggeratedly tiny, mouthless figure who is listening to her lover, a tall man speaking constantly. He is the type of man the author would probably qualify as a "bastard" (cf. p.42). The man's domination is mirrored in his physical dimensions. The second example can be found on page 36 at the end of the questionnaire. A huge man with overdimensioned legs and folded arms looks down on a tiny woman lying on her back who is in danger of being crushed under his feet, symbolising the enormous power men can have over women. Jacky Fleming - a radical feminist?In Our Blood, Andrea Dworkin demands that:
Although Fleming seems radical in her way, her ideas are rather different. Also, as she says in the interview with Moir quoted here before, "so far, men have not reacted badly" to the book. She points out that she expects men to laugh at the book, too. "They're in there, after all, they know what's going on." (Fleming quoted by Moir). This means that she does not want to exclude men from her readership. Her feminism is not aimed at the total destruction of existing structures but rather at the improval of them in favour of women. Also, her kind of feminism does not get stuck in a fruitless, theoretical discussion. She denounces such an approach depicting one of her male characters as an intellectual type who says: "I suspect that GENETICALLY I'm allergic to cleaning and CULTURALLY I need to have sex with a lot of people." (p.38). Finally, Fleming tones down the general message of her book in the prologue. It shows a grinning woman who says: "one day, you'll laugh at all this ..." (p.1). Bibliography
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Marie-Catherine BASEL |
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